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June 10, 2025 37 mins
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All the media, welcome to it could happen here, a
podcast about it happening here, which, if you are paying
attention to the news today is Los Angeles, not just LA,
but largely LA right now, which over the course of
the last couple of days while we were off for
the weekend, has broken out into a series of protests

(00:27):
and cop riots that are kind of consuming national news.
The federal government has activated the California National Guard and
asserted federal control over them. Governor Newsom is kind of
pushing back against that, although not in a way that
I am convinced or I've seen any evidence of matters
at this point. The United States Marines, a group of

(00:50):
I think about five hundred from Camp Pendleton, which is
down near San Diego, have been activated as well, which
is a probable violation of Passe coma tadas, So that
was kind of unclear to me the extent which they're
in the theater at this point. Largely, all of these
actions have been ineffective in making the protests go away
at this point. What sparked them was a series of

(01:12):
ice raids that took about two thousand people into custody
and brought a bunch of Los Angelinos out in Paramount,
California who were met by the police, the LAPD providing
crowd control to Homeland Security HSI agents. Yeah, and that's
the gist of what went down. Things have just kind
of escalated from there. Yesterday, probably four to six thousand

(01:35):
people in the street as opposed to five hundred or
so the day before. So things have continued to escalate
and the LAPD and their police have had no real
luck in containing the demonstrations. We'll see how long that
situation lasts. But yeah, that's where we are right at
this second. More or less, things are continuing to evolve today,

(01:56):
will have evolved since yep.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Yeah, a way, we're recording this on Monday. This will
probably coming out like Monday night, Tuesday morning, so who
fucking knows what will have happened by then. This is
like about one pm Pacific time when we're recording this.
I want to start also by going back to that
National Guard deployment, because the federalized National Guard deployment is
hideously illegal. Oh yeah, like unbelievably illegal. I cannot emphasize enough.

(02:23):
This is like constitution shatteringly illegal. Yeah, and the way
this is being reported in the media is fucking hideous.
They are just straight up lying about it. So okay,
So Trump has not declared the Insturruction Act yet, right.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
No, they activated a directive that Trump signed cited ten
USC one two four six, which is a specific provision
within Title ten if the US Code on Armed Services,
that provision allows, or part of that provision allows for
the federal government to deploy National Guard forces quote, if

(02:56):
there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against
the authority of the Guard of the United States.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
So basically, the.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Claim being made by the administration here was that the
federalization of the California Guard was justified by the fact
that the people of Los Angeles, which at the point
this was done was somewhere less than a thousand.

Speaker 4 (03:13):
Of them five hundred people, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
And were an open rebellion because they had yelled at
a bunch of vice officers for a while. That was
the situation.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Well, and also it's worth noting too, even if there
was a rebellion, which there isn't, he also can't use
that section because it's in coordination with the governor. You
could only do what if the governor is working with
you and the governor, like Newsom is being a real
piece of shit about this.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
For again, like the president, the LAPD has been yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
But it's like he's been sitting the LPD up, but
he hasn't given permission for the federal government to use
the California National Guard. They're just doing it, right, This
is like they've just stolen a state national Guard. And
newsroom's response has been because he fucking hates protesters, so
has been.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
Like, oh, this is bad.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Am, I gonna like do anything about the fact that,
like again, every single law about how the National Guard
is supposed to be used, it's just been torn the
fuck up. Yeah, no, like fucking MPR and like a
bunch of the mation media reporting about this has just
been saying that, oh, well, he used this provision and
it's like, no, he didn't. Like he did not He
explicitly every single part of the thing that lets you

(04:25):
use this provision, none of the conditions have been fulfilled,
which means he's not using it.

Speaker 4 (04:29):
He's just saying shit and doing it.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
Yeah, that's exactly right.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
And the activation of the US Marines is based on
like heg Seth posted a tweet being like I've got
marines ready in Camp Pendleton, which like there's absolutely no
constitutional justification for no, especially since the National Guard had
just been put in for deploying active duty US marines
into this situation. Absolutely not, it's all super like. For

(04:54):
one thing, the situation that they're in right now in
terms of like what we've seen from the National Guard
yesterday was like they're not very effective at this, right.
They fairly quickly after being deployed started using, you know,
firing impact munitions at the crowd, attacking the crowd in
the same way that the LPD had done. Nothing That
was like, I would say, an escalation beyond how the

(05:15):
fucking cops were active.

Speaker 3 (05:18):
Right.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
But National Guard is bad at handling these kinds of things, right,
Their force organization is not meant to be able to
be split up into small enough units the way the
cops are in enough areas, Like they're just not mint
for this sort of thing. It's not how they're meant
to be deployed to counteract protests, So you wind up
just kind of keeping them in this big blob of

(05:40):
guys who you don't have good Like they're sleeping on
floors in government buildings, right, now because the quartering Act exists,
which is amazing, and because there's not much in the
way of organization behind deploying them, and they don't know
they're not there. I mean, neither are the police generally
well trained with their impact munitions, but these guys certainly aren't.
And they freak out at the drop of a hat,

(06:02):
like they're like worse at it than the LAPD, and
the LAPD is.

Speaker 3 (06:06):
You know, not good at it, They're just good at
hurting people.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
So you've just kind of got this large, brittle group
of guys who you can plunk down in an area
while protesters continue to gather in groups all around the city.
And the more stories of shit like a blob of
National guardsmen fucking up protesters you get, the more people
are coming out and the less controllable the situation becomes.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
And it seems like we're seeing the very beginning stages
of people actually learning tactical lessons from twenty twenty and
twenty twenty four with the pala Sign encampments. Yeah, which
is like, yeah, like, if you concentrate all of your
people in one spot, police departments are very very good
at massing the whole bunch of people and rolling you over.
I mean, we've known this since twenty twenty. If you
are at a whole bunch of different spots at the

(06:50):
same time, they're terrible at responding to that. And that's
kind of what's been happening. Yeah, there's been a bunch
of protests popping up in different places. It's been very
effective at sort of like preventing that kind of like
one giant Sweet mobilizations that were like destroying the student encampments.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
Yeah, and I'm looking at based on reporting from CBS News,
about seven hundred US Marines have been activated from the
twenty nine Palms base near San Diego, which is, per
Jim Laporta, who's a defense reporter, widely considered to be
one of the worst bases to be stationed at in
the entire military, are being deployed to Los Angeles right now.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
So that's just great.

Speaker 4 (07:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Someone asked Trump what would it take for him to
use to authorize the deployment of the US military on
American soil, and he said, that's just that's up to me,
which is.

Speaker 4 (07:39):
Not how any of this works.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah, like that's just pure military dictatorship stuff. If Trump
is just able to like use the military just do
whatever the fuck he wants. That is just that is
the constitution gone. That is the pretense of democracy gone.
It is real bad. Now it hasn't happened yet, but
there has been a bunch of extremely alarming.

Speaker 4 (07:59):
Other shit that's happened.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
So the cops arrested the president of California SEIU, which
is the Service Workers Union in California, a very very
large union, not a super billetant one.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
No, And David Huerta isn't who you'd call like a
particularly militant leftist.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
No, he's just like he's just like a kind of
like a Democratic Party labor guy. And they just like
arrested him outside of outside of one of the initial
protests where he was injured him quite badly too. Yeah, yeah,
like beat the shit out of him. And then he's
still being held in in a federal detention building. They're
they're they're charging him with with federal felony conspiracy to

(08:37):
impede an officer. And again, this is this is the
this is the head of like one of the largest
unions of California.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
No, and they're they're justifying it in part based on
the charging documents because they saw him texting on his
phone outside and assumed he was texting to like a
protester to give them.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
More Yes, right, Like it's like fucking courtoon clown shit.
But like the actual effect of this again is that
they have like one of they they have like the
president of one of the largest unions in the state,
like yes, in a federal detention building. So, I mean
there's obviously been like unions are pissed about it. There
hasn't been any kind of large scom mobilization from them yet.
But if there was one possible thing you could do

(09:13):
to actually get Seiu outfit's ass and like show up
to shit, it's this. We don't know exactly what's going
to happen. The reporting that I've seen so far has
suggested that there is actually a kind of heartening degree
of cross union support for like, holy shit, the Feds
like just grabbing the president of a union is in
fact bad. We're gonna have to see exactly how that

(09:35):
plays out. But like he's still fucking in there. Maxine
Walters like tried to enter the facility to check on him.
This has happened with a bunch of different Congress people
who tried to enter this one in LA and a
couple of other tension facilities. They are all being denied,
which is unhinged.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
Yeah, especially since they have oversight over facilities like this.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
Other news from today that's just come out in the
last less than a day, the government has deployed m
Q nine reapers. I think at least two of them
over Los Angeles. These are the drones that are that
we were using overseas to shoot hell fire missiles of people.

Speaker 3 (10:10):
That's not what they're being used for here. They're being
used for surveillance.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
The last time this was done was in Minneapolis in
twenty twenty ye. Outside of their use for surveillance over
the border, but there's MQ nine's over an American city
surveilling protesters. Speaking of that, there's also just been like
the threat of surveillance being used against protesters.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
Kind of.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
The most chilling example from yesterday was an LAPD helicopter
flying low over a crowd, shining a spotlight on them
and saying like I've seen, we can see all of you.
We're going to come. I'm going to come to your
houses later, like you're all on camera and I'm cut,
Like specifically, I'm going to cut. We're coming to your
houses later.

Speaker 4 (10:49):
Yeah it's police state shit.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
Like, yeah, it's police state shit. Now do I believe
that they actually have the ability to know? They don't actually,
but yeah.

Speaker 4 (10:58):
That's aid.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Like where if you're going to one of these protest,
wear a fucking mask, yes, like I don't know, like
both for COVID, but like also Jesus fucking Christ, Like
they're flying petat trouts over these protests, like wear masks.
Good lord, do you know what else wants you to
buy masks?

Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (11:19):
The products and services that support this podcast perhaps, and we're.

Speaker 4 (11:36):
Yees.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
So I also want to talk a bit about the
specific conditions that caused all of this stuff, because I
think the reporting on it has been really bad. So
there were two thousand arrests from ICE on Tuesday. They
rested two thousand people on Wednesday. I think these are
like national numbers, the numbers like very specifically in LAS
are at least several hundred people have been being held

(11:58):
in just horrory find conditions. You know, some of them
are being held in federal attention centers, but they're also
just being held in like the basements of these fucking
buildings because there's not enough room to hold this many people,
you know, I mean, even the conditions and the regular
attention center are terrible.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
But like the.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Immigration lawyers who people were able to reach and talk to,
are talking about hundreds of people in rooms designed for thirty.
There's no cots, They're sleeping on the ground. Sickness is spreading,
there's not enough food or water. Conditions are fucking horrifying.
A lot of the people who are in there, you know,
the ones that we've been able to get any kind
of contact with from their lawyers. A lot of these

(12:33):
people cannot be deported because there are people who have
been granted stay of deportation by the US government, which
means they cannot be deported. But I said, just fucking
kidnapped them.

Speaker 4 (12:42):
Anyways.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
There's videos you can see from the protesters outside the buildings,
and there's something I remember from Occupy Ice in twenty
eighteen that's just fucking harrowing, is that, like, when you're
outside these buildings, sometimes you can hear the people inside shouting,
and it's fucking harrowing. And with these ones, there's a
bunch of videos if you can see that the people

(13:03):
inside the buildings are trying to like shine lights out
of windows so that people know that they're inside.

Speaker 4 (13:09):
It's fucking horrifying.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
And I think, just how bad this is, Like how
bad it was that like all of these fucking people
in their fucking tanks just rolled up and started kidnapping people.
Has just kind of been lost in all of this
discourse about the protest is like, no, this is what
was happening, Like this is straight up soldiers are just
taking people in the night, Like that's what this is,
you know, And this has been happening all over. There

(13:33):
was also a huge sort of protests have started at
this home depot where okay, so this is where this
is where we would get into the point where like
it's kind of difficult to see what's going on. Ice
claims that they were just staging a bunch of people
the private whole ind Security said to the BBC that
there was no raid on this home depot planned and
that they were just staging there. I don't believe that,

(13:56):
because these people lie for a living. It is their job.
They are police. It is their job as a cop
to lie to you. It is a constitutionally protected thing
that they have according to the Supreme Court, which is
absolutely ridiculous. But I am pretty sure they're lying about that.
But regardless, there's you know, like their approaches started up
and then like the cops just started tear gassing the
people who were protesting. Yep, this massive rage at a

(14:19):
home depot.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
Now there was another kind of noteworthy event is when
Ice showed up in force they got There were kind
of two different actions. There was one down at a
federal building where people attacked and dissembled barricades at the
same time as people showed up to go after the
ICE caravan. Ice officers were pelted in their vehicles with

(14:44):
a number of objects yea. And again this is the
kind of thing that makes it a lot more difficult.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
I mean that just.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
Appears operational operationally to be true for them to crack
down when they're expecting, you know, action in one direction
and it comes in multiple at the same time. There
was another instance earlier in the protest where ICE officers
were surrounded by a crowd and cut off for about
eight hours while the LAPD refused to respond to them,
and they eventually had to land a black Hawk on

(15:11):
the street in order to resupply because they were out
of water and I think running low on munitions which
they then used with reckless abandon So yeah, there's also
as I'm looking right now, just as about two hours ago,
a US Marine Age one z viper attack helicopter was
filmed flying low over Los Angeles. So it looks like

(15:32):
we've got active duty US Marine Corps forces in the city.
Unclear if they're directly engaging with anyone. I haven't really
heard of a lot of activity today, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah, my guess is things will intensify, you know, as
the day goes on and as we sort of roll
into night, because some people sort of start getting off
work and when temperatures start coming down a bit.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
That's the open question right as to like what's going
to happen. The last couple of days we saw numbers escalate,
but now it's Monday, people have work and there's more true.
It's like, yeah, it's not clear to me that that's
going to happen, that this.

Speaker 4 (16:06):
Is going to be like a yeah, we'll see.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
I'm seeing a lot of early comparisons to twenty twenty,
and it's not clear to me that's going to happen.
One thing to note is that kind of at the top.
So far, we've had four to six thousand people out
in the street in La Yeah, which is not you know,
compared to twenty twenty numbers. And while we've seen some
sympathy demonstrations, I mean here in Portland, I don't think
it got larger than forty or so people. There was another,

(16:29):
you know somewhere less than one hundred people in San
Francisco that some a good chunk of them got.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
Kettled the other day.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
But not mass demonstrations yet in other cities.

Speaker 4 (16:41):
Yeah, Yeah, it hasn't.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
It hasn't like really kicked off everywhere yet. And it's
also interesting because like these protests are kind of coming
off of the back of a couple of like scattered things.
We talked about this on executive disorder, but there was
a there was a very big confrontation in Minneapolis last
there's another one in Chicago where they like attacked a

(17:03):
bunch of Chicago aldermen, which was a time. The way
it's been going is like you get a giant rage
and it pisses people off, and there's a flare up,
and the flour ups have been getting larger but it
hasn't been like a sustained thing. It's largely been reactive
to these kind of large raids, and you know that's
not necessarily like the recipe for a sustained thing. However,

(17:25):
come the term administration, their target goal for the number
of arrests a day is three thousand, so like they're
trying to intensify the number of rage they're doing and
how sort of like aggressive and like militant they are.
And I think that might be a thing that causes
this to accelerate as we go, as we head into

(17:45):
like next weekend, because if they're still doing this right,
like if feds are if suddenly like like hundreds of
FEDS are in Chicago again and they're like grabbing people
out of like Logan Square, right, or you know, they're
they're trying they're doing this in like in New York,
they're doing this in like other places, I think it
could start to escalate, But right now it's still very

(18:08):
much unclear.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
Yeah, I mean, and that's where I stand too on
this is like I don't actually know what's going to
happen with this demonstration, but I think that, you know,
one possibility is certainly that this continues to escalate and
that you just get more and more people out consistently,
the others that it kind of peters out from this point.
If it continues to escalate, then the state is or

(18:31):
the FEDS are in a situation where they have committed
to continuing the escalation chain and there's not much for
them to go once they've got active duty soldiers in
the streets, but just actually shooting at people with live rounds,
assuming that they can't stop the demonstrations with a show
of force, and likewise, there's not much else for people

(18:53):
to do but either back down and stop coming out,
at which point the administration will take a victory lap
and say that like, look, this works, and this will
become their standard go to whenever a city erupts is
immediately nationalize the state National Guard, bring out live troops. Right,
that's what will happen everywhere. That's going to become the
new norm. Or people will continue escalating and yeah, like

(19:18):
in that case, the situation is like do people escalate
to deploying more force, do they have that real option
right or does the kind of stress of responding with
that sort of force, largely with soldiers that this is
not the primary thing they signed up to do. Do
they start like stop obeying orders? You know, these are
the kind of things that we would then be looking

(19:42):
at to see, right, Like, that's kind of where there's
a couple of different places it can go from here.

Speaker 3 (19:47):
You know.

Speaker 1 (19:47):
Another possibility is that, like if we see an instance
of like, okay, in order to try and crack down
on this, they authorize the use of deadly force against
a chunk of demonstrators and people get killed, then do
you see this kind of thing erupt in cities all
around the country like we saw in twenty twenty, right,
which case, again, things get very because there's not there's

(20:11):
not a lot of the US army. Really, there are
a lot of cops, but compared to the US population,
there's not even that any cops, right, and widespread enough
discent like this, you know what would force some very
difficult decisions from the federal government and from the administration, right,
And that's kind of our best case scenario is that

(20:32):
you get enough people out in enough cities that like
it is just crashing the US economy, right, and there's
no real way to lock down the unrest, and you
start getting National Guard refusing to respond to deployment orders
as well as active duty soldiers like refusing to respond right,

(20:53):
Like these are the That's the kind of thing that
we're looking at in terms of like a potential best
case scenario here.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
I don't know where things are going to head.

Speaker 1 (21:01):
I think maybe a likelier possibility is not that we
hit that that situation right now, but that we start
to see, like as this kind of peters out, the
administration puts out a victory lap, and then we start
to see you know, demonstrations responding in other cities, and
maybe there's kind of a slower tempo of escalation here.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
But I don't know.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
I want to say that my hope is that they
overplayed their hands here, but I just don't know that
that's clear, in part because we haven't seen the scale
of mobilization by people that is clearly going to be
impossible for them to respond to.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
I am still expecting that we're going to get a
really large escalating series approachest this summer. It's June, if
I am, it is June ninth as we're recording this, right,
it is going to be a long, hot summer, right,
Regardless of whether this is the whether it Peter's out here.
I think it is absolutely possible that this Peter's out

(22:04):
and this isn't the one. I don't think it's very
likely that this Peter's out the Republican's sake of victory lap
and then we don't get more protests this summer. Yeah,
at this scale or larger, Yeah, I think I think
that's very unlikely. We should take an at break and
that I want to talk a little bit about some
of the tactics we've been seeing, because they're very funny.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
Ah, and we're back. I should probably note very quickly that,
like obviously, one thing that happens when shit like this
goes down is that you get people posting on the.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
Internet their thoughts about this.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
One of the more prominent posters on Twitter in the
new musc Era has been the menswear guy, who made
a couple of statements that I don't entirely agree with
about like I mean general support protests, but like I
don't support you know, violent protests what I would call
some kind of miss interpretations of the civil rights movement,
but also like not something I wouldn't I don't care

(23:04):
that much if people are wrong on the internet.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah, I mean he did have a straight up poster
meltdown where he was like yelling about someone's like breakup
to say that they're insufficiently devoted because they didn't stay
with this person to keep them in the court.

Speaker 4 (23:19):
There is melt on base.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Shit, But like what matters, people melt down, posters melt
out what I think what matters is that like he
made a post later, a longer one, talking about the
fact that he was undocumented, his family was undocumented because
you know, they came to initially Canada after the tet
offensive and entered the US through a porous border and
talking about the way in which being undocumented has like
affected his entire life. And now the vice president and

(23:43):
the DHS account put us in a picture of like
spy kids of a kid with like a little like
computer tracker thing on his eye, and JD. Vance made
a post being like basically, we're going to deport the
menswear guy for his posts.

Speaker 4 (23:55):
Yeah, which is fucking hideous.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Which is it's just like again another example of the
ridiculous level of government repression that we're looking at here,
like where the federal government is like targeting themselves based
on posts that make people angry.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yeah, and well it's bifically post on Twitter, yeah too,
like and like that's also an important thing of like,
if you're not on Twitter, it is harder to get
the eye of the state on you if you are
on Twitter. Yeah, Like, the Vice president can be posting
fucking unhinged reply images to someone talking about deporting you,
like Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, is a horrifying level of repression.

(24:32):
The sort of mirror to this is the stuff we've
been seeing on the ground. Right there's a video going
around of a like a pretty right wing like Australian
journalists who's just like talking about the protests and.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
Like maybe twenty feet their back turned to a police
right line.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
It's more like like fifteen. The guy like the end
of the right line just like turns and shoots.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
Her, very casually. No protesters close to her, absolutely, no question,
no no, no chance that he was aiming at someone else,
zero chance, no chance that he thought that she was
attacking him. Just shot a lady in the back of
her thigh with an impact mutition for no reason.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
The most on hinge part of this, well, okay, the
most on hinge part of this was that they fucking
did this. The second most hinge part of it was
that her fucking like her fucking outlet in the description
of the video said that they appeared to be targeting
the profire, like appeared to be targeting a protest.

Speaker 4 (25:20):
It's like, no, they weren't. Man, there's this really.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
Amazing thing with the American press, were like they are
incapable of objectively describing the thing that a cop does
because if they described the thing that the cop does,
it looks like antipode.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
Everyone can see yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah, and so they have to just lie about it
and be like, oh, it was commonly. Crush was like, no,
with your own eyes you can see. But the headline
is lying.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
This is not questionable. This is not an arguable point.
This is not debatable. Oh, the footage is objective.

Speaker 4 (25:49):
Watch the video.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
It's like, Okay, guys, he just shot her because he
wanted to, because he thought it was funny, Like that's
why he did it, we.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
Know, Yeah, And like this kind of shit just continues
to happen, Like the press has learned nothing from twenty twenty.
They're still doing all the stupid snography shit. There's actually
been shit the cops have done in this protest that
I've never actually seen before, which is a new one,
because by by the time I was like I was
like a few weeks of twenty twenty, I had seen
basically everything, right, Like, I'm doing this for like fucking ages.

(26:19):
I've seen the cops trample people with horses before. I
had never seen them trample a guy and beat him
with the same person on a horse. Yeah, beating a
guy and trampling them with the horse at the same time.
That's a new one. Good fucking God. That's also and
I think it's actually is this worth understanding? Is that,
like that is the point of police horses, Like the

(26:39):
reason they have them is so they can trample people
with them.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
Yeah, it's to run people over with them.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Yes, Yeah, And it's it's real fucking bad. That's that's
hideous and shit like this has been happening this whole time.
There's been a bunch of journalists who have really been
really severely injured by impact munitions already.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yeah, one guy I get shot in the skull with
a You can tell it's a forty millimeters because of
the indent that left in his skull.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
Yeah, those things are like the size of your fist, and.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
Yeah, they're just they're they're massive, and they're not they're
not even meant to be fired directly. When you're shooting
at people, you're supposed to shoot them up at the
ground and bounce them into people.

Speaker 4 (27:12):
Yeah. Now, no cop has ever done this.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
They don't use them that way. I've had a used
on me, like I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
Yeah, this this munition has never been used like that,
no single time media.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
History's And that's the general truth of riot munitions. And actually,
I don't know if this guy was shot with a
with a with a rubber around or a foam round.
I think they probably shot him with a grenade, which
you're also not supposed to shoot at people, but again
they do all the.

Speaker 4 (27:35):
Time, which also kills people a lot.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Guy very nearly died in Portland a few years back
from that. Only his bike helmet saved them.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
Yeah, yeah, like this is this is a This is
one of the most common ways people get killed in
protests is by the cops shooting them.

Speaker 4 (27:47):
Yeah, like pure gas can.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Specifically, especially like in Turkey, this is a huge thing.
Like a bunch of people got killed by by You're
gonna keep my ter gut canisters.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
However, come there has been a bunch of extremely funny
and like pretty effective tactics people are using. One of
which I've never seen before that is fascinating is people
were calling wimos.

Speaker 4 (28:10):
Which are these like driverless yes, yes, yeah. So they
would use the app.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
To call winmos the places they wanted to set up roadblocks,
stop police cars going through, and stop ice cars going through,
and then they would land them on fire. And they
did this to so many of these cars that the
LAPD called Wimo and told them to shut it down
because they were like.

Speaker 4 (28:30):
Literally, it's it's it's a self driving flaming barricade.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
Well, and I think white people were doing it is
in part because like they like the board started spreading that,
like the police, were you getting footage from wimo right, ye,
so they were like, well, these are surveillance machines and
yeah if you if you show up, you light one
on fire and there's this flaming barricade.

Speaker 3 (28:49):
Yeah yep.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
And then and then people figured out that you could
just like oh, we could just bring these to places
like this, this is.

Speaker 4 (28:55):
A self deploying flaming barricade.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yeah, And and the other thing that that's interesting about
it too, is it's another one of these examples that
you see in protests of like people have this tendency
to think of riots as these like really spontaneous things
that nobody's like thinking.

Speaker 4 (29:13):
About a lot.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
But the thing about why MOS is that like, if
you've like walked in a city that has these things,
these things have tried to run you over at least once.

Speaker 4 (29:21):
Yeah, Like there's there's a serverials angle.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
There's also the angle that these things are trying to
fucking kill you all the time. And so and this
is like, you know, this is a very common like
like first thing that happens in the riot is like
people burn down the thing that has been trying to
fucking kill them this whole time. Yeah, so this is
this one, except they figured out how to try into
flaming card parricees.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
So I don't know, I guess we should end this
with assuming things do kind of get get bigger, or
assuming things get bigger later. Yeah, and you're watching this
and either you head out soon and wind up you know,
being at a protest, or that happens later. There's a
couple of things to keep in mind. One of them
is is, especially as we hit the summer, there's always
trade offs when we talk about like different kinds of

(30:04):
body armor that you may or may not want to have,
right you know, the two broad types are soft ballistic
armor and hard ballistic armour. When we talk about like
ballistic body armor that can that is resistant to bullets.
Downsides to both of those are expense no reliable body armor,
and I'm talking about NIJ certified body armour, which you
should always shoot forard. None of that is ever cheap.

(30:25):
Some is cheaper than others. Soft body armor is really
all you need for riot munitions. It doesn't stop the
pain as much as hard body armor. I've been hit
in hard body armor by impact munitions by like foam
rounds and stuff and barely felt it, whereas being hit
with them in soft armor is still pretty painful. However,
hard body armor, like the stuff that stops rifle rounds,

(30:47):
can shatter when hit by impact munitions, and again, because
it's a significant expense, means you might not have that
hard body armour anymore. The other thing to keep in
counter is that when you're talking about like armor for
your body, if you're worried primarily about impact munitions. It
doesn't have to be ballistic stuff like football pads, hockey
pads works very well against soft munitions.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
Right.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
Again, there's a huge trade off and potentially a safety
trade off if it's one hundred and ten degrees where
you are, like the danger of wearing any body armoor
and how much it slows you down, and how the
odds of it causing you to have heat stroke or
whatever can be significantly higher than like whatever you'd gain
in protection. However, there are some things you should never
go into a situation like this without in terms of armor.

(31:28):
One of those is a helmet. Again, there are ballistic
helmets that are resistant to pistol rounds. There are no
helmets that exist that will reliably stop rifle rounds at
in my close range with a rifle. We're talking within
a couple hundred meters, right, Those don't exist. They can
stop maybe a ricochet or a glancing blow. They're good
for shrapnel, they're good for pistols. That's what helmet ballistic
helmets are for, and those are great for police riot rounds.

(31:50):
A ballistic helmet is a really good thing to have
if they are shooting rubber rounds or shooting grenades directly
at people. It is not, however, the only thing you
need or the only thing that could provide safety. It's
not ideal to have like a bump helmet or a
bike helmet as opposed to a ballistic helmet, or like
a bike helmet as opposed to a bump helmet. These
are different things. A bump helmet is higher rated than

(32:11):
like a standard bike helmet. A motorcycle helmet is also
pretty robust. A bumper motorcycle helmet is better to have
if you're being shot at with non lethal or less
than lethal whatever you want to call them munitions, but
all of those, any kind of helmet is better than
your bare skull when police are shooting into a craft.
So where something even if it's a ten dollars fucking

(32:34):
bicycle helmet, if that's all you can get where that.
Don't go into a situation like this without a helmet.
Bring something like a fucking camelback or whatever that you
can have on your back and drink water from regularly,
as well as bottles of water that you can use
to wash out tear gas. Only use water to wash
out tear gas only water water and if you catch

(32:56):
people being like milk works, tell them you are wrong.

Speaker 3 (32:59):
Don't use milk.

Speaker 4 (33:00):
No friends, co rets, lovers, your family.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
He can be the generation that stops using milk for
tear gas.

Speaker 4 (33:09):
You can do this.

Speaker 1 (33:10):
You don't need to make cheese and your eyes only you.
You can people, for the love of God, it doesn't
work anytime. And if somebody starts talking about well, no,
you know, actually it's just like if you eat something spicy. No, no, no, no, no,
none of that's right.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
I'm telling you none of that's right.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Now.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Some people do use something called law, which is like
a mixture of I think it's an answer or something
like that. I think exactly what's in law, And yeah,
that can be effective, but don't use it. Just use water.
Use water. Use water.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
Just use water.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
If you are if you have some degree of like
professional medical treatment, and you decide law is better, do
whatever you want doctor right, but like, don't you listening,
use water right?

Speaker 3 (33:55):
Just want water.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
Look melt ice into water, use clean water.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
Idea from something like anyway whatever. When it comes to mace,
water eventually will get mace out. Mace is way different
from tear gas. Tear gas with water You can be
back to functional in a couple of minutes, right, if
you wash your eyes out. I've been tear gas like
two hundred fucking times, and I'll tell you it never
takes that long to get your eyes functional again.

Speaker 4 (34:21):
Assuming.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
The other thing you want to note is that if
you're going into a tear gas situation, if you wear contacts,
don't glasses only, right, because you do not want to
have mace or tear gas in your eyes. When you
have contacts, it can cause permanent debilitating damage.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
Right.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
They may need to surgically remove your fucking contacts where
your goddamn glasses. You can, And I have worn contacts
with like a full face respirator or a full face
gas mask, But there are still dangers there, including that
if you are wearing a full face mask or a
gas mask or something like that and the police catch you,
they will pull that up and mace you underneath your mask.

(34:57):
It's happened to a bunch of people I know. And
if you're wearing contacts under there, you can get in
very bad shape. There are easy ways to make glasses
holders if you've got a spare pair of lenses inside
a mask like that, Anyway, the other thing to note
is that mace is not the same as tear gas.
Mace fucks you up for much longer. You are going
to be out of commission for at least probably twenty

(35:18):
to thirty minutes with mace. In the best case scenario,
enough water will eventually wash out mace, right, It will
eventually deal with it, but not on any kind of
short timeframe. Right, It's going to take you a while
to get enough mace out of your eyes.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
That way.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Ideally, you get to a place where you have access
to something like a faucet or a hose, and you
use dawn dish soap is the best thing to use.
That's going to remove the surface thing. There's a better
thing for this, but I'm talking about if you don't
have access to specialized things or like baby shampoo, right,
something like that. Ideally, dish soap next would be something
like baby shampoo, right, with a good amount of water. Now,

(35:55):
the very best thing for mace is a specific wipe
that's made to be used for this, and this does
also help for tear gas. It's called Pseudocon Wipes sud
e co In. You can buy it off of Amazon
right now. They're not expensive and carry a couple of packs.
You generally want to like take what's in there in
two different pieces and use one to kind of wipe
away from your eyes and then the other to clean

(36:15):
your face up afterwards, once you've removed the bulk of
the material. Pseudocon wipes are the best thing to use
with mace. Anyway. That's a quick and dirty guide to
what kind of stuff is useful for this. And as always,
water water, water, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
And the one last thing I want to add is
that there is there is one more scourge that you
can end in this generation. Stop getting kettled on bridges.
I swear to God. Don't cross the bridge. Do not
don't be like My action is we're going to hold
a bridge. Every single time there's one of these goddamn protests,
like ten thousand people get a rest on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Speaker 4 (36:51):
It happens every time.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
The thing with bridges is that if the police cut
off both ends, you are now stuck on the bridge.
Don't go onto the bridge, simply do not. Like I'm
not even gonna give normally a speech that I give
here is about like, oh well, if you've on a bridge,
make sure you can hold one side of it. No, no, no, no,
no fuck that. No bridges, don't go on bridges. We
can stop. As a society. We have the technology. Don't

(37:13):
get don't get kettled on a bridge. It is so
fucking easy you simply don't go on the bridge.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
Yeah, okay, and that's that's the episode for today. Everybody
use water, don't get kettled on bridges.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
Yeah. Good luck everyone, good luck.

Speaker 5 (37:30):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 4 (37:41):
You listen to podcasts.

Speaker 5 (37:43):
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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