It Could Happen Here Weekly 210

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
every episode of the week that just happened is here
in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but

(00:23):
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Yet ready for anarchy in Atlanta?

Speaker 3 (00:36):
It should be clear to all Americans that we have
a very serious left wing terror threat in our country.

Speaker 4 (00:41):
State of the art, organized and well funded activists in criminals.

Speaker 5 (00:48):
On April twenty ninth, twenty twenty five, after almost exactly
four years of protests, sabotage, encampments, and organizing against the
construction of a state of the art police training facility
dubbed copp City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center officially
opened atop of the South River Forest Intocabb County, Georgia.

Speaker 6 (01:10):
Why two three cuts.

Speaker 7 (01:14):
The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is open? A handshake
between Governor Brian Kemp and are relieved Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.

Speaker 5 (01:21):
Getting here has not been an easy journey.

Speaker 7 (01:26):
The opening of the one hundred and eighteen million dollar
complex for police fire and E nine to one one personnel,
which includes academic leadership and simulation centers, came after not months,
but years of public pushback.

Speaker 5 (01:42):
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I've
been covering the combined Defend the Atlanta Forest Stop Cop
City movement on this show since twenty twenty one. I
first traveled to Atlanta to report on the ground from
inside of the protest encampments in spring of twenty twenty two,
and I moved to Atlanta to continue covering the story

(02:04):
more in depth in twenty twenty three. My coverage has
tracked the trajectory of the movement as well as my
ability as a reporter. But this will be my last
piece on the Stop Cop City movement. Every other reporter
mini series I've done on Stop Cup City was written
while the movement was still ongoing and the final outcome

(02:26):
had yet to be fully determined. Something that set the
movement in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this
fight was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty
aspirations of other anti police anarchists or leftist struggles. I
believe that we will win and COP City will never

(02:48):
be built. Where common turns of phrase and not just
repeated mindlessly as a protest chant, but deeply believed. But now,
six months after the grand opening of COP City, I
want to use this distance to offer a look at
the whole movement based on interviews and conversations I've had
with organizers, anarchists, and forest defenders, analyzing the movements rise

(03:11):
and fall and momentum, and why Atlanta is the bridge
between the twenty twenty protests during Trump's first term and
the current expansion of police surveillance, ICE activity and increased
state repression against quote unquote radical left terrorists. We don't
have enough time to retread a complete, in depth play

(03:31):
by play of the movement's history, most of which I've
already covered in previous episodes, but I will attempt to
break down the movement into a series of discrete phases.
After organizers learn about the plans to build COP City
in April of twenty twenty one, the movement to Defend
the Atlanta Forest first took form with an opening attack phase.

(03:52):
Throughout the entire summer of twenty twenty one, with tree
spiking and sabotage targeting construction equipment on the east side
of the forest, which a movie studio was planning to
develop at the time in partnership with local government. To
quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, early stages of
the movement were very intentionally defined by lots of sabotage

(04:15):
and unapologetic militancy. Just absolute, this is what we're doing.
This is what we're about. This is the goal. If
you don't like it, that's cool, but then don't be
a part of this. That was just what we were doing. Unquote.
In September twenty twenty one, the Atlantic City Council voted
to approve the Land Lease Ordinance, authorizing the Atlanta Police
Foundation to use hundreds of acres of city owned land

(04:38):
in the South River Forest to build copp City. After
this vote, electoral strategy gets largely eshewed, and soon after
the next phase fully kicks off that fall with the
physical occupation of the forest and the start of the
pressure campaigns targeting subcontractors working on the construction project. To
again quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, persistent encampment occupation,

(05:04):
lots of direct action happening, lots of sabotage happening, and
the cops just not knowing what to do at all.
Small incursions would get made, but they just had not
figured out what to do about it yet. There was
just kind of like free reign unquote. For the first
half of this occupation phase, the Atlanta police and de
Cab sheriffs seemed to be stuck in a form of paralysis,

(05:27):
not knowing how to disrupt the forest encampments or prevent
equipment sabotage. Meanwhile, the pressure campaign, inspired by the tactics
of the animal rights group Shack, showed early promise in
getting some contractors like Reeves Young construction and material suppliers
to drop out of the cop City project. But after
this stream of steady success from Fall of twenty twenty

(05:49):
one to May of twenty twenty two, the police were
forced to up the ante and started conducting large scale
raids in the forest to remove force defenders and damage
encampment infrastructure. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, May of twenty
twenty two is the end of the paralysis phase for
the cops. We had our first grid sweep raids where

(06:11):
the paralysis phase is broken. You're getting your multi agency
large sweeps where they're really coming in and putting in
a lot of work. That really leads up to January
of twenty twenty three, so where Torte got killed unquote.
Prior to the police killing of Torti Guita during a
forest encampment raid on January eighteen, twenty twenty three, the

(06:32):
occupation phase proved highly effective in preventing pre construction, but
the killing and Tortiguita essentially marked the end of the
continuous occupation phase. What followed was a period of high
octane intensity. Let's call this the revenge phase. Quoting an
Atlanta anarchist, you get this kind of like trading blows

(06:53):
with the cops repeatedly during that time, and things are
getting pretty fucking crazy, hitting their highest pitch at March fifth,
during the South River Music Festival. On March fifth, a
few hundred people splintered off from the festival and marched
to the nearby Cop City construction site. The crowd repelled
police and construction equipment was set on fire. The cops

(07:15):
retaliated quick, swarming the area with all available units. In Atlanta,
kettled the festival and eventually arrested twenty three people, charging
them with domestic terrorism. After the events of March fifth,
the movement entered an odd limbo phase, with heightened tensions
among the stop Coop City coalition on the role of
direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions. During this period,

(07:40):
police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter around the forest.
Entry became heavily restricted. Following this denial of operating space,
the forest around the slated construction site was preemptively clear
cut to both prepare for construction and demoralize the movement.
But a month later, the bail fund and legal defense

(08:01):
nonprofit the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, was raided by police and
were later charged with money laundering and charity fraud. Just
a few days after the raid, the city Council approved
a sixty seven million dollar cop City funding package. The
next day, organizers announced referendum campaign to gather petition signatures
to put the cop City land lease ordinance on the

(08:24):
upcoming November ballot. Despite setbacks, there was still energy going
towards stopping cop City, but it was fragmenting in ways
that it hadn't really before there was no clear consensus
on the direction to take the movement. Previous periods of
shift in the movement were often marked by an organized
Week of Action, which was a convergence of people from

(08:45):
all around the country or even the world, who traveled
to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth of events, actions,
and protests against cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation, and
contractors hired to build the facility. The summer of twenty
twenty three saw the sixth organized Week of Action, but
it too was caught in this limbo phase and without

(09:05):
the forest as an operating zone, the Week of Action
struggled to find its purpose, despite the surge in movement
participation around the city Hall budget vote earlier that June.
The next phase was the first to be positively determined
by the police, the repression phase, which really sets in
around August of twenty twenty three with the Rico indictment

(09:28):
charging sixty one people with racketeering, arson, and domestic terrorism.
State repression then evolved in the form of persistent surveillance
of activists, house raids, and additional charges, which leads to
the current trial phase. Quote an Atlanta anarchist quote, I
think an important aspect of this phase is obviously supporting

(09:48):
your defendants, preparing for the potential of long term prisoner support,
and also not letting the state be the one to
close the book by doing this, because you don't want
to let them define the near of this forever by
getting to put their rubber stamp on the end of
the trial and calling it Otherwise, the movement gets stuck
in this permanent zombie phase where we're still saying, stop

(10:12):
cop City is this thing that's happening when it's it's built,
It's built, it's right there, right like. It doesn't mean
that we all just go home, but it means that
you're like a veteran of this battle now and there's
new shit to do, new stuff to work. One. Even
in retrospect, people have been largely hesitant to assign blame

(10:35):
to a specific factor in why the fight to stop
cop City fell short of achieving its stated goal, But
we can track a decline in momentum which allowed the
state to gain the upper hand. For nearly three years,
state repression tactics failed to disrupt the growing momentum against
the Cop City project. Forest raids, arrests, and criminal charges

(10:58):
made little impact. The use of terrorism charges as a
repression tactic started back in December of twenty twenty two,
following an encampment raid resulting in six people being charged
with domestic terrorism. This was the first time that charge
has been used in Georgia, following its adoption in twenty
seventeen in response to the whitepremacist mass shooting by Dylan Roof.

(11:19):
Just a month after domestic terrorism charges were first deployed,
Tortuguhito was killed by police in another forest raid, but
this tragedy only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the
movement to fight cop City, which then only grew. Similarly,
the clear cutting of the force itself wasn't enough to
demoralize the people in Atlanta. Rather, the hesitation to build

(11:43):
on the momentum of a widely publicized direct action like
March fifth provided this state in opening while the movement
was stuck in limbo. Throughout this limbo phase, the movement
was adjusting from intensified momentum and the high octane aspects
to March fifth, But as the energy tapered down, the
state jumped on that dip in momentum then delta pretty

(12:07):
significant blow with the Rico indictment. The Rico charges in
August of twenty twenty three, followed by the series of
house raids in February of twenty twenty four, were a
pretty crippling one to punch that stifled the momentum to
almost a complete standstill. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, a lot
of people will argue their opinions about what was the

(12:29):
stifling thing. I think some of the more electorally or
mass movement, big tent minded people would argue that, like
March fifth takes a lot of the wind out of
the sails. I think a lot of people would disagree
with that, just because like you can build on the
momentum of a March fifth, you can build on like
a triumphant battlefield victory, it's a lot harder to build

(12:52):
on just everyone getting more charges and also people getting
their doors kicked in really early in the morning. It's
hard to build on that. Despite the Rico charges, acts
of sabotage did continue, but isolated sabotage alone wasn't enough
to propel the movement. After the referendum campaign was effectively

(13:16):
nullified by the state and fall of twenty twenty three,
there was a lack of willingness among its organizers to
engage in serious efforts to get people engaged in mass
actions or pressure campaigns targeted against elected officials, something multiple
activists in Atlanta have mentioned to me as a contributing
factor to the eventual decline in momentum during this limbo

(13:36):
stage is a sort of failure to prefigure alternative strategies
and adapt after the forest occupation became impossible to maintain,
especially considering just how much weight people had put into
that strategy, but then did not come up with a
clear next step after the police were able to suppress
that tactic by completing their ODA loops and improving their

(13:59):
own strateg The ODA loop is a four step military
decision making model used across a large variety of professional fields,
including policing. Step one, observe, gather as much information as possible,
then orient, synthesize an information with background knowledge, decide on
the next course of action using that newly synthesized information,

(14:23):
and finally act and the results of your actions should
then send you back to step one. Failure to act
at all or too slowly often ends in defeat. To
quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote. You need contingency lines, right,
either things that you're willing to escalate in the current

(14:43):
line of strategy that you're doing to make it still viable,
or a complete change in strategy. It could be changed
in tactics to something new and exciting. Either of those
are valid options. Doing both of them at the same
time can be extremely effective. But at the end of
the day, you have to when the cops start to
break out of paralysis. An example from any eco defense

(15:04):
or occupation, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else, when the
cops start to break out of that paralysis, you have
to escalate in some way. The occupation, the defense of it,
has to escalate in some way to prevent them from
feeling safe coming in or trying to, or the physical
space of action has to change because now they need

(15:24):
to recalibrate to oh, shit, like, not only is the
occupation less assailable than we thought because there's been a
change in tactics, but there's also a massive uptick and
shit going on everywhere else and that significantly impedes their
ability to have an ODA loop to do battle with.
You can even look at the ice pickups that got

(15:45):
a lot of attention in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were not
expecting that many people just to show up. You can
see when the crowd starts to hit like a critical
mass of rage and getting really close to those guys
that they fucking panic. They freak out like it. It's
very clear, even just in the small amount of their
faces and their movements that you can see that they

(16:07):
were panicking unquote. Similar scenes have since taken place in
Chicago and Portland, and I've seen this before with Bortec
during the twenty twenty protests in Portland. I think anyone
who has watched the cops retreat has seen this before.
But the more the same thing happens, the more you
get used to it, the more you experiment and find

(16:30):
ways to adapt and overcome. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote,
cops panic, and you can see it in the way
they walk like they weren't ready for that, and next
time they might be, which means you have to add
something new, a new spice has to get thrown in,
a new flavor profile. They'll get used to pushing through
crowds like that until someone hits them at the end

(16:50):
of the day, and whether you're like confronting them on
the ground or trying to get to the neighborhoods ahead
of time to knock people's doors to get them out.
Eventually cops will start to find ways to counteract your strategy,
but eventually you will have to reshift and recalibrate the
tools you are using to orient back to Atlanta. All

(17:10):
these instances I've mentioned amount to failing to take advantage
of key moments, whether that be in the aftermath of
March fifth, the seeming impossibility of continued forest encampments, or
of the city's blanket refusal to accept the results of
the referendum. In these moments, the police and the state

(17:31):
were able to determine where battle lines were drawn, and
quite literally so during the quote unquote block Cop City
protest in October twenty twenty three, where police easily repelled
a protest march from even reaching the road to the
Cop City construction site, and the state continued to push
their lines forward with the joint fbiatf raids on activist

(17:53):
houses in February twenty twenty four, which further stifled the
movement and was coupled with months to year year long
persistent surveillance and intimidation denoted by cops parked outside of
homes of alleged activists, mobile surveillance and hidden cameras placed
in front of activist homes and a local community center.
One of the more frightening incidents came in May of

(18:16):
twenty twenty four, where a resident of one of the
homes rated that February woke up in the middle of
the night to a bright light outside of the bedroom window,
only to find a lit road flare catching the wooden
railing of their porch steps on fire. One of the

(18:44):
things I've been reflecting on regarding Cop City is the
way people talked about fear as a tool. Frank Herbert's
Litany against Fear was a common refrain to overcome the
fear that this state used as a weapon. But the
first time I heard fear mentioned as an offensive measure
wasn't in reference to this state using fear. It was

(19:05):
in early twenty twenty two when I first visited the
forest encampment, and the anarchists talked about how the police
were scared of entering the forest, how delusions of Vietnam's
style booby traps demonstrated that the cups are not impervious
super soldiers. Instilling fear is a major aspect of police training.

(19:25):
They are susceptible to emotional impulses like all of us.
Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote. But while we understand our
own fear, I think people often fall into the trap
of not understanding that the state is also afraid of them,
because the state feels like this monolithic machine, like this

(19:46):
unassailable entity, that it is not. It's made up of
people with flaws and emotions who have the same corrozol
response to being threatened that you or I do. A
big part of the lessons learned from an has to
be a willingness to engage with them in a way
that is personally endangering. That is the single way out.

(20:08):
They're human and they get scared. The fear that I
think had them so tight until May of twenty twenty
two was a fear that manifested itself in a lot
of paralysis. Fear is a normal human emotion to danger.
So whether you're the most hardened swat team guy going
up against the craziest to eco freak in the world,

(20:30):
fear is a normal reaction to that. But what really
had them so tight was fear as a matter of
them being paralyzed by it that they cannot find out
how to move. And once they did find out around
May of twenty twenty two, we really start to see
things change and like they were scared enough in the
woods to shoot someone to death, like they were still afraid.

(20:53):
We were able to instill an immense amount of fear
in our enemy, which is an absolutely necessary tool if
you're going to be on the very nimble, small green
team insurgency side of things, you have to make your
enemy afraid of the dark, but also you have your
defensive strategy against fear. You would hear all the time

(21:14):
in Atlanta, the whole let the fear wash over you
and through you mantra. That was a thing that people
talked about and said constantly, because you have to find
a way to move through that paralysis. Eventually, and with
the help of a multi agency task force, the cops
in Atlanta were able to move through that fear and

(21:37):
continue their actions. They were not totally paralyzed by it.
In contrast, the pseudo paralysis affecting Stop Cop City only
set in very late into the movement. As a cumulative
result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics. As the
movement has been winding down and transitioning to court support.

(21:59):
Something people in Atlanta have had to balance is the
urge to keep stop Cop City in this sort of
un alive zombie state where you're still kind of acting
like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate local
result is pretty clearly finished. But in keeping this kind

(22:20):
of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents you
from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here and
using that for whatever comes next, which is at this
point a burgeoning police state and right wing power block.
Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, internalizing not just in
terms of like lessons learned and things that you need

(22:41):
to learn from and skill up on to keep that
honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting
on a larger scope than just Atlanta. As the cops
took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms of how
they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements, towards a lot
of the way that ICE operations are currently happening. That

(23:02):
necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and
also go to a larger scale with them. Also, if
you never close the book yourself on this battle that
you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount
of trauma doing at a certain point, this could just
remain like an open wound on you forever if you

(23:22):
let it. And it is probably unhelpful to keep seeing
the movement to stop cop City is doing a rally here.
Like when it's built, it's there, and now we need
to move on to other things. We need to move
on to other things that are larger than Atlanta. There's
still a police state to engage with here. You don't

(23:43):
need the container of this struggle to justify going out
and taking action against the police. And there are other
things happening in Atlanta. There's ice rates happening in Atlanta
in the north suburbs of the city. Cop City is
actively being in and if people want to continue stopping it,
they'll have to actually stop what the effects are which

(24:06):
are now happening on a nationwide scale. An early irony
of the movement was that though cop City was conceived
as a training ground for police first, it became a
training ground for anarchists as topcop City became the first
mass movement following the twenty twenty George Floyd protests. Whatever

(24:27):
happened in Atlanta would demonstrate what activists have learned from
the twenty twenty uprising, as well as influence what future
movements against police expansion might look like. Atlanta Police Chief
Darren Sheerbaum expressed as much during the Public Safety Training
Center grand opening.

Speaker 4 (24:46):
Because when Antifa put out its call for individuals to
rally here in this spot and on Peachtree Street from
across the nation and literally the globe, we were up
against a playbook we had never seen. At the Atlanta
Police Department, we ourselves put out the call for help,
and no sheriff said no, No police chief said no.
The Georgia State Patrol, the Department Natural Resources should ste

(25:09):
by side of this department, as did the FBI and
the ATF because we all knew that that playbook was
successful here in Atlanta, Georgia, it would find itself across
this country and public safety would be stymied wherever we go.

Speaker 5 (25:24):
While Atlanta served as this training ground for anarchists, in response,
the state also used the movement to test out strategies
for the next generation of counter insurgency tactics, well before
the cop City facility was finished being built. Now, with
this specific localized struggle at completion, both organizers and the

(25:47):
state are carrying lessons forward as Trump expands police power,
deploys National Guard, increases ice operations, and continues repression against
organizers protesting the Palestinian genocide. To quote in Atlanta anarchist quote,
I think as a matter of reimagining the struggle that
you're a part of, insurrectionary struggle is often an imaginative one.

(26:08):
And if you were part of this thing here, you
are now like a veteran of the fight in Atlanta.
This thing, like this specific thing that was defend the
Atlanta force stop cop City, is something to be learned
from and valued and also moved on from, and to
move on from while taking lessons learned, experience gained, and

(26:30):
connections made, and following those things through to their logical conclusion.
Such that the state has as well. They have taken
lessons learned from here and followed them through to their
nationwide logical conclusions. We are necessitated to do that as well.
That doesn't mean you have given up. It just means
that there's new shit happening. It's helpful to re imagine

(26:51):
yourself not as just we're in Atlanta, we're doing stop
coop City, to now you are engaged in a nationwide
anti fascist struggle against like a fascist police state unquote.
This nationwide focus has always been an aspect of Stop
Cop City. One of the movement's key slogans was cop

(27:11):
City is Everywhere. Organizers did speaking tours around the country
to educate about the movement, and thousands of people from
all around the country and the world traveled to Atlanta
to participate in weeks of action. The physical fight Top
cop City also expanded outside of Atlanta with solidarity attacks
and direct actions as a part of the tertiary targeting

(27:32):
campaign against subcontractors and insurance companies. This nationwide drift also
happened on the side of the state, with similar police
training facilities having been proposed in dozens of other cities,
and the strategies of repression used in Atlanta have been
copied on a national level. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote,

(27:54):
Now the cops are spreading out and their strategies and
the strategies of repression both militantly on the ground and legally,
and even their propaganda and their messaging has gone outwards
from here, and so too, then must our lessons learned
both in how we prepare and engage in struggle in Atlanta,
but also how we make connections to the rest of
the country. People who came here are now back home

(28:16):
and will make connections to the people around them. The
cops in different cities, they have big conferences, They talk
to each other, they learn from each other. There's no
reason that we shouldn't be, you know, doing so with
caution and security culture. Don't have your Atlanta veteran hat on,
but we have things to learn from each other. And

(28:37):
if you were here, you've got a lot to potentially
teach people, even if that was just like here's how
we fucking run a kitchen where we cook for like
four hundred people in a day, or here's how we
sneak around in the middle of the night. This is
a representative of the Fire and Movement defense at a
cop City trial press conference from September twenty twenty five.

Speaker 8 (29:00):
The horrors we predicted have come to pass. Federal agents
now stock communities from coast to coast, masked and unnamed
snatching people from buses, farms, kitchens, and churches. Who can
argue now that we were wrong to resist the endless
expansion of police power, now that Trump commands them, now

(29:22):
that they are his police. The very people who helped
lay the groundwork now scramble to distance themselves from his orders,
his camps, his federal troop deployments. But they built the logistics,
they funded the training centers, they expanded the surveillance. Liberal
governments like Atlantis helped pave the way for the descent
of our country into autocracy.

Speaker 5 (29:46):
As Merlincrats of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund told the New Republic, quote,
what's happening in Atlanta is a vision of the future.
This is a test run of a represses playbook that
authorities on many different levels are experimenting with to discover
what they can get away with. Let's look at some

(30:07):
examples of expanding surveillance, increasing police resources, and these strategies
for counter insertaency that are spreading in the era of
Trump two point zero. In January of this year, Georgia
Representative Marjorie Taylor Green introduced a resolution titled deeming certain
conduct of members of Antifa as domestic terrorism and designating

(30:31):
Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which the measure justifies
by referencing multiple instances of protesters in Atlanta being charged
with domestic terrorism. The Atlanta based surveillance company Flock Safety,
gained early notoriety for their camera towers placed around the
slated Copcity construction site in the South River Forest, which

(30:55):
protesters repeatedly toppled. Flock has grown massively the past four years,
with over eighty thousand quote unquote AI powered cameras in
forty nine states. These cameras complete over twenty billion scans
per month. Flock cameras and license plate readers have spread
all around the country and are used by all manners

(31:17):
of agencies, including ICE, as well as Texas sheriffs, who
have used the nationwide camera network to track pregnant women
seeking abortions. Border Patrol has used Atlanta's local Flock camera
network to make over three thousand and two hundred searches
from January to November twenty twenty five. In April twenty
twenty five, President Trump signed an executive order titled Strengthening

(31:42):
and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to pursue criminals and protect
innocent citizens. This order calls to quote unleash high impact
local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly
accused and abused by state or local officials, and surge
resources to officers in need unquote. It directs the Attorney
General to create a mechanism to have private sector law

(32:03):
firms provide pro bono legal events to police officers who
quote unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during
the performance of their official duties to enforce the law.
This tries to make it harder for police to be
held accountable for both civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending
qualified immunity to the criminal realm. The order also calls

(32:25):
to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and
strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to
quote seek enhanced sentences for crimes against LA enforcement officers,
promote investment in the security and capacity of prisons, and
increase the investment in and collection, distribution and uniformity of

(32:46):
crime data across jurisdictions. The Attorney General is directed to
review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on local
or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the
performance of law enforcement functions. And then finally, quote the

(33:06):
Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with
Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate,
shall increase the provision of excess military and national security
assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement.
And shall determine how military and national security assets, training,

(33:26):
non lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized
to prevent crime. As the police become further militarized, the
military prepares to do more policing. One of the executive
orders from Trump's police takeover of Washington d C contains
a section directing the Secretary of Defense to quote designate

(33:49):
an appropriate number of each state's trained National Guard members
to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization to assist federal, state,
and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances, and that
quote a standing National Guard quick reaction force shall be resourced, trained,
and available for a rapid nationwide deployment unquote. Later, in

(34:15):
October of twenty twenty five, the Department of Defense sent
out memos to each state's National Guard mandating that each
state have their own Quick Reaction Forces operational by January first,
twenty twenty six, with crowd control equipment and two full
time trainers by the National Guard Bureau being provided to
each unit. The units contain, on average, five hundred troops

(34:37):
per state, ordered to be ready to deploy within eight
to twenty four hours. The initial portion of the Bureau
training courses cover how to quote form squad sized riot
control formations, employ a riot baton as member of a
riot control formation, how to supervise a riot slash, crowd
control operation, crowd management techniques, and de domestic civil disturbance training.

Speaker 6 (35:02):
Quote.

Speaker 5 (35:04):
On September twenty second, Trump signed an executive order designating
Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later, Trump
signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum seven on Countering Domestic
Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which calls for a new
national law enforcement strategy to quote investigate all participants of

(35:25):
these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and
organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can
intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.
The memo orders local joint Terrorism task forces to quote
investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or

(35:48):
radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, or
conspiracy against rights, as well as investigating institutional and dad
and individual funders, including employees of organizations which are quote
responsible for, sponsor or otherwise aid in a bet the
principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct unquote. As previously described,

(36:14):
the Treasury Secretary will work with the Atorney General to
quote identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism
and political violence, and shall deploy investigative tools to examine
financial flows and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit
funding streams. The memo also instructs the IRS to quote
take action to ensure that no tax exempt entities are

(36:37):
directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism unquote,
and that the IRS shall refer organizations and their employees
to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.
Quoting the memo one final time, quote, investigations shall prioritize
crimes such as the following assaulting federal officers or employees,

(37:00):
conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense solicitation to commit
a crime of violence, money laundering, funding of terrorist acts,
or otherwise facilitating terrorism arson, violations of the Racketeer Influenced
and Corrupt Organizations ACT RICO, and major fraud against the
United States. At Trump's White House ANTIFO roundtable meeting, Seamus Bruner,

(37:27):
the director of research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed
his theory of how a network of NGOs are funding ANTIFA,
and specifically mentioned Stop Cop City.

Speaker 9 (37:37):
There was an event in Atlanta called Stop Cop City.
Over sixty rioters were charged with domestic terrorism. These groups
received money for that from both the billionaire class as
well as tax payer money.

Speaker 5 (37:51):
So On May one, twenty twenty five, Homeland Security Investigations
Secret Service and the acting ICE Director rated a home
in Irving, California, looking for a man who allegedly posted
flyers around Los Angeles containing the names, pictures, and phone
numbers of ICE agents with text in Spanish reading careful

(38:11):
with these faces. In April of twenty twenty three, three
activists were arrested for allegedly posting flyers identifying a police
officer connected to the killing of Tortigita on the mailboxes
in that officer's neighborhood in Barlow County, Georgia, about forty
miles from Atlanta. The activists were charged with felony intimidation

(38:33):
and were later added to the Cop City Weako case.
To circle back to the topic of fear, the targeting
of people putting up flyers simply identifying cops or anonymous

(38:56):
ICE agents demonstrates how the state understands as a weapon.
That's why they did the reco charges, That's why they
do the house raids, that's why they do overt surveillance
where you're getting followed around by police. But they are
susceptible to fear as well. Through their actions, ICE demonstrates
a high level of fear. They are taking massive steps

(39:18):
to hide the identities of ICE agents on the ground
and punishing people who attempt to identify these agents. They're
complaining about being compared to Nazis and called the Gestapo.
They're referencing very dubious statistics about an increase in assaults
against officers, and they are afraid enough to shoot their
guns at unarmed people more than half a dozen times

(39:40):
in the past six months. They are scared and as
evil and super soldiery as they may seem they are
indeed afraid, to quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, unless
you do something to keep them afraid, Eventually it will stop.
Unless you change your stread, change course, escalate in some

(40:02):
way that shatters their ODA loop, they will break free
of their paralysis and they will find a way through
their fear. So when that starts to happen, it's time
to do something new and insane, because you have to
keep them afraid, because like by every moral right, they
should be. They should be fucking terrified to leave their homes.
And if they are too afraid to leave their homes,

(40:23):
then they can't go out and do their jobs at
the end of the day. That's their ODA loop right there.
The scale of fear as a tool of repression is
always exponentially larger than this scale of physical or legal repression.
It punches well above its weight. You can look at
Atlanta as a good example of this, and you can
even look at some of the arrests made in response

(40:45):
to Palestinian liberation protests. It takes black bagging six people
to paralyze six thousand because it's terrifying, because it's scary,
like it's fucked up. That's a bad thing to have
happened to you, And like, of course, people are afraid.
Fear is one of those things that if you're engaging
an anti fascist struggle, whether you're an anti fascist, whether

(41:06):
you're an anarchist or whatever, all of us have an
ethical obligation to ourselves and the people around us to
push through fear as an emotion, to find ways to
work with it, because it won't go away, and it shouldn't.
Fear can also keep you safe, but we are necessitated
by the political moment we are in to find a
way to take extensive action in spite of that. Unquote.

(41:29):
Twenty twenty was a lot of people's first experience with
mass protest, and some of the people then carry those
experiences into Copcity. But then for other people, Stop cop
City was their first experience. And now you have an
even younger generation of people, the Gen Alpha terrorists, who
aren't even old enough to have been involved in Atlanta.
But people are still looking at what happened in Atlanta

(41:53):
as this bridge gap between twenty twenty and twenty twenty five,
the movement to Stop Cop City as the bridge between
these two different eras of uprising and resistance against authoritarianism.
As the Copsity chapter closes, activists in Atlanta want people
to carry on what's been learned in the contents of

(42:14):
their struggle onto whatever the next volume is. Because cop
City itself is in a sequence of events that have
happened beyond and longer than what me or anyone involved
in Copsity has been alive by generations. Cop City is
not Volume one. Cop City is volume like thirty two,
but at the same time, it's also the immediate prequel

(42:37):
to the rise of a nationwide expansion of police power
and surveillance led by a wanna be right wing strong man.
Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, a big lesson learned from
Atlanta is that it is way safer to do shit
in the middle of the night than anything else. We've
had exactly one arrest made over the years, and arrest

(42:57):
that's not gone to trial. This is an alleged crime
of one midnight sabotage action of the dozens and dozens
and dozens of ursins that have happened, and this arrest
happened very late into the movement, out of the dozens
and dozens of attacks that have happened. Only one arrest
has been made after the fact. Another lesson learned is

(43:20):
the difficulty of daily counter surveillance and how much that
requires militancy as a daily practice to again, quote from
an anonymous anarchist in Atlanta, quote, militant anarchism as a
daily practice understanding your adversary not just as this thing
that you meet on the field for twenty minutes of
action and then you both go home and like call it,

(43:43):
but that they are constantly pursuing you, That you are
being like hunted for sport, and you have to evade
and maneuver constantly. That security culture is a persistent thing
throughout the years, that you are going to continually keep
having to be a part of it and do so
in a very disciplined way. Unquote. A lot of the

(44:06):
success that Stop Cop City achieved was based on a
willingness to take an extremely militant approach to pre figurative infrastructure,
which added longevity to the combative struggle. Both were necessitated
as symbiotic elements of this same creature. Throughout the Cop
City struggle, organizers and activists learned that if you're not

(44:27):
always able to engage in a directly combative fight. Using
militancy and discipline in their infrastructural projects the same way
they would in a combative engagement helps prepare for what
will be necessary when things do turn combative. Quoting an
Atlanta anarchist quote, the state is this constantly churning machine,
like it is always trying to acquire new tools and

(44:49):
equipment and lessons, and we can't just sit still while
they do this and be like, Okay, Well, at some
point in four to five years, a flashpoint will happen
at the place that I live, and I'll go out
there and I'll be like I was in Atlanta. So
I'll be good because I remember how to do all that.
Because if you do nothing for the next four to
five years, we're just going to be reinventing the wheel

(45:10):
over and over again, and all the fucked up trauma
that you incurred doing that won't have been helpful at
all if you don't remember the skills learned on the ground,
because all skills atrophy and get weaker over time. Looking
back at stop Coopa City won't provide all the answers
to solve the problems facing the country today, especially in

(45:34):
light of the end result of the movement, but it
would be a mistake to overlook the ways stop Copacity
made a legitimate impact on the resulting facility and the
political situation in Atlanta and beyond. I think there's ways
of looking at degrees of success the movement had while
still recognizing its obvious shortcomings, considering the fact that there

(45:56):
is a facility called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center,
but a small group of activists turned a proposed police
training facility into a national political issue. Its opening was
delayed by years at at least thirty million dollars over budget,
and the current facility lacks the full mock city design

(46:18):
that it initially had, which inspired the cop City namesake.
Moving forward, both these successes and shortcomings will be internalized
by thousands of people who traveled to or lived in
Atlanta and joined in the movement to Stop cop City.
As Trump now signs executive orders expanding military equipment, federal training,

(46:38):
and legal protections for police, deploys the National Guard to
quell civil disturbance, and targets anti fascists, anarchists, and left
wing activists or ENGOs as domestic terrorists. Quoting an Atlanta
anarchist quote, What we are seeing is the logical conclusion
of our adversaries lessons learned in Atlanta, taking the things

(46:59):
that they learned how to do here, the skills they honed,
taken to a nationwide scale. This is the logical conclusion
of that, and there's a reason that they are doing that,
and if they are doing that, then we should also
do that. Like there's logical conclusions and escalations of the
things that we learned in Atlanta, that it would be

(47:19):
silly for us to not try and push those further,
including expanding the physical and metaphysical terrain of battle. The
immediate terrain for Stop Coopcity was obviously the forest and
now the cop City site itself, but there was also
the rest of Atlanta and all the other construction sites,

(47:40):
and then all these subcontractors around the country and everything
that supplies them. This same model can apply to, say,
the Palestine protests. There's a network that exists beyond Columbia
University campus that extends into the weapons manufacturing industry, which
could be targeted beyond consumer boycotts, like what we saw
was shack but what we saw in Atlanta, where boycotts

(48:03):
were an aspect, but by far not the most effective aspect,
and in fact, forcefully inflicting monetary damage caused a much
greater degree of hurt to the companies involved in the
Copsity project as opposed to the infighting caused by a
waffle House boycott. When reframing what the terrain of battle

(48:26):
could entail, it is actually intimidating to think about what
the reality of stopping these things might look like. And
as soon as you realize that these fights go beyond
a physical building, it becomes this love crafty and entity
that exists everywhere, and it's unnerving to contemplate what you'd

(48:49):
be forced to do to actually realistically confront that. Quoting
an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, it's important to not get
trapped in the you know, we're doing an occupation on
college campus. We're just going to keep trying to do
an occupation on college campus over and over again, and
the CoP's really good at clearing us up. But now
maybe this time. And I think a part of the

(49:10):
struggle here though, for people is when you decentralize like that,
the thing that you're doing starts to take on a
much different vibe. It can be everywhere versus this is
the college campus where we're doing protest. I generally think
at the end of the day, it starts to feel
a little bit too much like terrorismy, it starts to

(49:31):
feel too much like an insurgency, and you see the path,
you see the Pandora's box start to open up a
little bit, and you back off because it's scary and
that this thing will kill you. This thing will try
and kill you eventually, if you push it far enough,
it will try and kill you, and I might succeed.
And like, that's just the reality of engaging with fascism

(49:53):
combatively as an ideology, it's the reality of engaging with
advanced capitalism. That was the reality of engaging with the
police state, one that is well understood in Atlanta and
in many other places that this isn't a game. You're
not going to get anywhere, just kind of sitting on
the same college campus green over and over again, hoping

(50:15):
for a different result. And as we've seen this year
with the State Department cracking down on pro Palestine protests,
just sitting there on the college green doesn't prevent you
from being black bagged by the FEDS, taken to a
black site, and deported to close the episode. In September

(50:36):
twenty twenty four, the Georgia Attorney General's Office dropped the
money laundering charges against the organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund,
though the defendants still remained on the reco indictment. Almost
a full year later, on September ninth, twenty twenty five,
the defense successfully argued that the State AG's office did

(50:56):
not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute this sixth sixty
one defendants under the state's Rico statute due to simple
procedural error in neglecting to first ask the governor if
the AG's office could prosecute this case. Judge Farmer found
that the AG does not have the authority to prosecute
count one of the reco indictment, the racketeering and conspiracy charges.

(51:19):
Without the sweeping Rico charges engulfing the sixty one defendants,
just five defendants would be left with Count two of
the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which the AG does
have authority to prosecute, and Count three, the arson charge,
though Judge Farmer indicated that that charge could also be
thrown out on a similar technicality. The prosecution is appealing

(51:41):
this decision, and the defenses argued that the state domestic
terrorism law violates a constitution and is far too broad
and should be altered or overturned. Judge Farmer has yet
to rule on this, but he's expected to very soon.
Some of the sixty one defendants could face charges individually

(52:01):
in Fulton in a Cab County, but that remains to
be seen. The referendum case is still under appeal in
federal court, and the case against Jack Mazurich is still
in pre trial. Just because the Cop City trial is
finally progressing does not mean that movement participants are safe now.
Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchists quote, people should be very

(52:24):
mindful going into the trial phase that that does not
mean that they are safe. There is no statute of
limitations on a lot of this stuff. Like with a
lot of radical movements, You're gonna have to hold a
lot of that shit forever. Rely on support structures, rely
on your community, be careful about who you talk to. Unquote.
As Stop Coop City becomes history, there will be an

(52:46):
influx of people trying to define the legacy of the movement,
whether that's through podcasts, documentaries, a college dissertation or who
knows how many books are incoming. There already has been
a true crimification of the movement in certain coverage which
grossly objectifies the life of Torti Guita, platforms police as

(53:08):
more objective than movement participants and removes autonomy from key
subjects to reframe the entire movement around other public facing individuals.
To quote an Atlanta anarchist one final time quote, I
think a big lesson from Atlanta, and this is one
that we actually still have to win at is to

(53:28):
not let outside forces, whether that be the state or capital,
define the ending. That is a scope of battle that
we are still engaged with and still have to win.
We need to close the book on it ourselves. We
need to rubber stamp it ourselves. No other entity can
do that for us. It would be disastrous if they did.

(53:51):
Unquote this has been it could happen here. See you
on the other side. This is it could happen here.

(54:16):
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 and
Robert Evans. Yes, this episode recovering the week of November
nineteen to November twenty fourth.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
Boy, this year's just blown by yeah fast, Yeah yeah.
They sped up the time stream. You know what else?
Sped up the time stream watching something on Twitter blow
up again. We can't seem to stop talking about this
fucking website, and I'm tired of it. But the big
news this week from Elon Musk's fucking vanity propagana app

(54:51):
is see Everything Happen That they introduced a new feature
to let you know the location of the account and
also the number of like name changes, like how many
user name change it's had since the account has started.
I would say within sort of progressive and liberal circles.
The common interpretation of what's happened is best summarized by
this Daily Beast headline, top MAGA influencers accidentally unmasked as

(55:13):
foreign trolls. No shit Now, As is often the case,
this isn't entirely accurate. Not to say that there's not
a shitload of foreign trolls who are making money by
pretending to be American MAGA influencers. There definitely are. We've
known about this since well before this Twitter change. One
of the most prominent people on Musk's Twitter, Ian Miles Chong,
is a Malaysian man who has never been to the

(55:35):
United States and publishes nothing but maga content. Now, what's
happened here? You can find going through there's a bunch
of threads. There's threads on Blue Sky, threads on Twitter
threads and various articles that are basically all copies of
each other that are collecting a bunch of these accounts
that have been busted, right. One good example would be
the Magination verified account, which has almost four hundred thousand followers.

(55:57):
Started in twenty twenty four, it's had five named changes
since October twenty twenty five, and it is based in
Eastern Europe non EU.

Speaker 5 (56:05):
Yeah, that's mega nation.

Speaker 6 (56:07):
Yeah yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
A lot of people have taken to mean like it's Russian,
right yeah. Another account is the Ivanka News Trump, which
displays as Ivanka Trump even though it has nothing to
do with her, which it does note in its Twitter bio.
The account was started in twenty ten, it has had
eleven user changes since August of twenty twenty four, and
it is apparently based in Nigeria. You have to see
it you're seeing like aload a shitload of stuff like this, right,

(56:31):
and it's being taken unfortunately. I think this is a
mistake and I hate to be like the hey, guys,
stop being happy about this, but you should because you're
wrong about what's happening here. Most people are like the
Daily Beast account posts some liberal Twitter account being like
this is total armageddon for the online right. It's looking
like half of their large accounts were foreigners posting as
Americans all along. Now, let me clarify a couple things.

(56:54):
For one thing, nothing that Elon has done here, Nothing
that Twitter has revealed has proven that these account exist
in any particular country. I'm going to explain why a
lot of people use something called a VPN, and a
VPN masks the location that you're browsing and logging in from, right,
and you can use a VPN to look like you're

(57:15):
posting from almost any country on the planet. And there
is no evidence whatsoever that Twitter has done anything at
all to deal with this, right to like make sure
that they're getting someone's actual location. A bunch of accounts,
a bunch of like people have pointed out like, hey, look,
this is saying I'm from a country that I've literally
never been to, like, here's my information. I'm very transparent.

(57:35):
And there have also been organizations, including liberal coded organizations,
that have been mistakenly identified as coming from a country
that they are not set up. And for example, the
Planned Parenthood account was showing us from Germany, which has
ignited this conspiracy theory on the right, the Planned Parenthood
is some European fucking influence op in the United States. Now,

(57:56):
they used a VPN because they're in danger because it's
Planned parent right.

Speaker 5 (58:00):
No, I mean I ran into a very similar situation
because I mostly use Twitter to look at yowie now
and when I was in Germany last month, it wouldn't
let me look at the AWI without putting in my
government ID for like age verification, sure of course, and
then the state hits garrison, so obviously a non starter.
I'm not I'm not. I'm not giving X the everything

(58:21):
app my government ID to allow me to look at
YAWI in Germany, so instead I had to put on
the VPN. So I'm back into States and then I
can look at the YAWI. So it's basically the same
situation between me and Planned Parenthood here.

Speaker 1 (58:32):
Yes, I've said often that you and planned parenthood basically
identical beings. What's happening here is it is worth talking about.
But it's worth talking about not because we suddenly know
the truth that it's been revealed about. We don't really
know anything more than we did before this change came in, right.

Speaker 5 (58:48):
Well except Robert, I mean the biggest the biggest news
is that the DHS has been a massad operation this
last time.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
Yes, that's right, Yes.

Speaker 5 (58:54):
Like we've always suspected.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Yeah, so the the Department of Homeland Security out I
think it was got listed as having been based in Israel.
This is not real. This isn't even x fucking up.
Somebody just edited a screenshot and there's so many of
these going around, hundreds and hundreds of them, right that
this just kind of got shuffled in to the flood

(59:18):
and a lot of people didn't catch it, right, and
it just gets integrated into people's beliefs about the world. Right.
This is a standard story with how Twitter works now.
And this is, by the way, is overall I think
beneficial to Musk and his kind of people, which is
that we know less every day about the world. There's
more disinformation about what's happening. People are less keyed in

(59:40):
on reality and more just getting locked into different delusions.
Like that's what the story is here, which is that
this app and the way that social media in general works,
particularly in this age, each of these changes, even the
ones that get celebrated as having revealed something, are just
fogging up reality, and they're doing it in such a

(01:00:02):
way as to make it so that like, no one
knows anything about what's going on. Right, this is like
that this is the standard playbook that you've been getting
out of like authoritarian regimes from forever. Right. What's important
is not that just their propaganda be out. It's that
there's not really any any way for there to be
a consensus reality, because if there's at consensus reality, then
you can't put together a large enough block of people

(01:00:24):
who all believe basically the same things about reality to
stop what's going on. Right, That's what's happening here, And
you're wrong if you're looking at this is good. If
you believe that this has blown up the right and
that this has done damage to them, they're saying the
same things about you and about the left. Because a
shitload of people use VPNs and you can always cherry

(01:00:45):
pick a bunch of and I'm not again, none of
that I'm saying is not saying that they're in a
shitload Like Elon has specifically incentivized foreign accounts in different
countries to make money by getting into the US culture war, right,
that is absolutely a big part of how Twitter works today.

Speaker 5 (01:00:59):
No denying that.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
What I'm saying is that you don't know any more
than you did before this came out, because you have
no way of knowing if any of these accounts are
based where X is saying they're based because of how
VPNs work. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 5 (01:01:10):
Yeah, that's what I've got to say.

Speaker 6 (01:01:13):
It's incredibly annoying. It's incredibly annoying that we have to
continue writing about eggs everything. The half of half of
Blue Sky is people just virtue signaling that are not
using Twitter, and I'm being mad at Twitter.

Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
You know, it's the same Honestly, this will get me flat.
But it's the same thing about like whether people are
angry about substack or fucking Instagram or Twitter or whatever. Like,
if you're using social media, you're not doing yourself any favors.
And they're all pretty supportive of bad things and bad people,
and we use them anyway because that's the world. Like

(01:01:47):
we spend dollars anyway, and let me tell you, dollars
support some bad things. We pay taxes, and boy howdy,
I don't like where a lot of those taxes go.

Speaker 5 (01:01:56):
Yeah, but don't pretend.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
That because you pick the right social media app that
you're not fucking your brain up and introducing yourself to
a bunch of things that aren't true. We all do
it like that's the problem.

Speaker 6 (01:02:08):
Yes, they're not good for humans, yea broadly. Uh, do
you want to talk about something else it's not good
for humans?

Speaker 1 (01:02:15):
Yeah, let's not talk about fucking X the every goddamn
thing app anymore.

Speaker 6 (01:02:19):
No, Unfortunately, I have I have something rubbic which does
relate to X great everything app. So let's talk about Axios.
Oh yeah, are you guys familiar with axios. It's the
new satelet for people who hate paragraphs.

Speaker 5 (01:02:33):
People who love cocaine.

Speaker 6 (01:02:34):
Yeah yeah, yeah, for people reading the news while they're
having a dump. That is what axios is for. They
shit out news for you to read where you're having a.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Ship again, which makes cocaine even a bigger part of
the picture here.

Speaker 5 (01:02:48):
No, it's it's like it's like the ADHD is like
ideal news source.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
Yeah yeah, yeah, you do a line, you have to
go take a ship, you catch up on your news.

Speaker 6 (01:02:59):
Yeah, it's that's what they call productivity. That's the Robert
Evans grind set, the morning routine that everyone's been off.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
It's really it's really genius of fucking Axios to hit
that demographic exactly because those people also have a lot
of money because they're all day traders.

Speaker 5 (01:03:14):
True true, yeah, yeah, smash, I have I have polymarket
one to the Califi on the other axios always pulled up.

Speaker 6 (01:03:25):
That's split screening.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
You have one of those Apple like flat grass glass
touch screen panels. But it's just for doing coke off
of you've just.

Speaker 6 (01:03:32):
Got lines kind off on. Yeah, it's because the metaglass
is a contact right looping axio screen at Yeah, Axios
and use that left for people who are taking cocaine.
Has seemingly been duped into running a Russian wish list
as a proposed peace plant in Ukraine. Yeah great, This

(01:03:56):
is what happens when you do journalism the speed of paranoia.
But this has come at the same time as Trump
has proclaimed via truth via the medium of a truth
on Truth social that Ukraine was not showing fuscient gratitude
for what we had like eleven month of him failing
to end the war.

Speaker 10 (01:04:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:04:15):
So this twenty eight point plan was first published by Axios,
and it was pretty much immediately rejected by a number
of Senators, led by Senator Angus King, who were at
a security conference in Halifax, Halifax, Canada. Not og Halifax,
shout out yeah, Halifax Junior. The senators pretty much immediately

(01:04:39):
said that the US was not the author of the document.
Rubio quote made it very clear to us that we
are recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one
of our representatives, said Senator Mike Grounds. So what they
are saying is that the US didn't write to document
and it was delivered to them, one can safely assume
by Russia, right Rubio using X the everything app then

(01:05:01):
attempted to deny this. So what it appears has happened
is that this plan was drafted by Russian Special Envoy Dmitriev.
Probably was Steve Witkoff.

Speaker 1 (01:05:14):
Sure that sounds right.

Speaker 6 (01:05:15):
So Wickkoff is Trump's what leads I think he's a
special envoy to Russia at this point.

Speaker 1 (01:05:20):
Yeah, I believe he's an onvoid of Russia. Yeah, Warren
Zevonn wrote a song about guys like him.

Speaker 6 (01:05:25):
Yes, yeah, he has. He has not covered himself in
glory in his time doing this. He's kind of a
useful fool. He's formerly like a real estate guy.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
That'll prepare you to deal with Vladimir Putin, having sold
houses during the subprime mortgage crisis.

Speaker 6 (01:05:42):
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty much what he's doing here, right, Like,
he's consistently been duped and pretty much has become an
advocate for the Russian point of view a lot of
the times. In this case, it seems that it was
then strategically leaked to Axios. Right when Barack Ravid, who

(01:06:02):
authored the Axios article, posted it on X the Everything website,
Steve Witcoff responded saying, quote he must have got this
from k This is very funny because we have Steve
Wikoff right negotiating a peace process which affects millions of people,
and he also doesn't know how to use the DM
button on X the Everything website.

Speaker 5 (01:06:23):
To be fair, X the Everything, I've just changed their
dms and the whole the whole user interface for the
DMS is completely different. Now you have to put in
like a pass co and they claim to be encrypted,
and it's much uglier to look at.

Speaker 6 (01:06:36):
So in defense in defense of Steve, instead you can
instead leaks.

Speaker 5 (01:06:45):
Safe for more secure. Option might just be to do
it all in public, and.

Speaker 6 (01:06:48):
To do it in public. Yeah, So so Steve of
course using a code name there K will never know. Yeah,
because we can possibly tell the careal Dimitria of my
my might be using K as a code name, also
the first letter of his first name. So it seems
very likely that either Dimitrie of someone else in Russia

(01:07:08):
decided to leak this plan to Barakavid or Dave Lawler,
knowing it would be raised at a press conference of
belling that Trump, who, according to Wards the Post, seems
to have very little detailed knowledges and negotiations, would probably
see this as a quote unquote deal that then he
could claim for himself. Right, and it worked. I want
to talk about how Axios's model makes that possible. Right.

(01:07:31):
I'm very well aware that Barack Gravid was a member
of the eighty two hundred unit in Israel. If people
aren't familiar. That's like a SIGINT Israeli intelligent unit. This
is widely known. I've seen this being discussed in sort
of relation to this. The thing is, he doesn't need
to be nefarious for this to happen, And I think

(01:07:53):
the most likely option here is that the Axios model
is to do insider journalism and then rush to be
the first to post it on social media and then
get a bazillion clicks for your seventy eight word article. Right,
that is how That is their entire business model.

Speaker 5 (01:08:12):
It is the name of their whole game.

Speaker 6 (01:08:14):
Yeah, that's why they don't use paragraphs. It's news for
people who are like waiting for their coffee at Starbucks
or whatever the problem is in this case, states are
or nonstate actors, right, can effectively place a leak and
they know that Axios will rush it to press, probably
in minutes if not ours. And with the way that
the United States executive branches right now, it seems very

(01:08:36):
clear that that they can get it in front of Trump,
then they're going to get a reaction one way or another.
So it seems that Rubio was effectively cut out. The
United States Secretary of State was effectively cut out of
this whole process. And there's a lot of reporting about
like I don't want to do kremlinology for the Trump
White House particularly, but it shows how these news outlets

(01:09:00):
that lets to sort of don't fact check the Russia
price to do everything for social media can effectively be
used right in a way that the benefits in this
case Russia, but any number of organizations could do the
same thing.

Speaker 5 (01:09:12):
Robert mentioned some kind of like Wartimes warn some kind
of Wartimes song, and I was wondering, where is the
country of Zevon? You said, there's like a song about
Warren Zevon.

Speaker 6 (01:09:24):
Jesus Garrison, Garrison, get out of here about discrimination in
the workplace. Ah, I'm going to do a Woody Guthrie
thing in my next series. And Gary, it's just going
to sail straight past Garrison. You listen to Johnny Cash Garrison,
I liked.

Speaker 5 (01:09:40):
I like Johnning Cash.

Speaker 6 (01:09:41):
Okay, James Cash, that's what they call me.

Speaker 5 (01:09:45):
Here's some ads.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
And we're.

Speaker 5 (01:10:02):
New Doge News for the first time in who knows
how long the news being. There's no more Doge. According
to a report in Reuter's, Doge has dispended eight months
before its scheduled expiration in July of twenty twenty seven.
When asked about the status of DOJE earlier this month,

(01:10:23):
Office of Personal Management director Scott Poor told Reuters quote
that doesn't exist, adding that DOGE is no longer a
quote unquote centralized entity.

Speaker 6 (01:10:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:10:35):
Boro has also said that the DOGE mandated hiring freeze
is over and that there's quote no target around reductions unquote,
meaning that the DOGE era rule of having to fire
a certain number of people in order to be allowed
to hire people is no longer in use as well.
And this isn't really surprising. You have not really heard

(01:10:58):
about many DOGE related stuff in a while.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
They haven't been doing anything in a while. Musk has
basically been out of the center loop of things. But
also they did the things that they were needed to do, right.
They like did massacred large portions of government employees. Yeah,
did permanent damage to the administrative state and cost several
hundred thousand people around the world their lives through cuts
in USA.

Speaker 6 (01:11:22):
Yeah Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:11:23):
And like two former DOAGE employees, including big Balls, now
just work on web design for US government websites, and
other DOG officials have moved to agencies which they administered
cuts to a former DOGE team member, Zachary Terrell is
now the chief technology officer at the Department of Health
and Human Services, and Jeremy Lewin, who assisted these slashing

(01:11:44):
of you say it now overseas foreign assistants at the
State Department. Yeah, so those guys got jobs out of this.
All of the people who got fired or got natively
impacted by the government shutdown are probably not going to
be coming out as will was mister big balls here.

Speaker 1 (01:12:02):
Well, and there's some evidence that a number of folks
who worked with DOGE are now feeling left in the
wind and potentially in danger because there are a lot
of people who want these folks to be prosecuted for
what they did. Yeah, there's definitely talk about that. If
there's another Democratic administration, we'll see if they would ever
have the big balls to do it. But there was
an article in Politico recently, and I'm going to read

(01:12:24):
a quote from that Musk had not just been their
visionary leader for them, he was their protector, the man
who had an elect direct line to Trump, who they
believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential
pardon if the worst came without his presence in Washington,
they were suddenly exposed. A senior Doze figure named Donald
Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still
brothers in arms and that Musk would continue to protect them.
That led to another protesting and advising guys, seriously, get

(01:12:47):
your own lawyer. If you needed he lunch, great, but
you need to watch your own back. Watch your backs, guys.

Speaker 6 (01:12:52):
Yeah, these guys would be some of the more like
presumably very easy to prosecute and like obvious, Yes, another
democratic administration's.

Speaker 1 (01:13:03):
Some really obvious crimes in terms of like protection of information,
you know, like some some pretty obvious rule breaking that
went on that's not being prosecuted now, but yeah, they're right,
it could be prosecuted in the future.

Speaker 5 (01:13:15):
Those like first three four months of the Trump admin
What it really was just full steam ahead on the
Silicon Valley version of things, right, like the move fast
and brave things. Yeah, that's such a wild time to
look back on, not only just in terms of how
much damage they did, but the idea that if they
were going to continue at that pace for the rest
of the term, the government already is fundamentally different in
some ways, but like how much worse that would have been? Yeah,

(01:13:39):
and if Musk's ego is in part, what's sabotaged that
from being complete and really kind of doing that more
like Jarvin inspired project Hubris Uh kills kills a man
once again. But there is aspects of like the doge
idea and this government efficiency thing which aren't fully going
away like this, this still is and aspect of the

(01:14:00):
Trump administration there still is like some of those guys
at the Auspice of Budget Management and the Heritage twenty
twenty five guys who have a lot of this government
efficiency quote unquote government efficiency type stuff that they're still
working on, including at the Education Department, which last week
the Trump administration took another step towards closing the Department

(01:14:21):
of Education by shifting some of its duties to other
federal agencies, which the admin claims will quote streamline federal
education activities on the legally required programs, and reduce administrative
burden unquote. That is going to be done by these
six new interagency agreements which have been signed with the

(01:14:43):
Departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and State.
The Education Department riting in an announcement that this will
quote break up the federal bureaucracy, ensure efficient delivery of
funded programs, activities, and move closer to fulfilling the President's
promise to return education to the States. So by splitting

(01:15:04):
up Education Department duties among four different agencies in three
different interagency agreements, this is supposed to cut red tape
and lighten central bureaucracy.

Speaker 6 (01:15:15):
You have seven entities now what one entity did before.

Speaker 5 (01:15:20):
The elementary, high school, and post secondary programs will now
be administered by the Department of Labor.

Speaker 6 (01:15:25):
That's great.

Speaker 5 (01:15:26):
We'll nowveresee over thirty billion dollars in education grants aimed
at trying to boost the number of Americans in the workforce.
The Department of the Interior will be taking over the
education departments to Indian education programs and integrating them into
existing programs administered by the Department of the Interior, with
quote unquote proper oversight by the Education Department. College childcare programs,

(01:15:50):
and foreign medical school accreditation will be administered and overseen
by the Health and Human Services, and the State Department
will now oversee all foreign education programs, handle international education grants,
and fully administer the full Bright program. Justification for this
State Department takeover of these funds specifically cited five instances

(01:16:12):
of grants that were used to fund academic and medical
research on trans people, writing that these programs have deviated
from the core mission. Quote. The announcement from the Education
departments reads that the State Department is quote best positioned
to tailor foreign education programs with the national security and
foreign policy priorities of the United States. This partnership provides

(01:16:34):
an opportunity to streamline international education program funding and data
collection measures, consolidate program management, and advance national security interests.

Speaker 6 (01:16:46):
That's not good.

Speaker 5 (01:16:47):
Yeah, that doesn't seem great.

Speaker 6 (01:16:49):
Huh Yeah, this last part is particularly concerning that the
US previously has done a lot of funding of education
programs around the world, and to see that pretty much,
I like, with this current vasion of the State Department,
I to disappear or become even more straight up propaganda.
Like it's really worrying. This kind of builds on that

(01:17:11):
dose stuff that you were talking about, Like this is
the end of the State Department doing anything other than
the propaganda And I guess warmaking well.

Speaker 5 (01:17:20):
And specifically, like Rubio's focus on education has been to
crack down on academics, Palaestatian academics, academics who have who
have protested in support of Palestine. That's specifically what Rubio
has has talked about in terms of, you know, universities. Yeah,
so with all the stuff in that statement about you know,

(01:17:43):
national security and foreign policy priorities, it's not hard to
see what they could be gesturing towards. Yeah, as the
announcements are currently written, a lot of the programs itself,
at least in the trench transitionary period, remain kind of
the same. They're shifting who is like quote unquote administering them,
that's the word they use a lot. But they're not

(01:18:06):
cutting funds to these programs at the moment, and they
do talk about them as like legally required programs. But
I mean, Carolyn Levitt and Linda McMahon have said this
is just one step towards well fully sending education back
to the states.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
Woh.

Speaker 6 (01:18:22):
This also was sort like in massive disparities in educational
outcomes state by state in the United States, right, Like,
we already have that to some extent, but that's only
going to be exacerbated by this, right, talking about things
happening between the States. Let's talk about Gregory Buffino, person

(01:18:44):
who supposedly patrols the borders of the United States, but
has more recently been doing internal enforcement for the Border Patrol.
He gave an interview to AP recently that I was
just reading. They did confirm, interestingly that like a few
weeks ago, maybe months ago, we've been talking about Baveno
and like to work out if he was still chief
patrol agent in El Centro. It appears that he is,

(01:19:05):
but he's also a commander of this operation at large,
which is their sort of the thing that has moved
from Los Angeles to Chicago, which is now in Charlotte. Right,
this sort of internal enforcement operation. He calls his team
now quote unquote sanctuary busters, and he said that quote
there will be no more sanctuaries, which kind of does

(01:19:27):
build on what I spoke about in our last ed
right when we spoke about the idea that the reason
they had targeted Charlotte was because it appeared on that
CIS map quote unquote sanctuary city or sanctuary jurisdiction, despite
the passage of legislation in the state which would have
prevented it doing the things that sanctuaries do. I don't
want to talk about this ABC investigation into CBP's use

(01:19:50):
of licensed plate readers. CBPS has had these for like
eight or nine years now. I found the twenty seventeen
piece where they wrote out their justification for use them. Right,
their use has grown immensely right in it. Yeah, and
it has grown under both administrations we've I suppose Trump
administration from twenty to twenty twenty, by the administration twenty twenty,

(01:20:12):
twenty eighty four. We spoke actually in an episode that
I think it was just Robert and I in that
episode when we spoke about Gavin Newsom. People love that
episode and they send me great feedback, because, guys, it's
important that we all know that the only person standing
up against Trump right now is Gavin Newsom. Everything else
is pointless. But in that episode, we spoke about how

(01:20:34):
many California jurisdictions share license plate reader information with federal
immigration authorities, even when California law prohibits them from doing so. Right.
This is kind of one of those these things they grow.
It's a ratchet.

Speaker 7 (01:20:47):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:20:48):
Once you give that power to the state, it belongs
to all of the state, and you can never take
it back. Automated license to plate readers have been a
big thing in this kind of the post only twenty
tendency of democratic mayors in big cities to massively increase
spending on the police and massively increase police surveillance. We

(01:21:10):
have automated cameras on our lampposts here in San Diego
now right. California has prosecuted one jurisdiction that I'm aware of,
which is Alcoholone. People will be familiar with alcoholne from Alcoholone.
Mayor Bill Well's attempt to make a country music song
about how schools are turning kids trans that is un

(01:21:33):
ironically probably the most national use it that ALCOHOLA has
made for a while. But bundahursued Alcoholone for showing that data.
My guess is that that is because it's alcoholone, right,
Because Alcohol is a city where the mayor makes a
country music song about how schools are turning children trans like,
it's very obviously like a partisan prosecution. There are many

(01:21:54):
other jurisdictions doing this. What Border Patrol does with these
cameras is it targets quote unquote suspicious activities and then
it requests stops. Sometimes the stops are not made by
Border Patrol, but are made by local police. Right on
the pretext of something like speeding or failing to signal
before you change lanes, having a break light out could

(01:22:16):
be many, many things, right. The ABC piece quoted Deputy
Joel bab of saying, quote, the beautiful thing about the
Texas traffic code is there thousands of things you can
stop a vehicle for. The idea here is not to
explicitly talk about the license plate readers, right, And the
fact that they are using these to do predictive surveillance

(01:22:39):
is what they call it.

Speaker 8 (01:22:39):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:22:40):
They're trying to highlight like suspicious patterns of vehicle motion
and stop people. The piece has some they obtained through
public records requests from a court case, a WhatsApp group
chat between Border Patrol and Texas officers which the officer
has shared movement, social media profiles, car rentals, and home
addresses of people who they were interested in surveilling. Right,

(01:23:03):
And it reveals a massive level of surveillance. If you know,
if you if you're thinking of border patrol and you're
still under the impression that in America the border can't
come to you wherever you are, this is another example
of why that's not true. Right, DHS uses these all
over the country to include outside of one hundred mile
border enforcement zone. Right. This piece seems to believe that

(01:23:25):
the board one hundred miles zone is it's like a
legal hard line. It's not. It's an interpretation of a
quote unquote reasonable distance. There is no hard line stopping
BP for operating further from the border than that. That
is just generally where the interpretation of a reasonable distance
from the border is perceived to fall. Border patrol has

(01:23:45):
these cameras at fixed points, so like that would be
border patrol crossings, you know when you enter or enter
the enter or leave the country at a port of
entry and then at checkpoints. Right, people will be familiar
with checkpoints that live in a border area. And then
they also have these in mo bile and cover capacities, right,
And they're using them to find people who might be
driving near the border or staying and then leaving at

(01:24:07):
a strange time, and then they're building a profile of
those people's movements and using that request stops. Right. It's
a level of surveillance that I think should be worrying
to many people.

Speaker 5 (01:24:17):
And they have access to these like larger integrated camera networks,
like by Flock Safety, which I've talked about before, including
I think yesterday's episode. As Flock is like an Atlanta
based company that rose to prominence through their surveillance around
the forest where cops that was being constructed. Now Flock
is all over the country, and Border Patrol has access

(01:24:38):
to the Flock system. Yeah, and it's used for a
whole bunch of other really dubious stuff, including in Texas.
I think four h four Media did a report not
too long ago about Texas sheriffs tracking a pregnant woman
getting an abortion, not in Texas.

Speaker 6 (01:24:54):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I can see. Yeah, Texas law makes
it a crime to leave the state in order to
get should or something, right, and so that would be
their I guess their excuse here. But like I think
we can all see that that's a pretty pretty disgusting
use of the svealan state. But yeah, these things grew
massively in the time period between twenty twenty and today,

(01:25:15):
and it was not just in Republican jurisdictions. Right, There's
this like unabated support for state surveillance that we saw
all over the United States is now being turned against
migrants and anybody who is suspected of helping them, which
is not great. Talking of not great, we have an
obligation to pivot to add I'm happy. I think that's great.

(01:25:40):
I love I love having a job. I enjoyed to
consume products and services.

Speaker 1 (01:25:45):
That's right, and we're back. How's everybody doing good?

Speaker 5 (01:26:01):
Yeah? Banging, pretty good, pretty good. I just just finished
my Asahi smoothie from the Heritage Social twenty twenty four cup,
So I feel great.

Speaker 1 (01:26:10):
That's great. Yeah, that's good for you.

Speaker 5 (01:26:12):
Garrison really coming together, you know, politics from different sides
coming together to enjoy a smoothie. Not unlike the meeting
between Zora mum Donnie and Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 (01:26:21):
Oh my god, Oh.

Speaker 6 (01:26:23):
How long did you plan that for?

Speaker 11 (01:26:25):
Garrison?

Speaker 5 (01:26:26):
Like literally five seconds? It just it just came out.

Speaker 6 (01:26:28):
We don't do smooth transitions here like that.

Speaker 5 (01:26:31):
Well, you know sometimes do you know who was smooth?

Speaker 11 (01:26:34):
It was Zora moum.

Speaker 6 (01:26:35):
Donnie during that meeting, which like a duck's back, like
a like a seal, that kind of smoothness.

Speaker 5 (01:26:42):
Trump seemed pretty pretty enamored. Mister mum donnie mayor elect
mam donnie. Quote, we have one thing in common. We
want this city of ours to do very well unquote.
So this was on Friday, Trump and Mum Donnie had
a private meeting in the White House. Afterwards a thirty

(01:27:02):
minute press conference in the Oval Office where Trump was
sitting down, And so I was kind of looming over
the side of Trump the whole time, never fully smiling,
always having a little bit of like a a tiny
like both sided smirk, but not doing his traditional happy smile.
He had a very different look in the White House.

(01:27:23):
But as soon as the press conference started, it was
clear that the meeting went very well for Momdannie. Trump
was exuberant about the man.

Speaker 1 (01:27:32):
Yeah, he seemed really excited. Yeah, it's a little weird,
but he seemed really excited.

Speaker 5 (01:27:37):
He stated that they have common ground on getting housing built,
on affordability, on food and prices coming down, saying, quote,
there's no difference in party, and we're going to be
helping him to make everybody's dream come true unquote.

Speaker 6 (01:27:49):
Everybody's streamftory amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:27:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:27:55):
First, I want to play Zoran's initial statement as the
press conference started on what they spoke about during this meeting.

Speaker 10 (01:28:02):
I appreciated the meeting with the President, and as he said,
It was a productive meeting focused on a place of
shared admiration and love, which is New York City, and
the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers, the eight
and a half million people who call our city their home,
who are struggling to afford life in the most expensive
city in the United States of America. We spoke about

(01:28:22):
we spoke about groceries, we spoke about utilities, we spoke
about the different ways in which people are being pushed out.
And I appreciated the time with the President. I appreciated
the conversation. I look forward to working together to deliver
that affordability for the owners.

Speaker 6 (01:28:35):
It's one of the posture people with the green line.
The green line.

Speaker 1 (01:28:38):
Yeah no, I've seen, yeah, that's going on a couple
of times.

Speaker 6 (01:28:41):
They've already they've had that way with it, They've been
on it. Yeah, yeah, Okay, it does seem tense.

Speaker 1 (01:28:46):
The vibes in that room must have been very, very weird.

Speaker 5 (01:28:49):
N Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, no, Zorn's very tense. Trump's
trying to relax, like bad late.

Speaker 1 (01:28:56):
Face that you've posted on gas he is, I can
only it's like a shit eating grin on Trump's face. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
like he does seem genuinely happy, thrilled. Yeah, it's weird.

Speaker 6 (01:29:08):
He likes to be associated with winners.

Speaker 5 (01:29:10):
This is one of the big things, right A lot
of I mean, we'll talk about this more. That takes
okay at this, but but yeah, I think it's very
clear why Trump's actually having a good time here. Zoron's
like the most popular politician in the country right now,
and Trump likes winners. And if anything, Zoron has proven
to be an underdog that has an enormous capacity for winning,

(01:29:32):
and I think Trump does like that, and that, coupled
with a genuine love for New York, I think Zoron
was able to navigate around Trump pretty successfully. When asked
about Zoron being a communist, Trump said, quote, I feel
very confident he can do a good job. I think
it's going to surprise some conservative people actually unquote.

Speaker 1 (01:29:49):
And you should add what he said about liberal people,
because I thought that was his funniest line.

Speaker 5 (01:29:54):
Oh then also liberal people, but they already like him
too or something.

Speaker 1 (01:29:57):
Yeah, I don't think they'll be surprised, they'll just be half.

Speaker 5 (01:30:00):
Yes, they like him because they already like him.

Speaker 1 (01:30:03):
It was very funny it was very funny.

Speaker 5 (01:30:05):
Trump also talked about how a lot of Trump voters
actually voted for Zorn as well, saying quote unquote, I'm
okay with that, and so I mentioned that yes, one
in ten Trump voters in New York voted for Zoron
and Zorn mentioned the end to forever wars and the
cost living crisis as the driving motivators that voters spoke

(01:30:27):
about as he was campaigning. Throughout this press conference, and
we can assume some degree of the meeting, Zoran was
very laser focused on New York specifically, and you've even
seen this in interviews that he's given to like NBC
and other outlets the past few days, where people are
asking him about, you know, the Democratic Party as a
whole and national level, and Zorn repeatedly just goes back

(01:30:48):
to affordability in New York. This is like the one
thing that he's going to keep talking about. He doesn't
want to talk about any anything else really, And this
was evident throughout this meeting the way that Zorn would
would reiterate every question to being about New York. But
they didn't shy away from talking about the things they
disagreed on on, like an ideological sense, ICE being one

(01:31:08):
of them. Here's one of their exchanges about ICE.

Speaker 12 (01:31:11):
Resident you've threatened to send federal troops to New York City.
You both have differences when it comes to ICE agents
in New York City. On mister Mundonnie, you called ICE
a rogue government entity. I wonder how you reconcile your
differences on both of those issues.

Speaker 5 (01:31:26):
I think we're going to.

Speaker 3 (01:31:27):
Work them out. And I think that if we have
known murderers and known drug dealers and some very bad people,
you know, we want to get them out. And the
mayor ones have we discussed as a great length actually
maybe more than anything else. He wants to have a
safe New York. Ultimately, a safe New York is going
to be a great New York. If it's not safe,

(01:31:48):
no matter how well we do with pricing and with
anything else, we can talk about anything you want, if
you don't have safe streets, it's not going to be
a success. So we're going to work together. We're going
to make sure that if they they're horrible people there,
we want to get him out. I think he wants
to get him out, maybe more than I do, So
we'll work together.

Speaker 5 (01:32:07):
They talked about I is at one later point in
the meeting where you get kind of a peek at
what some of this conversation may have been like behind
the scenes, about trying to target any ICE enforcement against
people who have criminal records rather than these roving raids
that round up but just swaths of undocumented people like

(01:32:28):
the Canall Street raid a few weeks ago. It's still
not super clear what they are talking about, but there's
not compromise in this point, like Trump's obviously going to
try to frame this in a way that strengthens Trump's
own positions on this, and I think Zoron will do
the same. Before we discuss I don't want to play
this the second bit of their discussion because you get

(01:32:50):
more of Zoron's angle.

Speaker 10 (01:32:54):
We discussed ICE and New York City, and I spoke
about how the laws that we have in New York
City allow for New York City government to speak to
the federal administration for about one hundred and seventy serious crimes.
The concerns that many New Yorkers have are around the
enforcement of immigration laws on New Yorkers across the Five Boroughs,
and most recently we're talking about a mother and her

(01:33:14):
two children. How this has very little to do with
what that is.

Speaker 3 (01:33:19):
We discuss crime more than ice per se. We discuss crime,
and he doesn't want to see crime, and I don't
want to see crime, and I have very little doubt
that we're not going to get along on that issue.
He wants to and he said some things that were
very interesting, very interesting as to housing construction, and he
wants to see houses go up. He wants to see

(01:33:40):
a lot of houses created, a lot of apartments built, etc.
And you know, we actually people would be shocked, but
I want to see the same thing.

Speaker 5 (01:33:50):
See that.

Speaker 1 (01:33:50):
Yeah, that worries me a little bit.

Speaker 5 (01:33:52):
What about that worries you?

Speaker 1 (01:33:53):
I can tell what Trump's trying to do, which is
that he really would like to get Mom Donnie on
his side. And interestingly for Trump, I think he is
willing to move on some things if he can fundamentally
get Mom Donnie to agree that ice has a use. Yeah, right,
Like that's what he's clearly trying to do, and he's
clearly trying to portray it as we've already agreed on that.

(01:34:15):
And I think that within the context of this meeting,
because of how the questions were being asked. I don't
think Zorn got enough of a chance to fully address
that question. So I'll leave it open to see how
that is, like how he deals with that in the future.
But I don't think he got enough of an opportunity
to push back enough on some of the things Trump

(01:34:36):
was claiming here. That does concern me a little bit,
Like I think it's more a factor of how an
oval office press conference is structured. But I do think
that it's like I can see what Trump's trying to
do well.

Speaker 5 (01:34:49):
I think what mom Donnie is trying to navigate for
is if he can put an end to roving ice
rates that just like that just round up people at
whether they're at restaurants or from depots, and if there's
people who are who have been incarcerated, who are incarcerated,
and if removal operations are specifically against except like what

(01:35:12):
one hundred and seventy like serious crimes, and if that
is a sort of compromise, I guess I don't know.
He's not an office. Yes, it's it's unclear the way
that this would this would be enacted. Yeah, but if
it's an harm reduction measure of stopping ice raids from
happening or limiting the amount that ICE is able to
operate as as basically a rodenty within the city. And

(01:35:36):
I don't think we know enough to like actually see
what that will look like yet, because he's not taking
office for another what like forty five days.

Speaker 6 (01:35:44):
Yeah, yeah, what he's talking about. When Trump goes about crime,
crime is what they have always talked about, right, right,
when they talk about the ICE enforcement, the crimes that
they are speaking about, very right, they will always give
the exact ample of the person who's been convicted of
child abuse, of murder, of domestic violence. Right, But then

(01:36:05):
they will also go ahead and say the crossing between
ports of entry can be prosecuted as a crime, and
then they will use that as a justification for taking
anyone right and specifically people who have entered within the
last two years, many of whom were shipped to New
York from other states, and saying, well, these people entered
between ports of entry, which they did after the end
of Title forty two, right when we return to processing

(01:36:26):
people under Title eight, and they will place him in
actibility to remove all proceedings like that. That is what
they have been doing for a while. When he talks
about the sanctuary policies. New York right now doesn't honor
detainer requests. Right in theory, sanctuary laws prevent and Y see,
from what I understand, from honoring detainer requests, which would

(01:36:48):
be an extra forty eight hour detainer. We haven't, like,
as Robert said, we haven't really seen enough to see
you see what he's talking about there, But like, I
don't know if he's talking about a change to those
sanctuary policies or not. But yeah, that would be disappointing
if you did.

Speaker 5 (01:37:02):
I mean, I don't see there's any indication that he's
talking about a change to sanctuary policies.

Speaker 6 (01:37:07):
Well, when he's talking about we can cull them on
one hundred and seventy serious crimes, right, what does he mean?

Speaker 1 (01:37:14):
Yeah, And I think this gets back to the fact
that a press conference in the Oval Office is not
going to give you a chance to adequately address an
issue like this, and I see Trump trying to paper
over it and move past as quickly as possible. Yeah,
And I understand why you'd show up for this meeting,
and I think it was probably, on the balance, the
right thing to do. But like I am interested to

(01:37:37):
see what he does next, because I think Trump is
going to continue trying to push for accommodations. And it
is kind of it is wild and unique to see
that he seems to be willing to move on some stuff,
but he's willing to move on some stuff because he
thinks he can get Mom Donnie to soften some of
his stances.

Speaker 5 (01:37:54):
I mean stances on what I mean. I mean, I
don't on ice.

Speaker 1 (01:37:57):
I mean, that's what he's trying to do here. He's
trying to build a case for that.

Speaker 5 (01:38:03):
I mean, I guess I don't know the degree to
which we're using.

Speaker 1 (01:38:06):
The saying that this is a rogue government agency to
saying that this is a government agent. That's what Trump
is trying to push for. Yeah, I'm not saying Mom
Donnie agreed with that. I think that the nature of
this meeting did not give him enough time to push
back on that.

Speaker 5 (01:38:20):
Sure, sure you have Mum Donnie pointing there towards like
an instance of like you know, a mother and like
a child getting affected by this, and like and using
it as an example of like what they are trying
to prevent and like focusing on like the stopping ice
rates from happening, as as like the thing that Mam

(01:38:41):
Donnie is pushing for there and Mam Donnie as a
New York City mayor cannot abolish the entity of Ice,
and so like the degree in which we're framed that
a is like Mom Donny's like softening, I think still.
I mean, yeah, like, as you've said, there's not enough
here to make a full determination.

Speaker 6 (01:38:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:38:58):
I just think that's that's what Trump wants to get
out of this.

Speaker 6 (01:39:01):
I think Trump just wants to be associated with this
guy who is currently, as Garrison said, very popular.

Speaker 1 (01:39:06):
And it is really wild to see him be so
deferential to somebody.

Speaker 5 (01:39:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean including in this this this
question about Trump being a fascist, which he handled in
a very uh, very fascinating way that this is nuts.

Speaker 3 (01:39:22):
Yeah, are you affirming that you think President Trump is
a fascist?

Speaker 10 (01:39:26):
I've spoken about.

Speaker 3 (01:39:27):
That's okay, Okay, it's easier. It's easier than explaining.

Speaker 5 (01:39:33):
At Zorn did say yes during that exchange he did
that he did not he in fact did.

Speaker 1 (01:39:42):
Yeah, he absolutely did. It's one of the most remarkable
moments in American political history.

Speaker 10 (01:39:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:39:47):
If I had any stretch of the imagination.

Speaker 5 (01:39:50):
As Trump pats on the side. And I mean it's
it's wild for Trump. This word doesn't mean anything right
for Trump, like him saying it's easier than explaining. That's
just indicating to zort On that you don't have to
do this like little like political game for this reporter
and be like, you know, we have we have just
we've disagreed on policies, which blah blah blah. Like Trump's like, no,
you don't have to do that, it's easy and explaining

(01:40:11):
just say it yeah, yeah, which is a sort of
like a point like against like the media. That's from
Trump's point of view. It's like you you don't have
to do you don't have to do like the little
the little dance for like this like New York Post
reporter or whatever. Just say that I'm a fascist.

Speaker 6 (01:40:25):
It's fine. Yeah. And because politics is for him a
sort of behind closed doors boys club and they yes,
they both have to go out and then deal with
the media. But like you can sort of see that
in this sort of highly viviality that Trump goes for there.
I'm not saying that Ma'm Damie is less necessarily in
his boys club. I'm just saying that that is how
Trump perceives politics.

Speaker 5 (01:40:45):
Yeah, I mean he made other references like when when
Trump was asked if he considers or on a g hottist,
like someone else in the Republican Party called him, and
Trump's like, no, I mean, the man sitting in front
of me is not a too hottest People have to
say certain things during camp pains, but the man I
met was today, it's a very rational man. And like
little lines like that, like people, Yeah, when you're a campaign,

(01:41:06):
you have to say things that I think that he's
getting at a similar point there, But there was multip
points for this press conference where Trump defended Mamdani against
like other aggressive questions about his focus on international law
versus the Constitution, or why Zoron flew to DC instead
of taking a greener train. Yeah, silly, silly stuff. And
Trump was like Trump like dismissed these questions if like

(01:41:29):
for Zar essentially, I mean like all stand up for you.

Speaker 1 (01:41:31):
Yeah, it's it's something else.

Speaker 6 (01:41:34):
There are more salient criticisms that there were reasonable criticisms
you can make of some stuff he's done. Those are them.

Speaker 1 (01:41:42):
Yeah, it's just gotcha media stuff right, like which which
it's interesting how well Trump is able to call sort
of their bullshit. Yeah, always fascinating.

Speaker 5 (01:41:53):
One of the more hilarious attempts at I gotcha question
is from Jack Pasovic, who was in the room, who
asked this.

Speaker 6 (01:42:01):
God, he must have been having an absolute melt down.

Speaker 1 (01:42:05):
Yeah, he can't be happy about this, Okay.

Speaker 10 (01:42:09):
I want to know.

Speaker 13 (01:42:10):
One of the policies as well that Mayor, like Mandomie,
talked to a number of times about on the campaign,
was shifting the tax burden for property taxes from what
he called minority communities to white based communities and putting
more taxes on white people. I also noticed that in
your acceptance speech you didn't mention didn't mention anything.

Speaker 5 (01:42:31):
About America or Christians or white people.

Speaker 13 (01:42:34):
In general, and so I didn't know if that was
one of the policies that you guys had spoken about.

Speaker 5 (01:42:39):
Incredible, Yeah, And Trump's like smiling like a proud of
father this whole time. As weird question, it's such an
odds like schizophrenic moment.

Speaker 6 (01:42:52):
Yeah, it's it's weird.

Speaker 1 (01:42:54):
How much more he seems to like Zoran than like
his supporters.

Speaker 5 (01:42:58):
Oh yeah, I mean a lot of his supports the losers,
and Zorn's a winner, I mean from his cabinet members. Yeah,
because they're losers, like like Pete hagg saith Elon Musk,
they're losing.

Speaker 6 (01:43:06):
Yeah, they're all weeds, I mean JD. Van's right.

Speaker 5 (01:43:08):
Yeah, Zorn's has proved himself to be like an incredibly
capable figure. There's a little moment as Jack's first asking
the question where Trump indicates to Zora, like, Okay, you
you handle this guy, you could you can have fun
with this. Yeah, and it's it's it's very odd and
not odd and it's unexplainable. I understand what's happening here.
Actually I think this is actually very easy to understand,

(01:43:30):
but it's just still it feels odd.

Speaker 6 (01:43:33):
Yeah, yeah, and just give him the adversarial politics was
so used to.

Speaker 5 (01:43:37):
Like there's a lot of moments like this, like when
when Trump's asked if he's gonna cut off federal funding
to New York, he says, quote, I don't think that's
going to happen. I think we're gonna help. And this
is like an indication of like what Zora was trying
to do in terms of harm reduction in this meeting,
specifically around raids on National Guard deployment. And on, like
cutting off federal funds to the city. One of the

(01:43:58):
methods I think that Zoron used to help get Trump
on his side is appeal to like the real estate
brain that Trump has with mom Donnie's like left wing
yimby style of policies, talking about rent coming down by
building housing. And how much that surprised Trump because Trump
has this conception of people, like of people usually on

(01:44:19):
these like left wing positions are very very nimby in
a lot of ways, and Trump was like surprised by this.
I guess he hasn't really encountered like a left wing
yimby before, and this like this like caught him off guard. Yeah,
there's a good point here where Trump expresses this.

Speaker 3 (01:44:36):
Now we may disagree how we get there. The rent
coming down, I think one of the things that really
gleaned very very much today. He'd like to see him
come down, ideally by building a lot of additional housing here.
That's the ultimate way. He agrees with that, and so
do I. But if I read the newspapers in the stories,
I don't hear I don't hear that, but I hear

(01:44:57):
I heard him say it today, and I think that's
a very positive step. No, I don't expect. I expect
to be helping him, not hurting him. A big help
because I want New York City to be great. Look,
I love New York City. It's where I come from.
I spent a lot of years there.

Speaker 6 (01:45:12):
Now I'm right here, am Ray okay.

Speaker 5 (01:45:17):
And later Trump clarified that he would feel comfortable living
in New York under Mam Donnie and compared Mam Donnie's
popularity to that of Bernie Sanders, as well as how
supporters of Bernie moved over to Trump and then vice versa,
and through Trump talking about this, you can start to
kind of peak behind the current of like how Zorn
was framing his version of populism, which was able to

(01:45:39):
get Trump to be like friendly towards like the economic
affordability sides of his policy proposals. In talking about like
the crossover of support between Bernie and Trump and twenty
sixteen and the crossover support between Trump twenty four and
Ma'm donnie in twenty twenty five. At one point, Mom
Donnie did also address the genocide in Gaza.

Speaker 14 (01:46:00):
As mister Mumdney, you've accused the US government of committing
genocide and Gaza white. President Trump was working on peace.

Speaker 10 (01:46:07):
Why that I've spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide
and I've spoken about our government funding it. And I
shared with the President in our meeting about the concern
that many New Yorkers have of wanting their tax dollars
to go towards the benefit of New Yorkers and their
ability to afford basic dignity. And what we see right
now is we're in the ninth consecutive year of more

(01:46:27):
than one hundred thousand school children being homeless in our city,
and there's a desperate need not only for the following
of human rights, but also the following through on the
promises we've made New Yorkers. And I appreciated the meeting
we had and the work that we can do.

Speaker 5 (01:46:40):
Agree that President Trump didn't do a piece and work
hard to make the peace because we were hard to
do with the peace in the Midate East and everywhere.

Speaker 8 (01:46:47):
What do you agree with that?

Speaker 10 (01:46:48):
I appreciate all efforts towards peace. And I shared with
President Trump that when I spoke to Trump voters on
Hillside Avenue, including one of whom was a pharmacist, that
spoke about how President Trump's father actually went to that
pharmacy not too far from Jamaine states that people were
tired of seeing our tax dollars fund endless wars. And
I also believe that we have to follow through on
the international human rights and I know that still today

(01:47:10):
those are being violated and that continues to be work
that has to be done no matter where we're speaking of.

Speaker 1 (01:47:15):
Man, that's I I that's so complicated, so conflicting.

Speaker 6 (01:47:19):
That's a lot going on.

Speaker 1 (01:47:21):
On one hand, it's really good that somebody on record
said in the White House that the US is enabling
Israel and continuing a genocide. I'm glad that that happened.

Speaker 6 (01:47:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:47:31):
On the other hand, the fact that it's off roaded
so quickly to now let's talk about like what we
want to do for New Yorkers, and it is like, yeah,
it's not I don't know, it's it's the only way
this was going to happen at all.

Speaker 5 (01:47:46):
I suppose it's he's the main It's very no.

Speaker 1 (01:47:49):
I agree, I agree, but it's totally awkward, like it's yeah,
it's it's totally a little lot, especially when the topic
is genocide, right, Like the vote from genocide to housing
affordability and understand that both the serious issues.

Speaker 6 (01:48:03):
It's still a tonal shift that is jarring.

Speaker 1 (01:48:06):
And like, yes, it's absolutely fair to say he's the
mayor of New York. He has no ability to influence
US policy in terms of selling arms to Israel, and
the fact that he brought it up at all is positive.
But boy, is that is that a wild nit or
so of talking.

Speaker 5 (01:48:23):
I think the reason why he brought it up is
to talk about specifically, like funds that we are sending
to Israel should not be sent to Israel now, those
funds that should be being used in the United States
to do things to help people here. And that is
like why he brought that up as a seg well.

Speaker 1 (01:48:41):
And reiterating that Trump supporters often agree with the idea
that we should not be spending this much money on
this sending weapons over the world to fund wars overseas.
It'll be interesting to see if shit continues with Venezuela,
how that all moves. But I think it's valuable to
like really slam that home in the White House that like, hey,

(01:49:03):
you ran on getting the US out of these kind
of violent entanglements overseas. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad someone said it.
I guess, yeah, it's just weird. This is all a
very weird meeting.

Speaker 6 (01:49:15):
Yeah, yeah, the whole thing was jarring.

Speaker 5 (01:49:17):
I guess. There was another point there where he was
talking about like like local local New York businesses and
Trump's father like went to this pharmacy, and I think
stuff like that is the tactics that he used to
get Trump to be friendly with him as well as
Trump later spoke about how in one of the rooms
that they were meeting and there was a portrait of
FDR which Trump had personally like picked out of the

(01:49:38):
storage faults to hang, and Zorn asked him about the
portrait and asked if you could get a picture with it,
and this seemed to please Trump a lot.

Speaker 6 (01:49:46):
Trum.

Speaker 5 (01:49:46):
Trump wasn't able to talk about how he picked up
the picture, and then Trump said a few really interesting things.
He's like, I guess or it's a big fan of
FDR and the New Deal, which is phenomenal maneuvering from
Zor a classic technique to get like democratic socialist politics
across to someone. Again, there's moments like that stuff with

(01:50:08):
stuff of how we talked about like Bernie some some
you know, the you know, regular populist rhetoric, talking about
the crossover between you know, voters from between Trump and Mamdannie,
just his general love of New York and FDR New Deal.
You can see all these things that were used to
like navigate through this meeting to get to get Trump
to actually seed ground on a lot of stuff with

(01:50:29):
I think very very minimal concessions, if any, if any
real concessions even from zor like at all. Like I
think in general, Trump was the one that moved rhetorically
throughout this meeting and moved on like actual like actual
like promises to withhold funds to invade the city with
National Guard troops. I think Trump was the one who
actually seeded territory in this meeting. I do not see

(01:50:50):
much evidence of things that m Donnie had could have
personal impact on actually like losing losing ground on those
things throughout this meeting.

Speaker 6 (01:50:58):
It is almost important to remember that he has a
man ARMBI two, has a rhetorical role to play, right,
and yes, he is Mayor of New York. He is
also an extremely popular politician at the moment, and like
when he talks about things like the genocide in Gaza,
that that has rhetorical value. I'm not saying he can
go to New York City Council and stop it, but
like him saying that it is a genocide at the

(01:51:20):
White House is important, and like it is important that,
like when he has this this podium in front of
the whole world at the White House, so he used
it to talk about the genocide and he did, But like,
I don't think we should only think about this in
terms of New York. Like, it is sure important that
someone said that, and I hope he keeps using that
platform he has right now to say that as someone

(01:51:40):
who like is definitely looked up to nationally in like
DSA circles.

Speaker 5 (01:51:45):
I mean, I think, and this this goes into some
of the the I guess kind of I mean, some
of them are critiques, some of them aren't even really
critiques of this meeting. I think a lot of them
are people jumping on the opportunity to to just attacks
or on with no real construction critique there. But then
there's this kind of relates to these two different forms
of politics that people use on the left, like politics
as a form of personal expression, as a form of

(01:52:06):
like posturing as a as a form of like maintaining
of moral purity versus politics as an actual practical method
of achieving cyst like systematic change, and people engage in
these two different modes, and there're thing there's a role
for both of these modes of politics. Actually, I think
both of these have have a degree of necessity. And
Zoron has has taken one specific path, and there's the

(01:52:30):
others who are who are very clear in having taken
the other path. And there's there's a bunch of a
bunch of a bunch of critiques from this meeting quote
unquote critiques, including from a formal Seattle City councilman who
is now running for Congress as a socialist, Kashauma sawant quote.
If I were in Mamdani's position, instead of asking Trump
to meet me, I would have announced a mass rally

(01:52:51):
of tens of thousands of people in New York City
to protest against ice rates, to declare that New York
City will not tolerate ice and will fight Trump every
inch of the way. I will lunch mass campaign for
free transit and free childcare, and build a militant movement
to win unquote. These are things Zoran's are already participated in.
These are things that have happened. Just one more, like

(01:53:11):
one more protest that's going to be more effective than
actually having Trump seed some ground on the scale of enforcement.
This is part of why I have this like hesitation
around discussion of Zoran, because I think he's actually doing
kind of strategic moves to actually limit the amount of
damage that Trump's able to do in the city. And

(01:53:32):
he's doing it through like rhetorical maneuvers, and some of
that may feel awkward to watch in a like a
live press conference, but I think the actual end results
of that have a lot more potential than say, you know,
a rally of ten thousand people which effectively does nothing.

Speaker 6 (01:53:48):
Yeah. I mean we've had a bunch of those that
that is politics is performance right lately like that. Yeah,
people are very attached to that mode of political engagement
in the United States, like that that lie you know,
walking around with signs of shouting, demonstration and political intent.
It has not been successful in stopping ice grabbing random
people of the street, I'll just say that.

Speaker 5 (01:54:10):
And people have been criticizing Zoran just simply for even
taking this meeting because it's somehow quote unquote like humanizes
Trump in some way, like Trump doesn't need to be humanized, right,
Like it's like Zoron's platform by Donald Trump. He is
the president of the United States. He doesn't he he wins,
he has that position, he has bought the legitimacy like
this this, I don't think Zoron being there actually rehabilitates

(01:54:33):
Trump's image in a meaningful way. I think what he's
doing is trying to actually make New York a safer
and more affordable place to live by doing a kind
of complicated political maneuver, which I'm sure it's kind of
upsetting to kind of go through, but he's doing it.
And the wave of criticism that it's kind of based
on based on that sort of you know, humanizing argument

(01:54:54):
or this stuff on, like why doesn't Zorn just protest
instead of actually trying to like cut deals or like
not and cut deals because that sounds so like slimy,
but like actually like negotiate with the president. And like
this criticism comes on the tail end like a week's
worth of very reflexive criticism of Zoran for his retention
of New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tish, as well

(01:55:17):
as advocating against the New York City DSA's endorsement of
city councilmen and new DSA member she offses primary campaign
against Congressman Jokim Jeffries. Some of these criticisms, I get
the jeffersone a little bit more, But some of these
criticisms I find to be a little odd, mostly considering
the fact that Zoran has been open about his plan
to retain Tish for literal months, for literal months, and

(01:55:39):
just this week people acted like it was this massive
betrayal in his like ideological purity or his stated promises,
which just isn't true. He's been open about this like
since like last summer, and on the on the Jeffrey
side of things, I think Zorn's point of view here
is at a difficult primary campaign and one that's probably
going to be unsuccessful. Based on the Zoron twenty twenty

(01:56:00):
five general vote map, it shows that that'd be very,
very challenging. But this, this this difficult primary against referees
would also inhibit Zoron's ability to implement the affordability agenda
in the city. The New York Times quoted a leaked
portion of the DSA's endorsement meeting with Zoran saying, quote,
the choice before us is not whether to vote for

(01:56:20):
Chai or Hageeme at the ballot box. The choice is
how to spend the next year. Do we want to
spend it defending caricatures of our movement or do we
want to spend it fulfilling the agenda at the heart
of that very same movement. Unquote, Zora has a very
specific focus right now on the New York City government
and implementing the agenda for New York City and the

(01:56:41):
congressional campaign would, in his view, only put more roadblocks
to that at this point in time, versus, you know,
keeping a left wing ally in the New York City Council.

Speaker 6 (01:56:52):
I guess I don't see why they can't do both.
Like they will be defending caricatures of their movement for
sure the next forever, right until the Internet and and
stupid politics the stopping part of a politics which isn't
coming anytime soon. Like, I think it'd be perfectly possible
to give that endorsement and still say my job as
mayor is to do the shit that I promised to do.
I also endorse this person because I think they're a

(01:57:14):
better person than the Keem Jeffries, who has been very poor. Okay,
I don't I don't see those two things as mutually exclusive.
We need to talk about MTG, if only very briefly.

Speaker 1 (01:57:26):
What is there to say.

Speaker 6 (01:57:27):
That Magic the Gathering has finally reclaimed the acronym? Oh good, Yeah,
Marjorie Tayler Green leaving politics?

Speaker 5 (01:57:36):
Well maybe, well she's leaving the house. Is at the end,
at the end of the year, is leaving the House.
See what she's announced?

Speaker 6 (01:57:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:57:45):
It is unclear how she will continue her career.

Speaker 6 (01:57:48):
Maybe maybe Zoran will be taking her seat. Maybe the
Trump's new friends.

Speaker 5 (01:57:52):
I mean, I really don't think he's much interest in
being in the House of Representatives, especially in Georgia.

Speaker 1 (01:57:57):
Oh would jesus.

Speaker 6 (01:57:59):
He has a much more important role now. I guess
like he's able to do a lot more as executive
New York than he ever would be as like a
single rep in Yeah yeah, yeah, but yeah, no more MTG.

Speaker 1 (01:58:10):
Okay, well great.

Speaker 6 (01:58:12):
If you want to contact us, do you can reach
out to us at cool Zone, tips at proton dot me.

Speaker 15 (01:58:21):
We reported the news, We reported the news.

Speaker 5 (01:58:38):
Grinder. I hardly this is it could happen here where
today the it is gay flirting and or harassment, and
the here is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During the twenty twenty four
Republican National Convention. I'm gay also known by my undercover
alias Garrison Davis, and I was lucky enough to be

(01:59:00):
one of our on the ground RNZ correspondence. A few
weeks ago. We provided daily coverage of the GOP Coronation
festival based on our conversations with delegates, lobbyists, and think
tank ghoules, and reported on the general trends in rhetoric
used by popular speakers at the event. We'll have some
more in depth episodes about those topics in the weeks

(01:59:21):
to come, using more of our recorded interviews we collected
at the convention. But on top of our regular coverage,
I also had a special assignment that I'm more or
less assigned to myself. On this show, we often talk
about right wing extremism and issues facing gay and trans people,
including the various ways conservatives and Christian nationalists are trying

(01:59:41):
to make life harder for queer people, whether through legislation,
online harassment, and physical violence. As these are two of
our most frequently covered topics being at the Republican National
Convention provided me with the perfect opportunity to investigate the
intersection between conservatism and homosection U. For years, I've heard

(02:00:02):
rumors and urban legends about a massive influx of Republicans
flocking to the gay hookup app Grinder to get laid
during the RNC. Whether they be twenty year old Republican
twinks from Miami or fifty three year old self hating,
closeted gay men from Idaho trapped in loveless marriages, curiosity

(02:00:23):
has often gotten the better of me, and I needed
to know how many homosexual Republicans were actually logging onto Grinder.
In case you're unfamiliar, Grinder is technically a dating app
that serves the LGBTQ community, but in actuality, it is
a mediocre hookup app that mostly serves as a way
for strangers in their forties to completely unprompted send you

(02:00:45):
unflattering pictures of their penis. Grinder was launched in two
thousand and nine and is arguably the largest and most
popular gay dating app, especially among men. Grinder has only
been around for two in person RNCs prior to this point,
twelve and twenty sixteen. Since all convention activities moved online
during twenty twenty for the pandemic. So this July, for

(02:01:07):
the first time in eight years, Republicans from all around
the country could gather in one city and once their
wives fell asleep, log onto Grinder and this episode, I'm
going to tell you about my RNC Grinder experience. Before
traveling to the city that was about to be invaded
by all of the weirdest Republicans in the country, I

(02:01:28):
needed to do some prep to help ensure safety and
success in my investigative endeavor. I hope you queers liked
that terrible pun. Based on the massive increase in violent
anti trans rhetoric coming from the GOP, I already knew
that I would be dusting off my old boy motor
skills and going undercover as a cisgender male. Although my

(02:01:49):
ability to pass as a straight mail is debatable, I
can at least easily pass as a not quite straight mail.
My transfeminine fashion taste has been skewed more mask lesbian
in recent years, so clothing wasn't really an issue. I
packed up basically all my button up collar shirts, three ties,
two black suits, and a beige London fog trench coat. Basically,

(02:02:11):
the vibe I was going for was half young Republican,
half Roman towel boy dressed as a nineteen fifties FBI agent.
I refer to this as Dale Cooper moting. I was
unwilling to cut my hair to match most of the
young Republican frat boys, so I settled on styling my
wavy blonde locks like Baron Trump meets Total Swinton in Constantine.

(02:02:33):
I was kind of Gabriel maxing for most of the convention,
and though most attendees were unable to pick up on
my dikish undertones, the one day I wasn't wearing a tie,
I did get she heard by the Secret Service when
entering the convention through a security checkpoint. They're going woke.
So that was my general look for the convention. I

(02:02:53):
also completely remade my grinder profile for the RNZ for
simplicity's sake, I got to emphasize my twinking past and
removed the explicitly non binary transgender aspects of my profile,
replacing some of my more trans coded photos with pictures
of my light Yagami and Dale Cooper cosplay. Perhaps next

(02:03:14):
RNC I can experiment with discovering how many of the
RNC attendees are chasers. But for safety's at sake, I
went to more stealth, both online and in person at
RNC related events. For my main profile picture, I chose
a pretty basic photo of me with disheveled hair, wearing
a light gray shirt and thin black tie, looking just
frankly exhausted. I chose the simple yet elegant user name Twink,

(02:03:39):
and for my bio wrote gen z in town for Convention,
which I thought was pretty funny and signals to people
that yes, I am here for the R and C,
but leaves the exact reason why still a bit mysterious.
So this was my bait. On my way to the airport,
I was already dressed for the part, as I says

(02:04:00):
expected the flight from Atlanta to Milwaukee would be part
of the whole RNC experience. I arrived at the gate
and the vibe shift was immediate. Older white men with
even whiter hair wearing a mix of poorly tailored suits
and country club polo shirts fit for the driving range.
They all kind of looked like my Republican grandfather. The women, meanwhile,

(02:04:23):
regardless of age, were all cause playing their favorite female
Fox News anchor with bleached blonde hair. There were a
handful of delegates as well as Republican super fans wearing
Trump buttons and mega hats, just really excited to be
going to the convention, the way a NERD would be
excited to go to San Diego Comic con. Others at
the gate were more subdued, perhaps not wanting to attract

(02:04:45):
too much attention in the Atlanta airport, but I could
still overhear them getting into quiet small talk about their
RNC expectations and in hushed tones, asking others at the
gate if they were going to the convention. And that's
what everyone called it, not the Republican Convention, not the
GOP convention or the RNC the convention. As I was

(02:05:09):
bording the plane, an older woman with straw like blonde hair,
sitting a few rows in front of me waved me
and asked, young man, are you going to the convention.
I gave my best yes, ma'am, took my seat, and
then heard her remark to her friend about how happy
she was that more young people are attending the convention,

(02:05:29):
and I would suspect she would be quite disappointed to
learn why I was attending the convention and what I
was doing there, mainly trying to collect as much information
about these weird RNC Grinder Republicans as I can. And
you will hear more about those weird Grinder RNC Republicans
after the break. This episode is brought to you in

(02:05:49):
part by the top Gun soundtrack, which I was listening
to as I was coming down from adderall while writing
the second half of this episode, as well as these
products and sponsors. Okay, back to the Grind. Most convention

(02:06:14):
activities took place in the Piser Forum, which it took
about four days to learn how to pronounce. This venue
is usually home to the NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks,
and this is where I would do most of my
Grinder cruising so I could see other profiles within the
radius of the convention area. Every time I walked into
the Pfiser Forum, which was multiple times a day for

(02:06:36):
four days in a row, I would find a little
corner or a place to sit and discreetly boot up
Grinder and refresh my feed to see what profiles were
in my proximity. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Grinder, one
of its more terrifying features is the proximity detector telling
you what users are near you, whether that be five

(02:06:56):
miles away or five feet away. Every night, when I
got back to the hotel after recording with Robert and Sophie,
I would once again check a Grinder to see if
any unlucky delegates were put up in the hotels by
the airport. The hotel we were staying at was also
home to the Idaho and North Dakota delegates, and though
I don't believe anyone from our hotel was on Grinder,

(02:07:18):
save for maybe an anonymous profile or two, there definitely
were RNC attendees at some of the nearby hotels roughly
fifteen hundred feet away from my bed. The Grinder proximity
detector was quite useful to me and locating profiles active
around the footprint of the R and C, as well
as when sorting through all my messages back home to
confirm who attended the rn C from out of state.

(02:07:41):
Because Milwaukee is about six hundred and fifty miles away
from Atlanta, if someone's distance marker was substantially different from that,
I could assume that they were in Milwaukee for the
R and C from out of state. Even if I
wasn't able to confirm through any brief text exchange. I've
also done my best to follow up with certain profiles
to rule out possibilities of secondary traveling or other random

(02:08:02):
reasons for why the distance markers might not line up exactly.
And I think I have it narrowed down pretty well. Okay,
you've been very patient, and now I think it's time
to read through the highlights from my grinder in box.
And I gotta say I think I started off pretty strong.
While attending the RNC kickoff party the night before the
convention officially started, I got one of the very first

(02:08:24):
messages I received from a twenty one year old Republican
with the profile picture that's just a close up picture
of a dark suit with a dark blue shirt and
magenta tie, already horrendous vibes. He asked me if I
was quote unquote with the GOP and I said I
was attending with friends, and then I got no further response.

(02:08:45):
I saw this guy online throughout the convention, and then
after the convention was over, he moved like three hundred
miles away, so I'm pretty sure he was there for
the RNC. I got a message from someone who identified
himself as a local conservative of quote but not a
hardcore Republican unquote, and he was excited the convention was
in town, hopeful that he would quote meet my future

(02:09:09):
husband unquote. The first chaser I encountered with the bio
looking for some lady dick to feel in my ass,
saw through my CIS gender disguise and messaged me cock
question mark. I got one other message from a chaser
who was pretending to be Tea for Tea, who asked
me if I was in town for Kitsu Khan, an

(02:09:31):
anime convention in Green Bay. A nice local messaged me,
quote hope you're finding what you're looking for, smiley face,
which was very nice and just kind of amusing if
you consider that he thought I was just a gay
Republican looking for some other gay Republican. Another local with
the name Older for Young sent me the message quote boomer,

(02:09:53):
who will talk politics with you or we can just fuck.
I asked him if the quote unquot talk politics pickup
line works very often, and he replied quote less often
than I would hope for on here zero unquote. He
mentioned that he had noticed some convention attendees on the app,

(02:10:14):
telling me that they have infiltrated grinder. He then asked
me what exact hotel I was staying at, So that
was the end of that conversation. A minority of the
Milwaukee locals who messaged me identified themselves as conservatives and
were largely excited that the RNC was in town. They
vicariously questioned me about how the convention was going, as

(02:10:34):
most were disappointed that they themselves cannot attend. One such fellow,
who described Trump's first RNC entrance as electric and a
very emotional moment for him and the entire crowd unquote,
would have liked to attend, but he was busy working
at the hospital because they needed quote extra staffing just

(02:10:54):
in case unquote. Now, the worst profile picture I found
was an older guy wearing a baseball camp and one
of those half faced skull masks like Adam Offfen used
to wear. He said he was from Florida and claimed
to be in town not for the RNC but to
visit family, and mentioned that Vance had completely sold out

(02:11:15):
his morals for the VP spot. This guy's politics were impenetrable.
Maybe this was just like your average Florida independent, very
baffling fella. A younger guy messaged me asking you're a
Republican and I said not really, putting it lightly, and
he never got back to me. I did find a
thirty one year old chaser named Greg who I do

(02:11:36):
believe was attending the convention and his bio read quote
anon come drain Me trans CD as crossdresser sissy fem
to the front of the line. I asked, you like
trans and he responded yes. We had no further conversation.
I did talk with two other people who happened to

(02:11:57):
be covering the convention, including one guy who thought I
was with CNN because the Grinder proximity sensor put me
near the CNN area when I was actually using Grinder
at the Heritage Foundation party. And lastly, really the only
guy I saw who openly claims to be attending the
RNC in his public bio was a thirty two year

(02:12:17):
old from Shreveport, Louisiana with the user name suck me
Off one Word. He described the convention as exhausting but
awesome and told me he was quote proud to support
President Trump unquote and called Trump's speech on the final
day amazing. A lot of the RNC speakers, including Trump,

(02:12:39):
talked about Corey Competour, the man who was killed at
the Trump rally during the attempted assassination. So after mister
sucked me off talked about how awesome Trump's speech was,
I just replied to him, poor Corey, and he messaged
me back Corey Who, and that he told me what
exact hotel he was today. Now, part of the danger

(02:13:02):
of trying to use Grinder directly in the middle of
the RNC, even discreetly, is that even if I'm hunched
over on my phone, there is a non zero chance
that some passer by or persons sitting right above me
might catch a glimpse of an unsolicited dickpic that fills
my phone screen as I try to check my messages.
And this is simply a non negotiable part of the

(02:13:24):
Grinder experience. Whatever you do, grainy, unflattering, bizarrely angled photos
of some balding, forty three year old married man will
appear in your inbox. Ordinarily, I would check the profile
first to see who might be sending me a photo
to weed out the undesirable prospects before even considering to
open up a DM. Unfortunately, multiple factors prevented me from

(02:13:47):
doing this. For one, this was research, so I needed
to collect the most amount of data possible. But moreover,
even if I still wanted to vet for applicable profiles
in my dms, this was impossible without opening up to
each DM individually and clicking through to their profile from
the chat log. Due to one of the many glitches
I experienced using Grinder at the RNC, about halfway through

(02:14:10):
the week, the app started crashing pretty frequently. But the
main glitch I had to deal with, which has since
been fixed, is that I could not access anyone's profile
from the DM's page. I had to click into each
individual chat log to open up a user profile, which
meant I had to look at a lot more unsolicited
Dick pics before even being able to check anyone's profile.

(02:14:33):
So there I was watching Ted Cruise's speech, sitting underneath
about fifty Republicans and right next to both of my bosses,
scrolling through an endless stream of dick pics to see
who was local and who was here for the rn C,
hoping that whatever Republican voter from Alabama wasn't looking over
my shoulder at the plethora of dimly lit hog But

(02:14:55):
I was far from the only one reporting issues with
the app during the rn C around mis day. On Tuesday,
the second day of the convention, over one thousand users
reported a Grinder outage in the Milwaukee area on the
website down Detector. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote on the
final day of the r and C that quote reports
that the Grinder app crashing increased by more than ninety

(02:15:16):
percent in the past forty eight hours across the country unquote.
The down detector heat map showed Grinder outages in Chicago,
Los Angeles, and New York, as well as a hot
spot of outages in Milwaukee near the end of the convention,
indicating users were experiencing issues with the app, possibly due
to an increase in activity, and you will hear more

(02:15:38):
about that activity after this ad break. This episode of
It Could Happen Here is brought to you in part
by the Challenger's soundtrack remix by Boys Noise, which I
was listening to as I wrote most of this episode
while on the plane back to Atlanta. This episode is
also brought to you by these products and services. We

(02:16:09):
once again returned to the grind. We got to keep
on grinding. We're almost done, but we got to grind
a little more. Just one more grind bro I swear
about addictors. One more grind broachs one more grind. During
the influx of reports about the Grinder app breaking during
the RNC, a post from the Twitter account for the
Halfway Post went extremely viral, bolstering claims of a massive

(02:16:32):
increase in activity. Quote breaking, an executive of the gay
dating app Grinder says, the Republican National Convention is quote
basically Grinder's super Bowl unquote. This quote from a Grinder
executive went super viral, prompting discussions all over the Internet
about five different articles and even disgraced former New York

(02:16:53):
Congressman George Santos commented on the phenomenon content warning, gay Republican.

Speaker 14 (02:16:58):
So executives are calling the RNC convention the Grinder super Bowl. Folks. Look,
I'm openly gay, no qualms about it. Proud conservative Republican.
I met my husband on Grinder and we've been together
for six years going on seven, married.

Speaker 6 (02:17:20):
For almost three. Let me tell you something.

Speaker 14 (02:17:24):
Just come out the closet, boys, come on, it's fun.

Speaker 1 (02:17:28):
You can be.

Speaker 14 (02:17:28):
Gay and conservative, but look, Grinder's already out of you anyway.
Based on the hits and guess who's in town. It's
all you conservatives.

Speaker 11 (02:17:37):
Bye.

Speaker 5 (02:17:39):
Now, I certainly did observe a lot of blank or
anonymous profiles, at least more than I'm used to. I
also received messages containing variations of hay sexy from at
least five accounts that have since been deactivated. And this
does line up with a report from a Milwaukee area
Grinder user who spoke with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel saying
that he noticed a major bump in anonymous users. Quote.

(02:18:02):
On any given day, you'll go on there and see
a headless torso or a blank profile, said the source,
who did not want to be named. The Grinder user said,
on a normal day, you'll encounter maybe ten users with
no public profile. But Thursday, when he checked the app,
he said he stopped counting at fifty blank profile photos unquote. Now,
we don't have any official data yet on Grinder usage

(02:18:24):
near the twenty twenty four rn C, only the down
detector reports which our users submitted. But we do at
least have data from the last in person convention in Cleveland, Ohio,
all the way back in twenty sixteen. A Vice article
by Candice Brian spoke with sources from Grinder and wrote
that quote, Grinder usage near the Quick and Loans Arena

(02:18:45):
showed a sixty six percent increase during the r and C.
Other active destinations including Times Square, Capitol Hill, Disneyland, South Beach,
and Trump Tower showed no comparable increase in active users. Unquote.
Many of the local twinks and trains certainly were concerned
about possible RNC freaks hiding on the app. People would

(02:19:05):
often first ask me if I was a Republican or
why I was in town before trying to hit on me.
One such twink told me, quote, I would be surprised
if you were a delegate or something, but I had
to check. As the week progressed, more locals told me
that they had found a handful of out and proud
patriots online, but really not many. In fact, multiple Milwaukee

(02:19:27):
locals I chatted with on Grinder did claim to notice
an uptick in users, but mostly recognizable local users who
were online for the same reason I was, to see
if there was an influx of closet Republicans. Someone told me, quote,
for the record, it's like three times busier here than normal.
Everyone is out to see what the Republicans are up

(02:19:48):
to and the chasers have come out of the woodwork unquote.
Far from being the app's super Bowl. According to WECE,
the twenty sixteen rnc's sixty six percent bump in activity
is less than one half of the increase in Grinder
activity that was seen at the last in person DNC,
an event which was also a whole day shorter i'llreage

(02:20:11):
from wece. Quote. However, from Sunday to Monday, the week
of the Democratic National Convention, there was an even higher
one hundred and forty eight percent increase in activity around
the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia unquote. It's also worth
noting that of that sixty six percent increase in activity
around the twenty sixteen r and C, only about forty

(02:20:32):
percent of those users were visiting Cleveland, most were locals. Meanwhile,
sixty percent of Grinder users active near the DNC in
Philadelphia were visiting the city. Oh, and that quote from
a Grinder executive calling the RNC Grinder's super Bowl, as
well as George Sandos's other claim about Grinder purposely outing
gay conservatives. Both of those claims originate from Twitter satire accounts.

Speaker 6 (02:20:58):
It is totally made up, pure fiction.

Speaker 11 (02:21:00):
It's fiction.

Speaker 6 (02:21:01):
It's fiction.

Speaker 9 (02:21:02):
We made it up.

Speaker 1 (02:21:03):
We made this one up.

Speaker 6 (02:21:04):
It's a made up tail, it's a total fabrication. It
never happened.

Speaker 5 (02:21:08):
It's an urban legend that never happened. So no, the
RNC is not grinders a super Bowl. I got messages
from over one hundred and fifty different people. Over ninety
percent of the messages I received and profiles visible online
even while inside the Pfizer forum were from locals completely
unaffiliated with the RNC, and any boost activity that can

(02:21:31):
be attributed to people visiting for the RNC is a
minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the proverbial orgy
festival of out of town gay Democrats who travel to
the DNC, And like, if you think about this logically,
this shouldn't at all be surprising. The Republican Party has
spent the past two years screaming about how all drag

(02:21:52):
queens are child groomers, and though this was the first
year the GOP has removed opposition to gay marriage from
their party platform, they have massively increased their opposition to
and attacks against trans people and really any display of
a visible queerness like come on this is the Republican party.
There's this kind of fucked up cultural conception that homophobic

(02:22:13):
politicians must be so because they are secretly gay. And
while there is the occasional like Lindsey Graham or repressed
homosexual preacher, this is not the norm and all Republicans
being secretly gay is not the driving force of legislative homophobia.
It is an ideological drive, largely in furtherance of hegemonic

(02:22:35):
Christian nationalism, and now for people like Elon Musk and more,
young Republicans of fascistic notion of reproductive futurism built on
fears that young people white people aren't having enough white babies,
which they partially attribute to society becoming more accepting of
gay and trans people, resulting in people having less reproductive

(02:22:56):
or heterosexual sex. Never mind the fact that queer and
trans people are often times can and do have children,
which still doesn't seem to please these conservatives, as it
doesn't align with their traditionalist view of the family unit.
So No Grinder wasn't flooded with closeted Republicans because there
simply isn't that many closeted Republicans that are going to
be attending the RNC, and while there may not be

(02:23:18):
as many Republicans as I thought there might be, I
do believe that I have the bump in activity, albeit
a smaller bump than rumored. Basically figured out based on
my anecdotal experience and the reports of a handful of
local Grinder users and journalists I talked with who were
online during the twenty twenty four rn C, and considering

(02:23:38):
the twenty sixteen Grinder data, I can report that merely
a small minority of activity was due to ordinary RNZ attendees.
The majority of activity was from locals who either regularly
used Grinder or were specifically curious about who might be
online during the RNC. I observed two more groups that

(02:24:00):
would contribute to any noticeable increase in activity. Not everyone
who attends the RNC are guests or delegates. A lot
of people work at the convention center or work tech,
and a sizeable chunk of people are like myself researchers, posters,
or journalists who attend conventions like this for work. And lastly,
the final group that fills out the bump in Grinder activity,

(02:24:23):
one that for some reason didn't really expect to see
upon arrival, but in retrospect makes total sense. Are cops
so many cops? There were so many cops online at
the RNC, just like delegates or reporters. They are coming
to town from all around the country. There was cops
or state troopers from Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, California, Indiana,

(02:24:47):
and many more states, as well as US Capitol Police,
Secret Service, TSA, DHS, and FBI. They were all in
town as a part of the security detail. A few
of the guys that messaged me I can absolutely confirm
are one hundred percent police or some kind of military police.
A thirty three year old cop or military guy quote
looking for sexy bottoms with the tag's jock, military discreete

(02:25:11):
and weightlifting, as well as many pictures of him in
the gym. Said it in his bio that he was
quote really into slim, skinny toned, and muscular people. He
messaged me saying, Hey, now, I got a lot of
haze in my inbox, which is not unusual for Grinder.

(02:25:31):
You will probably mostly get hay as a message as
well as just like, you know, a picture of someone's penis,
but between a penis and hey, those are probably the
two most received messages you will get on Grinder. There
was another guy with a username DL military who said
in his bio he was working security for the week
and that Grinder messages had completely broke for him and

(02:25:52):
to instead message him on Snapchat. The DL in DL
military stands for down low. It's a tag that only
the worst people on Grinder will use, mainly like self
hating gay men who are closeted, and it's download because
they don't want to be like publicly seen being gay.
Just absolutely the worst. We do not fuck with DL,

(02:26:13):
both literally and figuratively. There were a bunch of other
non locals who I would describe as cop types. I
can't one hundred percent say for sure that they are cops,
but they have like the look, you know, like the look,
the cop look. I don't know. They could also be
like a bodyguard or work in private security. But one

(02:26:34):
of these cop looking guys message to me asking if
I was a trans guy, which I always love to see.
It means I'm doing gender very well. And a few
other cop types sent relatively boring messages. So yeah, a
lot of cops, which is not completely surprising considering the
fact that basically half the cops in the country were
at the Republican National Convention in some form or another.

(02:26:57):
A few final notes, Now, this really make up a
sizable chunk of the Grinder population. But after saying I
was just covering the RNC, a couple people on Grinder,
just completely unprompted, told me that they were attending the
protests against the RNC. Please do not do this. That's
a horrible idea for multiple reasons. You gotta stop talking

(02:27:18):
about your political activities on dating apps, especially Grinder, especially
at the RNC. Horrible idea. Do not do this. And
despite my lazy attempt at a young Republican disguised online profile,
a few too many people did recognize me from Twitter
or the pod, but they were very nice. They gave
me some recommendations for what gay bars to check out

(02:27:39):
after conventioned hours, and one person told me this interesting
anecdote that I'd like to share. Quote, I don't think
Trump is going to win. I can missed for Hillary
in twenty sixteen, and at least here it doesn't feel
the same unquote. I thought that was a little interesting
tibit that I received at probably round three am on Grinder,
So there you go. Well, anyway, that was my RNC

(02:28:02):
grinder experience. I'm sorry to report it is not the
hotbed of closeted Republicans that we mean it to be.
It's mostly local gaze, a few reporters and a few
more cops. I do not think I'll be reporting on
the DNC grinder, but I am curious to see if
there is a sizable increase in activity as compared to

(02:28:25):
the RNC Grinder, So I guess I will maybe posted
by that on Twitter at Hungry bow Tie if you
want updates on that. Anyway, stay safe out there. Be
careful if you're ever on grinder. Please especially don't tell
someone covering the RNC that you're attending any protests. But
in general, be careful on these types of dating apps
and I will see you on the other side. Message

(02:28:49):
from Quickie Grinder said you were super close yesterday, wasn't stocking?
I promise? Message from birthday present emoji I almost thought
you were Josh Thomas. Message from anonymous wait are you
pro or anti Republican? I'm not gonna lie. I mainly
asked your politics because I thought you were cute, but

(02:29:10):
I didn't want to hit on a Trumper message from
older for young aren't all the delegates propositioning you? You're cute?
Message from anonymous? Why establish a detlitarian state if I
can't breed It's a dictator message from suck me off?
I'm down for anything.

Speaker 11 (02:29:31):
Lol.

Speaker 5 (02:29:31):
Are you supporting Trump? Ha? Ha?

Speaker 6 (02:29:51):
Cool media.

Speaker 2 (02:29:54):
Welcome to you can Happen Hear a podcast trying to
figure out why some of the most powerful people in
the world to everyone to think that they're gamers. It
is it is your host me along with me as
Garrison Davis.

Speaker 5 (02:30:05):
I I've I've played a video game before. I'm not
very powerful, but I I.

Speaker 2 (02:30:10):
Too, have played many several video games.

Speaker 5 (02:30:13):
See I wouldn't. I wouldn't say several. I've I've played
like a few many. I have played too many, simply
too many video games. So okay, this is this.

Speaker 2 (02:30:24):
Is in some ways kind of a lighter episode, because
Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing.

Speaker 5 (02:30:29):
Is something going on out there.

Speaker 2 (02:30:30):
It's all really bad, and one of the people who's
been making everything really really bad is Elon Musk, who
has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers, the
PayPal guy, the PayPal guy, the owner of x.

Speaker 5 (02:30:43):
I've I've been I've been locked in my uh in
my gamer cave for the past like five months. I've
not left. I'm just hearing about this now. Yeah you might.
You might.

Speaker 2 (02:30:52):
You might know of him as the guy who paid
another guy to play Path of Exile two for him.

Speaker 5 (02:30:56):
We will get to that. See, I don't play those games.
Those games are gay. I only play Nintendo Mecca games
and hell Divers too, like a loser's that's reasonable, that's reasonable.
Those are those are? Those are fine games. Oh and Sonic?

Speaker 2 (02:31:12):
Oh god, okay, pushing aside the subject to Sonic. So okay,
I want to take a look a bit about why
this sort of matters and why all of these fucking
really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to
be gamers.

Speaker 5 (02:31:31):
And I think the place to start here is with
the fact.

Speaker 2 (02:31:34):
That gaming is in one hundred and eighty four point
three billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is an extremely
annoying guy but is also right, points out that this
is more money than TV, movies and music combined. So
this is the largest entertainment market in the world by
such an astounding margin in terms of.

Speaker 5 (02:31:53):
Just dollar value.

Speaker 2 (02:31:54):
Right, something like three billion people play video games. It's
mostly mobile game which makes the story I'm about to
tell very weird because the actual people who play these
games again, it's it's a lot of mobile games, and
it's also mostly people who are women and non white.
And yet, however, Comma, when people think about like the

(02:32:14):
gamer TM, you are not thinking about.

Speaker 5 (02:32:18):
That, yeah, like as a political class.

Speaker 2 (02:32:21):
Yeah yeah, you know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah,
you're thinking of a bunch of weird in cell right
wing dipshits who are white and suckass. And this is
in large part because gamer Gate was sort of the first,
like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as
a political identity. And obviously this is you know, this

(02:32:42):
is a fascist movement.

Speaker 10 (02:32:44):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:32:44):
Part of the reason this works, and we're gonna be
getting more into why this sort of works later, but
part of the reason this works is that this is
an extremely large group of people because it's new, no
one has sort of defined it as a political identity before,
and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure
about their ident He is a gamer because this is
a relatively new medium, which is why everyone fucking either

(02:33:04):
wants their games to be like treated like movies or
some shit, or they want it to be sports because
those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money,
and then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously.

Speaker 6 (02:33:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:33:18):
Yeah, And so the effect of this is that the
cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to
these people. And this is true actually really both on
the left as much as it is on their right.
There are a lot of like sort of political figures.
I don't know, you're sort of like online people who
come out of gaming, like like h Bomber guy, I

(02:33:39):
guess an example, like Hassan. To some extent, there's just
like a lot of people who are like gamers and
then by sort of like become political. But on the
other hand, gaming has always been like a not always
but has traditionally been an extremely right wing space. Oh god, Garrison,
I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit
this is. Have I told you the story about Kabob

(02:34:01):
the German No, oh boy? Okay, So back in the
dawn of Time, I played a lot of Hearthstone as
a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like good.

Speaker 5 (02:34:09):
Is that like a resource management type game for like
gay autistic people.

Speaker 2 (02:34:13):
No, this is this is the World of Warcraft card game.

Speaker 5 (02:34:16):
Okay, that's that's even more embarrassing. Yeah, really bad, really bad.

Speaker 2 (02:34:21):
I think I think I peaked at like two K
Legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top
like half a percent of players in the world's digital
collectible card video game. Come on, oh yeah, yeah, but
two k legend DNA is like fucking shitter ranks.

Speaker 5 (02:34:38):
It's bad.

Speaker 2 (02:34:39):
I was never like good, good at it. I was
just like, okay, kind of but you know, this is
like a thing that I did growing up, and something
I remember is like all of the fucking Heartstone streamers
and these are like really big streamers would play music
from this guy they called Kobob the German and it
turns out that his actual name was removed Kobob because

(02:34:59):
he was a fucking German neo Nazi.

Speaker 5 (02:35:02):
Well many such cases, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:35:05):
For people who like are not aware of of like
mid twenty tens German fascism. Remove Kabob is like a
slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of.

Speaker 5 (02:35:14):
Turkish people in Germany.

Speaker 2 (02:35:16):
So great stuff, great stuff, this is just was just
sort of like the water you were swimming in if
you were a gamer in like the twenty tens. Now,
this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed
kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these
tech CEOs like who want to be thought of as gamers.

(02:35:38):
And so the two examples we're gonna look at are
Sam bank and Freed's and this is this is really
technically on both sides of the political spectrum. Right, We're
gonna look at Sam Banker Freed, and we're gonna look
at Elon musk are new Overlord.

Speaker 5 (02:35:50):
I guess.

Speaker 2 (02:35:52):
So we're gonna start with Sam Bankon Freed, and you know,
as we go through what's happening here, we're gonna sort
of unravel why it's so important to them to be
seen as gamers. And I guess it is important to
note like Sam Bankman Fried like is I guess like
he is a gamer in the sense that like he's
like addicted to video games effectively and just plays them
fucking literally constantly.

Speaker 5 (02:36:12):
Yeah, he looks the part too. No offense.

Speaker 2 (02:36:15):
Yeah, yeah, before before he was put in prison for
twenty five years for fraud.

Speaker 5 (02:36:18):
Well, probably not anymore. He's probably gonna get part of God.
Maybe we'll see, we'll see. I don't know. Crypto vote,
it's the most valuable voting block. Now all young Americans
are too poor to open bank accounts, so they put
all their money in crypto. So now they're gonna vote
for whoever makes line go up.

Speaker 2 (02:36:35):
I'm gonna become the joker. So okay, then think about
Sam Megan Frieda. For people who have forgotten who SBF is.
He is the guy who was the founder of FTX,
which was like a crypto change that was actually effectively
a giant scam where he took everyone's money and betted
on the stock market and lost it. And you know,
Robert did a behind the bassardes on him. And one

(02:36:56):
of the things that happens constantly is he's just like
always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dogshit
game called Story Big Bralgy Meetings. He is a League
of Legends addict, which is like as as as any
gamer will know, a person who plays League of Legends
all the time, like one of the worst categories people
who's ever existed. And one of the things that that
SBF did as as a sort of pr thing right,

(02:37:18):
was let the author Michael Lewis of the Big shorts,
We're Gonna get the moneyball in a second, blindside other books.

Speaker 5 (02:37:29):
Reparatable financial advice books, is what I'm hearing.

Speaker 2 (02:37:33):
But you know, like a very very powerful, influential and
wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along
and and Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him.
But this is something that like ICBF was like, you know,
was like projecting right in order for this to be
the image of him was him as like the gamer.
And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis right,

(02:37:54):
because he just like doesn't understand someone who just has
ADHD and plays vide games all the time and doesn't
give a shit. So you play video games stream meetings
like no one has ever been like this. I have
no idea what you mean. I actually don't play video
games stream meetings because it is too obvious.

Speaker 5 (02:38:11):
But I play I play video games a once a week.
That's that's that's kind of my Oh.

Speaker 2 (02:38:16):
God, this is the one part about Sam bankmon Free
that's relatable to me. I play so many video games.
It is my like antidepression strategy basically, like when I
need to not think for a while, there's just MEO
playing actually pat the faxtyle too. One of the games
that we're gonna be fucking talking about today, something.

Speaker 5 (02:38:29):
That I play a lot of.

Speaker 2 (02:38:30):
I've done so much fucking gaming, Like God, I used
to play this game called Smite, which is like a
it's like a mob but like League of Legends but
like third person. And I played so much Smite that
they were pro showing my casual games. When when the
Zoomer Revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they
execute b I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know that's reasonable.
Like I can't argue with that.

Speaker 5 (02:38:49):
I'll inform the council. I can't our next folks council meeting,
I'll bring it to the table.

Speaker 2 (02:38:56):
But you know, so, so what what What what happens
with this sort of thing is that is that Michael
Lewis's image of SBF becomes as this gamer who's doing
these completely incomprehensible things. He's mind must be so unbelievably brilliant. Yeah, totally,
because he's just like playing fucking video games all the time.
And and this gets to one of the aspects of
why these people do this this sort of like pretending

(02:39:18):
to be a gamer thing and and like and like
SBF like is a gamer, right, but like why why
they make us part of their cultural image, which is
that a lot of the traditional media people, even though
gaming is an enormous industry, it's it's extremely profitable and
is enormously culturally powerful, it doesn't have the same kind
of critical culture around. It doesn't exist that you would

(02:39:39):
see or something like movies or.

Speaker 5 (02:39:41):
Like respectability in some way, except in like the reversed
Sam Bankman freedway, where like the schlubbiness is part of
what makes him like an extent your genius, right, like
like like that era of like Silicon Valley guy. Yeah,
that's like he's he's so different, right, Like he's he's
he's not like put together, and this like shows how
he's like a new and innovative thinker. So it's like

(02:40:03):
it's kind of like a double edged sword in like
that specific way.

Speaker 2 (02:40:07):
Yeah, well, this is all a feedback loop, right, because
like part of it not being respectable is that someone
like Michael Lewis, right, who was like as establishment of
a journalist as there's ever been these people don't play
video games. They're one of the figures people who just
like don't game. Are these like traditional mainstream sort of
access journalists, right, And so they run into this shit
and they have no fucking idea what the hell is

(02:40:27):
going on, And it's just really really easily just sort
of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer, like,
you know, you like, you show a gamer like a
League of Legends addict, and they will instantly be able
to just like read this person like a fucking book. Also,
by the way, gaming addiction like is like kind of
a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here, but also
like League of Legends makes you a worse person. It

(02:40:48):
simply does. You just get mad all the time. I've
known too many League Legisp players of my goddamn life.
Holy shit, terrible game.

Speaker 5 (02:40:55):
Yeah, but arcane though, right, All right, oh god.

Speaker 2 (02:41:00):
Okay, We're gonna take an ad break, and then when
I come back, I'm gonna explain part of why this worked,
which is the unique incompetence of Michael lewis Well.

Speaker 5 (02:41:07):
I look forward to that. I love hearing about unique incompetence.

Speaker 2 (02:41:20):
So we are back now, Okay, Obviously. Part of the
reason this works too is you know, as I've been
talking about, right, like these these really out of touch
sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an
enormous market.

Speaker 6 (02:41:31):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:41:33):
But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special
case because he is really truly an unbelievably glible dumbass.
And to get an understanding of this, I'm gonna go
into something that Lewis in theory understands a lot better,
which is sports.

Speaker 5 (02:41:47):
So Lewis has.

Speaker 2 (02:41:48):
Written two of the most famous books ever written about sports,
right He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're
gonna be talking about, which I'll get to in a second.
And he wrote The Blindside, which is another book that
they talk about on Behind the Bass Riaging listen to that,
But I want to go in on Moneybomb. Moneyball is
supposed to be this book about how this underdog athletics
team invented like baseball metrics, and they use sabermetrics to

(02:42:11):
like like build this roster out of nothing that like
went to the playoffs and did really well, and and
like I'm not going to get into the extent to
which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland
A's team, Like whatever. I'm not gonna argue about baseball statistics.
What I will argue about is that one of the
characters in this fucking book, right, who's one of the
sort of like underdog geniuses and like Michael Lewis loves

(02:42:32):
to find, right, is this guy named Paul Pedesta. He
is he is like one of the main figures in
this book. He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach. Basically,
what baseball team is this?

Speaker 11 (02:42:42):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (02:42:42):
This is the Oakland Athletics. Are now the last Vegas
Athletics or some shit. I don't know that they moved
to Vegas. I don't know what they're called the athletics now. No, no,
they are originally called the athletic I don't know what
they're called now. They've always been the well except what
just calls them the Oakland A's. They've been the A's forever.
But yeah, they've they've they've also been stolen. Las Vegas
has now stolen both the football team and the baseball
team of Oakland.

Speaker 5 (02:43:03):
Oh see, I was thinking of the football team. Yeah,
because I was like, wait a minute, didn't didn't Las
Vegas Thetors go there too.

Speaker 2 (02:43:09):
Yes, yes, they stole both of them.

Speaker 5 (02:43:11):
That's what I was thinking. And I am more of
a baseball head than a football head.

Speaker 2 (02:43:16):
But yeah, so okay, unfortunately we're gonna be talking about
football here. So this guy, right, Paul Padesta's like one
of these sort of geniuses she later goes on to be.
It's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in
the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely
wretched the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns. Now to get
an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are. My

(02:43:38):
opening savment for him on the Browns is it is
genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns
over the course of two seasons, going one in thirty one,
which is a feat of like just absolutely sucking shit
that is unrivaled in any other major American sports. I
think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth, no
one is going to fucking go one in thirty one

(02:44:01):
in two clus two seasons of football. Again, so again,
that is a one in fifteen season followed by an
owen sixteen season. The second oh to sixteen season ever
unclear how responsible for this he is. But what he
is responsible for is the Shaun Watson trade. Okay, it's
like mea, why the fuck you're talking about this? Part
of this is also like these people are just evil.
Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get

(02:44:24):
an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists
mostly have accused him of sexual assault. He is like
one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which
is a league of a lot of people who absolutely
fucking suck shit. So so that that's the first thing
you have to understand about Watson's that he is just
really fucking like morally reprehensible, right. He is like a

(02:44:44):
bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended
him for a season. And Paul Podesta, who again is
the guy whom Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting,
is like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is
going to set up this deal for his team to
trade for DeShawn Watson, who've been on the Texans, and again,
like Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be

(02:45:04):
for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds, Nia.

Speaker 5 (02:45:10):
Do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans.

Speaker 2 (02:45:13):
It is a team from Houston, Texas.

Speaker 5 (02:45:16):
That's all you need to know about this. And they
traded this guy. Hey, at least it's not Austin. No
offense to our Austin listeners.

Speaker 2 (02:45:23):
They fucking traded this guy, right, and popadest to orchestrates
this trade that is three is it is the worst
trade in the history of football.

Speaker 5 (02:45:31):
It is three first.

Speaker 2 (02:45:32):
Round picks, two thirds, two third round picks, and a
fourth round pick. And they hand this guy, who, again
I kind of emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right,
they hand him two hundred and thirty million guaranteed dollars,
the largest guaranteed salary the history of the NFL. So okay, So,
how does Deshaun Watson, like again, this guy who's being
held up by the guy who is now laundering being

(02:45:54):
a gamer as like the great symbol of sort of
like cultural like being a rogue outsider.

Speaker 5 (02:45:58):
Right, how does.

Speaker 2 (02:45:59):
Deshaun Watson his greatest fucking project due on the field.
So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately.
It is second season, in weeks one through five out
of out of seven hundred and fifty nine quarterbacks. Since
the year two thousand, to start weeks one through five
out of again seven hundred and fifty nine quarterbacks, he

(02:46:20):
ranks seven hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred
and fifty nine EPA for dropback seven hundred and fifty
three out of seven hundred and fifty nine. They traded
three first round picks for this guy. He has a
mind boggling an EPA of negative point three, which means
every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make
a pass, they are expected to get point three less

(02:46:43):
points than an average team would.

Speaker 5 (02:46:45):
How did you trick me into being on a sports episode?
I only agreed to this because I thought it was
video game. Don't worry.

Speaker 2 (02:46:53):
We're we're we're we're almost We're almost done with the
sports part of it. But there, I promise there is
actually a reason why I'm doing this, which is which
is the argument that's that that sports and the sports
and gaming actually serve very very similar cultural roles for
the right.

Speaker 5 (02:47:06):
Yeah, of course, yes, I understand that. I can I
can see that.

Speaker 2 (02:47:10):
Yes, also, I've always wanted to fuck you can played
about this on area, and this is this is the
best fucky chance I've ever gonna get.

Speaker 5 (02:47:15):
So Jesus fucking because it's like what I talk about
like movies or something. Is this, yes, yes, this is
what it feels like. Is this what I sound like?
Yes it is.

Speaker 2 (02:47:24):
It is absolutely what you sound like. So this guy
is like a generationally awful quarterback. They sign away basically
the entire future of this team hand this guy who
is a serial sexual predator two hundred and thirty million dollars.
And this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects
you to think is like a fucking analytics genius. And
this all comes back to again, like you know, the
sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is

(02:47:46):
that they're like picked on, like by the jock or whatever. Right,
That's that's like that's like the fundamental base of their
mythology that there's are like oppressed by this.

Speaker 5 (02:47:53):
But like it's just like.

Speaker 2 (02:47:54):
The same masculinity bullshit all the way down, And you
can watch, like, just like the worst people in fucking history,
this trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that
they're fucking geniuses by using both of these fucking affects.
So I want to read something, you know in looking
at the way that this stuff functions, the way that

(02:48:15):
gaming functions, like specifically in the culture, and you know
why these people choose to use gaming as like you
knows as the sort of affect they're trying to project
into the world. I want to read something by a
friend of the show, Vicky Osterwel and a piece called
game Boys. Video games also emerge at a time when
technology facilitates an increasingly administered life in which alienation and

(02:48:39):
isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice
is a form of control. An unbounded economic competition produces
widespread anxiety to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and
boredom that one was mastered to live under current economic conditions.
Games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable

(02:48:59):
of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non
normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play
that point towards the horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games
provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in
the social hierarchy. They give white men aggrandizing power inventions
fantasies that modulate their sense of self importance under conditions

(02:49:23):
that disempower them, but they are also capable of giving
everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist
patriarchal capitalism. This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers,
and fans have found space in and around games, despite
the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and
widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played

(02:49:44):
by CIS men. So, I think the important thing here,
and this is something important to remember both for Sambap
been freed and also for the construction of right wing
gaming movements in general, and for what we're going to
talk about with Elon Musk, is that gaming is content
tested ground right. As much as we think of gamers
as like right wingers right, there are a lot of

(02:50:06):
what you would call to like traditionally sort of left
looming demographics that play video games and have made spaces
here because as much as they are in some ways
like this force of discipline that like is something that
you learn, the kinds of like, ability to tolerate boredom
and repetition and things like that that you know you
use for fucking work, they're also a thing that people

(02:50:27):
use to like escape the fucking hell world totally. And like,
I mean I know this, right, Like I am fucking
like I'm a Chinese, chances remen better, he's better at
video games, and both the people have been to be
fucking talking about in the story, right.

Speaker 5 (02:50:40):
Like, well, I heard, I heard his Path of Exile
character was actually quite advanced.

Speaker 2 (02:50:44):
But oh, we're gonna we're gonna talk about the Path
of Exile character fucking next, you know. But but I mean
it's it's worth mentioning like speed running, right, which is
a very very trans genre.

Speaker 5 (02:50:53):
Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games. Uh yeah, it depends.

Speaker 2 (02:50:57):
It depends a lot on the genre. But yeah, like
competitive fighting game like yeah, Melee, I'm gonna briefly mention
Sonic Fox, who is a black, non binary furry who's
like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time,
incredibly beloved, the only person in history ever to beat
someone thirteen to zero in a first to eleven absolute legends, right,
But you know, these are the people that these sort

(02:51:18):
of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out
so they can use gaming as like as a sort
of cultural force. And this functions both in gaming and
also fuck it in real life. Right now, these people
are in power, and you know who else is in power.
It's a product and services to support this podcast.

Speaker 11 (02:51:34):
All Hail, we are back now.

Speaker 2 (02:51:47):
Obviously, the other part of this, you know, we've talked
of it. We've talked mostly sort of about racial politics,
but there's there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming.
And you know the thing about gaming, right is that
it is to some extent a tool that people use
to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the
violence of the gender system. And like I am also
doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy

(02:52:10):
nazi like gamer dipshit.

Speaker 5 (02:52:12):
Right, Yeah, that's why I hooed up f F seven
remake Hysteric Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm
feeling sad.

Speaker 2 (02:52:20):
But you know what the problem with what's happening here
right is that like the right, like that we're experiencing
violence and different ways, but it's like the systemic violence
from the gender system that it is the same system.
But these people's solution to is to blame it on women, right,
and this is you know, I had a conversation with
Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is
sort of drawn from and like I would compare it

(02:52:41):
to like, you know, lots and lots of people deal
with social isolation, right and and deal with this violence,
but like you know, on the other hands, most of
us don't become mass shooters.

Speaker 5 (02:52:50):
Most most Yeah, I would say, that's that's true.

Speaker 2 (02:52:53):
Yeah, right, and so and so we can look at
the structural forces that produces people and also just go
like fuck them, like eat shit, like I'm sorry, you've
you've become Nazis, like fuck off.

Speaker 5 (02:53:02):
Skill issue in some ways among other environmental factors.

Speaker 2 (02:53:06):
But yeah, yeah, but but also a lot of times
these people aren't fucking like they're not dealing with shit
at all, mostly, right, I mean, like yeah, like okay,
like Elon Musks weird insecurity is to some extent because
of the gender system, right, but like also he is
the richest man in the world, He's the most powerful
man live, He's one of the most powerful people who.

Speaker 11 (02:53:22):
Has ever lived.

Speaker 2 (02:53:24):
And he still has the same sense of like aggrievement
that powers all these people. And this is like one
of the key things of like the gamer mythos, right,
is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed
by like jocks or whatever.

Speaker 5 (02:53:37):
And now it's it's been shifted to this not anymore.

Speaker 2 (02:53:39):
Yeah, now now they believe that they're that they're being
oppressed by like fucking women in minorities, right.

Speaker 5 (02:53:45):
And and it's actually the people who are actually doing the
oppression is now all of the doge nerds at the
top of the system. Now it's it's been we have
we've had we've had a we've had a full Uno reverso.

Speaker 2 (02:53:56):
But the thing is, these people have always been at
the top of the fucking system, right and like, but
but it's an it's this feeling they have of their
of them being the ones who are oppressed, that like
you know, made them into the shock troopers that we
saw with Gamergate. If you're gonna read one vikiosc wral thing,
and I'm signing her a lot because I think she's
done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games,
which is a field that I feel like we just
haven't done much critical shit with. Like, I mean, there's

(02:54:18):
been lots of stuff about working conditions in the games, industry,
which are fucking terrible and it's good, but like as
a medium, there hasn't been anywhere near as much critical
engagement with it as there's been with like film or music.
But if you're gonna read one thing from her, read
a piece called goon Squad, which is about the sort
of like fascist reaction to the really broken state of
Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven when it came out. And one

(02:54:41):
of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers
are being i mean literally being used as like scabs
and pinkertons against people who make video games, and you know,
and this expands out to like workers more broadly, they're
literally being used to silence anyone who st talks about
the problems with like this game that like when Cyberpint
twenty seventy seven came out, it was literally giving people
seizures because it was it had just like fucking strobing
flashes and bullshit in ante they didn't warn anyone about because it.

Speaker 5 (02:55:03):
Was a broken, shitty game.

Speaker 2 (02:55:05):
And you know, they're also used for just like anti
queer and like anti feminist rasping campaigns, and that's that's
how they're sort of mobilized in real life too, And
and that gives you an insight into why these people
sort of like do this signaling, right, is that they're
also like signaling to their base that like I am
one of you, et cetera, et cetera, like you should
fucking support me for this shit now. Pivoting a little bit,

(02:55:27):
so when I was first talking about this episode, I
kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman as at of Sam
Bankman freed, because like.

Speaker 5 (02:55:32):
Man, they said, yeah, many such cases.

Speaker 2 (02:55:34):
Yeah, like the last, the last fucking white boy scammer
named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white
boy scammer named Sam. And it turns out though I
looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing
this like gamers stick thing, like specifically in interviews with
Elon Musk.

Speaker 5 (02:55:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:55:52):
Yeah, it's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now. And
this brings us to the man who has spent the
most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which
is Elon Musk.

Speaker 5 (02:56:03):
And Elon Musk is like not really a gamer, I
would say, like he sort of plays video games. He's
a Kenemine user, he's a Twitter power user. He is
the shadow President.

Speaker 2 (02:56:17):
Yeah, theis man of the world, bridges man who's ever lived.

Speaker 5 (02:56:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:56:20):
Also, he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he
is like in a he's an elite video game player
in like multiple games. He's obsessed with this.

Speaker 5 (02:56:28):
He's also I believe the term is a meme. Lord
h if I'm reading this right.

Speaker 2 (02:56:32):
Oh god, what one of his path of xtyle two
characters I didn't put in this script because it's actually
not the one we're going to talk about, but one
of his characters in that game was named Kekius Maximus.

Speaker 5 (02:56:41):
So like, this is the level of mind that uh,
that is one of his favorite names. In his White
House office, he has a he has a Kechius Maximus
portrait hanging behind his desk. There's an AI generated image
of like pet bite the Frog and like and like Roman,
like like Caesar.

Speaker 2 (02:56:57):
At higher I hate everything.

Speaker 5 (02:56:59):
So yeah, this is the guy who does the country now.

Speaker 11 (02:57:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:57:02):
Oops.

Speaker 2 (02:57:03):
So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at
video games, and the preface to everything we're going to
get to you is that he has actually he's like
for a long time been doing a like I'm a
gamer thing. So his kind of problems, and I think
really the origin of the weird paying people to make
him look like he's good at video games thing that
we're gonna get you in a second. This is something

(02:57:23):
that that Blue Sky user gay Dog reminded me of
because I'd forgot he has so many gaming scandals I'd
forgotten about this one, which is that he at one
point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring,
which is very difficult game, and he had two different
shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's like over encumbered,

(02:57:44):
Like it's okay, like the best expianation I've tried to
I figured out for Like how bad at this game
he is? Is that posting this build on Twitter is
the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at
my fucking sports car. It's stepping into like the shittiest
call you've ever seen, and then like slamming the accelerator
with the parking break on.

Speaker 5 (02:58:03):
Hey, I love the masdamiata Like that's that's like the
game of Criminals.

Speaker 2 (02:58:08):
And everyone who looked at it immediately was like, this
is the dumbest man who has ever lived. This man
has no idea what the fuck he's doing. He is
just like like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about
this game, like just baffling incomprehensible bullshit. And this was
like kind of a scandal for him. It wasn't like
a huge one, but like especially like this is one

(02:58:29):
that sort of broke on to the left a lot,
and people were giving him shit about it. So the
next time he wanted to brag about having been good
at video games, he very clearly like paid someone else
to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Diabo four.
I'm not gonna talk about Diebow stuff much because I'm
a Path of Exile player, not diable player, the diable
and Path vax Ale like Fairy much the same kind
of game basically, like you click somewhere and your character

(02:58:52):
goes there and you click other things that it does attacks.
But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one
of like the best Path of Exile two players in
the world, and he was doing this on his alt account,
which is has to handle. It's Cybergamer for twenty but
the all the e's are threes, So with CYB three

(02:59:15):
r G A M three R four twenty Wait wait.

Speaker 5 (02:59:18):
Wait, wait, say say that again.

Speaker 2 (02:59:21):
It's at CYB three r GA M three R four twenty.

Speaker 5 (02:59:28):
So I think I found something. I think the four
to twenty at the end is actually a reference to
Hitler's birthday April twenty damn it.

Speaker 2 (02:59:43):
So okay, he like claims to have one of the
like the best characters in hardcore, which is in mode
of Path of Exile, where if he died once you
get kicked out of it. So it's very hard to
like prove that he actually did this. He like does
a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile,
like on a Twitter live stream, and it is immediately

(03:00:04):
obvious that, like he has no idea what he's doing.
Like it's not just obviously people who play the game.
I hadn't played Path of xel To at this point, right,
I had only played the original one like a decade ago,
like a little bit of it, And I took one
look at what he was doing and immediately was like,
this guy has never played this game before, like has
no idea what he's fucking doing. Like it was so
unbelievably obvious, Like he like walked past one of those

(03:00:24):
valuable currencies in the game, just like walked past it.
Didn't notice it. It's like staggeringly obvious anyone who plays
video games. This guy has no idea what the fuck
he's doing. And this actually explodes on him, and eventually
he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level
his Path of exel to account and then he claims
that he never claims.

Speaker 5 (03:00:42):
That it was his path of xl too account.

Speaker 2 (03:00:44):
And this Jenny Weinley has been a real problem for
him because it pissed off like the entire gaming scene.
So you have videos with like millions of views. Some
guys like Asthmagold, who was like a he's a very
famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass like is
like a turbo right winger, like spends his time screaming

(03:01:07):
about how like black people in video games is dei
and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry
and fucking asthma Goold is watching this video and being
like this guy is a lying piece of shit, what
the fuck? And like everyone fucking reacts like this. It's
genuinely wild. I've never actually seen people like react to this,

(03:01:29):
to like to elon like this and like like again,
like this is his allies on the right taking one
look at this and being like, wait, this guy's just
like lying.

Speaker 5 (03:01:39):
Now.

Speaker 2 (03:01:39):
What's interesting about about this to some extent is that, like, again,
his whole thing here is he's trying to like pretend
that he's like a pro gamer or whatever, but his
affect is still largely targeted towards non gamers in the
sense that like, there's no way, I mean, okay, I
guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant
that he believed that he could just pretend to be
a top of Little Pets of Path of Exile on

(03:02:00):
a stream using someone else's account, but like, there's no
way anyone who plays video games could fall for that,
And a lot of people he talks to you about
the stuff, for people like Joe Rogan who aren't like
gamer TM people, right, it's like a lot of it's
a lot of people who aren't gamers, and he's like
sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's
really on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to
his sort of fascist bass, but on the other hand,

(03:02:21):
he's trying to use the sort of like cultural cachet
of of gaming as like this sort of renegade right
wing phenomena to like launder his reputation. Except he fucked
up because he, you know, spent all of this time
trying to like pretend to be a gamer. But the
thing about gamers is that, like there is literally an
entire genre of video like on YouTube that is very

(03:02:43):
very popular. That is just like people exposing people who
cheated video games, cheated record to video games. And Elon
has walked just like directly into this bear trap, right.

Speaker 5 (03:02:53):
And that means we got him, folks, mission accomplished. Wrap
it up, We beat Elon, got him. It's over. He's
he's been cast out of civil society for the high
crime of pretending to play a video game. He has
lost all respect among among the farthest reaches of the right.

(03:03:14):
So what's next? We have what he has? He has
one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.
Is this about the one video game he hasn't played?
Which is the funniest Elon Musk gamer story in my opinion?
Which which are you which? What are you talking about?
That's the one that that that he he had to
publicly announce that he he does not play GTA five. Oh,

(03:03:35):
that was funny. I forgot about that because he doesn't
like quote unquote doing crime and g t A five
quote required shooting police officers in the opening scene just
couldn't do it unquote. Oh, I really forgot about that.
So that that proofs that at least he has some integrity. God. Now,
some some gamers might be sick individuals acting out you know,

(03:03:58):
violence power fans, but at least Musk has some integrity
to not harm police officers in GDA five. That really
shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this,
you know, at times strange behavior.

Speaker 2 (03:04:15):
Yeah, that's also like that's also him signaling to like
a different like the weird Christian part of the bass.
That's like, oh, violence and video games is bad, which
because he's trying to single to all of his groups simultaneously,
and all of them are like, this guy is a
fucking loser who sucks ass and we hate him.

Speaker 5 (03:04:33):
It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy
because again he is the most powerful man in the world. No,
but it is mildly amusing.

Speaker 2 (03:04:41):
Yeah, But so that there is a sort of serious
note to this, which is that like the pushback he
is getting here is like I think actually kind of
is significant. So the last thing I want to talk
about it is is him pretending to have been like
a quake pro which the thing that he did, and
there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber
Carl Jops was like his thing is like people who

(03:05:01):
fake who like fake things in video games basically, and
he is like not a leftist. He's like like a
center right guy basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly
how far right he is. But he did a video
about about Elon claiming to be a quack player and
what he found so is Elon like apparently did actually
play in an early quake tournament, but none of the
good players were there, and he he came his team

(03:05:23):
came in second, but they came in second because they
had better WiFi than everyone else and so they had
less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into
a team that also had good WiFi and then he
got destroyed, which I just I just think it's funny, right,
That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he
he he has this thing claiming that he's like a
fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more
money than everyone else until he ran some much who

(03:05:44):
had the same amount of money that he did and
just got destroyed. But the reason I bring this up
is that like at the end of this video, jobstays
like goes on this whole thing about how and this
is this is like a stronger statement against Elon mustin
I have seen from anything in the mainstream press where
he literally goes on a thing where he says, yeah,
every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here
is a lie, and because he is just obviously lying

(03:06:08):
out of his ass, but literally everything in a field
that I know, this means that I literally can't trust
him when he says anything about any other fucking field
that I don't know. And this is a real shift, right.
I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon
Musk is just clearly a liar about this, and so
you should not be able to trust anything else he
fucking says. This is a larger degree of pushback than

(03:06:29):
anything else ever fucking seen outside of like the left about.

Speaker 5 (03:06:33):
What Elon Musk is doing.

Speaker 2 (03:06:34):
And like just the willingness to just be like this
guy is a fucking just just a serial liar, like
everything says is a lie. He literally calls him a
con like, says that his activity is like a con man.
He says the things that he's saying are like either
liars or delusional. There is a kind of like shift
happening right now where people like really are turning on him.
There's day that happened literally today where Ubisoft. You know,
ubi Soft is a famously like not a leftist company,

(03:06:58):
right like thea've done a lot of horrible, fucked up
sexual assault stuff. So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one
of their games has a black guy as like a
character in it, and literally the official Assassin's Create accounts
replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what
the guy playing your Path of Axile two account told you?
And like replied and replied to a thing about Hassan

(03:07:21):
like we we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space,
right This thing that had been like a really really
consistent base of support with people like Elon is kind
of fracturing against him and is sort of being polarized
against him by just like the fact that he's just
is so obviously cynically pandering to them, and how unbelievably
transparent it is. And like obviously, like I don't think

(03:07:44):
like the gamers are going to like fucking rise up
or whatever. But the actual serious point to all of this,
other than like looking at the ways of fascism, like
why these people do this and like gamers is like
a demographic that's important to these people, is that, like
the way that you destroy a coalition by this isn't
necessarily bypping everyone over to your side, right, that.

Speaker 5 (03:08:03):
Doesn't happen that often.

Speaker 2 (03:08:05):
But one of the ways you can do this, and
this is this is, you know, to take a really
really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the
October Revolution. They got their opponents to allies to stay
home and that was enough enough. People just staying on
the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks like came for Currency's
government was enough for them to take power. And I

(03:08:26):
think like the actual, like the actual serious points of
this is that the only way that we get out
of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these
people's coalitions so that when the confrontation with these people comes,
there are enough people who would be their supporters who
just fucking stay home that they can, they can be stopped.

Speaker 5 (03:08:44):
So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the
start of gamer Gate two.

Speaker 2 (03:08:50):
Gamer Gate two is already happening, damn it.

Speaker 5 (03:08:52):
This is gamer Gate three. This is an open call
to begin gamer Gate two point five right now on.
Behalf of me along, becaure you at me a oh no,
and then hopefully and I'll finally usher in the American
Bolshevik revolution after we get enough gamers just to stay

(03:09:15):
home or even better rise up right. We can we
can make some kind of graphic with like a fist
holding a controller or a keyboard. If you're a nerd
about it.

Speaker 2 (03:09:25):
Gamers are the cosacks. We've got to get them to
knock back the regime. That's actually the Fembry revolution where
they stood down.

Speaker 5 (03:09:31):
But you know, same point, same point. Come on me
a geez fuck, I am one of.

Speaker 2 (03:09:36):
The biggest things of Like people need to remember that
that Lenin did not overthrow the czar. He overthrew Kerensky,
who was kind of a socialist guy who was run
the provisional government in between the first Okay, we're done,
we're done here, We're done here, we're sucking out, we're leaving.

Speaker 5 (03:09:49):
What games are you playing? What games are I playing?
Pathovaxyle too.

Speaker 2 (03:09:53):
Don't play Rotato it will consume your life. Okay, play
rebo Quest. Robo Quest is great. Rob Request dares to
ask the question, what if like the art style of
Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice. But
also you're doing a roguelike with like Doom's combat.

Speaker 5 (03:10:10):
That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that.
Then I do Hell Divers too. Nearly every Monday. Armored
Corps six Course six rules. Love that game. Love that game.
Sonic X Shadow Generations, Final Fantasy, Sevin, and I'm waiting
for Mecca Break to come out for like their their
official release now that the beta's closed. Unfortunately, the character

(03:10:33):
selection is very gooner coded.

Speaker 2 (03:10:34):
Many many such cases, so I made.

Speaker 5 (03:10:36):
Sure to make the smallest the smallest chest size available
on my on my model. But the gameplay is fun.
This has been it could happen here.

Speaker 2 (03:10:48):
I good lord, they pay me for this.

Speaker 5 (03:10:53):
I had to. I had to watch so.

Speaker 2 (03:10:54):
Many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking clips of of
of Elon. Must thank playing video games for this.

Speaker 1 (03:11:03):
Oh hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes. Every
week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 2 (03:11:12):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (03:11:15):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 5 (03:11:23):
You listen to podcasts.

Speaker 1 (03:11:25):
You can now find sources for it could Happen Here
listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 5 (03:11:29):
Thanks for listening.

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