September 19, 2025 • 59 mins
The gang discuss the suspected Charlie Kirk shooter, texts between him and his roommate, and how the Trump admin is using Kirk’s assassination to attack free speech by labeling Antifa a terrorist organization and promising to target activist groups funding terrorism. We also talk about ICE killing a single father in Chicago and deportations to Ghana.
https://x.com/ConsulMexCho/status/1966636249910738951
https://unraveledpress.com/what-happened-to-silverio-villegas-gonzalez/
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.284773/gov.uscourts.dcd.284773.37.0_2.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.284773/gov.uscourts.dcd.284773.41.0.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/16/us/tyler-robinson-charges.html
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-leaked-messages-from-charlie
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/business/media/abc-jimmy-kimmel.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Old media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today
I'm joined by James Stout, Miya Wong, and Robert Evans.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
This episode, we're covering the week of September eleven to
September eighteenth.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Normally a week in history when very little happens.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
The most normal week of American politics.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, Traditionally, nothing around the first third of September's days
has as ever mattered in American history.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
We should schedule our calendar just to block out this
whole section of the year each time.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I already have it written down in micah calendar as
the week to forget, so I just spend it drinking.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Robert, do you want to introduce our first topic?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Yes, I mean our first topic, as we talked about
last week, is the fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk,
particularly its impact on free speech and the pretext it's
being used for to justify a crackdown on the quote
unquote left. Different NGOs and other organizations that are being
(01:14):
accused of being part of a vast and let's say,
unlikely conspiracy to commit terrorism that has nothing to do
with what's actually been discovered about Tyler Robinson Charlie Kirk's killer,
but nonetheless it's being used that way, and kind of
the first thing to probably talk about is what's come
out about Tyler Robinson's motivations in the time since we
(01:38):
recorded our last episode. Honestly, I was kind of surprised
Gerre when we recorded on Friday.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
I had expected us.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
To need to do an update before Monday in order
to catch up. Really, there wasn't much that came out.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
No, I did a brief update confirming that he was
living with a transperson, but that was really all we
knew with the time that could be confirmed. That was
pretty evergreen as we suspected it might be, and I
will say, frankly, the motive still remains not entirely clear,
but we do have some more concrete details about his
(02:15):
online background. Yeah, and a few others like ancillary pieces
which is included in the charging document, as well as
reporting on his discord logs.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
So I think we should talk first about the whole
trans roommate thing of it all because obviously, first off,
this is one of the most massive reaches I've seen,
Like they're always desperate to have a trans connection anytime
there's a shooting.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
They were trying to establish this literally like seconds after
it happened.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And that's been the case with like the last year
and a half or two worth of mass shootings yea,
or at least a sizeable number of them.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yeah, that was a meme.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
Right for why it's like a four Chan thing to
suggest that any mass shooter was trans and now it's
just become reality.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
And in this case, the legation started coming out from
the police that his roommate was transgender. This was before
the discord logs had leaked. So I want you to
talk a little bit. Gare you found the Reddit profile
of Tyler Robinson's roommate. Yeah, So first question is do
we know if they actually were trans and do we
know if they actually were in some sort of a relationship.
(03:19):
What is the actual evidence that exists to suggest that
based on what we have so far, they.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Did post about their transition on multiple subreddits and public
facing posts, and they referred to having a boyfriend BF
that was helping them cope with the results of the
twenty twenty four election. But that's really all we can
tell from this at the time of public Reddit profile
for the roommate of Tyler Robinson, who had again some
(03:48):
sort of romantic relationship with the like nitty gritty you know,
arc of their whole relationship is like not explicitly clear,
but but certainly a pad a romantic relationship.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, and I want to make it clear, which should
be obvious to anyone who has like a third of
a brain cell to rub together against the inside of
their skull. There's not any evidence that this roommate was
tied in any way to the Tyler Robinson's crimes, and
in fact, the exit evidence.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
The state is arguing this that the roommate had no
prior knowledge and has been fully cooperative. That the roommate
is not involved.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Not only is fully cooperative, but turned Tyler in.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
In part or produced evidence that was now used in
the charging documentary. Tyler turned himself in with his father,
like officially, but there was certainly conversations happening.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, And it's one of those things you can come
down morally on that however you want. It's just a
matter of there's absolutely no evidence, as people like Matt
Walsher saying that this is part of some grand LGBT conspiracy.
Their roommates seemed horrified to have been and you know,
understandably terrified to have been potentially implicated in a massive act,
massively faced active murder, right, Like, that's a that's a
(05:04):
scary thing to come. You like get a discord message realizing, oh, fuck,
now I'm potentially implicated in this.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
So I do have some.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Understanding for what a shocking moment that is. Like, it's
hard to imagine, yeah, dealing with that in any way,
shape or form. That's just a wild thing to have
happened in the middle of your fucking day, presumably while
you're at work or some shit. This would have been
around noon, so I'm guessing they were on the job
when they got these messages. She's a horrible, horrible thing
to deal with.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, let's go over some of the text exchanges included
in the charging document. It's technically not an indictment because
they did not charge via grand jury. Yeah, it's a
placeholder for that. Yeah, but it's referred to as like
a charging information document that they included some text messages
because it was the clearest evans to lay out to
(05:51):
charge them with the crime. So not the only evidence,
as we will soon discuss. And these text logs are
are core to like people like Walsh's current argument that
the trans roommate must have actually been involved because they
think that the messages that I'm going to read here
we were like scripted between the roommate and the shooter
specifically to exonerate the roommate, and that's the conspiracy that
(06:14):
people like Walsher spreading. Let's go over this section of
this document.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
The police interviewed Robinson's roommate, a biological male who was
involved in a metal relationship with Robinson. The roommate told
police that the roommate received messages from Robinson about the
shooting and provided those messages to police. On September tenth,
twenty twenty five, the roommate received a text message from
Robinson which said, drop what you are doing, look under
my keyboard. The roommate looked under the keyboard and found
(06:40):
a note that stated I had the opportunity to take
out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it unquote.
Police found a photograph of this note. The following text
exchange then took place. After reading the note, the roommate responded,
what with many question marks? You're joking, right, Robinson? I
(07:01):
am still okay, my love, but I am stuck in
orm for a little while longer yet, shouldn't be long
until I can come home. But I got to grab
my rifle still. To be honest, I'd hoped to keep
this secret till I died of old age. I'm sorry
to involve you, roommate. You weren't the one who did it, right,
many question marks, Robinson, I am sorry, roommate. I thought
(07:25):
they caught the person, Robinson. No, they grabbed some crazy
old dude that interrogated someone in similar clothing. I had
planned to grab my rifle from my drop point shortly after,
but most of that side of town got locked down.
It's quiet, almost enough to get out. There's one vehicle lingering.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Roommate.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Why Robinson, Why did I do it? Roommate? Yeah, Robinson,
I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be
negotiated out. If I'm able to grab my rifle unseen,
I will have left no evidence. Going to attempt to
retrieve it again. Hopefully they have moved on I haven't
seen anything about them finding it. Roommate, how long have
you been planning this, Robinson? A bit over a week.
(08:07):
I believe I can get close to it, but there's
a squad car parked right by it. I think they
already swept that spot. But I don't want to chance it, Robinson.
I'm wishing i'd circle back and grabbed it as soon
as I got to my vehicle. I'm worried what my
old man would do if I didn't bring back Grandpa's rifle.
I don't know if it had a serial number, but
it wouldn't trace to me. I worry about Prince. I
(08:30):
had to leave it in a bush where I changed outfits.
I didn't have the ability or time to bring it
with I might have to abandon it and hope they
don't find Prince. How the fuck will I explain losing
it to my old man. Only thing I left was
the rifle wrapped in a towel. Remember how I was
engraving bullets. The fucking messages are mostly a big meme.
(08:51):
If I see notices bulge ooh wu on Fox News,
I might have a stroke. All right, I'm gonna have
to leave it that really fucking sucks. Judging from today,
I'd say Grandpa's gun does just fine. IDK, I think
that was a two thousand dollars scope, Robinson, Delete this exchange, Robinson.
My dad wants photos of the rifle, he says, Grandpa
(09:13):
wants to know who has what. The Feds released a
photo of the rifle and it is very unique. He's
calling me r n not answering, Robinson. Since Trump got
into office, my dad has been a pretty diehard Mega.
I'm going to turn myself in willingly. One of my
neighbors here is a deputy for the sheriff. You are
all I worry about, love roommate. I'm much more worried
(09:36):
about you, Robinson. Don't talk to the media. Please, don't
take any interviews or make any comments. If police ask
you questions, ask for a lawyer, and stay silent. That's
the end of the exchange.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
It seems like this person fairly wisely stopped engaging with their.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, there's not a good response to give to that. No,
that's not and discord again. One of the one thing
I would hope this would bust is the This has
to have been a professional hit man, assassin of some sort,
which is a job that I mean, it technically exists.
(10:14):
Like there are guys who are for the fucking crypts
of the Bloods. You could call them professional hitmen, and
that they kill people for money. But they're not like
the people you see in movies, Like they're guys who
will walk up with a thirty eight and gut shoot
somebody and run the fuck off like they're they're not
We're not talking about like smooth operators. Those people almost
don't exist as a profession and certainly not as a
(10:37):
standard thing in the United States. And that that like
the fact that he was having this kind of conversation
on discord.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
This is I believe, regular text.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
So these are regular regular text.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
This is straight up yeah sms right, Like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
He's messaging this shit through unencrypted lines and left a
note under his keyboard and dropped the rifle in the woods,
Like this is all about what you respeck from a
twenty two year old kid who's a reasonably good shot
with a rifle and had no real other skills, Like
it's what it looked like.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Yes, this doesn't even seem like someone who spent a
great deal of time planning, right, like learning about that.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
They said they've been planning about it for about a week.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
Yeah, this lines up with what they said, right, like
like yeah, and they seem almost surprised.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yeah, I got this weird feeling reading it, Like Tyler
almost is shocked that they did it. Like there's this
almost sense of being pulled by history.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, it's seemingly confused by his own actions in his CeNSE.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
Yeah, like watching himself almost like.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yes, and like I I inscrite, like one of the things.
It sounds like and this is a little unclear, but
it sounds like in terms of those memes winding up.
But he was doing that before, maybe even before he'd
ever planned to shoot Kirk. That's just like a thing
he did for shit.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
For people.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
People have pointed to that as being like, oh, well,
obviously the roommate knew something was up. If if the
roommate was aware that that Robinson was carving bullets, that's,
first of all, that's not a crime. No, people just
do weird shit sometimes, especially if someone goes to the range.
Often maybe they're gonna fucking scribble on a bullet. Like
that's not indication of anything that's legitimately concerning frankly.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Yeah, it's indication again that this guy was very online
in the gamer right, yea, right.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
But that's it.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
So it's not just people like Walsh who are casting
doubt on the authenticity of these messages. Plenty of liberals
and people on the left have taken to suspecting that
these could have been written by an quote unquote FBI
agent or law enforcement as fake evidence to frame the shooter.
(12:43):
And people have pointed towards some weird verbiage like calling
his dad his old man and referring to quote unquote
like law enforcement type language like interrogate And Yeah, to me,
this is not very confusing. He talks like this because
he's raised Mormon and plays a lot of tactical video
(13:05):
games thousands of hours I have. I have a Steam profile, huge,
huge gamer. And he might talk a little odd because
he just did a fucking crazy thing.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
I don't even think it's that odd.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
It's nice people call someone they're in love with, my love.
That's a thing that happens in the world.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Like, that's not like a.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Very normal what are we doing here?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Yeah, why are we questioning this part of the story?
Speaker 4 (13:31):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
But and again, like these texts were handed over to
local police by Robinson's roommate. Why fake evidence that would
jeopardize the case when the police already have a lot
of other evidence DNA ballistic evidence, the friend group discord
chat where he also admitted to the crime right before
he turned himself in. Like, these textlogs don't even like
(13:53):
make him out to be a crazy leftist. He talks
like very vaguely about Kirk, like spreading hatred.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, he says nothing about politics. And again, as we'll
talk about because there's some evidence here suggesting that both
Tyler and their roommate, like their politics were mixed from
what little we can glean.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
About them, right, or a very minor part of their
lives in a sense, like yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
They're not talking about redistribution of wealth, they're not talking
about overthrowing the government.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Oh no, they're not talking about politics in that way.
This seems more like personal to him.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yes, he's in love with a transperson and he didn't
like what Charlie Kirk said about trans people.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah, and like if the government's going to fake messages,
why would they do so in a way that exonerates
the trans roommate the real ideological target here.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Especially look at what the government is doing right now.
Right they're going after quote unquote Antiva, They're going after
the Open Society Foundation, George Soros, all of these left
wing NGOs. If they were faking this, would he not
have referenced one of those organizations? Would there not be
a fucking black and red flag somewhere in there?
Speaker 4 (15:00):
It would be so easy. If you're going to implicate someone,
you could implicate it in text messages really easily, Like
it's ridiculous to suggest that, yeah, the state did this.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, why would you fake that?
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Why would you fake it that way?
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Baffling, incomprehensible. These texts are not load bearing to this case.
Plenty of other there's plenty of other evidence. And this
isn't the same thing as like cops planting evidence or
like a district attorney making subjective claims about intent, like
you don't need to overestimate state intelligence here.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
No, we don't even need her what we have. There
was no need for them to have done anything at all,
because Robinson specifically notes that as soon as pictures of
the rifle were posted online by police, his dad fucking
Costs family knew because it is a unique gun Yeah,
it is.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
It is.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
It is an antique mouser that was sportized and rebarreled,
presumably personally by his grandfather. Both his grandpa and his
dad seem to have recognized it immediately. There was no
getting away with it once the rifle was found.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
This is totally different from like the MS thirteen tattoo thing,
where the trumpetministration argued for an interpretation of tattoos and
then printed out a picture with like very clearly photoshopped
letters to draw a parallel between what they think the
tattoos meant and with their interpretation of it as letters
and numbers, which trump in all of his genius, mistook
(16:22):
for being actual tattoos. And then they just ran with
it because no one has the capacity to tell the
president you're wrong. This is completely different than faking all
these text messages. There's metadata, there's cell phone records, it's
probably still on the roommate's own phone. Like physical a
physical evidence, and like subjectively saying that you don't know
(16:44):
any gen z that talks like this, that's not valid evidence.
Twenty two year olds know how to use punctuation.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
Yeah, let me tell you of someone who crades hundreds
of papers every year from people who are largely but
not all, between eighteen and twenty five. Yeah, young people
can use punctuation. This is not like some kind of
forensic fucking literary analysis required.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
And the information obtained in these chat logs and through
interviews with his parents match reporting by Ken Klippenstein, who
got leaked messages from the shooter on Discord, very very similar.
Like lots of libs and people on the left are
saying this is fake because they wanted the shooter to
be conservative and they think that these texts damage the
(17:28):
narrative that they have chosen. I think that's why we're
seeing people react so strongly to this. It's not about
actually evaluating the evidence on like a base level, right,
Like this guy grew up in a conservative Mormon family.
His dad's pretty mega Robinson figured out he was bisexual
and started to move a little bit to the left
on like gender and sexuality issues. And even like a
lot of gen Z straight guys kind of have this
(17:50):
political profile, right, they're like pro gun, but their life
revolves around like gaming Discord and read it more than
like the political and.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
They're probably often pro capitalist, just not bigoted against queer people. Yea,
because that's not as common anymore. These aren't political partisans.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
They're not even on our slash bread tube, Like, yeah,
that's that's not what's happening. He played, he played furry
sex games on Steam when he was younger. One of
his Steam names was Donald Trump because yeah, he's twenty
two years old. Trump was an Augury when he was
like thirteen or whatever.
Speaker 4 (18:22):
Like, god, yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
We fucked the kids up so bad.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
It's it's a largely it's largely a political and like
this what he did is is existential violence manifesting a
political action from someone who isn't otherwise overtly political, right,
because shooting Charlie Kirk incredibly political action, even if that's
not the way that that the shooter maybe conceived it.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Yeah, like this person happened, So it happened across a
queer person who they are very fond of. Right, they
have queer people in their lives. That is not indicative
of any politics other than they have a queer person
in their.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
If this person stand the Soviet Union, we would fucking
know about.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
It because they would be running with that.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Used a mos in.
Speaker 5 (19:11):
For one thing.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
So they would have missed a little bit of Moses
slander for you today to break up the horrors. Speaking
of crackdowns, crack down on your wallet by buying these.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Products and services.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Beautiful, lovely.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, First Amendment crackdown. Massive rhetoric coming out of Stephen
Miller and from Pam Bondi and basically every mouthpiece of
the administration about going after the left, about dismantling particularly
organizations like the Open Sciety Foundation, going after George Soros
and his son. There's talk about prosecuting people criminally and
(20:04):
using the death penalty, even on folks who are quote
unquote funding terrorism, a term which has been so broadly
described by mouthpieces of the administration as to include potentially
just about anybody.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
This could be like bail funds, environmental NGOs, legal support NGOs,
like It's it's really unclear at the exact form that
this is going to take, but this is stuff that
the administration has pined about doing for a while.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, and it's unclear. You know, it's one of the
big pieces of news that's happened. Within twenty four hours
of us recording this episode, which we recorded on Thursday,
the eighteenth is that Trump has designated Antifa a domestic
terrorist organization.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Of that's not he's said that.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
What I'm saying is he said that, he said up
to me, those words that he has said.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Words that he has said before, including in twenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
For the letter of the law.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
For one thing, there's a wild difference between what you
could do legally to an international foreign terrorist organization, yeah,
and in domestic terrorist organization.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Because of the First Amendment, you can't just declare legally
in terms of what is written law, the president can't
just declare a group of people to be a domestic
terrorist organization. It's usually an enhancement charge, yes, and then
just go after people who have spoken out or donated
money to legal charities that are randomly declared to be
in support of that that's not legal, which doesn't mean
(21:27):
it what happened. Let me be really clear. Yeah, yeah,
but that's not what the law is about.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
And they've tried to do that in Atlanta was Top
Crop City and the Lena Solidarity Fund and going after
the Bail Fund and people who had donated money to
like the Forest Defense Fund, right, and this Trump is
similarly actually to Atlanta Is also talked about using Rico
charges to get people in trouble who are funding these
quote unquote domestic terror organizations, and on Yeah, September seventeenth,
(21:53):
Trump Truth, I am pleased to inform our many USA
patriots that I'm designating Antife, a sick, dangerous radical left disaster,
as a major terrorist organization. I will also be strongly
recommending that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance
with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for
your attention to this matter.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah, I mean, for a use the word major right,
which doesn't like there's a domestic terrorism is a concept
that's nebulous FTO, Foreign terrorist organization is an extremely clear
legal definition. He didn't use either of those. This is yeah,
this is a thing that like Ted Cruz, and I
think he enjoyed it. I'm sure there are other people involved.
(22:35):
But Ted Cruz in before twenty twenty twenty nineteen, tried
to introduce a resolution in the Senate condemning Antifa like
this has been a thing.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Marjor Taylor Green introduced legislation which went nowhere, or talked aboutization.
I don't even know if she actually introduced it like
this year about designating Antifa terrorist organization. It's been It's
been something like Andy know has been advocating for for years.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
It's a really important point that they have attempted and
failed to do this numerous times because the law doesn't
let them. And this is something that if you have
been in the riot reporting on public shootings business as
long as I have been, christ one thing I can
tell you is that in the wake of something like this,
it was the same with christ Church and the immediate
(23:17):
wake of christ Church, there was this really shocking moment
where a bunch of conservative I talked to these people
because I published the art the defining article on that shooting. Yeah,
a shitload of conservative organizations came out and said, you
know what, maybe we've been wrong about demonizing Muslim immigrants.
Maybe like that was really fucked up and we should
like those people were talking about that, people who you
(23:39):
would not expect that now, they didn't keep talking that way.
They got a pretty quick But what you have in
a moment like this is there's a limited period of
time where people's shock and horror and surprise at what
has happened creates spaces of possibility for folks who have
(24:00):
an agenda and you have a clear plan for what
to push, to push the overton envelope in their direction. Right,
this is not a period of time that lasts for ever.
And the folks who are largely orchestrating the conservative response
to Charlie Kirk's murder are aware of this, and they
(24:21):
are making the best use of this period of time
that they can get. Now, that doesn't mean the fact
that this is a limited period of time doesn't mean
there aren't long term consequences, doesn't mean that they can't
make significant progress on their plan to stifle free speech.
It doesn't mean we're not in massive danger. Because we
are in danger, folks. I'm not telling you we're not.
(24:42):
I'm telling you these spaces of possibility don't last for ever,
in part because the public moves on, and in part
because there is always a backlash to the backlash, and
you're seeing pieces of that already.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
They are seeing pieces of that.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Carl Rove of all motherfucking people wrote it article about
how the administration is unfairly blaming liberals and leftists for
the actions of an individual shooter. Tucker Carlson came out
and it made a statement that like, if the government
is able to go after you for this, they'll come
after conservatives at some point. He's not wrong about it.
I don't credit him doing that because of a serious
(25:18):
moral thing. I credited him to be a relatively intelligent
guy who was like, no, no, no, if they're able
to do this to you know whatever, milktoast liberals, eventually
it will happen to me.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Right and specifically, like Pam Bondi is, the etern General
made some statements a few days ago about them going
after quote unquote hate speech, yeah, which spawned a whole
bunch of conservative commentators Steven Krawdertucker Carlson, as well as
Matt Walsh. And under no circumstances do you have to
hand up to Matt Walsh. But this prompted them to
be like, no, actually, we don't believe in hate speech
(25:47):
as a legitimate legal category. There should be social consequences
for people who celebrate the murder of an innocent man,
but there should not be legal consequences for hate speech. Right,
We're fine with the government helping us like docks you
and get you fired from your job, but prosecuting hate
speech as a category is something that we do not
agree with, and neither did Charlie Kirk. So there's been
(26:09):
like that small reaction, which then prompted Pambondi to be like, no,
when I say hate speech, what I really mean is
like threats and assignment of violence, and like, yeah, okay.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
Fighting words I think is a legal term, right, Like
incitements to violence.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah, And you know, there's some stuff that's always been
illegal and never been punished. For example, when conservatives, I've
been dealing with this for years, threaten to kill and
rape activists and show up outside of their houses and
harass them. As a general rule, the police don't do anything. Yeah,
if those activists are on the left, right, even though
that crosses the boundary into fighting words, however, they have
(26:42):
legally could they choose not to.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
But if someone is out there saying in the wake
of the Charlie Kirk shooting, I want to incite people
to kill this person, that is illegal. You're not allowed
to say I want to incite people to murder this person.
That is a crime. If you're posting insane say that
you have broken the law. They won't go after a
conservative for doing that. But they'll go after you, right
(27:06):
like that is how things work, you know. However, we
have seen people who have been attacked for speech that
absolutely is not crossing the line into fighting words.
Speaker 6 (27:17):
Right.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
One of the better examples for this happened at Texas Tech.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
It happened.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
You've had variends of this happened at a couple of
colleges all around the country. They're specifically at Texas Tech,
which is, you know, one of Texas's kind of premier
state schools.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
There was a video of.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
An incident on the day that Charlie Kirk was killed,
where a student scene jumping up and down, yelling profanity
at a vigil in a free speech zone outside of
a student union building on the campus, saying y'all, Homie dead,
making fun of people who were mourning Kirk's death. At
one point, she touched a guy's hat. The video of
(27:55):
her went viral. Governor Greg Abbott called for her to
be arrested and expelled. She was expelled immediately. She was
arrested and charged with assaults shortly thereafter. Her family has
not made a statement. Very wisely, There's really nothing they
could say that would be great.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
At this point.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
There has been some pushback from student organizations in the
state because this is blatantly illegal. Calling what she did
assault is nonsense. In my opinion from watching the video,
she was at a free speech zone. Laughing y'all homely
dead when someone is killed is not fighting words. That
is not illegal. You are allowed to say stuff like
(28:34):
that under the letter of the law. Does this mean
this person won't get convicted of a crime. It's Texas,
and she's a black woman, she might. And this is
very chilling. This is deeply concerning, right. This is not
the only case. There's a universe, smaller university outside of
Austin where again a student was videotaped celebrating individual for
(28:54):
Kirk's death. That person was expelled as well. There have
been a number of teachers fired obviously, stuff like this
has been happening all over the country, right, And this
is deeply worrying. And even if even if the space
of possibility closes on these people faster than they're expecting,
if the crackdown on the Open Society Foundation doesn't happen,
if this Antifa stuff doesn't go any further than the
(29:16):
last time they've talked about going after Antifa, stuff like
this is going to continue to happen, and it will
only accelerate over the next couple of years, right, and
that is a massive problem.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Part of this culture shift can be seen in what
some people are probably not very smartly calling the biggest
attack on free speech they've ever seen in their life,
which is on Wednesday evening, ABC put Jimmy Kimmel's show
on hold quote unquote indefinitely, following pressure from the FCC
and affiliate stations owned by Nextstar. Before ABC's announcement next
(29:51):
our release statement quote, Next Stars owned and partner television
stations affiliated with the NBC Television Network will preempt Jimmy
Kimmel Live for the foreseeable future, beginning with.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
To it's show.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Next to Our strongly objects to the recent comments made
by mister Kimmel concerning the killing and Charlie Kirk and
will replace the show with other programming in its ABC
affiliated markets unquote. Sinclair Broadcasting also stated it would not
air Kimmel's show and called on Kimmel to apologize to
the Kirk family and donates to the Kirk family as
well as TPUSA. Earlier that Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr
(30:24):
advocated on the conservative podcaster Benny Johnson's show. Quote, it's
really sort of past time that a lot of these
licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast Disney and say,
we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you
straighten this out, and we, the licensed broadcaster, are running
the possibility of fines or license revocation from the SEC
if we continue to run content that ends up being
(30:46):
a pattern of news distortion unquote. Carr then made vague
threats towards like direct FCC involvement. Quote, we can do
this easy way or the hard way. These companies can
find ways to change con it can take action frankly
on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for
the FCC ahead on quote. The FCC controls broadcast licenses
(31:08):
for local TV channels, and next Star is planning a
merger with Tegna, which requires SEC approval. And this is
obviously a coerced attack on free speech.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
And we've seen a lot of people shows and whatnot
getting polled and people speaking out getting in trouble because
they're companies. They're trying to do a merger. Right, that's
not new.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yes, this has happened with ABC already, this happened with
a CBS and paramount. I think some people, including people
on the right, are misunderstanding some of the circumstances of
the firing or the being put on hold, as well
as what like Kimmel said, Like kim wasn't joking about
or celebrating Kirk's death. What he did do is possibly
(31:50):
like falsely insinuate that the shooter was Mega when evidence
at the time pointed otherwise. Kimmell said, quote, we hit
some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang
desperately trying to characterize the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk
as anything other than one of them and doing everything
they can to score political points from it.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
Unquote.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
He then went on to tell a joke about how
Trump did not seem very sad in the wake of
Charliekirk's death, comparing the death to a goldfish in Trump's mind.
That was the way the joke was framed. Yeah, so
that's what Kimmel actually said. You can interpret that either way.
Whether he's just saying that megas are desperately trying to
make it look like he's not one of them, and
(32:31):
scoring political points. Or you can interpret it as Kimmel
kind of insinuating that the shooter probably is mega. I
don't know Kimmel's mind. I'm not sure what he exactly
meant by that. But the Rolling Stone reported that sources
told them the quote. Senior executives at ABC, its owner,
Disney and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how
to minimize the damage. Multiple execs felt Kimmel had not
(32:53):
actually said anything over the line, but the threat of
Trump administration retaliation loomed. Yeah, and this is again, this
is chilling, absolutely chilling speech. The things he said, we're
not in line with the best available evidence at the
time that he said them. But they weren't hate speech,
they were not incitement to violence. There was nothing a
(33:14):
league know about them. And again you had a fucking
right wing figure on television urging for homeless people to
be executed, the involuntary lethal ejection to solve the homeless crisis. Quote,
just kill them. He's not getting fired.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
No, he had to make a half assed apology, but
that's it.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
Yeah, I can had to pretend to be sorry if
I had a nickel for every time someone on Fox
News said that like any mass shooter at all was
linked to a trans person, Like none of my trans
friends would ever be homeless. Again, Like they say this
shit all the time and nothing happens, even though it
is I mean literally just it is straight up tofammatory yep.
(33:55):
And they say that shit constantly and nothing happens. And
this is just a the pure I mean example of
just the latant political suppression of speech. And also this
sort of like we talked about this with the mergers,
is the structural problem with the way that like the
American quote unquote free press is supposed to be structured,
(34:16):
which is that they're all for profit companies and because
of that, all you need to do is just buy
out or threaten their profit enough and they'll just fall
on line. And that's what we've been watching with news
outlet after news outlets, news outlet like firing anyone who
said anything being about Kirk.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
I think with that that concludes our Charlie Kirk assassination
aftermath discussion for now, But there is in fact other
news this week happening. James, do you have stuff, Yeah,
un Fortunately, I'm like, I'm like bracing myself because I
know that James's news is never that good either.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
So the good news these days.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Really the passport thing was killed, right, the Mark Ruvio.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some good news.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Actually, there was a Senate bill, a writer on a
bill that was introduced that would have given Marco Rubio
the power to revoke passports for citizens for effectively political
speech and the guise of speech protecting you know, quote
unquote terrorists. That failed, like that was pulled by the sponsor,
which is good. There was a backlash to it, and
(35:23):
again when there's backlashes, that's that's good. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, I mean it's it's so annoying to have to
like we all know that like pointing out the hypocrisy
doesn't work as like a real strategy. But like there's
if there's a way besides that to like actually channel
resistance to these authoritarian and like speech chilling measures besides
just smugly going like haha, the Party of free speech
strikes again, which I understand how that's emotionally compelling. Well,
(35:54):
it's not going to stop them from taking away your
free speech. No, yeah, speaking of free speech, here's some
free ads.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
Yeah, we are back I don't worry, folks. It is
all downhill from here. I'm afraid because things have not
been good outside of the coverage and repercussions of the
(36:24):
Charlie Kirk shooting. And to start with, I want us
to talk about Ghana. This is one of those stories
that unfortunately has been kind of eclipsed this week, but
it shouldn't be, so we're going to talk about it. So,
the United States has begun using Ghana as a pass
through to send people back to other countries in West Africa.
In international law, when somebody has protection from being sent
(36:47):
to a place and you send them back via another place,
that is called chain refoulment.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Right.
Speaker 4 (36:53):
One could probably also pronounce that it's a bit where
a French word, but I have decided not to. In
this instance, I'm sending people to Ghana when their home
countries has been deemed to be too dangerous by a
United States court, or they are unable to send them
back to that country for some other reason. Right, people
in this part of the world don't need visas to travel,
so they can send them to neighboring countries without requiring
(37:17):
Like that, the Ghana can just bust them back, right,
it doesn't require a great deal of paperwork. So a
court has ordered the United States that there was an
attempt right to secure protections for these people via them
into a temporary restraining order to prevent them either being
sent away. Some of them were in Ghana at the
time the case was filed, right, so to prevent them
(37:38):
being sent from Ghana to places where they may face
as we're about to hear, torture, death, pretty much the
worst ship that can happen to people. So the court
did order the United States to produce a document which
details the exact nature of its agreement with Ghana. At
the time I'm writing, the United States has not produced that.
Gharanean sources have repeatedly suggest did that one exists. Right
(38:01):
in Ghanan government press conferences and internal Ghanan news reporting,
the case was bought by both Gambia and Nigerian citizens, right,
so people who don't want to be returned to those
countries and their attempt to obtain a restraining order. In
one instance, one of the people who bought the case
(38:23):
fled after torture by the police and military and was
explicitly told that if he came back they would kill
him and what the US is doing here is using
Ghana as a pass through to send him back.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Right.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
Yeah, some of them also detailed in the case they're
transport They said they were in straight jackets for sixteen
hours on the flight the US. Right, the government, the
United States government in this instance has once again claimed
that these people are out of its hands and it
has no way of stopping the government of Ghana from
sending them back to these other countries. Right. This is
(38:55):
an argument that is attempted to make in several other instances,
and I do just want to fly that like this
use of third party countries for deportation has much increased
under the Trump administration, that it was the Biden administration
who begun funding Panamanian deportations right way before Donald Trump
was even elected, and I have documented that extensively in
(39:18):
my series on the Darien Gap. The court determined in
this case that it didn't have the jurisdiction to grant
the plaintiff's relief right, so that means that they're not
able to get a restraining order. One of the people
had actually already been returned to the place where they
had a convention against torture, protection from and was in
hiding at the time. At the court case right, the
(39:39):
judge said that the government's actions were part of a
quoting here pattern and widespread effort to evade the government's
legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.
We are recording this on the eighteenth of September. It's
a Thursday, and about fifteen minutes ago, another United States
flight just landed in Ghana. Practice of BSHB ongoing. Secondly,
(40:02):
what I want to talk about is sadly another shooting,
the killing of Silverio Viegas Gonzales in Chicago. Diegos. Gonzales
was a thirty eight year old father, a Mexican national,
and he was shot by either one or two ICE
agents while driving away from them. An ICE statement claimed
(40:23):
that he drove towards them and ended up dragging an
agent a significant distance. Surveillance camera footage at the scene
shows one agent talking to Vegas Gonzales in his vehicle.
We then see the vehicle reverse away from them and
then move around them to the left when it sees
a gap in traffic. The ICE agents have placed their vehicle,
(40:44):
which is an SUV, in front of his vehicle. Sort
of cramping it into the curve right, so he has
to reverse backwards and then move forward and to the
left in order to try and drive away, which is
what he's trying to do. Right. We can only see
one of the officers in the footooth We see the
other officer later in other footage. The officer in the
footage does not appear to be dragged that he appears
(41:05):
to draw his weapon in by standard footage. We then
see two officers pull theegas Gonzales from the vehicle and
they begin administering first aid. We're just rewatching the footage
now and you can see the other age and on
the other side of the vehicle.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
This sounds very similar to the time that Ice shot
at the car driving away just a few weeks ago.
Speaker 4 (41:27):
Sure, and Sam Beernardino absolutely, Yeah. Generally, I have no
idea of what rules Ice are operating under. It's not
considered best practice to open fire a vehicle that is
moving away from you unless it is actively endangering no
someone else's life, right.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
In part because even if it's endangering someone else's life,
a handgun will not stop a car. Yeah, maybe you
hit the driver, but the odds are just as good,
if not much better, then it goes through a window
and remains lethal going past the car during people's lives.
Speaker 5 (42:01):
And also it's worth mentioning on the other side of
the car from the officer who we see draw his
gun is the other agent. Yes, yeah, so if you're
shooting at the car, you're you're shooting at your other.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Agian guns don't stop cars generally, unless you're calling a
fifty caliber anti materiel rifle. Guns don't stop cars. Yeah,
they do stop people, but they but they keep bullets
keep going when they miss. It's just bad. It's a
bad thing to do. It's irresponsible. It's normal cop shit.
Speaker 4 (42:34):
Yeah, so what we see is at least two shots fired,
and then we begin to see that then they leave
the screen of the surveillance camera, right, so we don't
see exactly like we're unable to see. I guess where
those bullets impact the bystander. Footy Sen shows his vehicle
(42:55):
crashed into the undercarriage of a large lorry like a truck,
and he's hit that vehicle in a way that could
also have been fatal, right like the way that he's
he's hit that vehicle, like the engine block of the
car goes underneath, so it would be the driver who
would take the main impact because the because the trailer
(43:15):
is higher off the ground. Right, Hopefully that's making sense
to people. Totally, he's traveled about one hundred feet in
this time period. Unraveled Press have a pretty good account
of this. I've cobbled together I think most of the
open source video and also the surveillance video. There don't
appear in those videos to be any other agents present,
(43:36):
and when we see the agents rendering aid, none of
them appears to be in the state someone would be
had they been dragged by a fast moving car. Also, again,
like with reference to shooting at a moving vehicle, off
the moving vehicle is dragging your colleague, you're shooting also
at your colleague if you shoot at the vehicle. So, unfortunately,
one of this changes the fact that this guy is
(43:58):
now dead. Right. The Mexican Consular has confirmed his age.
They said he was working as a cook as his profession,
and that he was from michual Pun. The consulate has
been in touch with his family. Generally, I'm not familiar
with this instance and what will happen. Generally, the Mexican
Consulate will help with returning the remains of Mexican nationals
(44:19):
to their families in Mexico. That's most of what I
have on his death. It seems to have moved like
very quickly through the news cycle, which is unfortunate because
obviously you have children who have lost a father here
like this. This is a tragedy too.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Yeah, no, this is tragic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5 (44:38):
You know, And I am sitting here haunted by the
fact that they killed this guy two days after the
Charlie Kirk shooting. I think most of the people who
are listening to the show right now don't know this happened.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, these agents aren't going to get prosecuted into court
of law for this, the same way that absolutely the
Charlie kirkisas ad will.
Speaker 4 (44:56):
Yeah, generally, like local dealer, there have been some cases,
but I'm not really aware of any filed against Border
Patrol agents. Generally, DHS has an agency which investigates like
use of force incidents, right, and it is I will
say it is extremely There have been times when agents
have been charged.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
They are rare Stephen Miller's DHSS. That seems very unlikely.
Speaker 4 (45:23):
Yeah, Like I'm aware of some charges, for instance, in
San Diego for like agents who have allowed drugs to
cross the border.
Speaker 5 (45:29):
Right, sure, it is pretty rare. Yeah, So let's let's
talk about what ICE's occupation of Chicago has been. Like, Yeah,
I kind of want to start with something that's been
very frustrating, which is a lot of the way that
Chicago has been discussed in the wake of Trump, like
not deploying the National Guard. There has been about oh,
(45:53):
if you resist Trumpet will like, you know, you can
defeat him, and like that's true. But also ICE and
Border patrol are on the ground in Chicago as we're
listening to this right now, dragging people from their homes.
The raids have gone to a significant extent the way
that we expected them to. They have been largely very
(46:17):
very fast lightning raids. A lot of them have been
an outlying part of Chicago land, which has been making
it difficult to both track them and determine numbers because
a lot of these parts of these massive Chicago suburbs.
We're going to talk about one later called Elgin that
has one hundred thousand people in it, but also doesn't
have the kind of I mean they have like local journalists,
(46:38):
but they don't have like the kind of press core
that they're like the city of Chicago proper has and
so documentation isn't much harder, which is part of why
they've been striking out there. It's largely been Ice, but
Border Patrol has shown up, and part of the Border
Patrol appearing has been that this has also been a
giant pr blitz for a Trump administration officials, as the
(47:02):
people at Unraveled have pointed out, and we'll be talking
to them more next week about what things have been
like on the ground. A senior Border Patrol official, Gregory
Bovino has claimed too, we don't actually have like photograph
everyone's in there, but he was posting on X that
he was. He went to Franklin Park, which is where
Ice shot that guy a couple of days after the shooting. Okay,
(47:27):
he has been releasing an entire stream of TikTok and
X posts to sort of like advertise his presence in
the city and doing this whole we did this in
LA or doing this here now thing. JMC. You don't
talk a little bit about who he.
Speaker 4 (47:40):
Is, Yeah, I do. So. Beveno was, at least until recently,
he's appeared to be as you say working in Chicago now.
His Twitter now reads Commander op at Large CA Gregory K. Bavino.
He was a chief patrol agent in Neil Centro sector
when we saw Operation Return to Sender right. Operation Return
Tocember was December of twenty t twenty four. That's happened
(48:00):
under a Biden administration. This was the first of these
border patrol roving stops way north of the border, right
up in the central Valley, stopping people in home depots,
stopping people people who appeared to be Latino, Latina Latine
on the street. I would say that cal Matters has
(48:21):
had a really good coverage of that, and I can
link it in the show notes. We also saw the
deployment of Border Patrol to La right, that was the
El Centre section, So people aren't familiar with El Centro
east of San Diego along the border right, it's sort
of most of the way to Arizona if your driving
from San Diego. He is really, like I would say,
a man of the moment in terms of Trump's border patrol.
(48:41):
Right like, border Patrol is an agency that's changed a
lot over the years. There was a time with Border
Patrol recruiter from the Peace corps now is not that time.
One thing that Bevino has been very good at in
the sense of like doing what the administration wants from
a border patrol agent right now is his use of
social media. My understanding is that they have a whole
team dedicated to this in the El Centro sector, right,
(49:04):
that they have videographers and photographers and such to make
social media for the border patrol. And Bavina really seems
to have been stepping up in importance, like he has
this sort of he also cuts a very distinctive figure
with this kind of crop side haircut, like you can
find a picture of his haircut online. I don't how
to describe it. It's where the brick picture shows him
(49:27):
holding an ar with a low powered variable octic Like
he is this new tactical, aggressive, very aggressive social media
presence border patrol officer. Right. And we've seen El Centro
Border Patrol station specifically be at the forefront of a
lot of these operations. As I said, even going back
(49:48):
to the Biden era, if you're wondering, border patrol sectors
are not just around the cities that they're named for, right,
They can go a long way north, So it's the
San Diego sector, the El Centro sector. These are not
necessarily defined by places that you would recognize as being
close to San Diego or El Centro, which is why
you would have seen them operating as far north as
Los Angeles. I'm not as familiar with northern border sectors,
(50:11):
haven't spent as much time there, but I would imagine
that there is a border patrail sector that attains to
the area that Chicago is in. So perhaps, but you know,
it's now doing some kind of operational command for these
urban things rather than working in that sector. I'm not
entirely sure, but yeah, that's who he is.
Speaker 5 (50:27):
Yeah, and he's been you know, he's been making an
enormous deal of showing up in Chicago, and this has
been something that's increasingly This is part of what it
means for ice and Border Patrol to show up in
the city, is you get these fucking, just absolutely hideous
pr ops. On Tuesday, Kercy nome last scene shooting a
(50:50):
dog joined a raid in Elgin, which is a pretty
far flung suburb of Chicago with about one hundred thousand
people in it, and she showed up to do basically
a PR junket at this raid at five in the
morning in Elgin, where I survived with helicopters. They blew
(51:11):
up someone's door and they grabbed a bunch of people,
and then they were forced to release two of the
seven people they grabbed because they immediately turned out to
be US citizens. Kurst has denied that they detained them
and said that, oh no, actually we just separated them
for their protection. What we did the operation like that
(51:34):
doesn't seem to be true from everything that we've heard
from witnesses the scene. But yeah, this is you know,
these are the way that these enforcement operations, the way
that these raids have gone is at the beginning of
a major operation, cycles turned into these press circuits for
people like Chursy Nome.
Speaker 4 (51:52):
Yeah, GNOME's been on a few raids like this has
been a consistent thing, right, that these raids are a
content creation exercises much tall law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Yes, and it excuse to dress up all that good stuff.
Speaker 5 (52:03):
Yeah, and you know it. It's this, it's this like
reveling both in this you know, in this sort of
like like constructed like I'm holding an air fifteen lookout
tough I am image and also just in the cruelty
and the suffering in the same way that the alligator
Alcatraz stuff was. But it's worth noting that most of
the raids have not looked like this, Like this this
(52:23):
was a raid where like, you know, people were woken
up in this basically this random suburb at five in
the morning because like they heard an explosion and ice
had blocked off all of their streets and their armored
vehicles and helicopters. Most of what they've been are not
like that. They've been following the pattern established in LA
of very very rapid raids to avoid rep response networks,
(52:47):
targeting accombination of houses, job sites, and you know, places
like home depot and you know, when we talked about
this beginning a couple of weeks ago, we talked about
how these people are being deployed largely from this naval
base that is hours out from the city, right And
that's part of why these a lot of these raids,
although they have been going to the South Side, which
(53:08):
is significantly far away, but a lot of these raids
have been in places like Elgin that are further north
and are more outlying because they are closer to this
naval base than the core of the city of Chicago,
and it's easier to do there because there's less resistance.
There's been a bunch of raids in Elgin. They took
(53:29):
a student from a community college. They've just been dragging
people from their homes and workplaces. There was a very
very well publicized raid in Naperville, which is another sort
of outlying suburb, where they grabbed people who are like
fixing someone's roof.
Speaker 4 (53:44):
Was that the one where people remained on the roof?
Yeah some time? Yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 5 (53:49):
Yeah, really horrible seeing people are extremely pissed off. There's
another story that I's gotten very very little coverage that
was horrifying in Displains, which is the suburb just north
of Oha, where ice agents and masks did a very
very standard thing that they've been doing.
Speaker 2 (54:05):
You know.
Speaker 5 (54:05):
This is, I mean a kind of standard ice tactic
where they wait for people to get back into a
truck and then they block the truck off with their
trucks to prevent it from leaving. And I'm going to
read a CBS report of what happened next because I
think it's important to understand what is actually like for
these people. Edgar, who's one of the people who was
in the car said that when the agent originally came
(54:29):
to the passenger door, he tried holding the door closed
for preventing him from opening it. He said at the
time that he and his family had no idea who
was at the vehicle, and everyone was scared. When the
agent tried opening the door, Edgar said he was tased
in the face. That's when he told everyone in the
truck to run for their lives. Despite being a US citizen,
(54:51):
they ran out of fear. So what's happening here is
there's these two brothers and their dad who is undocumented.
The two brothers were born in Chicago, and they block
off this car. They show up in masks. The people
in the car have absolutely no idea who they are,
and when they try to not get their car broken into,
(55:12):
they tase this guy, who is an American citizen in
the face. He has to go to the hospital because
they tased him in the face. And this there are
stories like this. This is a particularly bad one, but
there are stories like the rest of the raids that
we've been talking about every single day in Chicago that
do not break containments at all. In a country that
(55:34):
is literally entirely just talking about Charlie Kirk. There are
people being dragged from their homes. There are people being
dragged from their fucking places of work, They're being dragged
from their schools. And this is just what the US
is right now now, as fucking unbelievably bleak as this
is right, and people are terrified, but they're also angry,
(55:58):
and people are also organizing, and as we saw in LA,
people are forming rapid response networks and they're showing up
in places that I never would have thought. I mean,
maybe there'd be NGO networks, but they're doing things in
places I just wouldn't have thought possible. I want to
close this by there was a report on Thursday by
Sean Molkay, who's the news editor at The Reader, which
(56:20):
is a good independent outlet in Chicago. So ICE tried
the same tactic of blockading someone's truck and grabbing them
in a suburb called Wheaton, Illinois, and a bunch of
people when they tried to do this smash and grab
of this person's truck, a whole bunch of people showed
up and confronted them and screamed at them and recorded them,
(56:42):
and this caused the ICE people to take off and
run away without detaining the person. And this is a
stunning development if you know anything about either Chicago Land
or evangelicalism. Wheaton is the home of Wheaton College, which
is like, it's one of like the three big right
wing like Christian universities, alongside like Brigham Young and Liberty.
This is wild. This was one of the home bases
(57:04):
of power of the Bush era moral majority right like
Wheaton College is a school where dancing was illegal and
until two thousand and three, like, they've banned dancing for
one hundred and forty three years. And if people in
Wheaton are showing up to do direct actions against Ice,
these people they're cooked, right, They will be able to
do a significant amount of damage. They have been doing
(57:25):
significant amount of damage. We've just been talking about the
amount of damage they've been doing. But if this is
what is happening in places that used to be moral
majority strongholds right, places that produce some of the most
famous like Christian right wingers who shaped an entire half
century of American politics, if people there are showing up
(57:46):
and doing direct actions against Ice and winning, things are
fucking changing. People are radicalizing very quickly, and despite everything
that's been happening by all of the Kirk stuff Trump's
pulling keeps getting worse and worse, And I think this
is a good reminder that, like these people, part of
the reason they're moving so fast and so hard right
now is because they know they are staggeringly unpopular and
(58:09):
they have to get their crack down and they have
to build a political and legal power right now before
it gets even worse for them, and they're terrified that,
you know, if there are a thousand wheatns, what if
enough people resist them, they don't have the capacity to
stop them. Because everybody fucking hates these people and they
(58:31):
hate what they're doing. Nobody actually likes, you know, shock
troopers showing up in the neighborhoods and dragging the people
they love away from them. And it's going to be
a really, really long and hard battle. But the fact
that people are fighting in places where that would have
been unimaginable even ten years ago is I think at
(58:53):
least a small sign of hope in the darkness.
Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, and that's probably where we ought to end, is
a small sign of hope in the darkness.
Speaker 4 (59:02):
If you would like to contact us, you can do
so by using our proton mail email address cool Zone
Tips at proton dot me. It's encrypted if you use
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Speaker 2 (59:15):
We reported the news.
Speaker 3 (59:18):
We reported the news.
Speaker 6 (59:27):
It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources where it could Happen here listened directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Old media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today
I'm joined by James Stout, Miya Wong, and Robert Evans.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
This episode, we're covering the week of September eleven to
September eighteenth.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Normally a week in history when very little happens.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
The most normal week of American politics.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, Traditionally, nothing around the first third of September's days
has as ever mattered in American history.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
We should schedule our calendar just to block out this
whole section of the year each time.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I already have it written down in micah calendar as
the week to forget, so I just spend it drinking.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Robert, do you want to introduce our first topic?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Yes, I mean our first topic, as we talked about
last week, is the fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk,
particularly its impact on free speech and the pretext it's
being used for to justify a crackdown on the quote
unquote left. Different NGOs and other organizations that are being
(01:14):
accused of being part of a vast and let's say,
unlikely conspiracy to commit terrorism that has nothing to do
with what's actually been discovered about Tyler Robinson Charlie Kirk's killer,
but nonetheless it's being used that way, and kind of
the first thing to probably talk about is what's come
out about Tyler Robinson's motivations in the time since we
(01:38):
recorded our last episode. Honestly, I was kind of surprised
Gerre when we recorded on Friday.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
I had expected us.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
To need to do an update before Monday in order
to catch up. Really, there wasn't much that came out.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
No, I did a brief update confirming that he was
living with a transperson, but that was really all we
knew with the time that could be confirmed. That was
pretty evergreen as we suspected it might be, and I
will say, frankly, the motive still remains not entirely clear,
but we do have some more concrete details about his
(02:15):
online background. Yeah, and a few others like ancillary pieces
which is included in the charging document, as well as
reporting on his discord logs.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
So I think we should talk first about the whole
trans roommate thing of it all because obviously, first off,
this is one of the most massive reaches I've seen,
Like they're always desperate to have a trans connection anytime
there's a shooting.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
They were trying to establish this literally like seconds after
it happened.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And that's been the case with like the last year
and a half or two worth of mass shootings yea,
or at least a sizeable number of them.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yeah, that was a meme.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
Right for why it's like a four Chan thing to
suggest that any mass shooter was trans and now it's
just become reality.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
And in this case, the legation started coming out from
the police that his roommate was transgender. This was before
the discord logs had leaked. So I want you to
talk a little bit. Gare you found the Reddit profile
of Tyler Robinson's roommate. Yeah, So first question is do
we know if they actually were trans and do we
know if they actually were in some sort of a relationship.
(03:19):
What is the actual evidence that exists to suggest that
based on what we have so far, they.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Did post about their transition on multiple subreddits and public
facing posts, and they referred to having a boyfriend BF
that was helping them cope with the results of the
twenty twenty four election. But that's really all we can
tell from this at the time of public Reddit profile
for the roommate of Tyler Robinson, who had again some
(03:48):
sort of romantic relationship with the like nitty gritty you know,
arc of their whole relationship is like not explicitly clear,
but but certainly a pad a romantic relationship.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, and I want to make it clear, which should
be obvious to anyone who has like a third of
a brain cell to rub together against the inside of
their skull. There's not any evidence that this roommate was
tied in any way to the Tyler Robinson's crimes, and
in fact, the exit evidence.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
The state is arguing this that the roommate had no
prior knowledge and has been fully cooperative. That the roommate
is not involved.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Not only is fully cooperative, but turned Tyler in.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
In part or produced evidence that was now used in
the charging documentary. Tyler turned himself in with his father,
like officially, but there was certainly conversations happening.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, And it's one of those things you can come
down morally on that however you want. It's just a
matter of there's absolutely no evidence, as people like Matt
Walsher saying that this is part of some grand LGBT conspiracy.
Their roommates seemed horrified to have been and you know,
understandably terrified to have been potentially implicated in a massive act,
massively faced active murder, right, Like, that's a that's a
(05:04):
scary thing to come. You like get a discord message realizing, oh, fuck,
now I'm potentially implicated in this.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
So I do have some.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Understanding for what a shocking moment that is. Like, it's
hard to imagine, yeah, dealing with that in any way,
shape or form. That's just a wild thing to have
happened in the middle of your fucking day, presumably while
you're at work or some shit. This would have been
around noon, so I'm guessing they were on the job
when they got these messages. She's a horrible, horrible thing
to deal with.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yeah, let's go over some of the text exchanges included
in the charging document. It's technically not an indictment because
they did not charge via grand jury. Yeah, it's a
placeholder for that. Yeah, but it's referred to as like
a charging information document that they included some text messages
because it was the clearest evans to lay out to
(05:51):
charge them with the crime. So not the only evidence,
as we will soon discuss. And these text logs are
are core to like people like Walsh's current argument that
the trans roommate must have actually been involved because they
think that the messages that I'm going to read here
we were like scripted between the roommate and the shooter
specifically to exonerate the roommate, and that's the conspiracy that
(06:14):
people like Walsher spreading. Let's go over this section of
this document.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
The police interviewed Robinson's roommate, a biological male who was
involved in a metal relationship with Robinson. The roommate told
police that the roommate received messages from Robinson about the
shooting and provided those messages to police. On September tenth,
twenty twenty five, the roommate received a text message from
Robinson which said, drop what you are doing, look under
my keyboard. The roommate looked under the keyboard and found
(06:40):
a note that stated I had the opportunity to take
out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it unquote.
Police found a photograph of this note. The following text
exchange then took place. After reading the note, the roommate responded,
what with many question marks? You're joking, right, Robinson? I
(07:01):
am still okay, my love, but I am stuck in
orm for a little while longer yet, shouldn't be long
until I can come home. But I got to grab
my rifle still. To be honest, I'd hoped to keep
this secret till I died of old age. I'm sorry
to involve you, roommate. You weren't the one who did it, right,
many question marks, Robinson, I am sorry, roommate. I thought
(07:25):
they caught the person, Robinson. No, they grabbed some crazy
old dude that interrogated someone in similar clothing. I had
planned to grab my rifle from my drop point shortly after,
but most of that side of town got locked down.
It's quiet, almost enough to get out. There's one vehicle lingering.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Roommate.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Why Robinson, Why did I do it? Roommate? Yeah, Robinson,
I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be
negotiated out. If I'm able to grab my rifle unseen,
I will have left no evidence. Going to attempt to
retrieve it again. Hopefully they have moved on I haven't
seen anything about them finding it. Roommate, how long have
you been planning this, Robinson? A bit over a week.
(08:07):
I believe I can get close to it, but there's
a squad car parked right by it. I think they
already swept that spot. But I don't want to chance it, Robinson.
I'm wishing i'd circle back and grabbed it as soon
as I got to my vehicle. I'm worried what my
old man would do if I didn't bring back Grandpa's rifle.
I don't know if it had a serial number, but
it wouldn't trace to me. I worry about Prince. I
(08:30):
had to leave it in a bush where I changed outfits.
I didn't have the ability or time to bring it
with I might have to abandon it and hope they
don't find Prince. How the fuck will I explain losing
it to my old man. Only thing I left was
the rifle wrapped in a towel. Remember how I was
engraving bullets. The fucking messages are mostly a big meme.
(08:51):
If I see notices bulge ooh wu on Fox News,
I might have a stroke. All right, I'm gonna have
to leave it that really fucking sucks. Judging from today,
I'd say Grandpa's gun does just fine. IDK, I think
that was a two thousand dollars scope, Robinson, Delete this exchange, Robinson.
My dad wants photos of the rifle, he says, Grandpa
(09:13):
wants to know who has what. The Feds released a
photo of the rifle and it is very unique. He's
calling me r n not answering, Robinson. Since Trump got
into office, my dad has been a pretty diehard Mega.
I'm going to turn myself in willingly. One of my
neighbors here is a deputy for the sheriff. You are
all I worry about, love roommate. I'm much more worried
(09:36):
about you, Robinson. Don't talk to the media. Please, don't
take any interviews or make any comments. If police ask
you questions, ask for a lawyer, and stay silent. That's
the end of the exchange.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
It seems like this person fairly wisely stopped engaging with their.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, there's not a good response to give to that. No,
that's not and discord again. One of the one thing
I would hope this would bust is the This has
to have been a professional hit man, assassin of some sort,
which is a job that I mean, it technically exists.
(10:14):
Like there are guys who are for the fucking crypts
of the Bloods. You could call them professional hitmen, and
that they kill people for money. But they're not like
the people you see in movies, Like they're guys who
will walk up with a thirty eight and gut shoot
somebody and run the fuck off like they're they're not
We're not talking about like smooth operators. Those people almost
don't exist as a profession and certainly not as a
(10:37):
standard thing in the United States. And that that like
the fact that he was having this kind of conversation
on discord.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
This is I believe, regular text.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
So these are regular regular text.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
This is straight up yeah sms right, Like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
He's messaging this shit through unencrypted lines and left a
note under his keyboard and dropped the rifle in the woods,
Like this is all about what you respeck from a
twenty two year old kid who's a reasonably good shot
with a rifle and had no real other skills, Like
it's what it looked like.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Yes, this doesn't even seem like someone who spent a
great deal of time planning, right, like learning about that.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
They said they've been planning about it for about a week.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
Yeah, this lines up with what they said, right, like
like yeah, and they seem almost surprised.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yeah, I got this weird feeling reading it, Like Tyler
almost is shocked that they did it. Like there's this
almost sense of being pulled by history.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, it's seemingly confused by his own actions in his CeNSE.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
Yeah, like watching himself almost like.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yes, and like I I inscrite, like one of the things.
It sounds like and this is a little unclear, but
it sounds like in terms of those memes winding up.
But he was doing that before, maybe even before he'd
ever planned to shoot Kirk. That's just like a thing
he did for shit.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
For people.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
People have pointed to that as being like, oh, well,
obviously the roommate knew something was up. If if the
roommate was aware that that Robinson was carving bullets, that's,
first of all, that's not a crime. No, people just
do weird shit sometimes, especially if someone goes to the range.
Often maybe they're gonna fucking scribble on a bullet. Like
that's not indication of anything that's legitimately concerning frankly.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Yeah, it's indication again that this guy was very online
in the gamer right, yea, right.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
But that's it.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
So it's not just people like Walsh who are casting
doubt on the authenticity of these messages. Plenty of liberals
and people on the left have taken to suspecting that
these could have been written by an quote unquote FBI
agent or law enforcement as fake evidence to frame the shooter.
(12:43):
And people have pointed towards some weird verbiage like calling
his dad his old man and referring to quote unquote
like law enforcement type language like interrogate And Yeah, to me,
this is not very confusing. He talks like this because
he's raised Mormon and plays a lot of tactical video
(13:05):
games thousands of hours I have. I have a Steam profile, huge,
huge gamer. And he might talk a little odd because
he just did a fucking crazy thing.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
I don't even think it's that odd.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
It's nice people call someone they're in love with, my love.
That's a thing that happens in the world.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Like, that's not like a.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Very normal what are we doing here?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Yeah, why are we questioning this part of the story?
Speaker 4 (13:31):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
But and again, like these texts were handed over to
local police by Robinson's roommate. Why fake evidence that would
jeopardize the case when the police already have a lot
of other evidence DNA ballistic evidence, the friend group discord
chat where he also admitted to the crime right before
he turned himself in. Like, these textlogs don't even like
(13:53):
make him out to be a crazy leftist. He talks
like very vaguely about Kirk, like spreading hatred.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, he says nothing about politics. And again, as we'll
talk about because there's some evidence here suggesting that both
Tyler and their roommate, like their politics were mixed from
what little we can glean.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
About them, right, or a very minor part of their
lives in a sense, like yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
They're not talking about redistribution of wealth, they're not talking
about overthrowing the government.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Oh no, they're not talking about politics in that way.
This seems more like personal to him.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yes, he's in love with a transperson and he didn't
like what Charlie Kirk said about trans people.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah, and like if the government's going to fake messages,
why would they do so in a way that exonerates
the trans roommate the real ideological target here.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Especially look at what the government is doing right now.
Right they're going after quote unquote Antiva, They're going after
the Open Society Foundation, George Soros, all of these left
wing NGOs. If they were faking this, would he not
have referenced one of those organizations? Would there not be
a fucking black and red flag somewhere in there?
Speaker 4 (15:00):
It would be so easy. If you're going to implicate someone,
you could implicate it in text messages really easily, Like
it's ridiculous to suggest that, yeah, the state did this.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, why would you fake that?
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Why would you fake it that way?
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Baffling, incomprehensible. These texts are not load bearing to this case.
Plenty of other there's plenty of other evidence. And this
isn't the same thing as like cops planting evidence or
like a district attorney making subjective claims about intent, like
you don't need to overestimate state intelligence here.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
No, we don't even need her what we have. There
was no need for them to have done anything at all,
because Robinson specifically notes that as soon as pictures of
the rifle were posted online by police, his dad fucking
Costs family knew because it is a unique gun Yeah,
it is.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
It is.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
It is an antique mouser that was sportized and rebarreled,
presumably personally by his grandfather. Both his grandpa and his
dad seem to have recognized it immediately. There was no
getting away with it once the rifle was found.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
This is totally different from like the MS thirteen tattoo thing,
where the trumpetministration argued for an interpretation of tattoos and
then printed out a picture with like very clearly photoshopped
letters to draw a parallel between what they think the
tattoos meant and with their interpretation of it as letters
and numbers, which trump in all of his genius, mistook
(16:22):
for being actual tattoos. And then they just ran with
it because no one has the capacity to tell the
president you're wrong. This is completely different than faking all
these text messages. There's metadata, there's cell phone records, it's
probably still on the roommate's own phone. Like physical a
physical evidence, and like subjectively saying that you don't know
(16:44):
any gen z that talks like this, that's not valid evidence.
Twenty two year olds know how to use punctuation.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
Yeah, let me tell you of someone who crades hundreds
of papers every year from people who are largely but
not all, between eighteen and twenty five. Yeah, young people
can use punctuation. This is not like some kind of
forensic fucking literary analysis required.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
And the information obtained in these chat logs and through
interviews with his parents match reporting by Ken Klippenstein, who
got leaked messages from the shooter on Discord, very very similar.
Like lots of libs and people on the left are
saying this is fake because they wanted the shooter to
be conservative and they think that these texts damage the
(17:28):
narrative that they have chosen. I think that's why we're
seeing people react so strongly to this. It's not about
actually evaluating the evidence on like a base level, right,
Like this guy grew up in a conservative Mormon family.
His dad's pretty mega Robinson figured out he was bisexual
and started to move a little bit to the left
on like gender and sexuality issues. And even like a
lot of gen Z straight guys kind of have this
(17:50):
political profile, right, they're like pro gun, but their life
revolves around like gaming Discord and read it more than
like the political and.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
They're probably often pro capitalist, just not bigoted against queer people. Yea,
because that's not as common anymore. These aren't political partisans.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
They're not even on our slash bread tube, Like, yeah,
that's that's not what's happening. He played, he played furry
sex games on Steam when he was younger. One of
his Steam names was Donald Trump because yeah, he's twenty
two years old. Trump was an Augury when he was
like thirteen or whatever.
Speaker 4 (18:22):
Like, god, yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
We fucked the kids up so bad.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
It's it's a largely it's largely a political and like
this what he did is is existential violence manifesting a
political action from someone who isn't otherwise overtly political, right,
because shooting Charlie Kirk incredibly political action, even if that's
not the way that that the shooter maybe conceived it.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Yeah, like this person happened, So it happened across a
queer person who they are very fond of. Right, they
have queer people in their lives. That is not indicative
of any politics other than they have a queer person
in their.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
If this person stand the Soviet Union, we would fucking
know about.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
It because they would be running with that.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Used a mos in.
Speaker 5 (19:11):
For one thing.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
So they would have missed a little bit of Moses
slander for you today to break up the horrors. Speaking
of crackdowns, crack down on your wallet by buying these.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Products and services.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Beautiful, lovely.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, First Amendment crackdown. Massive rhetoric coming out of Stephen
Miller and from Pam Bondi and basically every mouthpiece of
the administration about going after the left, about dismantling particularly
organizations like the Open Sciety Foundation, going after George Soros
and his son. There's talk about prosecuting people criminally and
(20:04):
using the death penalty, even on folks who are quote
unquote funding terrorism, a term which has been so broadly
described by mouthpieces of the administration as to include potentially
just about anybody.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
This could be like bail funds, environmental NGOs, legal support NGOs,
like It's it's really unclear at the exact form that
this is going to take, but this is stuff that
the administration has pined about doing for a while.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, and it's unclear. You know, it's one of the
big pieces of news that's happened. Within twenty four hours
of us recording this episode, which we recorded on Thursday,
the eighteenth is that Trump has designated Antifa a domestic
terrorist organization.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Of that's not he's said that.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
What I'm saying is he said that, he said up
to me, those words that he has said.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Words that he has said before, including in twenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
For the letter of the law.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
For one thing, there's a wild difference between what you
could do legally to an international foreign terrorist organization, yeah,
and in domestic terrorist organization.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Because of the First Amendment, you can't just declare legally
in terms of what is written law, the president can't
just declare a group of people to be a domestic
terrorist organization. It's usually an enhancement charge, yes, and then
just go after people who have spoken out or donated
money to legal charities that are randomly declared to be
in support of that that's not legal, which doesn't mean
(21:27):
it what happened. Let me be really clear. Yeah, yeah,
but that's not what the law is about.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
And they've tried to do that in Atlanta was Top
Crop City and the Lena Solidarity Fund and going after
the Bail Fund and people who had donated money to
like the Forest Defense Fund, right, and this Trump is
similarly actually to Atlanta Is also talked about using Rico
charges to get people in trouble who are funding these
quote unquote domestic terror organizations, and on Yeah, September seventeenth,
(21:53):
Trump Truth, I am pleased to inform our many USA
patriots that I'm designating Antife, a sick, dangerous radical left disaster,
as a major terrorist organization. I will also be strongly
recommending that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance
with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for
your attention to this matter.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah, I mean, for a use the word major right,
which doesn't like there's a domestic terrorism is a concept
that's nebulous FTO, Foreign terrorist organization is an extremely clear
legal definition. He didn't use either of those. This is yeah,
this is a thing that like Ted Cruz, and I
think he enjoyed it. I'm sure there are other people involved.
(22:35):
But Ted Cruz in before twenty twenty twenty nineteen, tried
to introduce a resolution in the Senate condemning Antifa like
this has been a thing.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Marjor Taylor Green introduced legislation which went nowhere, or talked aboutization.
I don't even know if she actually introduced it like
this year about designating Antifa terrorist organization. It's been It's
been something like Andy know has been advocating for for years.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
It's a really important point that they have attempted and
failed to do this numerous times because the law doesn't
let them. And this is something that if you have
been in the riot reporting on public shootings business as
long as I have been, christ one thing I can
tell you is that in the wake of something like this,
it was the same with christ Church and the immediate
(23:17):
wake of christ Church, there was this really shocking moment
where a bunch of conservative I talked to these people
because I published the art the defining article on that shooting. Yeah,
a shitload of conservative organizations came out and said, you
know what, maybe we've been wrong about demonizing Muslim immigrants.
Maybe like that was really fucked up and we should
like those people were talking about that, people who you
(23:39):
would not expect that now, they didn't keep talking that way.
They got a pretty quick But what you have in
a moment like this is there's a limited period of
time where people's shock and horror and surprise at what
has happened creates spaces of possibility for folks who have
(24:00):
an agenda and you have a clear plan for what
to push, to push the overton envelope in their direction. Right,
this is not a period of time that lasts for ever.
And the folks who are largely orchestrating the conservative response
to Charlie Kirk's murder are aware of this, and they
(24:21):
are making the best use of this period of time
that they can get. Now, that doesn't mean the fact
that this is a limited period of time doesn't mean
there aren't long term consequences, doesn't mean that they can't
make significant progress on their plan to stifle free speech.
It doesn't mean we're not in massive danger. Because we
are in danger, folks. I'm not telling you we're not.
(24:42):
I'm telling you these spaces of possibility don't last for ever,
in part because the public moves on, and in part
because there is always a backlash to the backlash, and
you're seeing pieces of that already.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
They are seeing pieces of that.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Carl Rove of all motherfucking people wrote it article about
how the administration is unfairly blaming liberals and leftists for
the actions of an individual shooter. Tucker Carlson came out
and it made a statement that like, if the government
is able to go after you for this, they'll come
after conservatives at some point. He's not wrong about it.
I don't credit him doing that because of a serious
(25:18):
moral thing. I credited him to be a relatively intelligent
guy who was like, no, no, no, if they're able
to do this to you know whatever, milktoast liberals, eventually
it will happen to me.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Right and specifically, like Pam Bondi is, the etern General
made some statements a few days ago about them going
after quote unquote hate speech, yeah, which spawned a whole
bunch of conservative commentators Steven Krawdertucker Carlson, as well as
Matt Walsh. And under no circumstances do you have to
hand up to Matt Walsh. But this prompted them to
be like, no, actually, we don't believe in hate speech
(25:47):
as a legitimate legal category. There should be social consequences
for people who celebrate the murder of an innocent man,
but there should not be legal consequences for hate speech. Right,
We're fine with the government helping us like docks you
and get you fired from your job, but prosecuting hate
speech as a category is something that we do not
agree with, and neither did Charlie Kirk. So there's been
(26:09):
like that small reaction, which then prompted Pambondi to be like, no,
when I say hate speech, what I really mean is
like threats and assignment of violence, and like, yeah, okay.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
Fighting words I think is a legal term, right, Like
incitements to violence.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah, And you know, there's some stuff that's always been
illegal and never been punished. For example, when conservatives, I've
been dealing with this for years, threaten to kill and
rape activists and show up outside of their houses and
harass them. As a general rule, the police don't do anything. Yeah,
if those activists are on the left, right, even though
that crosses the boundary into fighting words, however, they have
(26:42):
legally could they choose not to.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
But if someone is out there saying in the wake
of the Charlie Kirk shooting, I want to incite people
to kill this person, that is illegal. You're not allowed
to say I want to incite people to murder this person.
That is a crime. If you're posting insane say that
you have broken the law. They won't go after a
conservative for doing that. But they'll go after you, right
(27:06):
like that is how things work, you know. However, we
have seen people who have been attacked for speech that
absolutely is not crossing the line into fighting words.
Speaker 6 (27:17):
Right.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
One of the better examples for this happened at Texas Tech.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
It happened.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
You've had variends of this happened at a couple of
colleges all around the country. They're specifically at Texas Tech,
which is, you know, one of Texas's kind of premier
state schools.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
There was a video of.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
An incident on the day that Charlie Kirk was killed,
where a student scene jumping up and down, yelling profanity
at a vigil in a free speech zone outside of
a student union building on the campus, saying y'all, Homie dead,
making fun of people who were mourning Kirk's death. At
one point, she touched a guy's hat. The video of
(27:55):
her went viral. Governor Greg Abbott called for her to
be arrested and expelled. She was expelled immediately. She was
arrested and charged with assaults shortly thereafter. Her family has
not made a statement. Very wisely, There's really nothing they
could say that would be great.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
At this point.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
There has been some pushback from student organizations in the
state because this is blatantly illegal. Calling what she did
assault is nonsense. In my opinion from watching the video,
she was at a free speech zone. Laughing y'all homely
dead when someone is killed is not fighting words. That
is not illegal. You are allowed to say stuff like
(28:34):
that under the letter of the law. Does this mean
this person won't get convicted of a crime. It's Texas,
and she's a black woman, she might. And this is
very chilling. This is deeply concerning, right. This is not
the only case. There's a universe, smaller university outside of
Austin where again a student was videotaped celebrating individual for
(28:54):
Kirk's death. That person was expelled as well. There have
been a number of teachers fired obviously, stuff like this
has been happening all over the country, right, And this
is deeply worrying. And even if even if the space
of possibility closes on these people faster than they're expecting,
if the crackdown on the Open Society Foundation doesn't happen,
if this Antifa stuff doesn't go any further than the
(29:16):
last time they've talked about going after Antifa, stuff like
this is going to continue to happen, and it will
only accelerate over the next couple of years, right, and
that is a massive problem.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Part of this culture shift can be seen in what
some people are probably not very smartly calling the biggest
attack on free speech they've ever seen in their life,
which is on Wednesday evening, ABC put Jimmy Kimmel's show
on hold quote unquote indefinitely, following pressure from the FCC
and affiliate stations owned by Nextstar. Before ABC's announcement next
(29:51):
our release statement quote, Next Stars owned and partner television
stations affiliated with the NBC Television Network will preempt Jimmy
Kimmel Live for the foreseeable future, beginning with.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
To it's show.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Next to Our strongly objects to the recent comments made
by mister Kimmel concerning the killing and Charlie Kirk and
will replace the show with other programming in its ABC
affiliated markets unquote. Sinclair Broadcasting also stated it would not
air Kimmel's show and called on Kimmel to apologize to
the Kirk family and donates to the Kirk family as
well as TPUSA. Earlier that Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr
(30:24):
advocated on the conservative podcaster Benny Johnson's show. Quote, it's
really sort of past time that a lot of these
licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast Disney and say,
we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you
straighten this out, and we, the licensed broadcaster, are running
the possibility of fines or license revocation from the SEC
if we continue to run content that ends up being
(30:46):
a pattern of news distortion unquote. Carr then made vague
threats towards like direct FCC involvement. Quote, we can do
this easy way or the hard way. These companies can
find ways to change con it can take action frankly
on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for
the FCC ahead on quote. The FCC controls broadcast licenses
(31:08):
for local TV channels, and next Star is planning a
merger with Tegna, which requires SEC approval. And this is
obviously a coerced attack on free speech.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
And we've seen a lot of people shows and whatnot
getting polled and people speaking out getting in trouble because
they're companies. They're trying to do a merger. Right, that's
not new.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yes, this has happened with ABC already, this happened with
a CBS and paramount. I think some people, including people
on the right, are misunderstanding some of the circumstances of
the firing or the being put on hold, as well
as what like Kimmel said, Like kim wasn't joking about
or celebrating Kirk's death. What he did do is possibly
(31:50):
like falsely insinuate that the shooter was Mega when evidence
at the time pointed otherwise. Kimmell said, quote, we hit
some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang
desperately trying to characterize the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk
as anything other than one of them and doing everything
they can to score political points from it.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
Unquote.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
He then went on to tell a joke about how
Trump did not seem very sad in the wake of
Charliekirk's death, comparing the death to a goldfish in Trump's mind.
That was the way the joke was framed. Yeah, so
that's what Kimmel actually said. You can interpret that either way.
Whether he's just saying that megas are desperately trying to
make it look like he's not one of them, and
(32:31):
scoring political points. Or you can interpret it as Kimmel
kind of insinuating that the shooter probably is mega. I
don't know Kimmel's mind. I'm not sure what he exactly
meant by that. But the Rolling Stone reported that sources
told them the quote. Senior executives at ABC, its owner,
Disney and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how
to minimize the damage. Multiple execs felt Kimmel had not
(32:53):
actually said anything over the line, but the threat of
Trump administration retaliation loomed. Yeah, and this is again, this
is chilling, absolutely chilling speech. The things he said, we're
not in line with the best available evidence at the
time that he said them. But they weren't hate speech,
they were not incitement to violence. There was nothing a
(33:14):
league know about them. And again you had a fucking
right wing figure on television urging for homeless people to
be executed, the involuntary lethal ejection to solve the homeless crisis. Quote,
just kill them. He's not getting fired.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
No, he had to make a half assed apology, but
that's it.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
Yeah, I can had to pretend to be sorry if
I had a nickel for every time someone on Fox
News said that like any mass shooter at all was
linked to a trans person, Like none of my trans
friends would ever be homeless. Again, Like they say this
shit all the time and nothing happens, even though it
is I mean literally just it is straight up tofammatory yep.
(33:55):
And they say that shit constantly and nothing happens. And
this is just a the pure I mean example of
just the latant political suppression of speech. And also this
sort of like we talked about this with the mergers,
is the structural problem with the way that like the
American quote unquote free press is supposed to be structured,
(34:16):
which is that they're all for profit companies and because
of that, all you need to do is just buy
out or threaten their profit enough and they'll just fall
on line. And that's what we've been watching with news
outlet after news outlets, news outlet like firing anyone who
said anything being about Kirk.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
I think with that that concludes our Charlie Kirk assassination
aftermath discussion for now, But there is in fact other
news this week happening. James, do you have stuff, Yeah,
un Fortunately, I'm like, I'm like bracing myself because I
know that James's news is never that good either.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
So the good news these days.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Really the passport thing was killed, right, the Mark Ruvio.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some good news.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Actually, there was a Senate bill, a writer on a
bill that was introduced that would have given Marco Rubio
the power to revoke passports for citizens for effectively political
speech and the guise of speech protecting you know, quote
unquote terrorists. That failed, like that was pulled by the sponsor,
which is good. There was a backlash to it, and
(35:23):
again when there's backlashes, that's that's good. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, I mean it's it's so annoying to have to
like we all know that like pointing out the hypocrisy
doesn't work as like a real strategy. But like there's
if there's a way besides that to like actually channel
resistance to these authoritarian and like speech chilling measures besides
just smugly going like haha, the Party of free speech
strikes again, which I understand how that's emotionally compelling. Well,
(35:54):
it's not going to stop them from taking away your
free speech. No, yeah, speaking of free speech, here's some
free ads.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
Yeah, we are back I don't worry, folks. It is
all downhill from here. I'm afraid because things have not
been good outside of the coverage and repercussions of the
(36:24):
Charlie Kirk shooting. And to start with, I want us
to talk about Ghana. This is one of those stories
that unfortunately has been kind of eclipsed this week, but
it shouldn't be, so we're going to talk about it. So,
the United States has begun using Ghana as a pass
through to send people back to other countries in West Africa.
In international law, when somebody has protection from being sent
(36:47):
to a place and you send them back via another place,
that is called chain refoulment.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Right.
Speaker 4 (36:53):
One could probably also pronounce that it's a bit where
a French word, but I have decided not to. In
this instance, I'm sending people to Ghana when their home
countries has been deemed to be too dangerous by a
United States court, or they are unable to send them
back to that country for some other reason. Right, people
in this part of the world don't need visas to travel,
so they can send them to neighboring countries without requiring
(37:17):
Like that, the Ghana can just bust them back, right,
it doesn't require a great deal of paperwork. So a
court has ordered the United States that there was an
attempt right to secure protections for these people via them
into a temporary restraining order to prevent them either being
sent away. Some of them were in Ghana at the
time the case was filed, right, so to prevent them
(37:38):
being sent from Ghana to places where they may face
as we're about to hear, torture, death, pretty much the
worst ship that can happen to people. So the court
did order the United States to produce a document which
details the exact nature of its agreement with Ghana. At
the time I'm writing, the United States has not produced that.
Gharanean sources have repeatedly suggest did that one exists. Right
(38:01):
in Ghanan government press conferences and internal Ghanan news reporting,
the case was bought by both Gambia and Nigerian citizens, right,
so people who don't want to be returned to those
countries and their attempt to obtain a restraining order. In
one instance, one of the people who bought the case
(38:23):
fled after torture by the police and military and was
explicitly told that if he came back they would kill
him and what the US is doing here is using
Ghana as a pass through to send him back.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Right.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
Yeah, some of them also detailed in the case they're
transport They said they were in straight jackets for sixteen
hours on the flight the US. Right, the government, the
United States government in this instance has once again claimed
that these people are out of its hands and it
has no way of stopping the government of Ghana from
sending them back to these other countries. Right. This is
(38:55):
an argument that is attempted to make in several other instances,
and I do just want to fly that like this
use of third party countries for deportation has much increased
under the Trump administration, that it was the Biden administration
who begun funding Panamanian deportations right way before Donald Trump
was even elected, and I have documented that extensively in
(39:18):
my series on the Darien Gap. The court determined in
this case that it didn't have the jurisdiction to grant
the plaintiff's relief right, so that means that they're not
able to get a restraining order. One of the people
had actually already been returned to the place where they
had a convention against torture, protection from and was in
hiding at the time. At the court case right, the
(39:39):
judge said that the government's actions were part of a
quoting here pattern and widespread effort to evade the government's
legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.
We are recording this on the eighteenth of September. It's
a Thursday, and about fifteen minutes ago, another United States
flight just landed in Ghana. Practice of BSHB ongoing. Secondly,
(40:02):
what I want to talk about is sadly another shooting,
the killing of Silverio Viegas Gonzales in Chicago. Diegos. Gonzales
was a thirty eight year old father, a Mexican national,
and he was shot by either one or two ICE
agents while driving away from them. An ICE statement claimed
(40:23):
that he drove towards them and ended up dragging an
agent a significant distance. Surveillance camera footage at the scene
shows one agent talking to Vegas Gonzales in his vehicle.
We then see the vehicle reverse away from them and
then move around them to the left when it sees
a gap in traffic. The ICE agents have placed their vehicle,
(40:44):
which is an SUV, in front of his vehicle. Sort
of cramping it into the curve right, so he has
to reverse backwards and then move forward and to the
left in order to try and drive away, which is
what he's trying to do. Right. We can only see
one of the officers in the footooth We see the
other officer later in other footage. The officer in the
footage does not appear to be dragged that he appears
(41:05):
to draw his weapon in by standard footage. We then
see two officers pull theegas Gonzales from the vehicle and
they begin administering first aid. We're just rewatching the footage
now and you can see the other age and on
the other side of the vehicle.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
This sounds very similar to the time that Ice shot
at the car driving away just a few weeks ago.
Speaker 4 (41:27):
Sure, and Sam Beernardino absolutely, Yeah. Generally, I have no
idea of what rules Ice are operating under. It's not
considered best practice to open fire a vehicle that is
moving away from you unless it is actively endangering no
someone else's life, right.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
In part because even if it's endangering someone else's life,
a handgun will not stop a car. Yeah, maybe you
hit the driver, but the odds are just as good,
if not much better, then it goes through a window
and remains lethal going past the car during people's lives.
Speaker 5 (42:01):
And also it's worth mentioning on the other side of
the car from the officer who we see draw his
gun is the other agent. Yes, yeah, so if you're
shooting at the car, you're you're shooting at your other.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Agian guns don't stop cars generally, unless you're calling a
fifty caliber anti materiel rifle. Guns don't stop cars. Yeah,
they do stop people, but they but they keep bullets
keep going when they miss. It's just bad. It's a
bad thing to do. It's irresponsible. It's normal cop shit.
Speaker 4 (42:34):
Yeah, so what we see is at least two shots fired,
and then we begin to see that then they leave
the screen of the surveillance camera, right, so we don't
see exactly like we're unable to see. I guess where
those bullets impact the bystander. Footy Sen shows his vehicle
(42:55):
crashed into the undercarriage of a large lorry like a truck,
and he's hit that vehicle in a way that could
also have been fatal, right like the way that he's
he's hit that vehicle, like the engine block of the
car goes underneath, so it would be the driver who
would take the main impact because the because the trailer
(43:15):
is higher off the ground. Right, Hopefully that's making sense
to people. Totally, he's traveled about one hundred feet in
this time period. Unraveled Press have a pretty good account
of this. I've cobbled together I think most of the
open source video and also the surveillance video. There don't
appear in those videos to be any other agents present,
(43:36):
and when we see the agents rendering aid, none of
them appears to be in the state someone would be
had they been dragged by a fast moving car. Also, again,
like with reference to shooting at a moving vehicle, off
the moving vehicle is dragging your colleague, you're shooting also
at your colleague if you shoot at the vehicle. So, unfortunately,
one of this changes the fact that this guy is
(43:58):
now dead. Right. The Mexican Consular has confirmed his age.
They said he was working as a cook as his profession,
and that he was from michual Pun. The consulate has
been in touch with his family. Generally, I'm not familiar
with this instance and what will happen. Generally, the Mexican
Consulate will help with returning the remains of Mexican nationals
(44:19):
to their families in Mexico. That's most of what I
have on his death. It seems to have moved like
very quickly through the news cycle, which is unfortunate because
obviously you have children who have lost a father here
like this. This is a tragedy too.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Yeah, no, this is tragic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5 (44:38):
You know, And I am sitting here haunted by the
fact that they killed this guy two days after the
Charlie Kirk shooting. I think most of the people who
are listening to the show right now don't know this happened.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, these agents aren't going to get prosecuted into court
of law for this, the same way that absolutely the
Charlie kirkisas ad will.
Speaker 4 (44:56):
Yeah, generally, like local dealer, there have been some cases,
but I'm not really aware of any filed against Border
Patrol agents. Generally, DHS has an agency which investigates like
use of force incidents, right, and it is I will
say it is extremely There have been times when agents
have been charged.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
They are rare Stephen Miller's DHSS. That seems very unlikely.
Speaker 4 (45:23):
Yeah, Like I'm aware of some charges, for instance, in
San Diego for like agents who have allowed drugs to
cross the border.
Speaker 5 (45:29):
Right, sure, it is pretty rare. Yeah, So let's let's
talk about what ICE's occupation of Chicago has been. Like, Yeah,
I kind of want to start with something that's been
very frustrating, which is a lot of the way that
Chicago has been discussed in the wake of Trump, like
not deploying the National Guard. There has been about oh,
(45:53):
if you resist Trumpet will like, you know, you can
defeat him, and like that's true. But also ICE and
Border patrol are on the ground in Chicago as we're
listening to this right now, dragging people from their homes.
The raids have gone to a significant extent the way
that we expected them to. They have been largely very
(46:17):
very fast lightning raids. A lot of them have been
an outlying part of Chicago land, which has been making
it difficult to both track them and determine numbers because
a lot of these parts of these massive Chicago suburbs.
We're going to talk about one later called Elgin that
has one hundred thousand people in it, but also doesn't
have the kind of I mean they have like local journalists,
(46:38):
but they don't have like the kind of press core
that they're like the city of Chicago proper has and
so documentation isn't much harder, which is part of why
they've been striking out there. It's largely been Ice, but
Border Patrol has shown up, and part of the Border
Patrol appearing has been that this has also been a
giant pr blitz for a Trump administration officials, as the
(47:02):
people at Unraveled have pointed out, and we'll be talking
to them more next week about what things have been
like on the ground. A senior Border Patrol official, Gregory
Bovino has claimed too, we don't actually have like photograph
everyone's in there, but he was posting on X that
he was. He went to Franklin Park, which is where
Ice shot that guy a couple of days after the shooting. Okay,
(47:27):
he has been releasing an entire stream of TikTok and
X posts to sort of like advertise his presence in
the city and doing this whole we did this in
LA or doing this here now thing. JMC. You don't
talk a little bit about who he.
Speaker 4 (47:40):
Is, Yeah, I do. So. Beveno was, at least until recently,
he's appeared to be as you say working in Chicago now.
His Twitter now reads Commander op at Large CA Gregory K. Bavino.
He was a chief patrol agent in Neil Centro sector
when we saw Operation Return to Sender right. Operation Return
Tocember was December of twenty t twenty four. That's happened
(48:00):
under a Biden administration. This was the first of these
border patrol roving stops way north of the border, right
up in the central Valley, stopping people in home depots,
stopping people people who appeared to be Latino, Latina Latine
on the street. I would say that cal Matters has
(48:21):
had a really good coverage of that, and I can
link it in the show notes. We also saw the
deployment of Border Patrol to La right, that was the
El Centre section, So people aren't familiar with El Centro
east of San Diego along the border right, it's sort
of most of the way to Arizona if your driving
from San Diego. He is really, like I would say,
a man of the moment in terms of Trump's border patrol.
(48:41):
Right like, border Patrol is an agency that's changed a
lot over the years. There was a time with Border
Patrol recruiter from the Peace corps now is not that time.
One thing that Bevino has been very good at in
the sense of like doing what the administration wants from
a border patrol agent right now is his use of
social media. My understanding is that they have a whole
team dedicated to this in the El Centro sector, right,
(49:04):
that they have videographers and photographers and such to make
social media for the border patrol. And Bavina really seems
to have been stepping up in importance, like he has
this sort of he also cuts a very distinctive figure
with this kind of crop side haircut, like you can
find a picture of his haircut online. I don't how
to describe it. It's where the brick picture shows him
(49:27):
holding an ar with a low powered variable octic Like
he is this new tactical, aggressive, very aggressive social media
presence border patrol officer. Right. And we've seen El Centro
Border Patrol station specifically be at the forefront of a
lot of these operations. As I said, even going back
(49:48):
to the Biden era, if you're wondering, border patrol sectors
are not just around the cities that they're named for, right,
They can go a long way north, So it's the
San Diego sector, the El Centro sector. These are not
necessarily defined by places that you would recognize as being
close to San Diego or El Centro, which is why
you would have seen them operating as far north as
Los Angeles. I'm not as familiar with northern border sectors,
(50:11):
haven't spent as much time there, but I would imagine
that there is a border patrail sector that attains to
the area that Chicago is in. So perhaps, but you know,
it's now doing some kind of operational command for these
urban things rather than working in that sector. I'm not
entirely sure, but yeah, that's who he is.
Speaker 5 (50:27):
Yeah, and he's been you know, he's been making an
enormous deal of showing up in Chicago, and this has
been something that's increasingly This is part of what it
means for ice and Border Patrol to show up in
the city, is you get these fucking, just absolutely hideous
pr ops. On Tuesday, Kercy nome last scene shooting a
(50:50):
dog joined a raid in Elgin, which is a pretty
far flung suburb of Chicago with about one hundred thousand
people in it, and she showed up to do basically
a PR junket at this raid at five in the
morning in Elgin, where I survived with helicopters. They blew
(51:11):
up someone's door and they grabbed a bunch of people,
and then they were forced to release two of the
seven people they grabbed because they immediately turned out to
be US citizens. Kurst has denied that they detained them
and said that, oh no, actually we just separated them
for their protection. What we did the operation like that
(51:34):
doesn't seem to be true from everything that we've heard
from witnesses the scene. But yeah, this is you know,
these are the way that these enforcement operations, the way
that these raids have gone is at the beginning of
a major operation, cycles turned into these press circuits for
people like Chursy Nome.
Speaker 4 (51:52):
Yeah, GNOME's been on a few raids like this has
been a consistent thing, right, that these raids are a
content creation exercises much tall law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Yes, and it excuse to dress up all that good stuff.
Speaker 5 (52:03):
Yeah, and you know it. It's this, it's this like
reveling both in this you know, in this sort of
like like constructed like I'm holding an air fifteen lookout
tough I am image and also just in the cruelty
and the suffering in the same way that the alligator
Alcatraz stuff was. But it's worth noting that most of
the raids have not looked like this, Like this this
(52:23):
was a raid where like, you know, people were woken
up in this basically this random suburb at five in
the morning because like they heard an explosion and ice
had blocked off all of their streets and their armored
vehicles and helicopters. Most of what they've been are not
like that. They've been following the pattern established in LA
of very very rapid raids to avoid rep response networks,
(52:47):
targeting accombination of houses, job sites, and you know, places
like home depot and you know, when we talked about
this beginning a couple of weeks ago, we talked about
how these people are being deployed largely from this naval
base that is hours out from the city, right And
that's part of why these a lot of these raids,
although they have been going to the South Side, which
(53:08):
is significantly far away, but a lot of these raids
have been in places like Elgin that are further north
and are more outlying because they are closer to this
naval base than the core of the city of Chicago,
and it's easier to do there because there's less resistance.
There's been a bunch of raids in Elgin. They took
(53:29):
a student from a community college. They've just been dragging
people from their homes and workplaces. There was a very
very well publicized raid in Naperville, which is another sort
of outlying suburb, where they grabbed people who are like
fixing someone's roof.
Speaker 4 (53:44):
Was that the one where people remained on the roof?
Yeah some time? Yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 5 (53:49):
Yeah, really horrible seeing people are extremely pissed off. There's
another story that I's gotten very very little coverage that
was horrifying in Displains, which is the suburb just north
of Oha, where ice agents and masks did a very
very standard thing that they've been doing.
Speaker 2 (54:05):
You know.
Speaker 5 (54:05):
This is, I mean a kind of standard ice tactic
where they wait for people to get back into a
truck and then they block the truck off with their
trucks to prevent it from leaving. And I'm going to
read a CBS report of what happened next because I
think it's important to understand what is actually like for
these people. Edgar, who's one of the people who was
in the car said that when the agent originally came
(54:29):
to the passenger door, he tried holding the door closed
for preventing him from opening it. He said at the
time that he and his family had no idea who
was at the vehicle, and everyone was scared. When the
agent tried opening the door, Edgar said he was tased
in the face. That's when he told everyone in the
truck to run for their lives. Despite being a US citizen,
(54:51):
they ran out of fear. So what's happening here is
there's these two brothers and their dad who is undocumented.
The two brothers were born in Chicago, and they block
off this car. They show up in masks. The people
in the car have absolutely no idea who they are,
and when they try to not get their car broken into,
(55:12):
they tase this guy, who is an American citizen in
the face. He has to go to the hospital because
they tased him in the face. And this there are
stories like this. This is a particularly bad one, but
there are stories like the rest of the raids that
we've been talking about every single day in Chicago that
do not break containments at all. In a country that
(55:34):
is literally entirely just talking about Charlie Kirk. There are
people being dragged from their homes. There are people being
dragged from their fucking places of work, They're being dragged
from their schools. And this is just what the US
is right now now, as fucking unbelievably bleak as this
is right, and people are terrified, but they're also angry,
(55:58):
and people are also organizing, and as we saw in LA,
people are forming rapid response networks and they're showing up
in places that I never would have thought. I mean,
maybe there'd be NGO networks, but they're doing things in
places I just wouldn't have thought possible. I want to
close this by there was a report on Thursday by
Sean Molkay, who's the news editor at The Reader, which
(56:20):
is a good independent outlet in Chicago. So ICE tried
the same tactic of blockading someone's truck and grabbing them
in a suburb called Wheaton, Illinois, and a bunch of
people when they tried to do this smash and grab
of this person's truck, a whole bunch of people showed
up and confronted them and screamed at them and recorded them,
(56:42):
and this caused the ICE people to take off and
run away without detaining the person. And this is a
stunning development if you know anything about either Chicago Land
or evangelicalism. Wheaton is the home of Wheaton College, which
is like, it's one of like the three big right
wing like Christian universities, alongside like Brigham Young and Liberty.
This is wild. This was one of the home bases
(57:04):
of power of the Bush era moral majority right like
Wheaton College is a school where dancing was illegal and
until two thousand and three, like, they've banned dancing for
one hundred and forty three years. And if people in
Wheaton are showing up to do direct actions against Ice,
these people they're cooked, right, They will be able to
do a significant amount of damage. They have been doing
(57:25):
significant amount of damage. We've just been talking about the
amount of damage they've been doing. But if this is
what is happening in places that used to be moral
majority strongholds right, places that produce some of the most
famous like Christian right wingers who shaped an entire half
century of American politics, if people there are showing up
(57:46):
and doing direct actions against Ice and winning, things are
fucking changing. People are radicalizing very quickly, and despite everything
that's been happening by all of the Kirk stuff Trump's
pulling keeps getting worse and worse, And I think this
is a good reminder that, like these people, part of
the reason they're moving so fast and so hard right
now is because they know they are staggeringly unpopular and
(58:09):
they have to get their crack down and they have
to build a political and legal power right now before
it gets even worse for them, and they're terrified that,
you know, if there are a thousand wheatns, what if
enough people resist them, they don't have the capacity to
stop them. Because everybody fucking hates these people and they
(58:31):
hate what they're doing. Nobody actually likes, you know, shock
troopers showing up in the neighborhoods and dragging the people
they love away from them. And it's going to be
a really, really long and hard battle. But the fact
that people are fighting in places where that would have
been unimaginable even ten years ago is I think at
(58:53):
least a small sign of hope in the darkness.
Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, and that's probably where we ought to end, is
a small sign of hope in the darkness.
Speaker 4 (59:02):
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Speaker 2 (59:15):
We reported the news.
Speaker 3 (59:18):
We reported the news.
Speaker 6 (59:27):
It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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