Speaker 1: Call zone media.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Kevin Foster, and
Speaker 3: for the past few months I've witnessed what I would
Speaker 3: describe as an egregious billionaire handout going down in the
Speaker 3: city of Portland and the state of Oregon as a whole.
Speaker 3: You might feel nauseous thinking about your tax dollars going
Speaker 3: to some wealthy bastard, and trust me, he is a bastard,
Speaker 3: but what if I told you it was for basketball?
Speaker 3: That probably sounds silly to many of you, but that's
Speaker 3: the question Portlanders have been grappling with. Tom Dundon, a
Speaker 3: Texas billionaire businessman, bought the NBA's Portland Trailblazers in April
Speaker 3: of this year. You may or may not have heard
Speaker 3: of Dundon. He made the rounds not too long ago
Speaker 3: when the other sports team he owns, the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes,
Speaker 3: won the Stanley Cup. Notably, he engraved his dog's name
Speaker 3: on it to the distaste of many hockey fans. Since
Speaker 3: Dundon took over the Blazers, he's fueled constant chatter about
Speaker 3: the possibility of moving the team out of Portland. He's
Speaker 3: done so by demanding the city, county, and state hand
Speaker 3: over approximately $ 600 million in public funds to renovate the
Speaker 3: Moda Center, the Blazers Stadium, which our wonderful producer Sophie
Speaker 3: has informed me is already quite nice. Despite Forbes estimating
Speaker 3: Dundon's net worth at around $ 2. 3 billion, he has no
Speaker 3: plans of contributing to the renovation himself, leaving it all
Speaker 3: to the taxpayers. There's a very dedicated Blazers community here
Speaker 3: in town, So the threats of leaving rang major alarm bells,
Speaker 3: but what has ensued is a revealing cascade of insights
Speaker 3: into local corruption, economic desperation, and a deep misunderstanding and
Speaker 3: or willful ignorance of sports economics. So today we're going
Speaker 3: to talk about the economics of sports and stadiums, why
Speaker 3: these investments are awful for your city to make, and
Speaker 3: what to watch out for as the business lobby and
Speaker 3: politicians in your town try to line the pockets of billionaires.
Speaker 3: While they will talk a lot about Portland, I want
Speaker 3: to be clear, a great deal of this could very
Speaker 3: easily spread across the country as Dundon sets a new
Speaker 3: precedent for what executives can scrape from taxpayers. On that note,
Speaker 3: I'd like to do a mini dive into Tom Dundon
Speaker 3: and some of his co-owners to give you a sense
Speaker 3: of the types of people we're dealing with here. A
Speaker 3: mini behind the bastards, if you will. For one, Dundon
Speaker 3: is a known penny pincher, in other words, a piece
Speaker 3: of shit. Some of his cost-cutting measures just since taking
Speaker 3: over the Blazers include massive layoffs of up to 70
Speaker 3: Blazers staff, leaving part-time players at home in Portland in
Speaker 3: the middle of the playoffs, breaking playoff tradition by not
Speaker 3: giving fans free t-shirts, ignoring players' coaching requests, and undercutting
Speaker 3: the pay of the coach he did end up hiring.
Speaker 3: And it gets worse. Dundon made most of his money
Speaker 3: in the subprime auto loan industry with the company Santander
Speaker 3: Consumer USA. According to Boston University finance professor Mark Williams,
Speaker 3: as referenced in an Oregon Public Broadcasting article, Dundon was, quote,
Speaker 3: one of the individuals that really grew the industry. Many
Speaker 3: would argue he took it to a new level, unquote.
Speaker 3: According to the New York Times, part of how Dundon
Speaker 3: and other Santander executives made millions was by packaging risky
Speaker 3: loans for low-income people into securities that could be sold,
Speaker 3: a la the 2008 financial crisis and what Wall Street
Speaker 3: ghouls did with mortgages. The various malpractices, which Santander never
Speaker 3: had to admit to in court, resulted in $ 550 million
Speaker 3: worth of legal settlements, including in Oregon. If you're waiting
Speaker 3: for some sort of karmic relief, it isn't really coming.
Speaker 3: Dundon walked away from Santander in 2015 with $ 700 million.
Speaker 3: He then continued to invest in subprime auto lenders while
Speaker 3: expanding into professional sports. This man is not well-liked, even
Speaker 3: by people who are clearly desperate to keep the Blazers here.
Speaker 3: For example, in a recent city council meeting, one fan
Speaker 3: who was in support of a public subsidy for the
Speaker 3: Blazers called Dundon a, quote, grade-A douchebag, unquote. And in
Speaker 3: order to buy the Blazers, Dundon had to put together
Speaker 3: an ownership group. One lesser-reported individual in that group is
Speaker 3: Mark Zahr, the co-president of the shadow bank Blue Owl Capital.
Speaker 3: On their website, Blue Owl calls themselves a, quote, partner
Speaker 3: to hyperscalers, unquote, in the AI data center space. And
Speaker 3: according to Bloomberg, they also sold a warehouse to DHS
Speaker 3: for an ICE megaprison for $ 120 million. Needless to say,
Speaker 3: these guys don't really embody the typical Portland energy. To
Speaker 3: be fair to Dundon and Czar, not that I'd really
Speaker 3: feel the need to, they're in piss-poor company among NBA owners.
Speaker 3: Oregon Public Broadcasting described the ownership roster in the league
Speaker 3: as a, quote, billionaires club whose past and current members
Speaker 3: or their companies have been accused of housing discrimination, knowingly
Speaker 3: underwriting improper mortgages, exploiting prison inmates, making racist comments, and
Speaker 3: engaging in sexual misconduct, unquote. Apparently, the former Blazers owner
Speaker 3: Jody Allen settled lawsuits over alleged sexual harassment, and attempting
Speaker 3: to smuggle penguin skulls and giraffe bones out of Antarctica
Speaker 3: and Africa. That's pretty much par for the course for billionaires,
Speaker 3: which is exactly why I think this issue is worth
Speaker 3: paying attention to. At some point, Dundon is going to
Speaker 3: end up in a room with all the other owners
Speaker 3: and talk about this sweet deal he got with just
Speaker 3: a bit of posturing and lobbying. And you don't have
Speaker 3: to take it from me. Here's renowned sports economist J.C.
Speaker 3: Bradbury talking about the dynamics between sports owners. This is
Speaker 3: from a webinar hosted by a few of the Portland
Speaker 3: City Councilors who actually pushed back against this deal.
Speaker 4: There's a great quote in Kim Belson's recent book on
Speaker 4: the NFL in which he interviews Stephen Jones, the son
Speaker 4: of Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys. And he
Speaker 4: describes the relationship as this. He said, as a competitive guy,
Speaker 4: he describes a competitive businessman culture among sports team owners.
Speaker 5: He says, accumulating money is keeping score.
Speaker 4: Jerry may not need more money, but if he doesn't
Speaker 4: make it, in his mind, he has failed. And I
Speaker 4: think that's what you're seeing a lot with owners.
Speaker 1: They're trying to one-up it.
Speaker 2: Up each other.
Speaker 3: And I think it's interesting.
Speaker 4: A lot of times you see owners go out and
Speaker 4: they donate vast amounts of money to charity, but then
Speaker 4: they go and ask for subsidies. And that seems like
Speaker 4: a contradiction.
Speaker 1: And I think what people need to.
Speaker 4: Understand is that these owners, they're not even necessarily interested
Speaker 4: in making money for themselves.
Speaker 3: They have billions of dollars.
Speaker 1: They're very wealthy.
Speaker 4: What they want to do is invite all the owners
Speaker 4: in and say, look at what I got these suckers
Speaker 4: to buy me. And they all high five each other.
Speaker 4: And they laugh at politicians who back them when they
Speaker 4: leave the room.
Speaker 3: The funny thing about all this for me is I
Speaker 3: don't really care for basketball. I like to think this
Speaker 3: helps me approach the issue from a relatively objective standpoint,
Speaker 3: which is why I'm all the more confident in the
Speaker 3: experts on this saying you'd have to be a fool
Speaker 3: to support these investments. But you know what else would
Speaker 3: be a good investment? Maybe some of the products and
Speaker 3: services that support this podcast.
Speaker 6: And we're back.
Speaker 3: Now that we have a sense of the demons we're
Speaker 3: dealing with, let's talk about sports economics. If I learned
Speaker 3: anything from my degree in economics, other than how pretentious
Speaker 3: most econ majors are, it's that the answer to many
Speaker 3: questions is just, it depends, and there's rarely consensus on
Speaker 3: any given issue. Sports economics, though, is one of those
Speaker 3: rare cases where most people actually agree. Politicians, business leaders,
Speaker 3: and sports team representatives will boast about the economic boon
Speaker 3: a team is to your city. They'll talk about the jobs,
Speaker 3: people going out to bars and restaurants, and supposed economic growth.
Speaker 3: In reality, sports teams suffer from something called the substitution effect.
Speaker 3: In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists John Siegfried and
Speaker 3: Andrew Zimbalist explain this in detail. The vast majority of
Speaker 3: consumers has a relatively inflexible leisure budget. If a sports
Speaker 3: team moves to town, the money one spends taking a
Speaker 3: family to a game typically is money that is not
Speaker 3: spent at a local bowling alley, golf course, restaurant, or theater.
Speaker 3: The net effect on spending in the metropolitan area, then,
Speaker 3: is zero or very close to zero. While sports teams
Speaker 3: may rearrange the spending and economic activity in an urban area,
Speaker 3: they are not likely to add much to it. Don't
Speaker 3: get me wrong, I'm all for defunding golf courses, but
Speaker 3: with sports stadiums, we're really just moving money around rather
Speaker 3: than growing. And funny enough, this can actually have a
Speaker 3: negative effect on surrounding businesses because people spend more at
Speaker 3: the game, putting money into Tom Dundon's pocket instead of
Speaker 3: the local community. The counter-argument to this is that sports
Speaker 3: teams bring in tourists from out of region or out
Speaker 3: of state, leading to greater profits, but this also doesn't
Speaker 3: necessarily ring true. Here's Victor Matheson, another leading sports economist,
Speaker 3: in that same webinar with the Portland City Councilors.
Speaker 1: I've actually studied this extensively.
Speaker 4: There is exactly zero impact on hotel room stays.
Speaker 1: And by zero, I mean literally zero.
Speaker 7: Literally no.
Speaker 2: Hotel rooms anywhere in the country get sold because people
Speaker 2: decide to come to a city to go see the NBA.
Speaker 3: I'm not certain exactly which studies Matheson is referencing, but
Speaker 3: he says they've looked into at least a dozen major
Speaker 3: cities and hundreds of game nights, finding no effect on
Speaker 3: hotel stays from the NBA. One example backing this up
Speaker 3: is a 2018 study by Craig E. Depkin and E.
Speaker 3: Frank Stevenson of Charlotte, North Carolina, which found that NBA
Speaker 3: regular season games were not associated with a net increase
Speaker 3: in hotel registrations or hotel revenues the day before, the
Speaker 3: day of, or the day after a game. They did
Speaker 3: find some increases for multi-day events, but the overall conclusion
Speaker 3: of the study is that hotel tax receipts fall short
Speaker 3: of the debt service incurred from stadium investments. On a
Speaker 3: larger scale, things like the Olympics and World Cup are
Speaker 3: a similar story, even with such a specific focus on
Speaker 3: international travel. A February 2026 article from the Council on
Speaker 3: Foreign Relations indicates multiple Olympic host cities in recent decades
Speaker 3: lost billions and that the economic benefits are dubious at best.
Speaker 3: Matheson suggested in a 2006 paper that these mega events
Speaker 3: can potentially lead to a profit for a city if
Speaker 3: they use existing infrastructure, such as the case of the
Speaker 3: 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, but this isn't always the case.
Speaker 3: And to give a sense of the broader economic consensus,
Speaker 3: a 2005 random sample survey of the American Economic Association
Speaker 3: members found that 86% agreed or strongly agreed with the
Speaker 3: elimination of state and local subsidies for sports franchises, versus
Speaker 3: just 5% in opposition. A 2008 paper by Dennis Coates
Speaker 3: and Brad R. Humphreys states, quote, the large and growing
Speaker 3: peer-reviewed economics literature on the economic impacts of stadiums, arenas,
Speaker 3: sports franchises, and sport mega-events has consistently found no substantial
Speaker 3: evidence of increased jobs, incomes or tax revenues for a
Speaker 3: community associated with any of these things, unquote. Matheson himself
Speaker 3: examined the other side of the argument on stadium subsidies
Speaker 3: in a 2018 paper published in the Journal of Policy
Speaker 3: Analysis and Management. He points out that there may be
Speaker 3: rare cases where public subsidies make sense, but at nowhere
Speaker 3: near the level that American taxpayers are contributing. Basically, the
Speaker 3: percent of funding that should come from public contribution may
Speaker 3: be simply greater than zero, but not very significant. At
Speaker 3: the end of the day, what this really amounts to
Speaker 3: is another massive handout for the wealthy, while the poor
Speaker 3: and working class pay the price in taxes or cut services.
Speaker 3: It's big business fucking over the little guy who often
Speaker 3: can't afford to go to the game, or is making
Speaker 3: a dogshit part-time wage working concessions at the stadium. And
Speaker 3: to bring it back to Portland, the mayor has talked
Speaker 3: about financing this deal with climate funds, which are already
Speaker 3: allocated to different projects. There's a real opportunity cost to
Speaker 3: using public funding for sports rather than on city needs,
Speaker 3: and that absolutely needs to be factored into the equation.
Speaker 3: One of the most basic sort of capitalist econ 101
Speaker 3: lessons is that there's just no such thing as a
Speaker 3: free lunch. This money has to come from somewhere, and
Speaker 3: that means other programs get the short end of the stick.
Speaker 3: Over the past few weeks, I've noticed there's this perception
Speaker 3: that Portland is somehow unique, that losing the Blazers would
Speaker 3: send the city into financial ruin. Apparently, this is quite common,
Speaker 3: as J.C. Bradbury's new book is literally titled This One
Speaker 3: Will Be Different, False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly
Speaker 3: Funded Stadiums. In just a bit, I'm going to dive
Speaker 3: into the tactics owners use to shake down cities, but
Speaker 3: one way they've done so in Portland is by broadening
Speaker 3: the conversation to our entire economy. I've watched city councilors
Speaker 3: play directly into this, claiming the city's economy is heavily
Speaker 3: based on perception while they make decisions that arguably worsen
Speaker 3: that perception. It's a paradoxical position. We're struggling, so we
Speaker 3: need to spend a bunch of money on something that
Speaker 3: won't make us that money back. That's the level of
Speaker 3: cognitive dissonance we're dealing with here, and it's all backed
Speaker 3: up by the business lobby. Our previous city council system
Speaker 3: penned a deal buying the Moda Center for one dollar.
Speaker 3: Very clearly, they took on a liability, not an asset,
Speaker 3: and left us on the hook. There's this fear of
Speaker 3: the Moda Center becoming a derelict mass and a stain
Speaker 3: on the city if it's not renovated. People generally seem
Speaker 3: to agree that it needs renovations, whether for basketball or
Speaker 3: for concerts, but looking at other cities who lost their
Speaker 3: sports teams, a rotting concrete corpse is just simply not
Speaker 3: an inevitability. An article in Blazer's Edge, a Blazers news
Speaker 3: blog and community site owned by sports media conglomerate SB Nation,
Speaker 3: pointed out how multiple other arenas across the U.S. have
Speaker 3: seen record profits after losing their anchor tenant. The Desert
Speaker 3: Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona lost the NHL's Arizona Coyotes
Speaker 3: in 2022 and In the year after, according to Glendale
Speaker 3: City Manager Kevin Phelps, the arena broke its revenue record
Speaker 3: by nearly $ 10 million. After the Golden State Warriors left
Speaker 3: the Oakland Arena in 2019, it had its best fiscal
Speaker 3: year ever in 2023 and reduced its operating deficit by 97%
Speaker 3: over the four years. And Key Arena, once hosting the
Speaker 3: Seattle Supersonics, a team referenced heavily by supporters of a
Speaker 3: Blazers subsidy, operated at a loss under the NBA team,
Speaker 3: according to Blazer's Edge, but it turned a bigger profit
Speaker 3: than ever after they left by, quote, freeing up the
Speaker 3: stadium revenue the sports teams were hoarding for themselves, unquote.
Speaker 3: I have to emphasize, even with mountains of evidence, reporting
Speaker 3: on this deal in Portland has felt like a truly
Speaker 3: Sisyphusian task, with the sheer volume of misinformation being thrown
Speaker 3: out by our own elected officials and at times the media. Surprisingly,
Speaker 3: some of the broadcast outlets have had some solid articles
Speaker 3: on this in the past few months, though I still
Speaker 3: would have liked better at times. I have a lot
Speaker 3: of respect for Dave Deckard, the author of the Blazers
Speaker 3: Edge piece, because his job seems to rely on the
Speaker 3: Blazers staying here, which he openly points out in his
Speaker 3: own article. I have a lot less respect for legacy
Speaker 3: outlets like the Oregonian, especially Bill Orem and the editorial
Speaker 3: board who repeatedly chastise people for pushing back against this deal.
Speaker 3: Some of what I've seen from the media has been
Speaker 3: more akin to stenography than journalism. The journalist's resource and
Speaker 3: organization aiming to bridge the gap between reporters and academic
Speaker 3: research says in these sports deals journalists, quote, often report
Speaker 3: figures from press releases and economic impact statements without questioning
Speaker 3: the assumptions of those analyses, unquote. The worst part of
Speaker 3: all this has been watching people fall for the propaganda
Speaker 3: in public comment. Some individuals even brought their children to
Speaker 3: speak at Portland City Council. It's painful to feel like
Speaker 3: I couldn't keep up as a reporter, so for the
Speaker 3: last quarter of this episode, I want to dive into
Speaker 3: all of the just head-spinning madness that has gone down
Speaker 3: in recent months in hopes of providing context that can
Speaker 3: help constituents in other cities fight off these terrible investments.
Speaker 3: But before we do that, here's Samantha. And we're back.
Speaker 3: Many of Oregon and Portland's leaders like to wear the
Speaker 3: badge of fiscal responsibility, yet they've done the exact opposite
Speaker 3: of what economists suggest. Unfortunately, it just so happens that
Speaker 3: this may be one of the worst arena deals of
Speaker 3: all time. According to data compiled by J.C. Bradbury for
Speaker 3: that webinar... $ 600 million is in the realm of a 60-70%
Speaker 3: increase over the median public contribution for a stadium renovation
Speaker 3: from 2025 onward. Stadiums like the Delta Center in Salt
Speaker 3: Lake City have lower projected renovation costs than Moda, despite
Speaker 3: needing a complete conversion from a basketball arena into an
Speaker 3: arena that can accommodate both basketball and hockey. That is
Speaker 3: a very expensive renovation, and yet they also negotiated a
Speaker 3: 30-year contract instead of the 20-year contract we have in Portland. Here,
Speaker 3: we're on track for a fully publicly funded renovation because,
Speaker 3: as I highlighted earlier, Tom Dundon said he didn't want
Speaker 3: to put any money in. The Oregon State Legislature capitulated
Speaker 3: almost immediately, along with our extremely unpopular governor, shelling out
Speaker 3: about $ 365 million dollars not including interest, and the county
Speaker 3: followed suit with approximately another $ 100 million. In this process,
Speaker 3: the Blazers have not actually shared what they want to
Speaker 3: use the $ 600 million for. We're riding blind because they've
Speaker 3: effectively stonewalled us while simultaneously making threats that they'll leave
Speaker 3: if we don't meet their every demand. They've justified this
Speaker 3: by claiming they're worried we'll sue them if they leave,
Speaker 3: leveraging language in the previous lease, which states the primary
Speaker 3: tenant is required to maintain the arena in, quote, first-class condition.
Speaker 3: Let me put that another way. Rip City Management, the
Speaker 3: operator of the Moda Center, asked for essentially a blind
Speaker 3: contribution of $ 600 million while simultaneously maintaining that the stadium
Speaker 3: is already in first-class condition because they're afraid of a
Speaker 3: lawsuit due to the contract they signed a few years ago.
Speaker 3: The math does not add up. it kind of sounds
Speaker 3: like the stadium is not actually in first-class condition, or
Speaker 3: they're scraping taxpayers for unnecessary renovations. And all they really
Speaker 3: had to do to enforce their agenda was dump a
Speaker 3: couple hundred thousand dollars into lobbying, then refuse to participate
Speaker 3: in good faith negotiations. It really should go without saying,
Speaker 3: your city, state, and county should not throw out hundreds
Speaker 3: of millions of dollars— technically more than a billion when you
Speaker 3: consider debt and other payments— without seeing the actual details
Speaker 3: of the renovation. It's like a fucking loot box, except
Speaker 3: we might literally get nothing of substance back. Beyond stonewalling
Speaker 3: and lobbying, the other tactics I'll call creative math and
Speaker 3: finding a fool. Finding a fool is simply grabbing business
Speaker 3: shills who will publicly support your propaganda campaign. In Oregon,
Speaker 3: we're spoiled for choice, and creative math is the coal
Speaker 3: that fuels the flames. For example, The Portland mayor, city councilors,
Speaker 3: and county commissioners have thrown around that the region containing
Speaker 3: the Moda Center produces $ 670 million in annual economic activity.
Speaker 3: According to the website RipCityNotRipOff, a community effort opposing the
Speaker 3: billionaire handout, about $ 290 million of this is just from players' salaries.
Speaker 3: A lot of this money likely does not stay within Portland.
Speaker 3: This concept is called leakages in that paper by Siegfried
Speaker 3: and Simbalist. When this creative math doesn't do the trick,
Speaker 3: sports teams apparently will often seek out impact analyses from
Speaker 3: consulting firms. And here's a particularly animated clip of Bradbury
Speaker 3: talking about this.
Speaker 4: I want to jump here. I want to talk about
Speaker 4: these economic impact studies. We would tell you they don't exist.
Speaker 4: Economists don't do analyses like that. These things are totally
Speaker 4: made up garbage. And I'm not even going to be
Speaker 4: nice anymore because I'm tired of having to deal with
Speaker 4: this from city to city. That's not how economists do studies.
Speaker 4: They simply just throw numbers in a barrel and roll
Speaker 4: out bigger numbers. And I'll tell you how you know
Speaker 4: this is true because most people don't know. They hear
Speaker 4: me say that's not true. Someone else says, oh, no,
Speaker 4: but the other side says it is true.
Speaker 1: And the way you know it is you say, could you.
Speaker 4: Show me some examples where you predicted a number and
Speaker 4: that it came true? And they will never, ever respond
Speaker 4: because they have never once predicted it right. And I've
Speaker 4: been asking for years, can you show me one example?
Speaker 4: And every time I meet with these consultants, I say,
Speaker 4: can you show me an example where you predicted correctly?
Speaker 4: They say, I'll get back to you. And I never
Speaker 4: hear from them ever again. These people are just, they're shills.
Speaker 4: They make a living doing this. And we need to
Speaker 4: start calling them out for doing that.
Speaker 3: In Portland's case, one of the DSA city councilors, Mitch Green,
Speaker 3: said he asked to see the data for the impact
Speaker 3: analysis put together by consulting firm Echo Northwest. According to Green,
Speaker 3: the person who conducted the analysis wanted to give him
Speaker 3: the data, but the Blazers said it was under an NDA.
Speaker 3: So we've kind of gone full circle back to stonewalling.
Speaker 3: If all else fails, teams may rely on astroturfing and
Speaker 3: boldface corruption to get a deal through. In Portland, a
Speaker 3: group known as We Are Rip City started up, claiming
Speaker 3: to be an independent community effort, but they have the
Speaker 3: telltale signs of a corporate astroturfing campaign. They list hundreds
Speaker 3: of coalition supporters on their website, from real estate groups
Speaker 3: to local businesses to unions. But their leadership is made
Speaker 3: up of business executives, and they work with the political
Speaker 3: consulting firm March Strategies, who previously contracted with the Blazers
Speaker 3: and is made up of former high-level Oregon government staffers.
Speaker 3: The head of We Are Rip City is Jim Etzel,
Speaker 3: the CEO of Sport Oregon, a non-profit promoting sports in
Speaker 3: the region. But Sport Oregon is funded in part by
Speaker 3: the city of Portland. In effect, the city has paid
Speaker 3: to lobby itself, and it somehow gets even worse. Portland
Speaker 3: is located in Multnomah County, which is currently set up
Speaker 3: to contribute around $ 100 million to the arena themselves. The
Speaker 3: chair of the Multnomah County Commission, Jessica Vega-Peterson, who is
Speaker 3: not running for reelection this fall, hired the county's negotiator
Speaker 3: for the deal. Guess who she hired? The fucking board
Speaker 3: president of Sport Oregon, who also used to work for
Speaker 3: the Blazers. Here's a clip from the county commission meeting
Speaker 3: when this came out. Speaking is Commissioner Megan Moyer.
Speaker 1: Did I miss here?
Speaker 8: He is on the board of Sports Oregon that is
Speaker 8: currently lobbying us on how much we should contribute to
Speaker 8: this deal?
Speaker 1: We hired a negotiator that's on the board of.
Speaker 8: An organization that is lobbying us on this issue?
Speaker 6: How is that not a wild conflict of interest?
Speaker 3: Oh, Megan, I feel you. Even after this revelation, Moyer
Speaker 3: was the only one of five on the commission who
Speaker 3: voted against their $ 101 million term sheet proposal. And trust me,
Speaker 3: I haven't even touched on all of the craziness surrounding this,
Speaker 3: but the underlying goal of the team seems to be
Speaker 3: total control over the conversation. Dundon has pulled off a
Speaker 3: masterclass in this. In reality, it would likely cost him millions,
Speaker 3: if not billions more to relocate the Blazers than to
Speaker 3: just fund the entire renovation himself. There's also debate over
Speaker 3: whether there's even a location for them to move to
Speaker 3: since the NBA has already floated an expansion of teams,
Speaker 3: which rakes in huge amounts of cash for the NBA
Speaker 3: owners versus relocation, an estimated $ 10 billion per new franchise,
Speaker 3: according to industry executives and league experts consulted by The Athletic.
Speaker 3: All of our government's negotiating leverage was thrown out like
Speaker 3: a bag of dog shit when the Blazers stepped in
Speaker 3: front of Oregon politicians. I've spent a lot of time
Speaker 3: dunking on Portland City Council, but to be fair to them,
Speaker 3: the state kind of screwed us from the outset. And
Speaker 3: I guess that's kind of my message with all this.
Speaker 3: You've really got to try to catch it early. They
Speaker 3: will absolutely try to shove it down your throat, and
Speaker 3: these owners know how to wage a strong propaganda campaign.
Speaker 3: What I've really tried to emphasize in all of my
Speaker 3: reporting is that supporting an arena subsidy, especially of this scale,
Speaker 3: is just out and out choosing the upper class in
Speaker 3: a sport over the people struggling on the streets. We
Speaker 3: have record heat waves, wildfire smoke, people starving, and yet
Speaker 3: we are giving money to a billionaire. The sickening irony
Speaker 3: is not lost on me watching a Boys and Girls
Speaker 3: Club representative testify in favor of a public subsidy and
Speaker 3: Yet when I drive by the Blazer-sponsored Boys and Girls
Speaker 3: Club in North Portland, I see the same woman sleeping
Speaker 3: outside on the sidewalk, her bones starting to protrude from
Speaker 3: her skin. It's not lost on me when the supposed
Speaker 3: liberals on Portland City Council vote to give Tom Dundon
Speaker 3: stronger rent control protections than everyday people in the city.
Speaker 3: Certainly there are things that are worse than another billionaire handout.
Speaker 3: but I don't know that I've ever been more personally
Speaker 3: disgusted by the people who claim to represent me, at
Speaker 3: least at the local level. The worst part is that
Speaker 3: they pretend to care. They might even think that they
Speaker 3: do actually care, but people have literally been yelling this
Speaker 3: in their faces. It was impossible for them not to hear.
Speaker 3: There truly is no excuse. They've sold us out, and
Speaker 3: we'll get a sense of the full damage in December
Speaker 3: when all the negotiations come to an end. I don't
Speaker 3: expect these deals will become any less common across the country.
Speaker 3: As the national economy worsens, I would not be surprised
Speaker 3: if cultivating local economic desperation becomes a center point in
Speaker 3: any NBA owner's playbook. Either way, it happened here. I
Speaker 3: hope it doesn't happen to you. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 7: Hi, James. You know, talking with you goes by really quickly.
Speaker 7: It's almost like no time has passed since we last recorded,
Speaker 7: but it's actually been a whole week. Crazy how time flies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the magic of podcasts.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 7: In the last episode, we left off by talking about
Speaker 7: how the U.S. took over the Guano Islands and how
Speaker 7: it established U.S. expansion as a mission of resource extraction.
Speaker 7: The Guano Islands were uninhabited, but this episode is all
Speaker 7: about how the U.S. overseas expansion took over people as
Speaker 7: well as land. So to talk about the five inhabited U.S. colonies,
Speaker 7: we need to talk about the Spanish Empire. Throughout the
Speaker 7: 19th century, Spain's expansive empire shrunk considerably. Several of their
Speaker 7: colonies were either overtaken by the U.S., as in the
Speaker 7: case of Florida or or became independent, as in the
Speaker 7: case of Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and others. By the
Speaker 7: end of the 19th century, the Spanish Empire was on
Speaker 7: its last legs, but it did have a few remaining colonies, Cuba,
Speaker 7: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Cuba, the Philippines, and
Speaker 7: to a lesser extent, Puerto Rico had been fighting insurrectionary
Speaker 7: wars against Spain for years by the time that 1898
Speaker 7: rolled around. in a final bid to keep some type
Speaker 7: of control over them, Spain gave Cuba and Puerto Rico autonomy,
Speaker 7: meaning that they could form a local government. Meanwhile, Spain
Speaker 7: entered into a truce with the Philippines with promises of
Speaker 7: future reforms. However, their insurgencies essentially continued. This wouldn't last long.
Speaker 7: because the U.S. government invaded the Spanish colonies a few
Speaker 7: months later as part of the Spanish-American War. As I've
Speaker 7: talked about, the end of the 19th century was marked
Speaker 7: by the wish to expand America's influence beyond its continental borders.
Speaker 7: It had partially done this with the purchase of Alaska
Speaker 7: as well as the coming annexation of Hawaii, which would
Speaker 7: happen in great part because the U.S. needed a military
Speaker 7: outpost in the mid-Pacific to support operations in the Philippines
Speaker 7: and Guam. However, it still wanted more, and Spain's weakness
Speaker 7: presented the perfect opportunity. So throughout the years before 1898,
Speaker 7: the government had been talking about intervening in Cuba's struggle
Speaker 7: for independence. This was done through yellow journalism, which we
Speaker 7: talked about a little bit in the last episode, but
Speaker 7: essentially the newspapers were talking kind of directly to the
Speaker 7: United States government and being like, we need to spread
Speaker 7: liberty to them and freedom we need to teach them
Speaker 7: uh how it goes and this was of course mixed
Speaker 7: with manifest destiny and the monroe doctrine where they wanted
Speaker 7: to quote unquote protect american hegemony uh in the new
Speaker 7: world yeah.
Speaker 9: I'm trying to remember who said this uplive civilize and
Speaker 9: christianize our little brown brothers.
Speaker 7: Um was it mckinley it.
Speaker 9: Seems like it would be but when i when i
Speaker 9: search that specific thing in quotation marks i don't.
Speaker 7: Oh wait so William Howard Taft, the first American governor
Speaker 7: general of the Philippines and later U.S. president, used the phrase, quote,
Speaker 7: little brown brother in cables to McKinley. So maybe it
Speaker 7: was there. Okay.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think I may have like combined two quotations.
Speaker 9: The paternalist racism there is fantastic. I'll drop it in
Speaker 9: later when we're talking about something else. I wasn't sure
Speaker 9: if it was Cuba or which country they were referring to.
Speaker 7: I mean, based on how Puck drew them, we could
Speaker 7: all be the Little Brown Brothers.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah. That is the stereotype they're getting, cool.
Speaker 7: Absolutely. So, speaking of protecting U.S. business interests overseas, in
Speaker 7: January 1898, the United States sent a warship, the USS Maine,
Speaker 7: to Havana Harbor to safeguard American business interests there as
Speaker 7: well as U.S. citizens. However, the USS Maine sank about
Speaker 7: a month later. And while the cause was likely an
Speaker 7: internal fire, according to recent experts, the contemporary opinion in
Speaker 7: the United States blamed it all on Spain.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 7: There was this smattering of yellow journalism that was like,
Speaker 7: you know, they did it. Oh, yeah. The Spain did
Speaker 7: it to us, even though they didn't really have a
Speaker 7: way to prove that. Right. Especially not in 1898. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And like the whole like going to the bottom of
Speaker 9: the ocean to look at the USS Maine was It's
Speaker 9: a thing. There have been a series of, I guess,
Speaker 9: underwater archaeology is what it is, but expeditions to ascertain
Speaker 9: exactly which direction it blew out. Various ones have had
Speaker 9: various conclusions. I think you rightly phrase it here. It
Speaker 9: doesn't matter what caused the explosion. It became a fact
Speaker 9: for the yellow press that the Spanish did.
Speaker 7: Absolutely. And I think it's really interesting that there's still...
Speaker 7: And I understand that why you want to like have
Speaker 7: a genuine conclusion, but the fact that it's still being
Speaker 7: litigated more than, what is it, like 128, 140 years after? Yeah.
Speaker 7: A little bit more, a little bit less, a little
Speaker 7: bit more.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Is still, you know, kind of this conception of American
Speaker 7: nation building where it couldn't be that the press got
Speaker 7: it wrong, that the government got it wrong, and that
Speaker 7: it became a fact in the media. And that's why
Speaker 7: the U.S. invaded. Cuba and other Spanish colonies, right? The U.S.
Speaker 7: kind of has to prove itself innocent in this regard.
Speaker 7: So per How to Hide an Empire, the U.S. government
Speaker 7: and the U.S. media wanted to intervene, but anti-imperialists in Congress,
Speaker 7: imagine that, didn't want Cuba to be annexed to the
Speaker 7: United States. So to ostensibly show that they didn't have
Speaker 7: colonial ambitions, Congress passed the Teller Amendment that stated that
Speaker 7: they would not annex Cuba. However, Congress said nothing of
Speaker 7: Spain's other colonies. I should also say that before the U.S.
Speaker 7: officially entered the war that year, Teddy Roosevelt, then Assistant
Speaker 7: Secretary of the Navy, had sent ships to essentially surround
Speaker 7: all of the colonies, not just Cuba. So they were
Speaker 7: kind of pretty clearly preparing for something, you know?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: So the U.S. went to war in 1898, and it
Speaker 7: won pretty handily. in large part, and this is the
Speaker 7: stuff that a lot of American history books won't tell you,
Speaker 7: because of the help of the independence movements that had
Speaker 7: already been fighting in these colonies for decades. However, the U.S.
Speaker 7: did as the U.S. does and essentially discarded these independence movements'
Speaker 7: ambitions once they had helped the U.S. win the war,
Speaker 7: showing once again that allies are not necessarily friends. I
Speaker 7: feel like this is a lesson that has to be
Speaker 7: taught and learned Throughout American history, right? You know? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Many, many, many such cases.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 7: In my opinion, nowhere is this more evident than in
Speaker 7: the Philippines, where the liberation movement declared independence from Spain
Speaker 7: in June of 1898, yet it went unrecognized by the U.S. Instead,
Speaker 7: the U.S. choreographed a mock battle with Spain that eventually
Speaker 7: led to them handing over their colony to the U.S.,
Speaker 7: per How to Hide an Empire. The Americans' lack of
Speaker 7: recognition for the Filipino independence movement would eventually lead to
Speaker 7: the Philippine-American War, where the U.S. trampled and devastated the
Speaker 7: Filipino insurgency that wanted independence from one conqueror, Spain originally,
Speaker 7: and their newest conqueror, the United States. You know, ostensibly,
Speaker 7: they came in to help these people and then essentially
Speaker 7: massacred them.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Little vexillogical aside.
Speaker 9: The star and triangle device that you see on lots
Speaker 9: of flags has its birth in this period. I believe
Speaker 9: it begins with José Martí and the Cuban independence movement. Obviously,
Speaker 9: it characterizes many of these states and their independence movement.
Speaker 9: But for a while there, that flag was the symbol
Speaker 9: of fighting against imperial conquest. That's why they incorporated it
Speaker 9: into the Catalan flag. the independent Senella has the triangle
Speaker 9: and then the Catalonia just as a thing without any
Speaker 9: particular political ambition doesn't have the triangle and the star.
Speaker 9: And then you have the red triangle for like socialist independentist,
Speaker 9: but like this blue triangle in flags, like it just
Speaker 9: shows how these actions like reverberated around the world, right?
Speaker 9: Like Spain had been the empire.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And like I had this in, in Spanish this week,
Speaker 9: we call it the Anus Horribilis of 1898, right? Like
Speaker 9: the complete collapse of Spain's external possessions. And like for
Speaker 9: a while there, people were like, huh?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Empires can fall.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We can defeat them. Unfortunately, a new one took its place. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 9: Empires can fall if a new empire slides in there
Speaker 9: and like, yes, helps with the fighting and what doesn't
Speaker 9: do all like, like you said, like these people have
Speaker 9: been fighting, like, Marty was dead by the time Roosevelt arrived,
Speaker 9: but he had already begun the independence movement.
Speaker 7: Uh, and actually now that you, you mentioned that about
Speaker 7: the triangle, I didn't include it in this, uh, script, right.
Speaker 7: But the Puerto Rican flag is actually directly based on
Speaker 7: the Cuban flag as well. It was made in 1895,
Speaker 7: I believe by, uh, Puerto Rican exiles in New York
Speaker 7: who were fighting for independence from Spain. And so they
Speaker 7: essentially adopted this Cuban design, but inverted the colors to
Speaker 7: show kind of Caribbean solidarity and brotherhood. Yeah. And, you know,
Speaker 7: it's been our flag ever since.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: And there's a thing about the Puerto Rican flag that
Speaker 7: I'm not going to get into too much, but like.
Speaker 7: based on the kind of color of the blue in
Speaker 7: the flag, uh, is the political status that you support, right?
Speaker 7: That's kind of a, a myth, kind of a myth
Speaker 7: that has essentially become the fact, right?
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 9: No, I love a little hidden flag shit, like the, uh,
Speaker 9: The Flandrians with their flag, like if the lion has
Speaker 9: claws or not, it denotes their status on independence. I think, yeah,
Speaker 9: it doesn't matter if that's what it was designed for. Again,
Speaker 9: it becomes true because everyone knows it to be true
Speaker 9: and they're using it to signal that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So in Puerto Rico, the light blue
Speaker 7: is kind of the independence flag. The medium blue, which
Speaker 7: is kind of the one that most often is used
Speaker 7: depending on the place, is kind of the status quo,
Speaker 7: sometimes independence flag. And then the darker blue, similar to
Speaker 7: the dark blue used in the U.S. flag, is the
Speaker 7: one that stands for statehood. That's cool. You shouldn't necessarily
Speaker 7: take this as fact because, you know, sometimes it's hard
Speaker 7: for people to get their hands on a specific color
Speaker 7: blue Puerto Rican flag. But you can usually tell based
Speaker 7: on the flag that they're waving around what they support.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Also, actually, speaking of flags, the flag of the Northern
Speaker 7: Mariana Islands, it goes hard. Have you seen it?
Speaker 3: No, I haven't.
Speaker 7: Oh, let me see.
Speaker 9: The Marshall Islands flag's fucking thick. Yes, I'm actually looking
Speaker 9: at it right now.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: A Marshallese football shirt.
Speaker 7: Let me send a pic real quick.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, that's a sick one.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, wow.
Speaker 7: There's a lot of very cool flag designs that I
Speaker 7: witnessed while writing this script.
Speaker 9: Oh, wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that one's great.
Speaker 7: So speaking about the Philippine-American War and the American occupation
Speaker 7: of the Philippines post-1898, quoting from Colonial Crucible, The four
Speaker 7: years of counter-guerrilla warfare that followed would make accurate intelligence
Speaker 7: an imperative, forcing a marked expansion of the military's limited capacities,
Speaker 7: particularly in the area of operational field intelligence. During the
Speaker 7: campaign in Manila, the U.S. Army, quote, created a modern
Speaker 7: metropolitan police force that applied military intelligence and data management
Speaker 7: to the problem of political espionage. developing covert techniques of
Speaker 7: surveillance and penetration to fight a dirty war in the
Speaker 7: city's slums and back alleys, end quote. And according to
Speaker 7: How to Hide an Empire, American GIs tortured Filipino guerrillas
Speaker 7: by administering the quote-unquote water cure, a torture method similar
Speaker 7: to the waterboarding which has happened in Vietnam and Afghanistan, right?
Speaker 3: And in Cuba, in the little US base that we
Speaker 3: have there.
Speaker 7: As well, right. And you kind of see this as
Speaker 7: part of the imperial feedback or the imperial boomerang that
Speaker 7: colonization of the U.S. 's colonies has sent back into
Speaker 7: the United States and how it's reverberated in future imperialist
Speaker 7: or colonialist conquest, right? This one torture method, which is
Speaker 7: very similar actually to waterboarding, has reverberated throughout American counterinsurgency history.
Speaker 7: So here you can see how the management of empire
Speaker 7: has instructed the U.S. 's military apparatus in quelling nationalist
Speaker 7: movements the world over. And this is obviously something that's
Speaker 7: come back towards the American metropole, particularly the kind of
Speaker 7: counterinsurgency used in policing American military occupations, right? This is
Speaker 7: very common because, quoting from Colonial Crucible, colonial regimes only
Speaker 7: had finite resources for costly social controls and generally chose
Speaker 7: to apply them to policing, prisons, and law enforcement. And
Speaker 7: kind of the colonial policing apparatus has reverberated throughout every
Speaker 7: single empire's history, right? I'm thinking of Smedley Butler taking
Speaker 7: the policing techniques he learned in Haiti back to Philadelphia
Speaker 7: with him. The filipino police kind of setting the scene
Speaker 7: for some of the policing that would happen in the
Speaker 7: united states this is like very much a thing that
Speaker 7: happens the world over or um god why am i
Speaker 7: blanking george orwell in uh india the the policing that
Speaker 7: he did in burma sorry.
Speaker 9: Yeah which was part of india at the time in
Speaker 9: the british conception.
Speaker 7: So orwell being a policeman there and kind of seeing
Speaker 7: how it impacted back home and we see this the
Speaker 7: world over, right? In terms of militarization, the military exports
Speaker 7: that the U.S. has taken to many, many, many countries,
Speaker 7: the world over is now reverberating back into U.S. streets.
Speaker 7: And actually, in terms of ICE and the kind of
Speaker 7: paramilitary campaign of terror that they're doing, we're seeing the
Speaker 7: people that the U.S. displaced in other places kind of
Speaker 7: fleeing there, trying to get a safe haven in the U.S.
Speaker 7: and The paramilitary tactics that were used against their parents, grandparents,
Speaker 7: or great-grandparents now being used on them, right? So the
Speaker 7: cycle of abuse and violence doesn't really end, sadly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So you know what won't invest resources in policing, prisons,
Speaker 7: and law enforcement? These advertisers.
Speaker 3: We can't say that for sure.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: Might be the Washington State Highway Patrol again.
Speaker 7: And we're back. Meanwhile, in Cuba, as I mentioned previously,
Speaker 7: anti-imperialists in Congress passed a law that meant the U.S.
Speaker 7: couldn't annex it. However, that didn't mean there couldn't be
Speaker 7: a military occupation, which lasted until 1902 when Cuba declared independence. However,
Speaker 7: the Platt Amendment stipulated that the U.S. could intervene in
Speaker 7: Cuban affairs, even invade if they wanted to. It also
Speaker 7: meant that the U.S. could establish a permanent naval base there,
Speaker 7: which is now and then called Guantanamo Bay. Actually, that
Speaker 7: might be the one piece of American overseas empire that
Speaker 7: I think is very present in the American consciousness. It's
Speaker 7: much more so than Puerto Rico or Guam or whatever.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the fact that it's like a cutout from Cuba,
Speaker 9: this country, that the whole thing of this half of
Speaker 9: the Trump administration is hating Cuba.
Speaker 3: And be like, oh, psych, we also own a little
Speaker 3: bit of that island.
Speaker 7: Right, exactly. And own it for more than a century
Speaker 7: at this point as kind of a bastion of continued
Speaker 7: control on it, right? Because they couldn't annex it completely.
Speaker 7: But if you just take a little small piece of
Speaker 7: it and then use it for a lot of evil things,
Speaker 7: you know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, to your point about it affecting the metropole, like
Speaker 9: so much of the worst parts of US history run
Speaker 9: through that little naval enclave there.
Speaker 7: Absolutely.
Speaker 9: Like the worst parts of the war on terror. We're
Speaker 9: now using it for a deportation camp, right? Like it's
Speaker 9: where we do our deniable crimes.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely. And that actually ties very much into a
Speaker 7: thing that I'll give a little preview on, which is
Speaker 7: why the U.S. Constitution doesn't really apply in the colonies.
Speaker 7: So the U.S. would go on to occupy Cuba two
Speaker 7: more times, from 1906 to 1909, and once more from
Speaker 7: 1917 to 1922. Even after the U.S. occupation ended, the U.S.
Speaker 7: would go on to have a very good relationship with
Speaker 7: the Batista dictatorship because of American business interests in the
Speaker 7: Cuban archipelago. However, the Cuban Revolution of 1953 would eventually
Speaker 7: mark the end of this relationship with the U.S. oscillating
Speaker 7: between wanting to outright take over or destroy Cuba again,
Speaker 7: as the current Trump administration wants to do, or to
Speaker 7: just being kind of very critically wary of the government, right?
Speaker 7: There was a point in recent American history where tensions
Speaker 7: between the two countries, and I say tensions, but it's
Speaker 7: really an extremely lopsided situation. kind of hate from the U.S.
Speaker 7: 's part. There was a time in recent memory where
Speaker 7: tensions were kind of mellowing out. Then you could visit
Speaker 7: Cuba without there being a major international incident under Obama.
Speaker 7: And similar to the Philippines, Cuba became an important part
Speaker 7: of how the U.S. would portray itself overseas. There were
Speaker 7: several things that happened in Cuba and have happened in
Speaker 7: Cuba that have defined the colonial empire, right? Like Guantanamo Bay,
Speaker 7: But this time, I don't want it to be something
Speaker 7: so dark. So, per Colonial Crucible, American forces occupying Cuba
Speaker 7: worked ceaselessly to control the dreaded yellow fever in Havana
Speaker 7: and the rest of the island. But like the public
Speaker 7: health campaigns of other colonial powers, these efforts were not
Speaker 7: an expression of medical beneficence. As elsewhere, public health in
Speaker 7: Cuba served the needs of the colonizer rather than the colonized.
Speaker 7: to protect commerce, maintain the labor force, safeguard troops, and
Speaker 7: colonial administrations, and justify colonial rule. The eradication of yellow
Speaker 7: fever in Cuba, an unprecedented success of colonial public health,
Speaker 7: achieved for the United States nearly all of these goals.
Speaker 7: American public health efforts in Cuba were a colonial enterprise
Speaker 7: that provided economic and political benefits to important supporters of
Speaker 7: the American imperial state, demonstrated that American imperialism could succeed
Speaker 7: where European powers had failed and so inspired further American
Speaker 7: colonial expansion in the region. So here you can kind
Speaker 7: of see how even if the U.S. is doing something
Speaker 7: like patently good, like eliminating yellow fever in the Cuban archipelago,
Speaker 7: it's still because they want to further control Cuba and
Speaker 7: its neighboring islands. So a similar hookworm eradication campaign took
Speaker 7: place in Puerto Rico, which remains a U.S. colony to
Speaker 7: this day. this hookworm eradication campaign would go on to
Speaker 7: inform a similar campaign throughout the American South. However, as
Speaker 7: noted by How to Hide an Empire, the Southern campaign
Speaker 7: largely succeeded, in part because of a million-dollar philanthropic donation
Speaker 7: from John D. Rockefeller. Meanwhile, a victim of colonial neglect,
Speaker 7: the Puerto Rico Project received only $ 5, 000, and no matter
Speaker 7: how many hookworm pills Puerto Ricans took, they became reinfected
Speaker 7: again and again, because the government did not care to
Speaker 7: uplift them from poverty, would have significantly reduced hookworm rates.
Speaker 7: In comparison, the US South essentially received this mega donation,
Speaker 7: which helped them uplift them, as well as investing in
Speaker 7: school and several other programs that made it so this
Speaker 7: hookworm infection wasn't so disastrous for the region. However, Puerto
Speaker 7: Rico being a colony, they were like, you know, we
Speaker 7: don't need to do as much So here we see
Speaker 7: how colonial health campaigns can be used to benefit the
Speaker 7: metropole at the expense of the colonies. Yes, Cubans and
Speaker 7: Puerto Ricans got help for their illnesses. But in one case,
Speaker 7: it was used to justify further colonization. And in the other,
Speaker 7: they were used essentially as guinea pigs to help white
Speaker 7: people of the American South. Puerto Rico was under military
Speaker 7: rule from 1898 to 1900, and was eventually placed under
Speaker 7: civil administration in 1900 under the Foraker Act. Puerto Ricans
Speaker 7: would become American citizens 17 years later, just as the U.S.
Speaker 7: was entering World War I. It's commonly stated as a
Speaker 7: myth that we were made citizens exclusively to become soldiers.
Speaker 7: And this is like half right. The thinking by the U.S.
Speaker 7: government was that citizenship would convince Puerto Ricans to fight
Speaker 7: any foreign aggressors that could possibly attack the archipelago, as
Speaker 7: well as help the U.S. military project a military force
Speaker 7: into the Caribbean. I should say that this is according
Speaker 7: to the book Soldiers of the Nation by Harry Frankie Rivera.
Speaker 7: And actually, Puerto Rico is called the Gibraltar of the
Speaker 7: Caribbean in World War II because of its coastal defenses.
Speaker 7: Got it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: However, it wouldn't be until 1949 that we were able
Speaker 7: to choose our own governor and we became, quote, Estado
Speaker 7: Libre Asociado or Commonwealth in 1952. I'm going to spare
Speaker 7: the political conjecture. Truthfully, Estado Libre Asociado is kind of
Speaker 7: a nonsense statement. It's essentially just colony with a fancier name, right?
Speaker 7: There's not really any difference between Puerto Rico and Guam
Speaker 7: in this sense, right? Puerto Rico is a commonwealth, same
Speaker 7: as the Northern Mariana Islands, actually. But there's really no
Speaker 7: difference legally from other colonies by being called an Estado
Speaker 7: Libre Asociado. And speaking of political repression by the U.S. government,
Speaker 7: the Puerto Rican independence movement has waxed and waned over
Speaker 7: the years. All the while, the movement has faced pretty
Speaker 7: brutal political repression throughout all that time, including being bombed
Speaker 7: by the Air Force during the 1950 Hayuya uprising, one
Speaker 7: of the few times that the U.S. has bombed its
Speaker 7: own citizens, as well as the longest domestic surveillance program
Speaker 7: in U.S. history that spanned roughly six decades and tracked
Speaker 7: somewhere over 100,000 people, according to the book Las Carpetas
Speaker 7: by Ramón Bosque Pérez and José Javier Colón Morera. Here,
Speaker 7: like the Philippines, we see how the U.S. 's imperial
Speaker 7: quelling of nationalist movements would go on to boomerang back
Speaker 7: to the metropole. Las Carpetas, as the program is colloquially known,
Speaker 7: preceded COINTELPRO, and its DNA can be found throughout the
Speaker 7: domestic surveillance programs that we know of, and surely those
Speaker 7: that we don't. And I want to stop here to
Speaker 7: speak a little of the Puerto Rican status debate, because
Speaker 7: I've seen a lot of people who don't know anything
Speaker 7: about it acting like experts on twitter.com over the years. Shocking.
Speaker 7: Puerto Rico has performed several referendums over the decades where
Speaker 7: you vote on the status. And over the last decade,
Speaker 7: a state has won three of them. Truth be told,
Speaker 7: these referendums don't actually mean that much in terms of
Speaker 7: measuring public support because they've been boycotted and many people
Speaker 7: view them in the same way that they would a
Speaker 7: public poll. Also, it's non-binding, which means even if whatever
Speaker 7: option wins, nothing's going to happen. Congress is the only
Speaker 7: one that could approve statehood for Puerto Rico, no matter
Speaker 7: how much Puerto Ricans asked for it. Even so, in
Speaker 7: the last referendum during the 2024 election, some form of independence,
Speaker 7: meaning either full independence or compact or free association, received 41% support,
Speaker 7: while statehood received 59%. So, while statehood is ostensibly the
Speaker 7: majority choice, it's not as clear-cut as many people would
Speaker 7: want you to believe.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And now I'm sorry to say that I'm going to
Speaker 7: summarize a lot of the history of Guam, American Samoa,
Speaker 7: the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands to
Speaker 7: get to how the Constitution doesn't fully apply there. But
Speaker 7: I still want people to know some of the basic
Speaker 7: facts about the other colonies. Guam was under military rule
Speaker 7: for 47 years, first by the U.S., then Japan for
Speaker 7: four years during World War II, and again by the U.S.
Speaker 7: until 1950, when Truman signed the Organic Act of Guam,
Speaker 7: giving them a civilian administration and a civilian court. Meanwhile,
Speaker 7: the U.S. annexed American Samoa in 1900 when local chiefs
Speaker 7: ceded Tutuila, the largest island to the U.S. This was
Speaker 7: followed by Manoa in 1904 and Swains Island in 1905,
Speaker 7: although it's also claimed by Tokelau, a colony of New Zealand.
Speaker 7: As I said during the last episode, American Samoans are
Speaker 7: non-citizen nationals, and they have to naturalize if they want
Speaker 7: to become American citizens. Per the ACLU, being a non-citizen
Speaker 7: national means that they can't be firefighters, paramedics, and public
Speaker 7: school teachers. The U.S. Virgin Islands were bought from Denmark
Speaker 7: for $ 25 million in 1917. The U.S. had been negotiating
Speaker 7: this in one way or another since 1865, and like
Speaker 7: Puerto Rico, USVI is an important strategic foothold in the
Speaker 7: Caribbean for military purposes. Finally, the Northern Mariana Islands have
Speaker 7: oscillated rulers between several empires. However, after World War II,
Speaker 7: they became United Nations Trust Territories under American administration. It
Speaker 7: became a colony of the U.S. in 1986. The Marshall Islands, Micronesia,
Speaker 7: and Palau were also part of this trust, but they
Speaker 7: chose to enter into compacts of free association instead of
Speaker 7: becoming colonies. There is a common trait among all of
Speaker 7: these colonies that I've mentioned throughout, which is being key
Speaker 7: to military force projection by the United States in the
Speaker 7: Caribbean and the Pacific. Bases in each of these colonies
Speaker 7: are crucial to the U.S. military's logistical ability to deploy
Speaker 7: throughout the world. Recently, a long dormant naval base in
Speaker 7: Puerto Rico, Roosevelt Roads, was brought back to life as
Speaker 7: part of the Trump administration's attacks on Venezuela and the
Speaker 7: boat strikes throughout the Caribbean, as well as including the Pacific.
Speaker 7: The planes that are doing the boat strikes aren't leaving
Speaker 7: from Puerto Rico to do in the Pacific, obviously. Another
Speaker 7: common trait that all of these colonies share is that
Speaker 7: stuff is super expensive. in part because of the Jones Act,
Speaker 7: a 1920 shipping law that mandates that any goods traveling
Speaker 7: between two U.S. ports has to move on a U.S.-flagged, owned,
Speaker 7: and crewed ship. People might be most familiar with this
Speaker 7: law based on the amount of times a sitting U.S.
Speaker 7: president has put it on pause. In fact, Trump extended
Speaker 7: the Jones Act waiver for another 90 days just a
Speaker 7: few days ago to assuage pressures from oil price increases.
Speaker 7: A 2024 working paper by two Purdue University economists with
Speaker 7: backing of the World Bank found that the Jones Act
Speaker 7: imposes an annual welfare burden on Puerto Rico of $ 1. 4 billion.
Speaker 7: Because foreign-flagged commerce ships can't stop in Puerto Rico then
Speaker 7: go on to Florida, for example, they have to go
Speaker 7: to Florida first, have all their stuff moved onto a
Speaker 7: U.S.-flagged ship, then it comes here. And all of this
Speaker 7: cost is passed on to the consumers. The Jones Act
Speaker 7: also affects Hawaii and Alaska.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think people who have not experienced this will
Speaker 9: not realize the profound nature to which this, and just
Speaker 9: being so far from the colonial core, impacts everyday life.
Speaker 9: The way you eat is fundamentally determined. by the fact
Speaker 9: that this shit is so expensive. I know this gets
Speaker 9: particularly the case in interior Alaska, where just getting there
Speaker 9: is in and of itself expensive, but this has a
Speaker 9: big role to play.
Speaker 7: Absolutely. Actually, this isn't the script, but in terms of
Speaker 7: Puerto Rico, part of the American industrialization of the archipelago,
Speaker 7: as well as the way that it was backed up
Speaker 7: by the local government, meant that we switched from a
Speaker 7: kind of agricultural society to an industrial one. And we
Speaker 7: went from growing a ton of our own food to
Speaker 7: only growing about between 10% to 20% of it, which
Speaker 7: back then was very good because there was a boom
Speaker 7: time for the Puerto Rican economy. But kind of now,
Speaker 7: it means that everything is incredibly expensive because it has
Speaker 7: to come from all over the world, get moved onto
Speaker 7: a US flagship in the contiguous 48 states, then come
Speaker 7: back here. Right.
Speaker 9: It places you not only at a place where you're
Speaker 9: already paying more, but also at the whim of shipping costs,
Speaker 9: oil prices, these things that we're all seeing go up
Speaker 9: right now.
Speaker 7: Absolutely. And part of those costs have been assuaged recently
Speaker 7: because of the waivers. But there is a very big
Speaker 7: contingent of people in Puerto Rico who are really dreading
Speaker 7: the moment those waivers stop because things are going to
Speaker 7: get really expensive again. And I mean, they're still expensive,
Speaker 7: but they're going to get even more expensive, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah. So at this point, if you've been listening closely,
Speaker 7: you'll notice that there's a pretty glaring omission in what
Speaker 7: I've covered so far. Alaska and Hawaii, the only overseas U.S.
Speaker 7: territories to become states, have gone almost completely unmentioned. I
Speaker 7: purposefully left them out because they overcomplicated the whole history
Speaker 7: and it was easier to put them at the end
Speaker 7: than in the middle. So Alaska was bought from Imperial
Speaker 7: Russia in 1856 for $ 7. 2 million, and Hawaii was annexed
Speaker 7: in 1898 after U.S. businessmen and Marines did a bloodless
Speaker 7: coup against the Kingdom of Hawaii and its then-queen. They
Speaker 7: eventually became the 49th and 50th state in the middle
Speaker 7: of the 20th century, and the kind of annexation of
Speaker 7: Alaska and Hawaii is the thread that's been running throughout
Speaker 7: these two podcast episodes.
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 7: In terms of Alaska, it's resource extraction. By buying Alaska,
Speaker 7: they got access to miles and miles of pristine nature
Speaker 7: that had in it gold, fur, and oil. In Hawaii,
Speaker 7: they received a strategic foothold in the Pacific, which has
Speaker 7: become extremely important over the years, particularly at the time
Speaker 7: that it was annexed during the Spanish-American War, where the U.S.
Speaker 7: military had to use it as a launchpad, essentially, for
Speaker 7: its war in the Philippines and Guam. According to How
Speaker 7: to Hide an Empire and an article in The Conversation
Speaker 7: titled Why Russia Gave Up Alaska, America's Gateway to the
Speaker 7: Arctic by William L. Igiagruk Hensley, The purchase of Alaska
Speaker 7: brought with it a cornucopia of natural resources, including gold, fur,
Speaker 7: and oil, that could be mined from this new territory
Speaker 7: as well as nearly 400 million pristine acres of new
Speaker 7: land with a comparably small addition to the U.S. 's
Speaker 7: majority white racial calculus. And this is a very important thing.
Speaker 7: The United States has never really added territories at this
Speaker 7: point that would significantly throw off the amount of white
Speaker 7: Anglo-Saxon people that inherit it, right? And I'm thinking of
Speaker 7: choosing to incorporate Oklahoma instead of the indigenous state of
Speaker 7: Sequoia because of how it would affect the amount of
Speaker 7: white people in the United States.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and the way that it would affect the representation
Speaker 9: in Congress too, right? Like specifically partitioning states off in
Speaker 9: such a way that they don't tend to give people
Speaker 9: who are not white representation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely. Meanwhile, Hawaii, with a much more multicultural population,
Speaker 7: was a four-year issue. But the U.S. decided to make
Speaker 7: them a state anyway because it helped them reach Pacific
Speaker 7: markets and because it provided an important geopolitical strategic interest
Speaker 7: during the Cold War. Hawaii was made into a state
Speaker 7: because of the Spanish-American War, but it was annexed, not
Speaker 7: made into a state. A declaratory note there. Right, yeah.
Speaker 7: I'm severely flattening history here, but that's the gist of
Speaker 7: how they became states. And, dear listener, you might be asking,
Speaker 7: what makes them different from Puerto Rico and the rest
Speaker 7: of the colonies? The key difference is that Alaska and
Speaker 7: Hawaii were both, quote-unquote, incorporated territories. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico, Guam,
Speaker 7: the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American
Speaker 7: Samoa are quote-unquote unincorporated territories. If that distinction means nothing
Speaker 7: to you and it sounds kind of racist, welcome to
Speaker 7: the club. This distinction was created in 1901 by a
Speaker 7: series of racist Supreme Court decisions called the Insular Cases.
Speaker 7: A critical part of the Insular Cases created the doctrine
Speaker 7: of incorporation that governs non-contiguous territories, as well as created
Speaker 7: the idea of incorporation versus unincorporation, creating the legal framework
Speaker 7: saying that the Constitution does not fully apply to the
Speaker 7: unincorporated territories. Downs v. Bidwell was the most important case
Speaker 7: here because it created the term unincorporated territory to describe
Speaker 7: Puerto Rico's legal status shortly after it had been acquired.
Speaker 7: The case created the distinction that some territories were unincorporated
Speaker 7: and others were incorporated, like Alaska and Hawaii, which were
Speaker 7: integral parts of the U.S. and thus bound for statehood. However,
Speaker 7: unincorporated territories like Puerto Rico and Guam were not on
Speaker 7: that path to statehood, and they were a pertinent to
Speaker 7: the United States, the same word the US used for
Speaker 7: the islands it claimed under the Guano Islands Act. We were,
Speaker 7: and this is a quote, foreign in a domestic sense.
Speaker 3: What an amazing legal fucking term to come up with.
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Great.
Speaker 7: I don't know. It's like very incredible because all of
Speaker 7: this is like a legal fiction applied.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: Like, Literally, right?
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's a bunch of people dancing around saying long
Speaker 9: words to be like, totally not a colony, dude.
Speaker 3: No, absolutely not. No way. Totally different, bro. I don't
Speaker 3: know what you're talking about.
Speaker 7: The US would never have colonies. They're just foreign in
Speaker 7: a domestic sense. Another case, the Lima v. Bidwell, was
Speaker 7: decided on the exact same day. It explained that Puerto
Speaker 7: Rico belonged to the US. I'm simplifying the explanation here,
Speaker 7: but when you mix it with Downs and other cases
Speaker 7: over the years, you get the phrase that we know
Speaker 7: all too well. Owned, but not part of. To drive
Speaker 7: the point home, I want to paraphrase from Amy Kaplan's
Speaker 7: The Anarchy of Empire. The insular cases put Puerto Rico
Speaker 7: and other colonies in a liminal space, both inside and
Speaker 7: outside of the boundaries of the Constitution, relegating the people
Speaker 7: who live there to a permanent state of limbo, neither
Speaker 7: fully citizens nor completely foreign. The insular cases cemented the
Speaker 7: imperial mode of governance so thoroughly that many Americans would
Speaker 7: not even consider their home country to be an empire.
Speaker 7: These colonies remain in limbo to this day, likely never
Speaker 7: going to be made states, yet equally as likely to
Speaker 7: never become independent. This ideological and legal framework has extended
Speaker 7: past the colonies, the most salient example being Guantanamo Bay,
Speaker 7: a colonial holdover from U.S. occupation in Cuba. Per Kaplan
Speaker 7: in her essay, Where is Guantanamo Bay?, court decisions built
Speaker 7: on top of the insular cases recognize the base as
Speaker 7: domestic for some purposes and foreign for others, thus facilitating the, quote,
Speaker 7: global reach of U.S. power by creating a shadowy hybrid
Speaker 7: legal system coextensive with the changing needs of empire. There
Speaker 7: have been several attempts to overturn the insular cases, but
Speaker 7: they remain case law. These cases that describe the people
Speaker 7: of Puerto Rico and other U.S. colonies as, quote, alien
Speaker 7: races and savage tribes remain the way that the United
Speaker 7: States views its overseas possessions. The last challenge to the
Speaker 7: insular cases came in 2018, In a case titled Fitisamanu
Speaker 7: versus United States, where free non-citizen nationals from American Samoa
Speaker 7: challenged the U.S. government's denial to extend to them birthright citizenship.
Speaker 7: A Utah federal district court, right? Not an American Samoan court.
Speaker 7: A Utah federal district court declared that American Samoans were
Speaker 7: citizens of the United States and deserve birthright citizenship. But
Speaker 7: the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision citing
Speaker 7: the Insular cases. And in this process, there is kind
Speaker 7: of a very specific othering of people of the colonies, right?
Speaker 7: You don't get to go to your local court and
Speaker 7: show them, hey, I want to be a part of
Speaker 7: this nation, which is what they wanted, right? You have
Speaker 7: to go to Utah, to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals,
Speaker 7: and be like, hey, I want you to recognize my
Speaker 7: constitutional rights.
Speaker 9: That has now got me wondering, like, what circuit they're in. Like,
Speaker 9: do they fall into a federal circuit? No, it doesn't
Speaker 9: have a federal court, apparently.
Speaker 7: No, because part of the reason that American Samoa is
Speaker 7: so different from the rest of the colonies, right, is
Speaker 7: that the indigenous population there has kind of wanted to
Speaker 7: keep them separately. And, right, there's varying opinions on this, right,
Speaker 7: which is why we saw that challenge to the insular cases.
Speaker 7: During that challenge, the... country or the government of american
Speaker 7: samoa they were pro-insular cases being like hey we want
Speaker 7: to continue for this to be case law because it
Speaker 7: wouldn't challenge certain laws that they have in the books
Speaker 7: that people with certain amounts of american samoan ancestry can
Speaker 7: buy land and those without it can't buy land there yeah.
Speaker 9: Okay so they didn't want to get equal protection or
Speaker 9: something under the equal protection clause of the constitution they
Speaker 9: felt like it was a net positive for them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but obviously this has changed through time, I should say, right?
Speaker 3: Right, yeah.
Speaker 7: For some, it means that they can stop gentrification and
Speaker 7: further colonization of their island, but it also means that
Speaker 7: their people face significant challenges if they choose to travel
Speaker 7: outside of American Samoa. which, based on how the U.S.
Speaker 7: economy works, usually means that a significant portion of that
Speaker 7: population has to leave in order to find employment, right?
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think of, like, how, like,
Speaker 9: Marshallese people, they're not U.S. citizens, but they can travel
Speaker 9: to the U.S. without a visa and reside and.
Speaker 3: Work in the U.S. without a visa.
Speaker 9: But, like, if they join the military, they can join
Speaker 9: the U.S. military, but then if they want to access
Speaker 9: their VA benefits, they have to go to Hawaii, like,
Speaker 9: across like a it's a several hour flight like it's
Speaker 9: several days on a boat right so and like obviously
Speaker 9: not all of the uh you know the services that
Speaker 9: they might need medically available on marjora so like they
Speaker 9: they have to they have to take that journey just
Speaker 9: to access the benefits that like in theory are owed
Speaker 9: to them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's not exactly the same situation here in Puerto Rico,
Speaker 7: but the VA benefits system here is not that great
Speaker 7: compared to the contiguous United States, which in and of
Speaker 7: itself is also not that great from what I've read
Speaker 7: and people have told me.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah.
Speaker 7: But there's only one hospital here in several clinics. So
Speaker 7: if you live far away from the hospital, you have
Speaker 7: to travel to that to get VA care. And that's like,
Speaker 7: one of the many, many things where the U.S. colonies
Speaker 7: are forgotten and left by the wayside in terms of
Speaker 7: these things that the U.S. government should ostensibly provide for
Speaker 7: its citizens and the people under its dominion, right?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So the insular cases essentially said that people in the U.S.
Speaker 7: colonies were owned but not part of the United States.
Speaker 7: That meant that we had to be given American citizenship
Speaker 7: if we got it, not the case of American Samoa,
Speaker 7: through federal statute. This is different than people born in
Speaker 7: the contiguous United States or Alaska and Hawaii, where they
Speaker 7: get birthright citizenship through the Constitution. Because the Constitution doesn't
Speaker 7: fully apply to us, we had to get it through
Speaker 7: federal statute. This means that it would be pretty easy
Speaker 7: to take away birthright citizenship in the colonies compared to
Speaker 7: taking away birthright citizenship throughout the entire U.S. This is
Speaker 7: something that Virginia Congressman Morgan Griffith wants to do. Griffith
Speaker 7: presented a law to eliminate birthright citizenship in the U.S. colonies,
Speaker 7: saying that it was the only thing that the U.S.
Speaker 7: could do to protect American citizenship. And because our American
Speaker 7: citizenship is through statute, several laws throughout history in Puerto Rico,
Speaker 7: as it was in 1917, then codified by the American
Speaker 7: Nationality Act. He could do it if the law passed
Speaker 7: Congress and Congress chose to eliminate birthright citizenship here. His
Speaker 7: press release specifically cited the Insular cases as giving Congress
Speaker 7: the power to take it away. However, to be clear,
Speaker 7: It's very unlikely that this bill will even make it
Speaker 7: to a vote, much less become law. But through this
Speaker 7: kind of threat to take away birthright citizenship, we see
Speaker 7: how the U.S. still has kind of extremely direct control
Speaker 7: over its colonies.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: You know, as I hope I have evidence throughout this episode,
Speaker 7: the American colonies, the current American colonies, not the 14 colonies, right,
Speaker 7: have always been laboratories for the American experiment. in terms
Speaker 7: of surveillance, in terms of military occupation. And here, with
Speaker 7: this bill that, again, probably won't even make it to
Speaker 7: a vote, we are seeing the Republican administration trying to
Speaker 7: experiment with how they can take away birthright citizenship, which
Speaker 7: they failed to do through Trump's executive order. But they
Speaker 7: are trying to see how they can ram it through
Speaker 7: to take it away from people. And recently... we saw
Speaker 7: Trump sign an executive order to do a similar thing
Speaker 7: to ostensibly address, quote unquote, birth tourism, a thing that
Speaker 7: doesn't really matter. Yeah.
Speaker 3: In the grand scheme of things, it's an infinitesimally small
Speaker 3: number of people.
Speaker 7: Exactly. The thing that I want to express is that
Speaker 7: the U.S. colonies have always been laboratories of empire. What
Speaker 7: happens here doesn't stay here. And contrary to the way
Speaker 7: that many people think, the U.S. and other empires, to
Speaker 7: be clear, doesn't just exert power, ideology, and movements outwards. Instead,
Speaker 7: it is in a continuous feedback loop with its colonies
Speaker 7: that have shaped what happens in the imperial core the
Speaker 7: same way that it has shaped what happens in the
Speaker 7: imperial periphery. And I want to end this episode by
Speaker 7: talking about how Trump has signaled several times towards U.S.
Speaker 7: territorial expansion. He has made moves or said that he
Speaker 7: wants to annex Canada, Venezuela, Cuba, the Gaza Strip, Mexico,
Speaker 7: and Greenland, among others. And as I mentioned in the
Speaker 7: last episode, he's been obsessed with Greenland for a hot minute,
Speaker 7: even reportedly saying that he wanted to trade it for
Speaker 7: Puerto Rico, which was then ravaged by Hurricane Maria, according
Speaker 7: to NBC. His most recent signal was posting a picture
Speaker 7: of Venezuela with the American flag on it, essentially saying
Speaker 7: that he wants to make it the 51st state. To
Speaker 7: be clear, there are several other places that he could
Speaker 7: do that in, but he is projecting this idea of
Speaker 7: the 51st state as a way of kind of colonial capture. Right.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: By promising to bring liberty and freedom to Venezuelans. He
Speaker 7: is saying, we will make you equal. even though he
Speaker 7: has forgotten a bunch of equal rights for 4 million
Speaker 7: people in the US colonies. And while a lot of
Speaker 7: Trump's rhetoric about territorial expansion of the United States has
Speaker 7: been brushed off as the mad ramblings of a despot
Speaker 7: without any real power to do so, he did genuinely
Speaker 7: kidnap Nicolas Maduro and has kind of made the country
Speaker 7: into a vassal state of the US, right?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And I learned that this is called a sucerain.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 7: A sucerain is a political leader that expresses power Over
Speaker 7: a separate sovereign entity.
Speaker 3: Okay. Yeah. In like an informal fashion like this?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 7: While the lines aren't quite clear enough right now, it's
Speaker 7: become increasingly evident that the U.S. is exerting more than
Speaker 7: simple influence in Venezuela, making it into a U.S. protectorate
Speaker 7: in all but name. And to be honest with you,
Speaker 7: in my opinion, the U.S. would never add another state
Speaker 7: to the union, particularly one that would add 28.6 million
Speaker 7: Latinx people to the nation's demographics. However, as I hope
Speaker 7: I have evidence throughout the episode, the American empire has
Speaker 7: various forms of exerting its colonial influence throughout the region
Speaker 7: and the world, right? It doesn't necessarily have to become
Speaker 7: a state to become owned by the United States, as
Speaker 7: Puerto Rico, Guam, and several other colonies. Within its treatment
Speaker 7: of its colonies and the insular cases, the U.S. has
Speaker 7: established a separate ideological and legal framework to treat those
Speaker 7: people and pieces of land that it wants to own
Speaker 7: and occupy but not incorporate. Carlos from the future here.
Speaker 7: A couple days after we recorded this episode, Trump announced
Speaker 7: that he already considered the Strait of Hormuz quote-unquote American territory.
Speaker 7: This was reported by several news outlets, including The Guardian,
Speaker 7: which is where I read it originally. While it seems
Speaker 7: pretty obvious that the U.S. government has no way of
Speaker 7: actually establishing control over the Strait because it's on the
Speaker 7: losing side of the war, the overture towards taking it
Speaker 7: over is an attempt to establish a new sphere of U.S.
Speaker 7: hegemony in the region. Imperialism is a business enterprise, and
Speaker 7: much like the conquest of the Guano Islands and the
Speaker 7: inhabited colonies meant access to new resources and military footholds, U.S.
Speaker 7: control of the Strait, which again, very unlikely, would be
Speaker 7: an incredible boon for the U.S. economy. The most comparable
Speaker 7: thing here would be the Panama Canal. Control of the
Speaker 7: canal helped the U.S. become a major global power because
Speaker 7: it controlled shipping in the region. The U.S. government likely
Speaker 7: wants to do something similar with the Strait of Hormuz,
Speaker 7: a major maritime passage for all types of things that
Speaker 7: make the economy move. While the threat against the Strait
Speaker 7: is the newest in a long line of threats to
Speaker 7: annex new territory to the U.S., we should normalize them.
Speaker 7: Through its colonies and the insular cases, as well as
Speaker 7: decades of colonialism and imperialism, The U.S. has built the
Speaker 7: apparatus to expand its empire to people and places beyond
Speaker 7: its borders. While it's unlikely, we shouldn't write it off completely,
Speaker 7: especially as the Trump administration continues to signal that it
Speaker 7: wants to regain domination over the Western Hemisphere and other
Speaker 7: parts of the world.
Speaker 3: If they'd like to read more of your work, where
Speaker 3: can they find you?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm at Vaquero2XL on social media. It's V-A-Q-U-X-L. E-R-O-2-X-L.
Speaker 7: I'm a freelancer, so I've written for a bunch of places.
Speaker 7: My most recent work has been a series of short
Speaker 7: documentaries about different immigrant populations in Puerto Rico, the Dominican population,
Speaker 7: the Chinese population, and the Palestinian population. The Palestinian one
Speaker 7: came out a little less than a month ago. And
Speaker 7: that's pretty much where you can find me. Thanks for
Speaker 7: accompanying me on this colonial journey, James.
Speaker 3: That's what I do. But yeah, thank you for explaining that.
Speaker 9: I feel like it's really good to have these things
Speaker 9: all wrapped up in a way people can understand like that.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Welcome to It Could Happen Here, seemingly the only podcast
Speaker 6: bold enough to do what the mainstream media is too
Speaker 6: cowardly to do and let trans people talk about ourselves,
Speaker 6: I guess, or the unhinged issues that a bunch of
Speaker 6: reactionary cis people have foisted upon us. And here to
Speaker 6: talk with me today about a truly baffling and very
Speaker 6: weird and shitty... anti-trans panic that has been launched in
Speaker 6: the WNBA is Frankie de la Cruz, who's a sports
Speaker 6: writer who writes at the intersection of sports and gender
Speaker 6: and does a very good job of it in a
Speaker 6: way that I was going to say few others do.
Speaker 6: And then I was like, who am I thinking about
Speaker 6: who also does this and does it this well?
Speaker 5: And like, I'm not sure I have anyone.
Speaker 6: So incredible work.
Speaker 8: I appreciate that.
Speaker 6: The other guest I have on today is Bugs Matrix, who,
Speaker 6: if you have like been on the internet and been
Speaker 6: anywhere near trans people, you are aware of bugs. What
Speaker 6: I think people are less aware of is a, that
Speaker 6: if you ever heard a trans person say, yeah, that's,
Speaker 6: that's bugs. B B bugs was also a trans college athlete.
Speaker 6: So both of you two, welcome to the show. And
Speaker 6: I'm excited to get to actually talk about this WNBA,
Speaker 6: Sophie Cunningham bullshit with, The trees. of former trans college athlete,
Speaker 6: trans journalist, and whatever the hell I am, transgender.
Speaker 1: It's truly the meeting of irons.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm excited too. I spend most of my time
Speaker 8: talking to cis people about this, so it's nice to
Speaker 8: have different conversation partners.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's so nice to be able to talk
Speaker 1: with people who intrinsically know Ball.
Speaker 5: That too.
Speaker 6: Oh, God. So, OK, speaking of knowing Ball. So the
Speaker 6: specific controversy, I don't even know what to call this
Speaker 6: media frenzy.
Speaker 1: Witch hunt.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah. centered around a WNBA player named Sophie Cunningham, which
Speaker 6: I guess people have heard of her now. My first
Speaker 6: experience of this was... Seeing everyone talking about Sophie Cunningham
Speaker 6: and being absolutely baffled because I was like, wait, isn't
Speaker 6: she that bench player from The Fever? Why is everyone
Speaker 6: talking about her?
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 6: In, like, football terms, the only thing I can think
Speaker 6: of is, like, somehow everyone in the world knows who, like,
Speaker 6: the Broncos' long snapper is. It's like, what?
Speaker 5: Like, why does anyone know this? Like, what's happening?
Speaker 1: It's like, she's the drop chap. What's going on, dog?
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think The ball knowers have
Speaker 8: kind of always known, because she's a rage baiter, she's
Speaker 8: kind of been a professional bench warmer and rage baiter,
Speaker 8: but the rage baiting has really come to the forefront
Speaker 8: over the last season or two. I think she's personally
Speaker 8: preparing for a exit of the basketball career to right-wing
Speaker 8: grifter kind of trajectory.
Speaker 7: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 8: And this worked out perfectly, didn't it?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can't believe this is still a looper than grift.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean.
Speaker 8: I feel like there's so many places that we can
Speaker 8: start to talk about it, but it's so, I think,
Speaker 8: for me as a journalist, the most frustrating part of
Speaker 8: the entire thing is how it started, which was with
Speaker 8: irresponsible journalism and irresponsible ESPN profile with this dropped-in quote
Speaker 8: from her. And it has, I mean, we're on what
Speaker 8: week of this? Three of this?
Speaker 1: I think we're somewhere in week three, yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it seems sort of like it's never ending. I
Speaker 8: wish it would end.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're going to get more into this in a second.
Speaker 6: I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a player who
Speaker 6: comes off of the bench on this team, which means
Speaker 6: she's not a starter. And she comes off the bench
Speaker 6: to like brick a couple of threes and then goes back.
Speaker 8: And start fights.
Speaker 6: This is like not a.
Speaker 8: Excuse me, excuse me.
Speaker 1: I'm being racist.
Speaker 7: That's true.
Speaker 6: But like, this is not like a star. And the
Speaker 6: team that she's on, the Indiana Fever, has like several
Speaker 6: legitimate superstars on it. And ESPN is like cutting their
Speaker 6: highlights where the first highlight will be like her making
Speaker 6: a basket. And it's like, well, okay, that's the only
Speaker 6: basket she's made in like two weeks.
Speaker 5: But it's like, why?
Speaker 9: Why?
Speaker 6: God, I don't know. I'm frustrated about this, but we
Speaker 6: should tell the actual story. And I think to tell
Speaker 6: the story, I think we need to go back and
Speaker 6: talk about Caitlin Clark's entrance to the league because I
Speaker 6: think that, to some extent, is the beginning of all
Speaker 6: of this and the beginning of kind of this bunch
Speaker 6: of weird fascists who are now, I guess, quote-unquote WNBA fans.
Speaker 8: No, I think that's true because... You know, I think
Speaker 8: the WNBA has this reputation as like a very progressive league.
Speaker 8: And for the most part, that's the players that have
Speaker 8: been progressive. The league is a corporation that has benefited
Speaker 8: from the players, you know, actions. But there's always going
Speaker 8: to be conservative, you know, players or people in kind
Speaker 8: of any atmosphere. And Sophie Cunningham, if you've followed her
Speaker 8: since her college career, has always been that. She, you know,
Speaker 8: was known for being racist when she was at Mizzou, like,
Speaker 8: There was the meme of her and Kalia Copper when
Speaker 8: they were both on different teams. They really did not
Speaker 8: get along. This is a reputation that Sophie has had
Speaker 8: for a long time and on its own just would
Speaker 8: have been, I think, you know, again, a random bench
Speaker 8: player that most people didn't know. But Kaitlyn Clark coming
Speaker 8: to the WNBA and being as high profile as she
Speaker 8: was and the way she was framed as the next
Speaker 8: great white straight cis hope for this league really brought
Speaker 8: a particular kind of culture and fan with her and
Speaker 8: so i think without caitlyn clark coming into the league
Speaker 8: and you know maga people and right wing people seeing
Speaker 8: her as a way to kind of gain a foothold
Speaker 8: with this league i don't think sophie blows up in
Speaker 8: the way that she does especially when you consider that
Speaker 8: right She's been brought to the Fever as essentially Caitlin
Speaker 8: Clark's enforcer because Caitlin Clark can't play defense or hold
Speaker 8: her own on the court at all.
Speaker 6: I swear to God. It's like this team, I keep
Speaker 6: doing cross-sports comparisons, but it's like the Fever are this
Speaker 6: weird team where it's like they're like last year's Cowboys
Speaker 6: where it's like a.
Speaker 6: Weird white fan base that also pulls in a bunch
Speaker 6: of random, like, I just kind of know about football fans. B,
Speaker 6: elite offense. Literally cannot play defense at all.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and, like, this isn't hockey. We don't have enforcers
Speaker 8: in women's volleyball in the same way.
Speaker 1: Right, it's not full contact like this, dog.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think it's worth kind of talking about the racial
Speaker 6: dynamics of this because a lot of the initial hype around.
Speaker 6: Caitlin Clark was this weird sort of like, yeah, like
Speaker 6: what you're saying, Frankie, like this great white hope stuff.
Speaker 6: And like her rival was like, she was like set
Speaker 6: up against Angel Reese, who's a black player who is
Speaker 6: very weird and interesting basketball player. But unfortunately, nobody really
Speaker 6: cares about that because everyone, there's just this like racist
Speaker 6: sort of panic around this whole thing to, to the
Speaker 6: extent where like, there's like congressmen, who are talking about
Speaker 6: starting investigations into Caitlin Clark's fouls.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I think it's important to point out whether
Speaker 8: you want to be super generous and put none of
Speaker 8: this onto Caitlin and say she's an avatar for whatever
Speaker 8: culture war the right is waging, or you want to
Speaker 8: say she really should have been shouting this down a
Speaker 8: long time ago, and whether she believes this or not,
Speaker 8: she's in part responsible because she's complicit in her silence.
Speaker 8: Whichever kind of route you want to take with that
Speaker 8: what you can't deny is that every time she flops
Speaker 8: or is you know takes a hard foul against a
Speaker 8: player who is black queer masculine it gets blown up
Speaker 8: the player on the other end of that is getting
Speaker 8: you know death threats they're dealing with harassment and abuse
Speaker 8: and racial slurs and this has been a pattern that
Speaker 8: goes back to her rookie season And so there is
Speaker 8: very much a gender component, right? A racial component to
Speaker 8: how Caitlin Clark is being received by this fan base
Speaker 8: and how her opponents in a predominantly Black, overwhelmingly queer
Speaker 8: league are also being received.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And circling back to what you were saying about whether
Speaker 6: or not Caitlin Clark is, you know, either you think
Speaker 6: either she's complicit or not in this, like that is
Speaker 6: the base of people who have surrounded her. And that's
Speaker 6: been the basis of the way that sports media also has,
Speaker 6: has interacted with her because if you're sports media, you know,
Speaker 6: there's an enormous incentive to just sort of drive out
Speaker 6: this like racist drivel and like, you know, make clips
Speaker 6: of like every single time she gets knocked down or something,
Speaker 6: or every time she just like flops when someone like
Speaker 6: is like even vaguely in her proximity.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: It creates this sort of feedback loop of it where
Speaker 6: you have, on the one hand, you have these white supremacists, right,
Speaker 6: who feed off of this stuff and want to use
Speaker 6: this as an avenue to push their racism, but then
Speaker 6: also that develops this symbiotic relationship with the sports media
Speaker 6: who are like, yeah, we can make money off of
Speaker 6: this and we're sort of like this a lot of
Speaker 6: the time anyways.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I've been covering the WNBA for about a
Speaker 8: decade since it was Just lesbians and old people in
Speaker 8: the stands. And those were the best days, I will say.
Speaker 8: And as someone who has covered the league for that
Speaker 8: long and been to as many games as I have,
Speaker 8: I will obviously say not all Fever fans feel a
Speaker 8: particular way or believe a certain thing. Of course, that's
Speaker 8: the case. I've also seen the shift in the three
Speaker 8: years that Caitlin Clark has been in the league of
Speaker 8: who shows up to the Fever games. And as we
Speaker 8: will continue to talk about, I think as we talk
Speaker 8: about Sophie and now that kind of Sophie has become
Speaker 8: the actual mouthpiece that Caitlin has failed to be for
Speaker 8: these people, the people who are showing up to their
Speaker 8: road games as well in support of Sophie and her viewpoints.
Speaker 8: And so, of course, right, probably the majority of Fever
Speaker 8: fans are great. And it's also true that there really
Speaker 8: has been an influx of people who never... I can
Speaker 8: curse here, right? Never fucked with the WNBA, right? They
Speaker 8: didn't care about women's sports. And they have shown up
Speaker 8: and brought a lot of the toxic mainstream culture and
Speaker 8: things about men's sports culture that probably most of us
Speaker 8: watch women's sports to get away from has shown up here.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 6: It coincides with, with Caitlin Clark, you know, coming to
Speaker 6: the league. So I guess we should start actually talking
Speaker 6: about Sophie Cunningham.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Like for better or for worse, Caitlin Clark, does want
Speaker 6: to play basketball.
Speaker 1: Yeah like she she's here to literally play ball like
Speaker 1: like definitely her not speaking up against like being portrayed
Speaker 1: as this avatar is shitty and frustrating but like at
Speaker 1: the end of the day she's here to play with
Speaker 1: the nice little orange sphere and Sophie not so.
Speaker 6: Much Yeah, this is one of these things where it's
Speaker 6: kind of vibes based, but I feel like the way
Speaker 6: that it was portrayed in the media and then this
Speaker 6: also fed into sort of like the fascist base was
Speaker 6: that Caitlin Clark was going to come into the WNBA
Speaker 6: and she was immediately going to be the best player
Speaker 6: and everyone was going to have to deal with it.
Speaker 6: And that like didn't happen because she's like, a pretty
Speaker 6: good player, but, like... She's fine. A, even if she
Speaker 6: was that good, it's like, okay, unfortunately for every other
Speaker 6: great basketball player in the WNBA, you exist at the
Speaker 6: same time as Prime Major Wilson, so, like, good luck
Speaker 6: ever winning any award.
Speaker 7: Like, I don't know.
Speaker 6: This is, like, maybe the greatest basketball player who's, like,
Speaker 6: walked the earth in this generation.
Speaker 5: Like, good luck.
Speaker 8: It's true. And even when Caitlyn drops 30 points, she's
Speaker 8: often giving up 30 on turnovers, so she kind of
Speaker 8: ends up being a net neutral.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And Angel Wilson, by the way, was, like, Defensive Player
Speaker 6: of the Year and MVP. And, like, you know, it's like... She's, like,
Speaker 6: you know, just this, like, transcendent player.
Speaker 9: But....
Speaker 6: I think there's this moment where like it becomes clear
Speaker 6: after like a couple of years of this that like,
Speaker 6: you know, like there's still a bunch of people who
Speaker 6: are in the trenches being like Caitlin Clark is the
Speaker 6: best player in the league. But like, no, it's not
Speaker 6: clear to me if she's better than like rookie Olivia Biles.
Speaker 3: She's not.
Speaker 2: I don't think she is.
Speaker 8: She's not. Olivia Miles has a has an MVP case
Speaker 8: like as a rookie that I mean, yeah, doesn't in
Speaker 8: my opinion.
Speaker 7: I love her.
Speaker 6: I want to talk about her at the end because
Speaker 6: I want to end up like a little bit of
Speaker 6: just like ball good. But I think there's this moment
Speaker 6: of like Caitlin, like I guess she like kind of
Speaker 6: denounced it like the end of her first season.
Speaker 1: But like she felt like without going like hard in
Speaker 1: the paint to it, like you're still leaving room.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But it's like like she won't go hard in the
Speaker 6: paint against it. But she also, you know, as you're saying,
Speaker 6: like before the break, it's like, yeah, she wants to
Speaker 6: play basketball.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And so she's not willing to go on camera and
Speaker 6: say the things and do the things that these people want.
Speaker 6: And I guess that's where Sophie Cunningham came in because
Speaker 6: she will do that.
Speaker 5: She will.
Speaker 8: And I mean, I think it's also related that she
Speaker 8: started a podcast this year, right? Like she has decided to,
Speaker 8: she's basically using her profile as a fever bench player, AKA,
Speaker 8: you know, Caitlin Clark's enforcer. And the exposure that has
Speaker 8: come with that, which is more than she's ever had
Speaker 8: in her, you know, however many seven or so seasons
Speaker 8: in the WNBA. But to me, what's clear is that
Speaker 8: she is setting herself up for an exit. And the
Speaker 8: podcast is kind of the first step in that. And
Speaker 8: maybe people didn't care what she had to say before.
Speaker 8: But now that more people know who she is because
Speaker 8: of who she's playing with, She is kind of starting
Speaker 8: to step into this other— and it's very, very— we can talk
Speaker 8: more about this, too, but it's very insidious the way
Speaker 8: she talks about sharing her views because she's basically co-opting
Speaker 8: social justice language when she'll say things like, people tell
Speaker 8: you to use a platform, and then when you use it, right,
Speaker 8: they criticize you for it or whatever it is. And
Speaker 8: so she's kind of doing this thing where she's starting
Speaker 8: a podcast. She's already, also, she keeps getting fined for
Speaker 8: saying shit on her podcast about the refs and stuff.
Speaker 8: She really just, like, mouths off. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, maybe her being on a podcast is a
Speaker 1: good thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, right?
Speaker 8: So she has this podcast, but then at the same time,
Speaker 8: she's projecting the, I'm using my platform for, you know,
Speaker 8: my beliefs, right?
Speaker 6: Which is something that, like, I've heard even sort of, like,
Speaker 6: left-wing people, like, in the space doing this, like, well,
Speaker 6: it's just an interesting thing because the WNBA has always
Speaker 6: been a league where, like, players do use their platforms
Speaker 6: to do activism. And, like, and that is absolutely true. Like,
Speaker 6: the actual first in professional sports, actually, I could be
Speaker 6: wrong about about that because maybe there was another women's
Speaker 6: league that did it first that I just missed, but
Speaker 6: I'm pretty sure they were the first professional sports league
Speaker 6: that was actually doing like anti-police brutality protests.
Speaker 8: Yes, they were. They also, they were doing that before
Speaker 8: Colin Kaepernick took a knee.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah.
Speaker 8: And then once he did kneel, actually that's how I
Speaker 8: started following the WNBA was I was writing about player
Speaker 8: protests and somebody told me entire WNBA teams were kneeling
Speaker 8: on the court and it had gotten no coverage. And
Speaker 8: I was like, oh, and that's when I actually started.
Speaker 8: So Yeah, they were doing media blackouts to talk about
Speaker 8: police brutality before Colin Kaepernick knelt.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's fucking awesome.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they fucking rock. Like, it's good as hell.
Speaker 1: That's sick.
Speaker 6: But then you get media people being like, well, this
Speaker 6: has always been a league where people use their platform
Speaker 6: for activism.
Speaker 1: That's such a mealy-mouthed bullshit. Like, okay, sure, technically, but like.
Speaker 8: I.
Speaker 6: Guess you could call a clan rally activism. If you
Speaker 6: really want to do that, I will be angry at you.
Speaker 6: But like, this is like not the same thing at all.
Speaker 1: There is no difference between the Unite the Right rally
Speaker 1: and going to help out at Food Not Bombs. If
Speaker 1: you're stupid. If you're fucking stupid.
Speaker 5: That must be such.
Speaker 6: An amazing world to live in psychologically. Everything must be
Speaker 6: so easy for you if you just don't understand anything.
Speaker 1: You gotta be so great to be a moron.
Speaker 8: I mean, the Turning Point USA flyer to support Sophie
Speaker 8: Cunningham spelled her name wrong, so honestly.
Speaker 5: Of course.
Speaker 6: This is coming back to one of the things about
Speaker 6: being on the right versus being on the left, which
Speaker 6: is like, you know, In order to be on the left,
Speaker 6: you do have to have standards. Like, you can't be, like,
Speaker 6: an abuser, right? Like, you will eventually get run out
Speaker 6: for that.
Speaker 8: Maybe.
Speaker 6: Whereas on the right, you can just do it and
Speaker 6: it's fine. But, comma, if you get arrested, only one
Speaker 6: of these two groups is going to be there for you.
Speaker 6: And it sure as fuck not the people who are
Speaker 6: going to spell your name wrong on the promotional flyer.
Speaker 1: It's so beastline. okay, but like, what has Sophie been
Speaker 1: saying and doing? Let's just get into the meat of it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's talk about that.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 8: And I think this is where, as I kind of
Speaker 8: said at the beginning, I think it's important to look
Speaker 8: at where it started because I think this was a
Speaker 8: failure of media from the beginning. And the reason that
Speaker 8: it has snowballed in the way that it is is
Speaker 8: with an incredible headline. It was basically like, love her
Speaker 8: or hate her, like Sophie won't be ignored. And I
Speaker 8: kind of was like, well, she was, I was ignoring
Speaker 8: her until you Decided to run a profile.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you've decided she won't be ignored.
Speaker 6: On a baseline, like, this is such a baffling player
Speaker 6: to run a profile of.
Speaker 8: Right, well, so the profile itself, too, is, like, such,
Speaker 8: to me, an example of, like, shoddy journalism. Because they spend, like,
Speaker 8: most of it where her parents are kind of bragging
Speaker 8: about how she was a childhood bully. Then they go
Speaker 8: on to say how she used to play on teams
Speaker 8: with boys and beat them and that was like a
Speaker 8: source of pride for them. And then after those things,
Speaker 8: they kind of casually drop in Sophie saying, people think
Speaker 8: I hate trans, end of sentence. Trans what?
Speaker 5: We don't know.
Speaker 8: But I don't. I don't. I just essentially, I believe
Speaker 8: in love, but I think biological males should not be
Speaker 8: in sport with girls. So again, we also have adult
Speaker 8: men being playing, somehow playing sport with young girls. So
Speaker 8: there was just so many places as a reporter, if
Speaker 8: I were writing this profile, that I kind of would
Speaker 8: have been like, huh, okay, well, can you give any
Speaker 8: examples of, you know, grown men playing sports against girls?
Speaker 8: Could you talk to me about why you're so proud
Speaker 8: of having played against boys, but you think, like, there
Speaker 8: were so many places you could have gone here, and
Speaker 8: none of it happened.
Speaker 6: It just not there in the middle of this profile.
Speaker 6: To be fair to ESPN, they did fire most of
Speaker 6: their actual journalists in order to give more money to
Speaker 6: a fucking Pat McAfee, a guy who used to be
Speaker 6: a hunter, I think, and who now spends all of
Speaker 6: his time having fucking Aaron Rodgers on his show to
Speaker 6: scream about why vaccines are bad and why trans women
Speaker 6: shouldn't be able to compete in sports. So, like, you know,
Speaker 6: this is truly not ESPN's fault. They simply fired everyone
Speaker 6: who could normally do journalism, and now we're left with
Speaker 6: whatever this shit is.
Speaker 8: Another person whose opinion on trans women in sports we
Speaker 8: should really be listening to, Aaron Rodgers.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Aaron Rodgers.
Speaker 7: I will listen.
Speaker 6: I will not agree with Aaron Rodgers' position on sports,
Speaker 6: but if he can stay in the pocket for longer
Speaker 6: than 2.3 seconds on two consecutive plays, I will listen
Speaker 6: to him talk about women's sports. And he can't.
Speaker 7: He can't do it. He won't.
Speaker 6: Okay me being pissed at aaron rogers for hitting me
Speaker 6: aside why did they write this that's the part i
Speaker 6: don't understand i.
Speaker 1: Mean because there is like a larger media ecosystem that's
Speaker 1: going to feed on just that one little nugget of
Speaker 1: like anti-trans hate. Like it is so easy. The left
Speaker 1: is going to get mad. The right is going to
Speaker 1: embrace this and it's going to just fuel this culture war.
Speaker 1: Like it's, that's going to generate so many clicks.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 8: And I think, I don't know how long this profile
Speaker 8: was in the works. Sometimes it can be, you know,
Speaker 8: for profiles like this, it can be in the works
Speaker 8: a very long time. Other times it's not, but I
Speaker 8: think it's also worth mentioning that just before this profile dropped,
Speaker 8: Sophie got into a high-profile skirmish during a game against
Speaker 8: the Phoenix Mercury. Many people, most people, have probably seen
Speaker 8: the kind of viral meme of her pointing, and she's
Speaker 8: pointing at Dawana Bonner, who they're former teammates, actually, and
Speaker 8: Alyssa Thomas. And basically, I mean, it was almost like
Speaker 8: a full-team brawl, but there were a lot of kind
Speaker 8: of racial undertones to the way that that went down.
Speaker 6: Racial overtones, the way it was talked about, they were
Speaker 6: just racist shit.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 8: And the way that meme has shown up, I think,
Speaker 8: is really important because there's not really a way to
Speaker 8: deny that it was racist when it's actually being used
Speaker 8: in very, like, I've seen it at least, in very
Speaker 8: racist or offensive or problematic ways since it happened. But
Speaker 8: that profile drops on the heels of that really big
Speaker 8: fight that was all over the televisions. It was being
Speaker 8: played up and people were taking sides and saying how
Speaker 8: great and how cool Sophie was. It was appalling, actually,
Speaker 8: to watch. But these two things, this profile drops right
Speaker 8: on the heels of that. And I think that that
Speaker 8: really put more eyes on it than might have happened
Speaker 8: otherwise as well.
Speaker 3: That makes sense.
Speaker 1: So I did just pull up the profile and the
Speaker 1: framing of this is so fucking annoying. there's a whole
Speaker 1: section is, is she hero or heel? And then there's
Speaker 1: just anecdotes where she's a hero here. She's a heel here.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's, oh my God.
Speaker 6: It's written very clickbaity.
Speaker 7: It is.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, this is incredibly clickbait. This
Speaker 1: is incredibly like, it's supposed to be like, she's divisive
Speaker 1: for some reason, but we're telling you that she's divisive.
Speaker 8: And I don't think there was any reason to have
Speaker 8: asked her about her stance on trans women in sports
Speaker 8: because she, before this profile, we could have maybe guessed
Speaker 8: where she stood based on some likes and retweets of
Speaker 8: things about protecting women and girls, but nothing was overt.
Speaker 8: She had not been overt enough that it actually, to me, again,
Speaker 8: as the journalist writing this story, I wouldn't have asked
Speaker 8: her about it because to me, it wasn't significant enough
Speaker 8: in what she had said. It isn't a thing I
Speaker 8: would have even wanted to try to have her clarify.
Speaker 8: So it seems to me either she brought it up
Speaker 8: or she was deliberately asked about it and given the
Speaker 8: opportunity to make these comments.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I guess this is an important part of
Speaker 6: the pivot because kind of before this story, she was
Speaker 6: just a racist. Like, that was her lane, was just.
Speaker 5: Being a racist.
Speaker 6: Let's get into her doing the transphobia pivot, which was
Speaker 6: kind of arc two. Well, okay, I'm saying pivot here.
Speaker 6: It's not like she's not still doing, like, racist stuff, but.
Speaker 1: The transphobia, yes, they are.
Speaker 8: It's yes and, and I think actually, if we talk
Speaker 8: about transphobia as being rooted in white supremacy, they're really
Speaker 8: two sides of the same coin here, because at the
Speaker 8: end of the day, what's actually happening is conversations around
Speaker 8: who is an acceptable definition of a woman, whether it's
Speaker 8: the black masculine women she's playing against and bullying, or
Speaker 8: the trans women and girls that she's speaking out against.
Speaker 8: So I'd say, eh, two sides of the same coin.
Speaker 1: I think that's a fair way to sum it up.
Speaker 6: I'm realizing now we probably should have mentioned this at
Speaker 6: the beginning for people who have not seen her, but
Speaker 6: like Sophie Cunningham looks like the kind of person you
Speaker 6: would have seen on like, I don't actually know who
Speaker 6: did the like positive propaganda for the Nazis, but like what, like,
Speaker 6: I don't know, like, like if you're doing, if you're
Speaker 6: doing like a dare story, like, yeah.
Speaker 1: Lenny Riefenstahl would have loved her.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Like Lenny Riefenstahl, like recruitment ad thing. Like she is
Speaker 6: like the person you would put on that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, she's now had more gender-affirming care than most
Speaker 8: dolls could ever dream of having, so.
Speaker 1: Oh, also that, also that. They want to be quacky
Speaker 1: so bad, it's crazy. Like, there's something psychosexual rooted in, like,
Speaker 1: Mar-a-Lago face, I swear to God.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so let's talk about, kind of, the arc of
Speaker 6: Sophie Cunningham as anti-transmedia. person because she initially leans like
Speaker 6: all the way the fuck into it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Sophie leans into it. But what happens pretty quickly
Speaker 8: is that right wing media picks it up, it kind
Speaker 8: of gets news aggregated everywhere. And then she doubles down
Speaker 8: in press conferences and starts to kind of say, I
Speaker 8: said what I said, essentially.
Speaker 6: And I.
Speaker 8: Should have the ability to, you know, say what I believe.
Speaker 8: And once she doubles down in the press conference, that's
Speaker 8: when you start to see the rallies happening, anti-trans rallies
Speaker 8: outside because the fever is on a road trip now.
Speaker 8: And so, and every city they visit, anti-trans groups start
Speaker 8: showing up, whether it's, you know, to promote their bill for,
Speaker 8: you know, children having general exams to play sports or
Speaker 8: whatever else they're there to do. But some of the
Speaker 8: more high-profile anti-trans groups starts to show up, and that's,
Speaker 8: I think, when it devolves.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I guess we have ahead of us the branching path of,
Speaker 6: should we talk about the devolution, or should we talk
Speaker 6: about her brief attempt to pivot back to basketball?
Speaker 8: Well, I guess what I think is really notable is
Speaker 8: that the group that really shows up, and I think
Speaker 8: where there starts to be some controversy is a group
Speaker 8: called XXXY Athletics that was started by a woman named
Speaker 8: Jennifer Say. And I think that mainstream people do not
Speaker 8: know who this group is. And basically their whole thing
Speaker 8: is that they pay cis girls to protest sporting events
Speaker 8: where they might have to compete against a trans girl.
Speaker 8: And then that protest creates media and controversy. So they
Speaker 8: literally are like paying people to create these controversies. And
Speaker 8: they showed up and they paid two girls to sit
Speaker 8: in the front row at the game against the storm
Speaker 8: with signs thanking Sophie and a storm owner got upset
Speaker 8: and cursed them out. And the storm owner got suspended
Speaker 8: and the transphobes got an apology. And so this I
Speaker 8: think is also where the WNBA now had an opportunity
Speaker 8: to do something and they took the wrong side. And
Speaker 8: so The thing to me that is really notable is
Speaker 8: that the specific group and then Riley Gaines, you know,
Speaker 8: noted fifth place swimmer Riley Gaines shows up.
Speaker 1: Oh my God.
Speaker 8: And once that happens, it's kind of, it's out of control.
Speaker 8: But I think what sucks as someone who's been covering
Speaker 8: this for so long is there are certain names that
Speaker 8: when I see them, I know the playbook. I know
Speaker 8: what's happening. I know what's coming and I'm prepared for it.
Speaker 8: And no one in media was prepared for it. And
Speaker 8: they have failed to identify anyone. people in XXXY shirts
Speaker 8: in the front row of, you know, a basketball game
Speaker 8: as wearing hate symbols. They have failed to state that, like,
Speaker 8: trans people are being genocided by the government, and it
Speaker 8: has turned this entire thing into, like, a we can
Speaker 8: agree to disagree. And so I feel like that's kind
Speaker 8: of the missing piece here, right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it is just, like, an abject failure to do, like,
Speaker 1: an iota of research on, like, who these folks are.
Speaker 1: So following the event with the storm, Coach getting penalized
Speaker 1: for being a normal person, the WNBA's statement pissed me
Speaker 1: off so hard because it's like, we're having hard conversations,
Speaker 1: thinking about a lot of things. And there has never
Speaker 1: been a trans woman competing in the WNBA. There are
Speaker 1: no trans athletes who are likely to be competing in
Speaker 1: the WNBA anytime soon. This is such a hypothetical non-issue.
Speaker 1: This shouldn't be a hard conversation to have. Just take
Speaker 1: us stance. Even if you fuck up, take us stance.
Speaker 1: I swear to God.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: And not only is it a non-issue at this point,
Speaker 8: we have people saying, well, we can have hard conversations
Speaker 8: and agree to disagree. And I'm like, who gave a
Speaker 8: bunch of cis people permission to disagree about a group
Speaker 8: that they are not part of and policies that actively
Speaker 8: do not affect them? And the other piece that the
Speaker 8: media doesn't do is like, okay, we can agree to
Speaker 8: disagree or we have two different opinions. What are those opinions? Like,
Speaker 8: one group wants human rights, basic human rights, and to
Speaker 8: be included in society. And the other group wants, at best,
Speaker 8: for a group of people to, like, not exist, and
Speaker 8: at worst, to die.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: The fact that we're in a genocide, like, by our government,
Speaker 8: and nobody will name that. And this is, that's so frustrating.
Speaker 8: These are the stakes here, right?
Speaker 5: Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1: This is a microcosm for all of it. And it's
Speaker 1: just like you're saying, agree to disagree on what? What
Speaker 1: are you disagreeing with? Let's say that the WNBA takes
Speaker 1: the radical stance of implementing the former standards that the
Speaker 1: International Olympic Committee, had up until fairly recently regarding trans athletes,
Speaker 1: which necessitated like two years of hormone therapy. before a
Speaker 1: trans woman could compete. And just on a personal stance,
Speaker 1: I'm like, I don't like setting hard boundaries for when
Speaker 1: trans people can exist. But that aside, having just a
Speaker 1: baseline policy that will not impact a single player currently
Speaker 1: involved in the WNBA, that's so bare bones. That is
Speaker 1: the easiest thing to do because it functionally changes nothing
Speaker 1: on the day to day.
Speaker 8: I do think the WNBA needs to be careful because
Speaker 8: we've seen like the policy you're talking about wouldn't impact anybody.
Speaker 8: And whether I agree that they should have a policy,
Speaker 8: I mean, you know, I don't really think anyone should
Speaker 8: have these policies.
Speaker 10: No, no, no.
Speaker 1: I agree. I agree with that.
Speaker 8: But I see your point. I think my concern becomes
Speaker 8: we've seen how chromosome testing and some of these other
Speaker 8: forms of sex testing are happening above the WNBA and
Speaker 8: often in the, you know, the International Olympic Committee and everything.
Speaker 7: Oh my God.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: And often, right, that trickles down. And I think something
Speaker 8: the WNBA needs to be very careful about and cognizant of,
Speaker 8: the people who are most directly impacted by these sex
Speaker 8: testing policies, there's no trans women in the WNBA and
Speaker 8: they won't be impacted. But, you know, Black women in
Speaker 8: particular are so often that directly impacted the population like
Speaker 8: the league the WNBA is actually full of people who
Speaker 8: are directly impacted by a lot of the policies that
Speaker 8: we're talking around even though they're not trans and so
Speaker 8: it's a very slippery slope that I like I hope
Speaker 8: they get right in this moment because if they go
Speaker 8: too far in the other direction it will be a
Speaker 8: mess in like.
Speaker 1: 12 ways Oh yeah, no, and I'm not actually advocating
Speaker 1: for them to implement a policy like that. I'm just like,
Speaker 1: for me, having any policy, just to shut up like
Speaker 1: the couple of former NBA yahoos who are like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to go be a woman now. And I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: you can go shut up.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Oh no, I didn't think you were advocating for that.
Speaker 8: I think just because we can see how sex testing
Speaker 8: is going elsewhere, I think sometimes people forget.
Speaker 1: No, I remember Caster Semenya. Like, don't worry. I, like,
Speaker 1: absolutely do not want to see that shit happen.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and but mainstream, like, whether mainstream people or, like,
Speaker 8: mainstream media or just, like, cis people in general, they don't, like,
Speaker 8: there's so many nuances here, too.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 8: They get completely missed and everything gets flattened and then
Speaker 8: it becomes more well, we'll just put this policy in
Speaker 8: place and then, you know, people don't think about that
Speaker 8: it's a whole different, you know, can of worms.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The fact that they had no policy before any
Speaker 1: of this came into being, it's kind of what I
Speaker 1: think led this to be the perfect storm.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because, like, with it being such a blank slate for grifters,
Speaker 1: bad actors, and even just super misinformed folks who don't
Speaker 1: really know what's going on, like, to kind of project
Speaker 1: and or manipulate the situation, there is not a clean,
Speaker 1: quick answer.
Speaker 8: There's not. And I will say a lot of leagues,
Speaker 8: I think, are trying not to put policies in place
Speaker 8: right now if they don't already have one, because if
Speaker 8: there's no policy, there's nothing to violate. And I think
Speaker 8: they hoped they could fly under the radar. I know
Speaker 8: that a lot of trans advocates in this space are
Speaker 8: actually you know, behind the scenes kind of suggesting that
Speaker 8: as well, kind of wait, wait it out a little
Speaker 8: bit because without a policy, you hope you don't end
Speaker 8: up on the radar of the Trump administration or whoever else.
Speaker 8: Obviously that has not been what happened here at all. Unfortunately.
Speaker 6: I want to talk a little bit about the weird
Speaker 6: shit where like Ennis Cantor freedom, who's like a former
Speaker 6: sort of NBA washout turds, like right wing, culture war
Speaker 6: guy him and like Royce White and apparently some other
Speaker 6: just absolute fail sons of the MNBA they're like oh
Speaker 6: we're going to declare for the for the 2027 draft
Speaker 6: and I think that that in some ways I think
Speaker 6: is actually a really clarifying thing for what the question
Speaker 6: of can trans women play women's sports is actually about.
Speaker 6: And I think this is the thing that the media
Speaker 6: has really not understood because, you know, some of it,
Speaker 6: I think, is just transmisogyny, right? Like, they don't actually
Speaker 6: really think that trans women are women. But, like, the
Speaker 6: argument over can trans women play women's sports, if you
Speaker 6: listen to how people like Sophie Cunningham frame it, and
Speaker 6: this has spread everywhere, throughout even parts of the Democratic Party,
Speaker 6: where you get people talking about, like, well, should young
Speaker 6: girls be playing against men? And that's the actual argument here.
Speaker 6: The stakes of this argument is not about sports. It's,
Speaker 6: are trans women women, or are we not? And if
Speaker 6: we're not, then it becomes sort of de facto legitimate
Speaker 6: to impose, you know, all of the segregation policies that
Speaker 6: they've been putting in place, all of the, you know,
Speaker 6: and when I say they've been putting in place, I'm
Speaker 6: not talking about even sports leagues, I'm talking about, like,
Speaker 6: the federal government.
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 6: And a bunch of state governments, the Catholic Church... you know,
Speaker 6: in terms of gender affirming care bans, that's the actual
Speaker 6: stakes of this is like, are we women or not?
Speaker 6: And the moment you go, no, you're not, you're like
Speaker 6: some other kind of thing where like, maybe we'll let
Speaker 6: you do this eventually at some point, you start getting
Speaker 6: people making, you know, we listen to these people being like, well,
Speaker 6: the leagues can decide individually, like league by league, who
Speaker 6: they think is like legitimately qualified to play. And it's like, okay,
Speaker 6: this is an argument for segregation.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Right? This is explicitly an argument that is, leagues should
Speaker 6: be allowed to segregate players. And that's also the whole, like, oh,
Speaker 6: why don't trans people go start their own league? It's like,
Speaker 6: we had this.
Speaker 5: It was segregation.
Speaker 6: It's this thing that's, like, infuriating. It just doesn't click.
Speaker 6: That's what the goal is here.
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: I think what makes, like, trans women in sports such
Speaker 1: a potent, like, rallying point, it's preying on so many
Speaker 1: axes of Not just like putting young girls in danger,
Speaker 1: but also like I can like there's an economic component
Speaker 1: to because like so many people get involved in sports
Speaker 1: as kids so that they're able to get college scholarships.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 1: And so like it's just it becomes this thing all
Speaker 1: the way down.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But, like, it's this situation where by saying that this
Speaker 1: boy could be on the girls' team, that is implicitly
Speaker 1: signaling this notion that this boy is going to get
Speaker 1: all of the college scholarships. Or this trans woman who
Speaker 1: we're framing as a boy on the girls' team because,
Speaker 1: God forbid, they be normal for 10 seconds. And aside
Speaker 1: from everything else, that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how
Speaker 1: much money there isn't in like women's college sports programs
Speaker 1: or even like women's professional sports. There is not a
Speaker 1: single trans athlete who was transitioning for that good, good money.
Speaker 8: No, it's never, never happened. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That is literally never happened.
Speaker 6: Like, even if you were to transition to play in
Speaker 6: the WNBA, it's like, great, you're making you're making as
Speaker 6: much money as like, I don't know, if you're the
Speaker 6: best player in the league, you might be making as
Speaker 6: much money as like a practice team guy on like
Speaker 6: an NFL team.
Speaker 1: Well, like.
Speaker 8: If you're transitioning so that you can play women's sports,
Speaker 8: something tells me you just needed an excuse and you
Speaker 8: wanted to transition anyway.
Speaker 1: Also that, like, if you start, okay, actually, actually, if
Speaker 1: you start transitioning as a bit so you can dominate
Speaker 1: women's sports, call me. I want to have you on
Speaker 1: my podcast.
Speaker 8: Truly commitment to the bit.
Speaker 6: It's like, obviously, like, none of the people who are
Speaker 6: doing this are ever going to like do any kind
Speaker 6: of even vaguely transitioning thing.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 6: The closest thing I've seen to this, the actress who
Speaker 6: did She's the Man.
Speaker 8: Amanda Bynes.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like talked about it in an interview one time
Speaker 6: that like having to like pretend to be a guy
Speaker 6: gave her, like she didn't have the words gender dysphoria,
Speaker 6: but if you read her describing it, it's like, oh no,
Speaker 6: she got gender dysphoria.
Speaker 1: No, she totally talked about having gender dysphoria. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, it's very genuinely, again, like, if this is
Speaker 1: the push that you need to start playing with your gender,
Speaker 1: because for some reason you just really want to play
Speaker 1: on the women's teams. Like, baby girl.
Speaker 6: DIY HRT.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: It's just this, like, right-wing protect-the-children fantasy that they're using
Speaker 6: as the justification for, you know, like, this is the
Speaker 6: wedge issue that they use to push all of the
Speaker 6: rest of their stuff. And if you go back to, like,
Speaker 6: the Daily Wire people who were instrumental in getting a
Speaker 6: bunch of the anti-trans bills passed under the Biden administration,
Speaker 6: before they kind of blew up their company trying to
Speaker 6: make Pendragon.
Speaker 1: They're thankfully in their flop era right now. Yeah.
Speaker 6: But back when they were doing this, you would listen
Speaker 6: to them talk about how we need to eradicate transgenderism,
Speaker 6: because that was the actual goal. It was never about sports.
Speaker 6: It was about eradicating us yeah the second.
Speaker 1: They're allowed to speak yes that's when the mask comes
Speaker 1: off and yeah.
Speaker 8: And I think the piece about the trans misogyny that
Speaker 8: I think sometimes gets missed too is we can look
Speaker 8: at somebody like Jennifer Say who you know runs the
Speaker 8: XXXY athletics and she in addition to someone like Nancy
Speaker 8: Hogshead who was an Olympic swimmer who started the women's
Speaker 8: sports policy working group with Martina Navratilova similar kind of
Speaker 8: group trying to not allow trans women and girls to
Speaker 8: play sports with girls. These are people who actually made
Speaker 8: their post-athletic kind of names as advocates against sexual abuse
Speaker 8: in sport. They'd both been victims of adult male coaches.
Speaker 8: This is where that really insidious, turfy kind of when
Speaker 8: you paint trans women as men. Again, the problem is
Speaker 8: still men, right? And so these are people who were
Speaker 8: known as feminist advocates in the space before making the
Speaker 8: anti-trans pivot. And I think that sometimes that piece gets
Speaker 8: missed too in the very insidious way that framing trans
Speaker 8: women as men is. actually can make some of these
Speaker 8: target points of making them seem like threats appealing or
Speaker 8: make sense to maybe feminists, quote-unquote, like Jennifer Say or
Speaker 8: Nancy Hong said.
Speaker 6: You know, this has been a thing that's been happening
Speaker 6: back down to, like, the original TERFs, right? Like, the original, like,
Speaker 6: transphobic wing of the radical feminists, where, like, if you
Speaker 6: look at how this played out during the porn wars, too,
Speaker 6: one of the fundamental... issues with organizing as any kind
Speaker 6: of marginalized group is that, you know, there's always going
Speaker 6: to be people inside of your marginalized group who you
Speaker 6: don't agree with. And there can become a point where
Speaker 6: the incentive to, instead of trying to like fight or
Speaker 6: directly like have conflict with the actual group that is
Speaker 6: oppressing you, right? Where it's like, yeah, if you're doing
Speaker 6: women's sports, the group that is oppressing you is like
Speaker 6: the men who are abusing you, right? You can look
Speaker 6: at this in sort of the class context, right? Where
Speaker 6: you know, like, yeah, if you were a worker, like
Speaker 6: you were being oppressed by the actual ruling class, which
Speaker 6: is the capitalist class that owns the means of production.
Speaker 6: But there becomes a point where it's easier to try
Speaker 6: to police the behavior of your own than it is
Speaker 6: to fight the dominant group. And this is, you know,
Speaker 6: I'm taking this on a little bit of a tangent here,
Speaker 6: but like, if you've ever heard the term like the lumpenproletariat,
Speaker 6: it's just this term that I know there are going
Speaker 6: to be some people in the audience who are very
Speaker 6: attached to that term as like a self-referential thing. But
Speaker 6: it's supposed to be this, like, part of the working
Speaker 6: class that's, like, drifters and vagrants and, like, Marx goes
Speaker 6: on this, like, really sort of, like, blood-curdling rants about, like,
Speaker 6: organ grinders and, like, pimps and, like, runaway soldiers and, like,
Speaker 6: all of the, like, boot shiners on the street and, like,
Speaker 6: all of these groups of people who have nothing to
Speaker 6: do with each other from, like, a sociological class sense. Like,
Speaker 6: there is, like, absolutely nothing in common that, like, someone
Speaker 6: who polishes boots on the street has in common with, like,
Speaker 6: someone who's, like, run away from being a soldier. But
Speaker 6: this is, like, Marx's, you know, there's this thing in
Speaker 6: the journal Endnotes about this. This is, like, Marx's disgust,
Speaker 6: specifically at, like, the Victorian disgust about, like, this part
Speaker 6: of the class that he thinks is, like, lowly or whatever.
Speaker 6: And Marx just, like, goes off on these people. And
Speaker 6: this has been a thing for a really long time of, like,
Speaker 6: the working class movement trying to, like, purify itself of these, like,
Speaker 6: lumpen elements who are supposed to be, like, anarchists and, like, unpure.
Speaker 6: And you get this in the feminist movement where, like,
Speaker 6: in the feminist movement, like, that was us. That was
Speaker 6: trans women. We were, like, the elements that was, like,
Speaker 6: the easiest to, you know, you could be, like, well,
Speaker 6: all these trans women are actually men and they're trying to, like,
Speaker 6: infiltrate our spaces. And you can spend all of your
Speaker 6: energy trying to purify your own movement against this other
Speaker 6: group of people who are inside of your movement instead
Speaker 6: of actually like fighting the outside and also you'll be
Speaker 6: rewarded for it you're.
Speaker 8: Doing the patriarchy's work for them.
Speaker 6: Yeah and they'll pay you for it instead of fighting you.
Speaker 8: Right by pitting cis women and trans women against each
Speaker 8: other they fight each other instead of realizing that their
Speaker 8: struggles are tied up together and you know fight the
Speaker 8: patriarchy together Yeah, right?
Speaker 1: Like, literally, like, trans access to healthcare is going to
Speaker 1: help everyone else, too. It's that simple. Yeah.
Speaker 6: There's, like, an unbelievable number of, like, reproductive healthcare organizing, like,
Speaker 6: are trans people.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Like, it's a bunch of trans fans. And also trans fans, too. Like,
Speaker 6: it's like, you know, these are struggles that are intimately
Speaker 6: bound up. From an external perspective, if you can pit
Speaker 6: these two groups against each other, and then from an
Speaker 6: internal perspective, if you can, you know... convince one of
Speaker 6: these groups that the reason they're being oppressed is the
Speaker 6: other one and channel them into this path of least
Speaker 6: resistance where you can nominally be doing what you think
Speaker 6: is like radicalism to like free your people but is
Speaker 6: actually just like fucking over another group of people in
Speaker 6: service of the ruling class you can do genocides and
Speaker 6: here we are yep yeah and here we are So
Speaker 6: there's a couple more things I wanted to touch on.
Speaker 6: One of which, and I think Bugs, you have an
Speaker 6: interesting perspective on this, is that like, it didn't used
Speaker 6: to be like this for trans athletes.
Speaker 1: It literally didn't used to be like this. So yeah, like,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm the very funny camp of having been
Speaker 1: a college athlete, having competed on both the men's and
Speaker 1: women's teams for track, albeit this would have been like,
Speaker 1: you know, small potatoes, D3, everything. But it was such
Speaker 1: a non-issue for me to this. So this would have
Speaker 1: been like end terms. I'm not going to give like
Speaker 1: firm dates, but like, you know, end of the Obama era,
Speaker 1: beginning of the Trump era, roundabouts, like mid tens. And
Speaker 1: I never faced any pushback to myself from either like
Speaker 1: my teammates or anyone that I competed against. I ran
Speaker 1: track and it I mean, it was kind of like
Speaker 1: eye opening because I was expecting it to be like
Speaker 1: much shittier. But like, no, like it was just people
Speaker 1: were just normal. And I mean, I think this is
Speaker 1: also just kind of thinking about the ways in which
Speaker 1: like transphobia writ large has become so many people's like
Speaker 1: pet little bigotry situation because they want to. They want
Speaker 1: to oppress someone. And it's so, so, so easy to
Speaker 1: go after the trans. But yeah, like I managed to
Speaker 1: compete at a fairly high level within D3 as a
Speaker 1: trans woman. And I like genuinely was terrified for like,
Speaker 1: I competed in nationals and for like a week after
Speaker 1: I was like, and then someone's going to show up
Speaker 1: and people are going to like, I'm like, someone's going
Speaker 1: to write.
Speaker 7: An article about this.
Speaker 1: And no one did because I mean, I really don't
Speaker 1: want to bring like the politics of passing into this,
Speaker 1: but like that could have also played a factor at
Speaker 1: least when dealing with like betters. Like obviously everyone on
Speaker 1: my team was very aware because like, Even though I was,
Speaker 1: I was like very baby Tran running on the men's
Speaker 1: team because it was just like, well, I want to
Speaker 1: compete at the airbug rules. No one cares that the
Speaker 1: trans woman is smoking the men's team because she hadn't
Speaker 1: started hormones yet. But like, even within the context of that, like,
Speaker 1: and again, just getting back to what we said earlier,
Speaker 1: I do not think there is a simple or one
Speaker 1: size fits all policy for any sort of like hormonal requirement,
Speaker 1: because as we discussed, that is so right for abuse.
Speaker 1: But I can speak from personal experience in saying that
Speaker 1: after being on hormones for a period of time, the
Speaker 1: fastest 400 I ever ran as a woman was was
Speaker 1: slower than the slowest 400 I had ever run competitively
Speaker 1: in track dating back to my freshman year of high school.
Speaker 1: And so, like, if a trans woman's competing in sports,
Speaker 1: it's probably going to be fine. We have seen this
Speaker 1: over and over in the few instances where trans women
Speaker 1: have been allowed to compete. Like... Leah Thomas took fifth.
Speaker 1: Even in the moment, like I think before Riley Gaines
Speaker 1: became Riley Gaines, like that was still a nothing moment. Yeah.
Speaker 8: And I think it's funny because we can argue about
Speaker 8: this on a basis of like a human rights issue,
Speaker 8: which I think it fundamentally is and that should be enough.
Speaker 8: But then if you like people want to argue about
Speaker 8: the science, The science is also on our side. Like
Speaker 8: there's literally no evidence that there's an advantage. You talk
Speaker 8: to any trans woman who has been an athlete before
Speaker 8: and after transition, and she will tell you, I lost
Speaker 8: muscle mass. I lost bone density. I lost like lung capacity.
Speaker 8: Like I watched my times go down or my weight
Speaker 8: go down.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it happens pretty fast or it happened fast
Speaker 1: for me. Like your mileage may vary, but.
Speaker 8: Well, my mileage is I started taking low dose tea.
Speaker 8: So I'm going to make the Olympics next year. Watch out.
Speaker 5: Oh, well done.
Speaker 9: Alright, alright, alright.
Speaker 8: I'm on testosterone now, so watch out.
Speaker 6: Well, and it's one of these things where, like, you
Speaker 6: can look at the extent to which this isn't really.
Speaker 3: Like, about.
Speaker 6: It's literally not about this. You can tell it's not
Speaker 6: about ability because, like, I can't play women's chess.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's like, what the f * * * are we
Speaker 5: doing here?
Speaker 1: Like, the second Magic the Gathering bans trans women from
Speaker 1: the pro tour....
Speaker 8: Are they going to have a Pro Tour anymore?
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, the Pro Tour actually just came back. As
Speaker 1: of this year, thank God.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but ability-wise, too, I'm like, so what? Let trans
Speaker 8: people win things? That's also okay?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it comes down to this. Again, the fundamental question is...
Speaker 6: is a trans woman a woman or not? And if
Speaker 6: you're a woman, then you have all of the rights
Speaker 6: that a woman does. And if you're not, then you don't.
Speaker 6: That's just fundamentally what it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And it's so frustrating that this has turned into this
Speaker 6: sort of like, Oh, we can agree to disagree about
Speaker 6: whether you should exist or not.
Speaker 1: That's like, well, can I agree to disagree whether you
Speaker 1: should exist or not? Is this a two-way street? I'm
Speaker 1: just using my platform to advocate for my beliefs.
Speaker 6: I think journalists should be banned from having health care.
Speaker 6: I think it's actually dangerous for me as a trans
Speaker 6: woman to exist in the same space as a journalist,
Speaker 6: because journalists have a long tradition of... and history of
Speaker 6: harming my people, so I think we should talk about
Speaker 6: restricting their access to healthcare because giving journalists healthcare allows
Speaker 6: them to reproduce transphobia.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, it got me convinced.
Speaker 7: God.
Speaker 6: Well, okay, before we wrap up, I do want to
Speaker 6: get a little bit of joy out of this episode, which, so,
Speaker 6: the kind of, one of the kind of concluding points
Speaker 6: of this story, I don't know, given the fact that, like,
Speaker 6: we now live in an administration where the richest man
Speaker 6: on Earth gave two Nazi salutes at the inauguration, like,
Speaker 6: Who knows, like, by the time this episode comes out,
Speaker 6: Sophie Cunningham might have, like, fucking born a swastika or
Speaker 6: some shit. But, like, there's a kind of capstone to
Speaker 6: this story, which is Sophie Cunningham doing this, oh, why
Speaker 6: are all the journalists talking about the culture wars instead
Speaker 6: of focusing on basketball? So I want to take a
Speaker 6: second to talk about Sophie Cunningham as a fucking basketball player.
Speaker 6: Because I have been so angry about having to fucking
Speaker 6: hear about this motherfucker that Like, you know what?
Speaker 7: Fuck it.
Speaker 6: I'm going to do the Julius Caesar bit. The whole
Speaker 6: of Gaul, Julius Caesar once remarked, is divided into three parts. Likewise,
Speaker 6: analysis of athletics is also divided into three parts, one
Speaker 6: of which the tape grinders inhabit, the analytics nerds another,
Speaker 6: and the old school coaches the third. The life of
Speaker 6: the tape grinder consists of endlessly digesting and watching like
Speaker 6: fucking 17 second clips of some athlete doing something and
Speaker 6: trying to figure out whether or not they're good. The
Speaker 6: analytics nerd lives in statistical annexes of unimaginable tedium from
Speaker 6: which they emerge to tell you that this player is
Speaker 6: either good or bad based on a bunch of unbelievably
Speaker 6: convoluted mathematical formulas they are not capable of explaining. And
Speaker 6: the old school coach largely consists of like old white
Speaker 6: guys on the internet going that boy nice after they've
Speaker 6: been fired for saying slurs in a locker room. Now,
Speaker 6: very rarely, all three of these factions will come to
Speaker 6: a consensus on a player. You have heard their names.
Speaker 6: This is Aja Wilson. This is Michael Jordan. This is, like,
Speaker 6: Peek LeBron. All three factions will unite to be like,
Speaker 6: this player is good.
Speaker 9: Occasionally!
Speaker 6: Once in a blue moon, you will get all three
Speaker 6: factions agreeing that a player fucking sucks.
Speaker 5: And that is Sophie Cunningham.
Speaker 6: She is statistically one of the worst players I have
Speaker 6: ever seen. Like the regular statistics, the game before she
Speaker 6: did her big, she did her big, we're pivoting back
Speaker 6: to sports. She shot 0% from the field. 0%. Can
Speaker 6: you explain what that means for a player to shoot 0%
Speaker 6: from the field?
Speaker 8: It means they didn't make a single basket. I mean,
Speaker 8: I love this pivot for her. It seems like being
Speaker 8: transphobic is somehow making an already bad basketball player worse. And, like, again,
Speaker 8: couldn't have happened to a better person, in my opinion.
Speaker 1: I was about to say I could do better than that,
Speaker 1: but then I'm pretty good at points, so.
Speaker 3: Oh, no.
Speaker 6: Okay, speaking of I Could Do Better, can we talk
Speaker 6: about the game that she played after she did her
Speaker 6: We Need to Pivot Back to Basketball thing?
Speaker 10: Because.
Speaker 6: Like, this is not a good WNBA player, even when
Speaker 6: she's not embroiled in controversy. Like, there's, oh God, who
Speaker 6: was it?
Speaker 7: The Stephen A.
Speaker 6: Smith joke about someone getting a single single. Like, if
Speaker 6: she averages a single single over the course of a week,
Speaker 6: that is her doing good. This is someone who comes
Speaker 6: off the bench, misses a bunch of three-pointers, gets somewhere
Speaker 6: between like eight and twelve points, and then fights people.
Speaker 8: I think her career average is about eight points a game,
Speaker 8: but She played like 28 minutes last week and scored
Speaker 8: two points, three points, something like that.
Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know, really productive time on the floor.
Speaker 1: Go for her. You could put a horse on the
Speaker 1: fucking court and it would do more.
Speaker 8: Truly, I do feel like maybe I could also at
Speaker 8: some point throw a basket and it might go in.
Speaker 5: Statistically, it should happen.
Speaker 3: Statistically.
Speaker 5: That two-point game, she scored two points on free throws.
Speaker 1: She didn't throw a basket.
Speaker 5: She just got free throws. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 6: And then she had another game, which was statistically... This
Speaker 6: isn't really an advanced statistic. There's a basketball statistic called
Speaker 6: plus minus, which, Frankie, you correct me if I'm explaining
Speaker 6: this incorrectly, but it is when you are on the court,
Speaker 6: either how many more points does your team score or
Speaker 6: does the opponent's team score? So if you're, for example,
Speaker 6: like a plus 10, that means when you were on
Speaker 6: the court, your team scored plus 10 more points than
Speaker 6: when you were off the court.
Speaker 9: Yes.
Speaker 6: She played a game where she was on the court
Speaker 6: for 17 minutes and she had a plus minus of
Speaker 6: negative 28.
Speaker 8: Incredible.
Speaker 5: How is it even possible to be on a court?
Speaker 8: Is it the worst game in WNBA history? It's close.
Speaker 6: It's the worst game on a win.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 8: Yes. There's a great Instagram account. I think has to
Speaker 8: talk to WNBA stats or WNBA data. That's what it's called.
Speaker 3: Maddie.
Speaker 8: And Maddie looked at this game and it was definitely,
Speaker 8: if not the worst game in WNBA history, very close.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it was like the worst ever in
Speaker 6: a win. And I kind of emphasized enough, right? The
Speaker 6: WNBA games are shorter than NBA games. So you have
Speaker 6: less time to build scoring volume, right? So you kind
Speaker 6: of have to be more efficient. To have the other
Speaker 6: team score 28 more points when you were on the
Speaker 6: court for 17 minutes is astronomical.
Speaker 8: They might as well be down a player. Like, why
Speaker 8: are you even there?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: No, if you were literally playing four out of five,
Speaker 6: I think you would do better. Like, that's like, it's astonishing.
Speaker 6: This is a slightly dishonest way of putting it, but
Speaker 6: it gets into like how colossal of a fuck up
Speaker 6: this is.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean, she's never won a championship at any level.
Speaker 8: I mean, unless you're counting high school.
Speaker 6: No, of course not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because she's bad.
Speaker 6: And like, to put it in perspective, how bad being
Speaker 6: minus 28 is. So Aja Wilson is by a pretty
Speaker 6: big margin, like the highest points per game score in
Speaker 6: the WNBA this season. She's scoring 26 points a game.
Speaker 6: That's the best player in the league. The like, a
Speaker 6: kind of like, I don't know, like perennial MVP, like generally,
Speaker 6: like literally a generational player is dropping on average 26
Speaker 6: points a game.
Speaker 5: You were minus 28.
Speaker 6: Having you on the court was like having Aja Wilson,
Speaker 6: but better on the other team.
Speaker 2: Like....
Speaker 6: Like, and this is the f * * * ing
Speaker 6: basketball players.
Speaker 3: I just like.
Speaker 6: This is the basketball player who's, like, maybe, like, the
Speaker 6: second or third most famous person in the WNBA now
Speaker 6: because of all of this bullshit?
Speaker 8: No, truly, I was at the Sun game last weekend,
Speaker 8: and they were not playing the Fever, and there was
Speaker 8: two people in Fever Cunningham jerseys, which is obviously now
Speaker 8: the new MAGA hat, and I kind of just wanted
Speaker 8: to go up and be like, why are you wearing
Speaker 8: the jersey of, like, the worst player in the league? Like,
Speaker 8: at least the Caitlin Clark jersey, I kind of get it, but, like,
Speaker 8: Sophie Cunningham, really?
Speaker 1: Yeah is everything okay at home like yeah like you
Speaker 1: need someone to check in on you babes.
Speaker 6: Like oh god as just like a source of joy
Speaker 6: i want to close this by talking about olivia miles
Speaker 6: who is maybe my favorite basketball player ever now who
Speaker 6: is so cool i love her she's great she's my
Speaker 6: height So she's like a 5'10 point guard, but like
Speaker 6: she scores at the rim. Nothing about the way that
Speaker 6: she plays basketball makes any sense to me. It's like
Speaker 6: this shouldn't work and it does and it's beautiful and
Speaker 6: I love it. And she's like, she was the best
Speaker 6: player on the best team in the league as a rookie.
Speaker 8: She's amazing to watch. You know, I knew she would
Speaker 8: be great in W. I think I was shocked at
Speaker 8: how quickly her game translated. And I think it really
Speaker 8: highlighted not to like shit on Caitlyn again, but I
Speaker 8: think it highlighted what people kind of thought Caitlyn Clark
Speaker 8: would look like because, you know, she's also a point
Speaker 8: guard and they have similar, you know, great passing ability,
Speaker 8: great court vision. Those are things that both players share.
Speaker 8: And you're like, oh, well, there's always a transition period.
Speaker 8: You know, you're playing against grown women. Like, you got,
Speaker 8: you know, you're going to get your butt kicked your
Speaker 8: first season. That's just kind of how it goes. And
Speaker 8: then Olivia Miles steps in and it was like seamless,
Speaker 8: like no time had passed. Courtney Williams was like happy
Speaker 8: to be like, I'm going back to being a shooting guard.
Speaker 8: You're leading our team as a rookie. Like you got us.
Speaker 8: She is, I don't know how to describe what she
Speaker 8: looks like when she plays because nothing she does seems
Speaker 8: like it should be possible. And yet it's also just
Speaker 8: like graceful and powerful and like smooth and just kind
Speaker 8: of everything all at once. And She's got really great
Speaker 8: style off the court, and I love that. Also, did
Speaker 8: you see the nickname? Because she wears glasses off the court.
Speaker 8: She wears, like, goggles on the court. And the nickname,
Speaker 8: The Spectacle, which I'm now obsessed with.
Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
Speaker 6: Oh, that's so good.
Speaker 1: That's so good. No, because, I've only recently learned who
Speaker 1: she is. It's literally a couple days before we recorded this,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, holy fuck.
Speaker 8: Yeah, she's breaking ankles everywhere. And she could be an
Speaker 8: MVP candidate. I think the only time we've seen a
Speaker 8: Rookie of the Year and MVP was Candice Parker in
Speaker 8: the same year. She could do it.
Speaker 7: I support it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it is really truly one of those, like, I
Speaker 6: feel so bad for her for having to be in
Speaker 6: an MVP race with Aja Wilson. But, like, the other
Speaker 6: thing about her that I love is, like, she also
Speaker 6: plays defense.
Speaker 1: She does.
Speaker 6: And she, like, seems to really enjoy it. And, like,
Speaker 6: I have this, like, indelible image of her like in
Speaker 6: this game where she's trying to defend someone. I can't
Speaker 6: remember who she's playing. She's trying to defend someone who's
Speaker 6: like four inches taller than her. And she like bites
Speaker 6: on a fake.
Speaker 5: So she's like in the air.
Speaker 6: But somehow she has like, she's like, she's like in
Speaker 6: the air jumping and she has like her back to
Speaker 6: the shooter. But somehow she has managed to angle this
Speaker 6: such that even though she's, she like bit on a
Speaker 6: fake and is jumping, she's still blocking the shot by
Speaker 6: being in the air in front of them.
Speaker 5: And I was like, how is that even possible? Like,
Speaker 5: How do you do that? I don't know.
Speaker 6: You owe it to yourself to go watch some of
Speaker 6: her highlights. Go watch Olivia Miles' highlights. It was what
Speaker 6: I was using as eye bleach after I was trying
Speaker 6: to watch Sophie Cunningham tape, which was one of the
Speaker 6: most miserable experiences of my life.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Olivia Miles is kind of a walking highlight reel.
Speaker 8: She's really something to watch. I'm excited that it's just
Speaker 8: her rookie season, too. I get a lot more of
Speaker 8: her Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6: And she's on a really good team. She's in a
Speaker 6: great environment. Like, everyone seems to love her. And I just,
Speaker 6: I'm so happy for her.
Speaker 1: I'm still hooked on to this spectacle. That's so fucking good.
Speaker 8: It's so good. So good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So this has been, this has been a good happen here.
Speaker 6: And thank you both for coming on and also for
Speaker 6: letting me gush about one of my favorite players because
Speaker 6: I love her.
Speaker 7: She's so great.
Speaker 8: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 7: Oh my God.
Speaker 1: Literally anytime. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 6: If you would like to be found and have people
Speaker 6: find your work, where can people find your work?
Speaker 8: I am on social media on Instagram and blue sky
Speaker 8: at the Frankie DLC. And the, probably the best place
Speaker 8: to follow my work is my newsletter called out of
Speaker 8: your league where I write stuff, but I also link
Speaker 8: out to the stuff that I write elsewhere.
Speaker 3: Really good. And we have a.
Speaker 8: Great queer women's sports discord community. Um, And yeah, it's
Speaker 8: pretty dope.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You can find me on blue sky. Yeah. But about
Speaker 1: stuff and, or if you've enjoyed hearing my dulcet cackles,
Speaker 1: I got a podcast called everything is wrestling, but I
Speaker 1: do with my friend Ella Taylor, where we basically just
Speaker 1: invite cool people on to info dump about their special interests.
Speaker 1: And we try to relate it to professional wrestling. I
Speaker 1: think at the time, this drops the most recent episode was,
Speaker 1: will either have been the law is wrestling or Muppets
Speaker 1: is wrestling.
Speaker 8: I'm proud of mom.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, hell yeah.
Speaker 6: Thank you two again so much for coming on and
Speaker 6: talking about this. And may we all live long enough
Speaker 6: to see trans women actually in the WNBA.
Speaker 3: Honestly, yeah. That'd be sick as hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Welcome to It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. A
Speaker 5: few months ago, the Department of Justice indicted 15 anti-ICE
Speaker 5: protesters who participated in the community response to Operation Metro
Speaker 5: Surge in Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this year. Here's U.S. Attorney
Speaker 5: Daniel Rosen announcing the charges in a press conference dated
Speaker 5: June 16th, 2026.
Speaker 11: Last year, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7,
Speaker 11: which directed the Department of Justice to prioritize politically motivated violence.
Speaker 11: To accomplish that mission, the Deputy Attorney General stood up
Speaker 11: Joint Task Force Vanguard to enforce a national security strategy
Speaker 11: to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political
Speaker 11: violence and intimidation. Today, a federal indictment was unsealed, charging
Speaker 11: 15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers
Speaker 11: and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa
Speaker 11: groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in
Speaker 11: our state.
Speaker 3: As U.S.
Speaker 5: Attorney Daniel Rosen said, all 15 quote-unquote Antifa defendants were
Speaker 5: charged with conspiracy to impede or injure an officer. According
Speaker 5: to the DOJ, the conspiracy to impede amounted to plans
Speaker 5: to temporarily block roadways around the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building,
Speaker 5: where ICE operations in the Twin Cities were and still
Speaker 5: are based out of. The start of the 95-page indictment reads, quote,
Speaker 5: The defendants were members and associates of Twin Cities Direct Action,
Speaker 5: which later changed its name to Direct Action Minnesota, or DAM,
Speaker 5: an organization dedicated and committed to direct action against federal
Speaker 5: law and immigration enforcement. Direct action refers to disruptive and
Speaker 5: obstructive tactics used by participants to forcibly challenge, block, or
Speaker 5: stop immigration raids, detentions, and deportations. DAM describes itself as
Speaker 5: A decentralized coalition of working class people engaged in various
Speaker 5: forms of community defense against the current federal occupation happening
Speaker 5: within the wider metro area and against state and far-right
Speaker 5: violence more broadly, unquote. Here's attorney Daniel Rosen again at
Speaker 5: that press conference.
Speaker 11: The organization trains its members in the aggressive use of
Speaker 11: shields against law enforcement, surveillance, operational planning, and rapid mobilization
Speaker 11: against law enforcement actions.
Speaker 5: The first piece of evidence presented by Rosen in this
Speaker 5: press conference is a Facebook post by one of the
Speaker 5: defendants reading, it's going to get so much worse and
Speaker 5: a nonviolent ideology and our politicians aren't going to save us.
Speaker 5: We need to become ungovernable. We need to actively resist
Speaker 5: any way we can to materially stop the Nazi occupation forces.
Speaker 5: I do think it's worth noting that When President Trump
Speaker 5: spoke at the Libertarian Convention in 2024, the wall behind
Speaker 5: him featured giant text reading, Become Ungovernable. Now, most of
Speaker 5: this 95-page indictment is spent detailing random conversations on Signal
Speaker 5: and various group chats discussing First Amendment activity, planning protests,
Speaker 5: discussing how to go about fundraising... making flyers, participating in
Speaker 5: ICE rapid response, writing articles on Crimethink, and an anarchist
Speaker 5: speaking tour, all of which the indictment lists as, quote,
Speaker 5: overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. And that's how
Speaker 5: conspiracy charges work. Not all the overt acts themselves have
Speaker 5: to be illegal. In fact, they usually are not. They
Speaker 5: just have to be actions taken involving multiple people to
Speaker 5: advance some other criminal goal. In this case, quote unquote,
Speaker 5: impeding law enforcement. And what makes this case particularly weak
Speaker 5: is that the impeding in this case amounts to extremely
Speaker 5: ordinary First Amendment protests. So, not only are the majority,
Speaker 5: if not all, of the overt acts listed completely legal actions,
Speaker 5: they were actions taken in furtherance of legally protected First
Speaker 5: Amendment activity. Now, the indictment does list a few other
Speaker 5: charges against specific individuals. One person is charged with allegedly
Speaker 5: making threats based on statements made in Facebook and Instagram videos.
Speaker 5: Two people are charged with interstate stalking based on following
Speaker 5: vehicles leaving the Whipple building across state lines into Wisconsin.
Speaker 5: One person is charged with allegedly assaulting a federal officer
Speaker 5: by knocking notes out of their hand and destruction of
Speaker 5: government property for kicking a vehicle. And lastly, another defendant
Speaker 5: is charged with assaulting a federal officer for allegedly brake-checking
Speaker 5: and side-swiping the officer's vehicle, causing a collision. No evidence
Speaker 5: for these alleged assaults has been presented thus far. But
Speaker 5: the conspiracy charge, tying the 15 defendants together, is the
Speaker 5: most oh-so-it's-illegal-to-make-plans-with-friends-now case I've ever seen. If it wasn't clear
Speaker 5: from the moment this indictment dropped that It only gets
Speaker 5: more and more clear over time that this case is
Speaker 5: not based on the strength of the evidence or threat
Speaker 5: to public safety, but rather political targeting based on the
Speaker 5: beliefs held by the defendants and the DOJ's ability to
Speaker 5: paint the defendants as Antifa lunatics. separate from the majority
Speaker 5: of peaceful, liberal anti-ice protesters, all while building a precedent
Speaker 5: to criminalize ordinary First Amendment protest activity, including ICE rapid response.
Speaker 5: To make it so that any protest against ICE is
Speaker 5: qualifies as interfering or impeding ICE from carrying out its
Speaker 5: immigration enforcement duties. And to create this precedent, the feds
Speaker 5: located a small group of Antifa, some outside agitators, that
Speaker 5: they believe a jury might be more likely to convict
Speaker 5: than the dozens and dozens of cases that have failed
Speaker 5: to move forward. In absence of any evidence of illegal
Speaker 5: violent acts, the DOJ must rely on radical-sounding statements made
Speaker 5: by the defendants discussing their politics to turn a jury
Speaker 5: against them. And that's most of what the indictment contains.
Speaker 5: It's not detailing alleged acts of violence. It's detailing conversations
Speaker 5: about protesting. This indictment contains a lot of signal chat logs,
Speaker 5: as well as conversations from in-person meetings, which leads one
Speaker 5: to wonder... How exactly did DHS obtain that information? Well,
Speaker 5: a few weeks ago, about 30 documents were released as
Speaker 5: a part of a discovery motion filed by one of
Speaker 5: the defendants. And these documents provide maybe the closest look
Speaker 5: at how federal law enforcement under Trump, and specifically how
Speaker 5: DHS and Homeland Security Investigations are investigating and surveilling not just,
Speaker 5: quote unquote, Antifa, but anti-ICE protesters more broadly, community activist groups,
Speaker 5: left-wing organizations and non-profits, and even labor unions. The lawyer
Speaker 5: for the defendant in this case called this a, quote,
Speaker 5: unprecedented campaign by DHS to spy on Minnesotans. Before I
Speaker 5: get into some of these specific details, I want to
Speaker 5: read the opening overview by the defense lawyer, Kevin Ryok,
Speaker 5: discussing what Discovery has so far revealed. Quote, Undercover agents
Speaker 5: posing as protesters surveilled community meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools,
Speaker 5: and union halls. These agents surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations
Speaker 5: with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment
Speaker 5: right to protest ICE's lawless rampage in our state. The
Speaker 5: agents gathered information about Minnesotans from law enforcement databases and
Speaker 5: internet searches and created dossiers that are apparently now available agency-wide.
Speaker 5: Homeland Security Investigations' abuses did not stop there. HSI secretly
Speaker 5: obtained financial records for several national labor unions and social
Speaker 5: justice non-profits, all with zero criminal predicate to do so.
Speaker 5: The government's presentation to the grand jury reflected this broad
Speaker 5: and irrational investigation. With no evidence, the government alleged to
Speaker 5: the grand jury that the conspiracy in this case extends
Speaker 5: far beyond the defendants to include the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis
Speaker 5: Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Monarcha,
Speaker 5: Veterans for Peace, and the Grease Pit Bicycle Repair Shop,
Speaker 5: among others. These wild conspiracy allegations are born from the
Speaker 5: fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump administration. President
Speaker 5: Trump and senior administration officials routinely speak of the political
Speaker 5: left in dehumanizing terms, as deformed, scarred, and filled with ugliness,
Speaker 5: for example. The administration has crystallized those sentiments into policies
Speaker 5: that encourage and authorize political prosecutions like this one, most notably,
Speaker 5: National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, unquote. I'm not exaggerating that
Speaker 5: this motion filed by the defense is maybe the greatest
Speaker 5: motion I've ever read. The understanding by the lawyer in
Speaker 5: this case of how the Trump administration is carrying out
Speaker 5: state repression against protesters is incredibly politically fluent. That last
Speaker 5: bit at the end discussing administration officials referring to the
Speaker 5: political left as deformed, scarred, or filled with ugliness relates
Speaker 5: to Stephen Miller's comments at Mark Rubio's left-wing terrorism summit
Speaker 5: last month that we discussed on executive disorder. And what
Speaker 5: he said during that conference was legitimately crazy. I didn't
Speaker 5: get to much of what he said in our previous
Speaker 5: episode because we were running short on time. But there's
Speaker 5: one quote I highlighted back then when I was doing
Speaker 5: research that I want to read now. Quote, the leftist
Speaker 5: looks at what is beautiful and what is good and
Speaker 5: what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred.
Speaker 5: The leftist looks at the perfect family with the perfect
Speaker 5: life and the perfect job and perfect kids that goes
Speaker 5: to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling
Speaker 5: of inadequacy and jealousy and they covet. And they turn
Speaker 5: those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress,
Speaker 5: and to inflict pain and suffering. It's not a coincidence
Speaker 5: that when you look at any of these violent Antifa
Speaker 5: demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled,
Speaker 5: to be blunt, Not one of the people that is
Speaker 5: demonstrating looks like a normal person. They're all deformed in
Speaker 5: some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerisms.
Speaker 5: Why is that? Every one of them, through the course
Speaker 5: of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body
Speaker 5: and their appearance in many different ways, to the point
Speaker 5: in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their
Speaker 5: inner hatred.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 5: Super fascist stuff, like incredibly fascist. And the point by
Speaker 5: Kevin Ryok, the lawyer for one of the defendants, that
Speaker 5: the Trump administration has turned these fascistic sentiments into enforcement
Speaker 5: policy like MSPM 7 is a really crucial point because
Speaker 5: these are not just personal sentiments held by Stephen Miller.
Speaker 5: These sentiments have been distilled into mandates to investigate and
Speaker 5: prosecute the political enemies of the Trump administration. Just four
Speaker 5: days after Border Patrol murdered Alex Preddy, Homeland Security Investigations
Speaker 5: opened a new investigation into anti-ICE protests in the Twin
Speaker 5: Cities called Operation Puppet Master. As in looking for the
Speaker 5: alleged puppet master orchestrating the spontaneous and community-led protests. Or,
Speaker 5: I guess, as in, HSI is the puppet master, infiltrating
Speaker 5: the protests with undercover agents puppeteered by DHS? Either way,
Speaker 5: DHS produced a report detailing the opening of Operation Puppet Master,
Speaker 5: and that report states, quote, this case is opened to
Speaker 5: document the integration of HSI undercover agents into groups, organizations,
Speaker 5: or other gatherings. identified by intelligence information and other sources
Speaker 5: as potentially threatening to law enforcement personnel in the performance
Speaker 5: of their duties. The report by HSI Special Agent Jacob
Speaker 5: Marquise continues, quote, Since November 28, 2026, I assume he
Speaker 5: means 2025.
Speaker 7: Great work, guys.
Speaker 5: Ongoing protests and incidents of civil unrest have occurred in
Speaker 5: public areas throughout Minneapolis, Minnesota. During these events, violent opportunists,
Speaker 5: or VOs, have exploited the protests as cover to attempt
Speaker 5: breaches of federal properties and perpetuated multiple assaults against federal
Speaker 5: officers tasked with protecting these facilities. Homeland Security Investigations of St.
Speaker 5: Paul has identified an organized network of conspirators operating through
Speaker 5: online and in-person who are providing material support to violent
Speaker 5: opportunists and agitators and involved in impeding federal law enforcement, rioting,
Speaker 5: destruction of federal property, and assaults on federal agents and officers. Unquote.
Speaker 5: This sentiment was also shared by U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen
Speaker 5: in that press conference.
Speaker 11: During Operation Metro Surge, Direct Action Minnesota infiltrated and exploited
Speaker 11: lawful protests to more efficiently carry out its unlawful direct actions.
Speaker 5: Despite the claims made by Rosen and in this HSI
Speaker 5: report of violent opportunists exploiting protests to perpetuate multiple assaults,
Speaker 5: in the defense's overview of these reports and documents, the
Speaker 5: defense lawyer notes that HSI does not actually identify any
Speaker 5: specific violent opportunists in this report, nor does it flag
Speaker 5: any specific incidents of rioting, destruction of property, or assaults
Speaker 5: on federal agents or officers. To quote the lawyer for
Speaker 5: the defense, the undercover surveillance initiated by Operation Puppet Master
Speaker 5: did not actually investigate or unearth any such instances, but
Speaker 5: instead encompassed all manner of privacy and constitutional violations against
Speaker 5: organizations and individuals who opposed ICE's activities in Minnesota, unquote.
Speaker 5: And in his press conference announcing the conspiracy charges, U.S.
Speaker 5: Attorney Daniel Rosen was asked multiple times whether any officer's
Speaker 5: actually got hurt, and Rosen could not identify any instance
Speaker 5: of officer injury.
Speaker 6: We talked about coordinated attacks. What kind of injuries did
Speaker 6: officers sustain as part of these campaigns?
Speaker 3: Can you elaborate on that?
Speaker 11: I can't elaborate on that today, and I don't believe
Speaker 11: I used the word attacks.
Speaker 7: But if I did, I stand by it.
Speaker 5: That really sums up this whole case for me. No,
Speaker 5: I can't provide any evidence to support the wild claims
Speaker 5: I'm making, and I don't think I used that word,
Speaker 5: but if I did, I stand by it. Incredible stuff.
Speaker 5: We will look into more of the Homeland Security Investigation
Speaker 5: case files after this at a break. Welcome back. The
Speaker 5: HSI report detailing the opening of Operation Puppet Master concludes
Speaker 5: by stating, quote, HSI St. Paul is actively conducting a
Speaker 5: thorough financial investigation to uncover the funding sources used by
Speaker 5: these groups and to detect any illicit transactions enabling further
Speaker 5: criminal acts. HSI St. Paul will use the results of
Speaker 5: this financial investigation to identify those responsible, disrupt ongoing and
Speaker 5: future unlawful activities, and pursue prosecution of the individuals involved.
Speaker 5: And two weeks after the launching of Operation Puppet Master,
Speaker 5: HSI opened another investigation called Project Whipple Shield, specifically focusing
Speaker 5: on the identification of potential funding sources, the organizational structure,
Speaker 5: and the, quote, predicate actions behind these campaigns. To quote
Speaker 5: that HSI report, quote, this investigation is focused on identifying
Speaker 5: and disrupting sophisticated, organized campaigns supporting and engaging in this
Speaker 5: behavior and to prevent such unlawful activities. Regarding this investigation,
Speaker 5: lawyer for the defense Kevin Ryok wrote, As with Operation
Speaker 5: Puppet Master, HSI's investigation in Project Whipple Shield extended far
Speaker 5: beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety. It concluded,
Speaker 5: with no evidence but obvious political animus, that numerous Twin
Speaker 5: Cities unions and non-profit organizations were involved in a widespread
Speaker 5: conspiracy to violate 18 U.S.C. 111, assaulting, resisting, or impeding
Speaker 5: certain officers or employees. And it surveilled and surreptitiously gathered
Speaker 5: financial records generated by these organizations, despite the lack of
Speaker 5: any clear connection between those organizations and criminal conduct, unquote.
Speaker 5: At that press conference announcing the indictment, U.S. Attorney Daniel
Speaker 5: Rosen said that Direct Action Minnesota is actually, quote, comprised
Speaker 5: of members of subgroups like the Black Cat Workers Collective, unquote.
Speaker 5: But the alleged quote-unquote subgroups extend far beyond just Black
Speaker 5: Cat Workers Collective, as evidenced by a little diagram that
Speaker 5: was presented to grand jurors for this indictment. This diagram
Speaker 5: is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. In
Speaker 5: the middle is the logo for Direct Action Minnesota, the
Speaker 5: organization that the DOJ alleges is connected to the 15 defendants.
Speaker 5: But surrounding the DAM logo is logos for 15 other organizations,
Speaker 5: all with arrows pointing towards Direct Action Minnesota and text
Speaker 5: reading council member, as if all of these organizations are
Speaker 5: sending council members to Direct Action Minnesota to plan or
Speaker 5: orchestrate the direct action's in response to Operation Metro Surge.
Speaker 5: This diagram that was presented as a slide to grand
Speaker 5: jurors is titled The Conspiracy, and the conspiring organizations are
Speaker 5: listed as Monarcha Rapid Response Line, which is one of
Speaker 5: the rapid response networks in the Twin Cities. The other
Speaker 5: organizations in this diagram, going clockwise, include Minnesota 5150, the
Speaker 5: organizers of the No Kings protests, Minnesota Ice Watch, Minnesota
Speaker 5: Association of Professional Employees, a labor union, Minneapolis Federation of Educators,
Speaker 5: Local 59, Left Jab, a self-defense group, The Grease Pit,
Speaker 5: a bike shop, Democratic Socialists of America, Black Cat Workers Collective, AFL-CIO, Workers'
Speaker 5: Solidarity Circle, Whipple Watch, Veterans for Peace, Socialist Alternative, Showing
Speaker 5: Up for Racial Justice, SCIU 26, Red Pine Revolutionary Collective,
Speaker 5: and Ray Rainbolt Memorial Gun Club. HSI agent Desmond Garcia
Speaker 5: testified to the grand jury regarding this slide, quote, This
Speaker 5: is kind of a breakdown, like I mentioned earlier, with
Speaker 5: members of DAM being associated with other organizations. Through the
Speaker 5: course of the investigation, this is just a snapshot of
Speaker 5: some of the other organizations that members are affiliated with.
Speaker 5: that kind of comprise and make up Direct Action Minnesota, unquote.
Speaker 5: This is one of the funniest things I've ever seen
Speaker 5: and provides really, really useful insight into how HSI is
Speaker 5: imagining the organizational structure of these protests, that all these
Speaker 5: organizations are sending, quote-unquote, council members to this more secretive group,
Speaker 5: Direct Action Minnesota, that orchestrates the most radical parts of
Speaker 5: the anti-ICE protests. Regarding this diagram slide, the lawyer for
Speaker 5: the defense wrote, If any individual was connected to both
Speaker 5: DAM and any of these entities, the government considers the
Speaker 5: entities to be conspiring. Fueled by visions of this vast
Speaker 5: and irrational conspiracy, HSI surreptitiously obtained financial records of labor
Speaker 5: unions and non-profit organizations as a part of a quote-unquote,
Speaker 5: financial investigation into, quote, domestic terrorist financing, unquote. And let's
Speaker 5: go over the financial probe aspect of this investigation. One
Speaker 5: of the reports uncovered through Discovery revealed that HSI secretly
Speaker 5: subpoenaed three years' worth of financial records from SEIU, one
Speaker 5: of the biggest labor unions in the country, largely focused
Speaker 5: on organizing the healthcare, public service, and service work sectors.
Speaker 5: Last March, HSI agents served an administrative summons, or an
Speaker 5: administrative subpoena, to Fedwire to obtain wire transfers involving SCIU.
Speaker 5: The wire transfers that the Federal Reserve Bank of New
Speaker 5: York gave over to DHS range from January 1, 2023
Speaker 5: to March 19, 2026. To quote the HSI report, quote,
Speaker 5: Beginning in December, HSI St. Paul began a multifaceted approach
Speaker 5: to identify and investigate individuals engaged in acts of violence,
Speaker 5: destruction of federal property, intimidation of federal officers and employees,
Speaker 5: and attempts to impede federal operations. Through this investigation, HSI St.
Speaker 5: Paul has identified a network of individuals operating online and
Speaker 5: in person who are engaged in this behavior by either
Speaker 5: directly participating or by providing support through fundraising, planning, and organization.
Speaker 5: The following report of investigation provides preliminary cursory details related
Speaker 5: to wire transfers from various financial institutions to and from
Speaker 5: Service Employees International Union, main financial institution, the U.S. Bank
Speaker 5: of Minneapolis, Minnesota, unquote. And what did this investigation find?
Speaker 7: Well.
Speaker 5: a quote-unquote preliminary analysis of the wire transfers, quote, revealed
Speaker 5: that the SEIU National Union has numerous wire transactions to
Speaker 5: and from SEIU local unions for various types of debits
Speaker 5: and credits to include annuity payments, strike payments, strike supplies, investments,
Speaker 5: union member dues, retiree dues, medical expenses, and pension fund expenses, unquote.
Speaker 5: So they found nothing. They just looked through three years
Speaker 5: of financial records from SCIU and only found regular transactions
Speaker 5: that a union would have. They found absolutely nothing. And
Speaker 5: this report ends with this incredible sentence, quote, this financial
Speaker 5: investigation involving protest domestic terrorist financing continues.
Speaker 7: Sure, dude.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm sure it's going to continue. I'm sure it's
Speaker 5: going to continue to find nothing. Because in the 95-page
Speaker 5: indictment against these 15 defendants, one of the frequently recurring
Speaker 5: topics in the overt acts and furtherance of the conspiracy
Speaker 5: is discussing how they don't have any money, how they're
Speaker 5: constantly trying to fundraise to help continue the anti-ICE protests.
Speaker 5: The indictment outlines them consistently struggling to to pull together $ 5, 000.
Speaker 5: But yeah, sure, let me make a few calls to
Speaker 5: the SEIU real quick. I'm sure they'll just wire transfer
Speaker 5: over the money. And the other thing is that this
Speaker 5: three-year time span of the financial probe stretches way longer
Speaker 5: than Operation Metro Surge and the protests surrounding ICE activists
Speaker 5: in the Twin Cities. Because what's actually going on here,
Speaker 5: and to the Fed's own admission, is that they're just
Speaker 5: enacting NSPM-7. using whatever pretext they can concoct to dig
Speaker 5: through the finances of entities and organizations that they view
Speaker 5: as political enemies. And it wasn't just SCIU. HSI also
Speaker 5: obtained three years' worth of bank records for the Communication
Speaker 5: Workers of America, including donations and PAC spending. The CWA
Speaker 5: union represents thousands of journalists and print and broadcast news
Speaker 5: workers in the U.S. and Canada. And as a part
Speaker 5: of this financial probe, HSI obtained records for one of
Speaker 5: the Canadian branches of this union, the International Federation of
Speaker 5: Professional and Technical Engineers, with the administrative summons requesting information
Speaker 5: from the Bank of Montreal. This very same summons also
Speaker 5: demanded three years worth of financial records from the environmental
Speaker 5: activist organization Sunrise Movement and the Sunrise Movement Educational Fund.
Speaker 5: And as we will discuss, HSI was also actively surveilling
Speaker 5: Sunrise meetings in Minnesota. Now, HSI also subpoenaed financial records
Speaker 5: from at least one other entity that we know of,
Speaker 5: a local Minneapolis activist organization called Voices for Racial Justice.
Speaker 5: But rather than bank records and wire transfers, HSI went
Speaker 5: after PayPal and Venmo transactions. Voices for Racial Justice was
Speaker 5: founded in 1993 and describes itself as the longest-running racial
Speaker 5: justice organizing training organization in the state of Minnesota. The
Speaker 5: DHS investigative report regarding the subpoena into the organization says
Speaker 5: that the website for Voices of Racial Justice, quote, boasts
Speaker 5: several articles on Ice Out and or Truth, Freedom, and
Speaker 5: Ice Out of Minnesota. Their website also provides links to
Speaker 5: Defend the 612, Minneapolis St. Paul Whistles, and Monarcho Rapid
Speaker 5: Response for upcoming trainings.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 5: That's basically the entire justification DHS gives for probing into
Speaker 5: the donations and Venmo and PayPal records for this racial
Speaker 5: justice organization. That their website, hosts links to other anti-ICE organizations.
Speaker 5: Defense attorney Kevin Ryok wrote, quote, this broad coalition of
Speaker 5: financial records of labor and social justice advocacy organizations done
Speaker 5: in secret and with no articulable criminal predicate violates both
Speaker 5: the First Amendment and these organizations' right to financial privacy.
Speaker 5: It also reflects a sinister turn in our democracy and
Speaker 5: when the party in power feels no compunction about peering
Speaker 5: into the private finances of its political opponents, collecting that information,
Speaker 5: and storing it away for further use. The lawyer also notes, quote,
Speaker 5: among other problems, the use of the administrative summons seems
Speaker 5: to violate the Right to Financial Privacy Act, which requires
Speaker 5: law enforcement to provide notice to the account holder if
Speaker 5: they are trying to obtain bank records via administrative subpoena. Here,
Speaker 5: not only did DHS hide these inquiries from the account holders,
Speaker 5: it told responding financial institutions, quote, you are requested not
Speaker 5: to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite
Speaker 5: period of time. Any such disclosure will impede the investigation
Speaker 5: and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law, unquote.
Speaker 5: Though the federal government would likely argue that HSI's use
Speaker 5: of the administrative subpoenas without notice would fall under some
Speaker 5: of the exceptions within the Right to Financial Privacy Act.
Speaker 5: Most reporting I've seen on this batch of discovery has
Speaker 5: focused on the financial probing of unions and activist organizations.
Speaker 5: And yeah, that is a big deal. That is very
Speaker 5: serious and deserves a lot of focus. But most of
Speaker 5: the investigative reports released as a part of discovery pertain
Speaker 5: to HSI undercover operations, surveillance and infiltration of anti-ICE organizing
Speaker 5: in the Twin Cities. And there is a lot of
Speaker 5: interesting information in there. that explains why the 90-something page
Speaker 5: indictment is like that, why it has transcriptions of so
Speaker 5: many regular in-person conversations and text logs from Signal. To
Speaker 5: quote defense lawyer Kevin Ryok, undercover HSI agents posing as
Speaker 5: protesters or activists surveilled community meetings at churches, parks, libraries,
Speaker 5: union halls, schools, and restaurants. Undercover agents secretly made audio
Speaker 5: and video recordings of those meetings, unquote. And now I
Speaker 5: want to quote from one of the HSI reports regarding
Speaker 5: their use of undercovers. Quote, prior to the initiation of
Speaker 5: Operation Puppet Master, HSI deployed an undercover agent to participate
Speaker 5: in both virtual and in-person meetings within the Twin Cities area.
Speaker 5: The objective of these activities was to gather intelligence regarding
Speaker 5: any organized networks of conspirators or operating online and in person,
Speaker 5: who may be providing material support to violent opportunists and
Speaker 5: individuals engaged in impeding federal law enforcement, rioting, destruction of
Speaker 5: federal property, and assaults on federal agents and officers, unquote.
Speaker 5: So before Operation Puppet Master even started in January, the
Speaker 5: month prior, HSI already had an undercover digging into the
Speaker 5: anti-ICE protests. In reports, this undercover is identified as 9843,
Speaker 5: And he started out by attending a virtual ice watch
Speaker 5: training on December 3rd, put on by a group called
Speaker 5: States at the Core and a Chicago-based org called Protect
Speaker 5: Rogers Park. A few days later, the agent, quote unquote,
Speaker 5: acting in an undercover capacity, attended a publicly advertised in-person
Speaker 5: legal observer training in Richfield, Minnesota. During the training, the
Speaker 5: agent joined a rapid response network sponsored by a Minneapolis-based
Speaker 5: community defense group called Monarcha via a QR code. On
Speaker 5: December 13th, The Undercover attended a Sunrise Movement action training
Speaker 5: called How to Stop Ice and Build the Revolution at
Speaker 5: a Universalist church in Minneapolis. After this meeting, The Undercover
Speaker 5: was added to the group's announcement chat and started messaging
Speaker 5: one of the organizers, about how people are verifying which
Speaker 5: hotels ICE agents were staying at. A few days later,
Speaker 5: the undercover reviewed a website with info, toolkits, and signal
Speaker 5: links for ICE rapid response called Defend612. com. 612 is the
Speaker 5: Minneapolis area code. On December 22nd, the undercover participated in
Speaker 5: a Sunrise Zoom meeting about a then-upcoming protest in front
Speaker 5: of the Hampton Inn housing ICE agents. Per the investigative
Speaker 5: report detailing undercover operations prior to the creation of Operation
Speaker 5: Puppet Master, during this Sunrise Zoom meeting, the undercover agent
Speaker 5: learned that there were, quote, multiple signal chats dedicated to
Speaker 5: the hotel scouting and license plate gathering. The gathering is
Speaker 5: a collaborative effort with, quote-unquote, Whipple Watch, the known agitator
Speaker 5: group stationed outside the Whipple building. HSI undercover agent 9843
Speaker 5: was added by the team leader for the quote-unquote action
Speaker 5: team to this signal chat group, unquote. So beyond joining
Speaker 5: public signal chats, it appears the main way this undercover
Speaker 5: was able to worm his way into more private chats
Speaker 5: regarding Whipple Watch was through attending Sunrise Movement meetings. In
Speaker 5: the motion outlining this batch of discovery, the lawyer for
Speaker 5: the defense noted, quote, undercover agents actively participated in organizing
Speaker 5: and directing the groups they were surveilling, at times working
Speaker 5: to entice people into discussing or committing crimes, unquote. The
Speaker 5: main example of this in these documents is another Sunrise
Speaker 5: Movement meeting from late January titled Resistance Skills Training, held
Speaker 5: at the Minneapolis Public Library. Two undercovers attended this training,
Speaker 5: and the investigative report details about 25 people in quote-unquote
Speaker 5: breakout sessions focused on recruiting, action, and de-escalation. The report
Speaker 5: notes that Sunrise recommends using quote, police liaisons and protest
Speaker 5: safety marshals. The quote-unquote action section discussed sit-ins and the
Speaker 5: protests outside hotels, with HSI noting in the report quote,
Speaker 5: it was made clear that the Sunrise Movement organization focused
Speaker 5: on quote-unquote peaceful protests. Regardless of that, one of the
Speaker 5: undercovers at this meeting quote-unquote privately informed someone that he
Speaker 5: works in construction and could quote, build items that might
Speaker 5: assist other groups with more quote-unquote direct action protests, unquote.
Speaker 5: And the undercover also told this person at the meeting
Speaker 5: that that going to jail quote-unquote did not bother him.
Speaker 5: So two undercovers attended this Sunrise Movement meeting discussing peaceful
Speaker 5: protests and noted that in the report, but still tried
Speaker 5: to talk to attendees about quote-unquote building items to assist
Speaker 5: in direct action protests and that they're okay with going
Speaker 5: to jail because of it. We'll talk more about how
Speaker 5: undercover HSI agents began their infiltration after this ad break.
Speaker 5: Welcome back. The main undercover HSI agent who started to
Speaker 5: infiltrate the protests in December of 2025, who's identified in
Speaker 5: reports as undercover 9843, also operated a signal account with
Speaker 5: the screen name Peanut Butter Jelly. And according to the defense,
Speaker 5: this undercover, quote, routinely exchanged signal messages with people regarding
Speaker 5: purely First Amendment protected conduct. messaging participants in the Art
Speaker 5: Money Comms Club signal chat and stating, quote, also the
Speaker 5: interested in the financial world. organizing piece. I like numbers
Speaker 5: and data. And marrying that together with propaganda. So would
Speaker 5: love to work on both sides of these groups. Unquote. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I am sure you're interested in the financial organizing piece. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I bet. I like numbers and data.
Speaker 7: Incredible.
Speaker 5: The interested in the financial organizing piece. Also, as a
Speaker 5: part of Discovery, we've learned that the undercover discussed fundraising
Speaker 5: messaging strategies and offered to draft fundraising language for Twin
Speaker 5: Cities Direct Action and design a protest flyer. One message
Speaker 5: with the undercover using the screen name Peanut Butter Jelly reads,
Speaker 5: I'm sure you're swamped with the speaking tour, but do
Speaker 5: you have a suggestion for a donation platform? I believe
Speaker 5: open collective and the idea of asking our own banks
Speaker 5: was discussed, unquote. According to the defense, these new discovery
Speaker 5: documents also detail how Undercover's, quote, routinely surveilled individuals engaged
Speaker 5: solely in First Amendment protected activity, including the Whipple watch
Speaker 5: group that engaged in peaceful observation of ICE vehicle activity
Speaker 5: in and out of the Whipple building. conduct that both
Speaker 5: Judge Mendez and Chief Judge Schiltz have confirmed is not unlawful, unquote.
Speaker 5: One of the DHS investigative reports details how agents captured
Speaker 5: the license plate information of anti-ice protesters attending a Twin
Speaker 5: Cities Direct Action quote-unquote art club meeting at the Prince
Speaker 5: of Peace Lutheran Church. In the report, the undercover who
Speaker 5: infiltrated this meeting, quote, described the meeting as democratic in
Speaker 5: nature in the sense that everyone talked over each other, unquote.
Speaker 5: The undercover also noted how most of the meeting discussed
Speaker 5: fundraising and how to make social media agitprop. But while
Speaker 5: he was attending this meeting, other HSI agents documented the
Speaker 5: license plates of attendees. According to the defense, quote, Agents
Speaker 5: then used this information to obtain the names of the attendees,
Speaker 5: searched social media for pictures of these individuals, and compiled
Speaker 5: an intel workup that included names, photos, addresses, personal information,
Speaker 5: including family and employment information, and vehicle registration information for
Speaker 5: each meeting attendee. None of these individuals did anything other
Speaker 5: than engage in protected First Amendment speech in a church
Speaker 5: meeting room. Yet, now their personal information is memorialized in
Speaker 5: a DHS dossier, unquote. The best idea why HSI decided
Speaker 5: to zero in on the group of individuals allegedly associated
Speaker 5: with Direct Action Minnesota, or formerly called Twin Cities Direct Action,
Speaker 5: relates to a meeting held in early January. If you recall,
Speaker 5: HSI undercover 9843 was added to the Whipple Watch signal
Speaker 5: chat after attending a few Sunrise Movement meetings. And according
Speaker 5: to investigative reports, on January 10th, an undercover agent received
Speaker 5: a flyer in the Whipple Watch chat for an upcoming
Speaker 5: emergency meeting on the 11th. Remember, this was three days
Speaker 5: after the killing of Renee Good. The undercover got permission
Speaker 5: to attend this emergency meeting and was quote-unquote vouched by
Speaker 5: one of the defendants, Isaac Sant, identified in chats as Ike.
Speaker 5: This emergency meeting was to share plans of an upcoming
Speaker 5: protest on July 23rd. And the HSI report claims that
Speaker 5: this meeting is where Twin Cities Direct Action emerged from,
Speaker 5: as that was the name of the signal chat created
Speaker 5: at the end of this meeting, and the Twin Cities
Speaker 5: Direct Action logo was first used on a flyer for
Speaker 5: this upcoming protest. On January 19th, the undercover surveilled and
Speaker 5: attended a follow-up meeting at a local restaurant in North Minneapolis,
Speaker 5: hosted by SEIU 26 and Socialist Alternative, to plan this
Speaker 5: action on the 23rd, which was then identified as a
Speaker 5: general strike. The HSI report describes this meeting as a, quote,
Speaker 5: general discussion on the upcoming Walk Out on Ice event
Speaker 5: being held on January 23rd.
Speaker 3: And as usual, this.
Speaker 5: Report doesn't actually allude to anything illegal being discussed in
Speaker 5: this meeting. And this strike and march action later took
Speaker 5: place on January 23rd and was attended by tens of
Speaker 5: thousands of people. Planning such an action is an ordinary
Speaker 5: protected First Amendment act. Around this point, and especially following
Speaker 5: the killing of Alex Preddy, DHS started really ramping up
Speaker 5: the surveillance and infiltration of anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities.
Speaker 5: They started using multiple undercover agents, not just 9843, and
Speaker 5: began surveilling and trying to infiltrate many more types of
Speaker 5: protest beyond what was organized by Twin Cities Direct Action.
Speaker 5: Two HSI reports detail surveillance of individuals and groups attending
Speaker 5: protests the No Kings protests, and an anti-war protest last March.
Speaker 5: The report on the Stop the War in Iran protest
Speaker 5: held on March 7th specifically mentions 5150, Veterans for Peace, Sunrise,
Speaker 5: and PSL. To quote the report, Undercover 5022 and Undercover
Speaker 5: 137 did not have extended interactions with any members of
Speaker 5: the crowd. Many people were also not identifiable slash recognizable
Speaker 5: due to wearing face coverings. Undercover 5022 observed that during
Speaker 5: the event, several people appeared to be conducting event overwatch
Speaker 5: or quote-unquote marshalling. They were wearing reflective vests, were wearing
Speaker 5: red hats, and carried radios. They were located at the
Speaker 5: edges of the crowd. Investigative note. While testifying to the
Speaker 5: grand jury, Agent Garcia claimed that every single individual being
Speaker 5: investigated has criminal predicate. Quote, One of the things that
Speaker 5: is abundantly clear, not only in guidance, but it's just
Speaker 5: principles as far as this investigation is, no one is
Speaker 5: ever investigated or looked at or even researched on for
Speaker 5: First Amendment protected activities. Every single individual that we have investigated,
Speaker 5: there is criminal predicate to why we are investigating them.
Speaker 5: Either statements that they have made that are criminal to
Speaker 5: their actual participation in overt criminal acts, unquote. Now, to
Speaker 5: quote the lawyer for the defense, of course, as the
Speaker 5: above examples demonstrate, HSI was obtaining wide swaths of financial
Speaker 5: data from labor unions and non-profits with zero quote-unquote criminal predicate.
Speaker 5: Undercover agents captured dozens of First Amendment-protected conversations on surreptitious recordings,
Speaker 5: many of which did not involve any of the defendants
Speaker 5: or unindicted co-conspirators in this case. Agent Garcia's statement is
Speaker 5: simply not true, unquote. And yeah, I don't know how
Speaker 5: you can think after considering all the examples I've just
Speaker 5: read that HSI had criminal predicate for every single organization
Speaker 5: or person that was under investigation or surveillance. That's just
Speaker 5: a lie. Because if they had criminal predicate, they would
Speaker 5: be charged. there would be charges against more people. There
Speaker 5: could be charges against some of those other 15 conspiring
Speaker 5: organizations in that diagram shown to the grand jury. Oh,
Speaker 5: and by the way, the DOJ lawyer who convened this
Speaker 5: grand jury, Deputy Attorney General Brian Lynch, was also a
Speaker 5: January 6th insurrectionist who entered a restricted zone alongside other rioters.
Speaker 5: And as this indictment was being put together, the government
Speaker 5: forced the court to vacate the convictions against Oath Keepers
Speaker 5: involved in January 6th. This grand jury was literally put
Speaker 5: together by a January 6th insurrectionist to indict protesters for
Speaker 5: conspiracy to impede. At the exact same time, the federal
Speaker 5: government was vacating convictions of other January 6th insurrectionists. The
Speaker 5: last thing I want to note about this batch of
Speaker 5: discovery is how it also details instances of counter-surveillance. In
Speaker 5: one report, a self-described community member walks up to a
Speaker 5: government vehicle containing HSI agents conducting surveillance, also staged to
Speaker 5: support an undercover infiltrating an event, and the community member
Speaker 5: asks the agents inside if they are ICE. They say
Speaker 5: no and point to a safety vest and a helmet
Speaker 5: in the vehicle. The community member then responds by saying, okay,
Speaker 5: and then tells them that he'll have to run the
Speaker 5: vehicle's plates to check. DHS investigative reports also detail people
Speaker 5: at meetings warning that ICE could be trying to infiltrate
Speaker 5: those very meetings and telling all the attendees to not
Speaker 5: say anything that they wouldn't say directly to an ICE agent,
Speaker 5: which is really good advice when that meeting is being
Speaker 5: attended by an ICE agent and one of the funnier
Speaker 5: investigative notes in this batch of discovery relates to an
Speaker 5: undercover's infiltration of a self-defense workshop. Quote, Due to the
Speaker 5: physicality of the event, undercover 5022's concealed body-worn audio recorder
Speaker 5: erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium near the
Speaker 5: end of the training. The undercover briefly left the gymnasium,
Speaker 5: realized she no longer had the device, and returned to
Speaker 5: the gymnasium to retrieve the device from the floor. During
Speaker 5: these approximately three minutes, the undercover was not present in
Speaker 5: the gymnasium. So... While this batch of discovery has given
Speaker 5: us a closer look at the extent of the surveillance
Speaker 5: of anti-ice protests and HSI's method of investigation, the government
Speaker 5: did not hand over everything. It was supposed to as
Speaker 5: a part of discovery. And the lawyers are requesting more documents.
Speaker 5: This batch of discovery is missing, among other things, quote,
Speaker 5: special reports of investigation that the government has admitted withholding,
Speaker 5: claiming that they're unrelated to this investigation, even though they
Speaker 5: were created and filed within it. The disclosures admit to
Speaker 5: any investigative reports that document HSI's domestic surveillance, but were
Speaker 5: placed in other case files. They admit documents and communications
Speaker 5: related to the initiation and supervision of HSI's undercover operations,
Speaker 5: and they admit downloads of the undercover phones and undercover
Speaker 5: laptops used by undercover agents in this case to communicate
Speaker 5: with the defendants and others, unquote. And those documents are
Speaker 5: useful not just to us, so we know how these
Speaker 5: investigations are being carried out, but also for the defense,
Speaker 5: because reports of government surveillance of protesters and activists during
Speaker 5: Metro's surge are relevant to the defendant's motion for, quote,
Speaker 5: selective prosecution and outrageous government conduct, as they constitute additional
Speaker 5: evidence of DHS targeting individuals based on their political beliefs
Speaker 5: and First Amendment-protected conduct, unquote. So yeah, that is my
Speaker 5: not-so-brief overview of this batch of discovery reports. I'll have
Speaker 5: links to the court documents below if you want to
Speaker 5: take a look yourself. And hopefully we'll get even more
Speaker 5: discovery in these next few months. See you on the
Speaker 5: other side. This is It Could Happen Here Executive Disorder,
Speaker 5: our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House.
Speaker 5: The Crumbling World and What This Means for You. I'm
Speaker 5: Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong,
Speaker 5: Robert Evans, and special correspondent Carlos Berrios-Pilanco, who we have
Speaker 5: had on a few times for regular episodes. This episode,
Speaker 5: we are covering the week of August 19th through August 26th. Robert,
Speaker 5: do you want to start us off with our tribute?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so before we get going today, as I'm sure
Speaker 2: everyone listening is at least broadly aware, Dolly Rebecca Parton
Speaker 2: Dean passed away the day before we recorded this on
Speaker 2: August 25th, 2026. Dolly Parton was more widely beloved than
Speaker 2: pretty much anyone that was still alive in the United States.
Speaker 2: Her death was met by immediate mourning from every side
Speaker 2: of society. And I do mean every side. President Donald
Speaker 2: Trump ordered all flags to fly at half staff and
Speaker 2: issued at least as genuine a statement of respect as
Speaker 2: he's ever put out about anyone saying this is a
Speaker 2: true loss for millions of people. There has never been
Speaker 2: anyone like her and never will. It's hard to argue
Speaker 2: with that. The DSA also sent out an official in
Speaker 2: memoriam praising Parton as a hero to the working class.
Speaker 2: And you would find anyone hard pressed to genuinely disagree
Speaker 2: with that statement, too. Dolly was born in a one
Speaker 2: room cabin in Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children of
Speaker 2: a dirt poor and illiterate sharecropper. She wrote more than
Speaker 2: 3000 songs in her life and had 44 career top
Speaker 2: 10 country albums, which is nuts. But I wouldn't be
Speaker 2: talking about Dolly on this show, which does not do
Speaker 2: obituaries as a rule, if she'd just been a rags-to-riches
Speaker 2: entertainment industry success story. Dolly had the good luck to
Speaker 2: become rich and famous, and she would always emphasize that
Speaker 2: luck had a lot to do with it, even though
Speaker 2: she worked very hard. And she grew up poor enough
Speaker 2: that she never, ever forgot that had things been a
Speaker 2: little different, she would have stayed dirt poor. So she
Speaker 2: dedicated her life and her fortune to helping the least
Speaker 2: fortunate in our society. Parton established the Dollywood Foundation to
Speaker 2: improve education in Sevier County, Tennessee, and in participating classes,
Speaker 2: the dropout rate fell from 35% to 6%. She founded
Speaker 2: the Imagination Library, her best-known charity, and donated her 100
Speaker 2: millionth free book to children in 2018. She helped build
Speaker 2: hospitals and universities and was the single highest dollar donor
Speaker 2: to research that created the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. When getting
Speaker 2: vaccinated became a political hot-button issue, Dolly posted a video
Speaker 2: of herself taking the vaccine and performed a cover of
Speaker 2: her own song, Jolene, themed after getting vaccinated. She was
Speaker 2: also a longtime and vocal advocate for queer people. In 1990,
Speaker 2: The Sun, a British magazine, found out that her Hollywood
Speaker 2: chauffeur was a trans man named Jason Pirro. They interviewed him,
Speaker 2: and he told the magazine, Dolly has been good to me.
Speaker 2: I'm not real comfortable talking about myself. Dolly knows all
Speaker 2: about me and is a very nice lady. Even back
Speaker 2: in the 90s, Dolly Parton was comfortable openly supporting trans
Speaker 2: people and the rest of the queer community. Her song Family,
Speaker 2: released in 1991, is probably the first country music song
Speaker 2: to use the word gay, certainly the first to use
Speaker 2: it in like a positive sense of the word. And
Speaker 2: she had queer and trans employees as far back as
Speaker 2: the early 90s and talked openly about that. In 2016,
Speaker 2: she was interviewed by Chris as a party for Pride
Speaker 2: Source and said, I have many gays and lesbians in
Speaker 2: my own family, she revealed to me, and then she
Speaker 2: used a word that stuck with me for a decade now.
Speaker 6: Ours.
Speaker 2: They're ours, and they're who they are, and we know
Speaker 2: they're wonderful and they're like us. Some relatives back in
Speaker 2: the mountains, she admitted, still weren't quite sure what to
Speaker 2: make of it. She also told me casually, like it
Speaker 2: was nothing, which is exactly how she wanted it treated.
Speaker 2: that she had transgender employees on salary in her own company,
Speaker 2: years before most corporations would say that sentence out loud,
Speaker 2: let alone mean it. People came to her the way
Speaker 2: they used to come to her mama, she said, to
Speaker 2: be told it was safe to be honest. You need
Speaker 2: to let people know who you are, and you need
Speaker 2: to come on out, she'd tell them. You don't need
Speaker 2: to live your life in darkness. Parton strenuously avoided direct
Speaker 2: political punditry when she could, but after the right-wing moral
Speaker 2: panic over trans rights ignited in the 2020s, she spoke out,
Speaker 2: stating her explicit and direct support for trans people. I
Speaker 2: know how important this is to them. That's who they are,
Speaker 2: she said. They cannot help that any more than I
Speaker 2: can help being Dolly Parton, you know, the way people
Speaker 2: know me. If there's something to be judged, that is
Speaker 2: God's business, but we are all God's children, and how
Speaker 2: we are is who we are. There's so much more
Speaker 2: to who Dolly was and what she did, from reinvesting
Speaker 2: royalties from Whitney Houston's cover of I Will Always Love
Speaker 2: You into the black community, after refusing to license the
Speaker 2: song to Elvis, to starring in The Best Little Whorehouse
Speaker 2: in Texas, arguably the best film about either Texas or whorehouses.
Speaker 2: She did it all in her life. I think the
Speaker 2: loss of Parton hurts so keenly because of the very
Speaker 2: thing I started with, though. The fact that her loss
Speaker 2: has been mourned across the aisle almost regardless of political stance.
Speaker 2: Dolly Parton was the closest thing our culture had to
Speaker 2: a secular saint, a Joshua Norton-like figure who could have
Speaker 2: waded into the middle of a deadly partisan riot and
Speaker 2: parted the fighting with her presence like that baby at
Speaker 2: the end of Children of Men. I might be going
Speaker 2: a little bit far with that last one, but in
Speaker 2: my research for this, I came across a recollection of
Speaker 2: Dolly by Roger Ebert that I feel I need to share.
Speaker 2: Roger Ebert, if you're on the younger side, was a
Speaker 2: very famous Pulitzer-winning film critic, and this is him talking
Speaker 2: about meetings that he and his partner Gene Siskel had
Speaker 2: with Dolly Parton. In Dallas for the premiere of 9
Speaker 2: to 5, I had an uncanny experience, and on the
Speaker 2: plane home to Chicago, I confessed it to Siskel. I
Speaker 2: had been granted a private half hour with Dolly Parton,
Speaker 2: And as we spoke, I was filled with a strange
Speaker 2: ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual.
Speaker 2: It was healing and comforting. Jean listened and said, Roger,
Speaker 2: I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her.
Speaker 3: We looked at each other.
Speaker 2: What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt
Speaker 2: that feeling again. From time to time, we would refer
Speaker 2: to it in wonder. And to close off, I think
Speaker 2: I should give us all some advice courtesy of Dolly Parton.
Speaker 2: Find out who you are and do it on purpose
Speaker 2: and do it with purpose. You got to know who
Speaker 2: you are because so many people try to emulate or
Speaker 2: copy somebody else. And that's what I got to say
Speaker 2: about Dolly.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Robert. For some less good, I mean, how
Speaker 5: do I say this? Um, Some people who are less
Speaker 5: good than Dolly Parton. There are billions of them. Let's
Speaker 5: start with some small things regarding people who are not
Speaker 5: as good as Dolly Parton. Darlene Graham just won the
Speaker 5: runoff election for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina.
Speaker 5: Graham won with 52.5% of the vote, dominating in the
Speaker 5: eastern part of the state where Trump campaigned for her
Speaker 5: last Friday in Myrtle Beach. On Wednesday morning, the Department
Speaker 5: of State in partnership with the Department of Treasury, has
Speaker 5: announced the Italy-based autonomous anti-capitalist digital service provider Autistici Inventati,
Speaker 5: or the IA Collective, is now a specially designated global
Speaker 5: terrorist organization. To quote from Treasury, quote, Today, the U.S.
Speaker 5: Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control took
Speaker 5: action to counter the growing threat posed by violent far-left
Speaker 5: terrorist groups, by sanctioning the IA Collective, an Italy-based entity
Speaker 5: that supplies specialized digital architecture tools and services for Antifa
Speaker 5: cells and other violent far-left extremists, including the foreign terrorist
Speaker 5: organization Palestine Action. The IA Collective also operates the web
Speaker 5: platform NoBlogs, which hosts many Antifa and anarchist communiques. Though notably,
Speaker 5: the State Department has repeatedly asserted that Rose City Antifa
Speaker 5: used the NoBlogs platform online, And that is simply not true.
Speaker 5: What they are referring to is Rose City Counter Info,
Speaker 5: a separate website that is not affiliated with Rose City Antifa,
Speaker 5: which is used by local anarchists to make community bulletin
Speaker 5: board style updates. I cannot emphasize enough that these are
Speaker 5: totally separate groups with often very different politics. But on
Speaker 5: both social media and official State Department press releases, These
Speaker 5: two groups have been conflated, asserting that Rose City Antifa
Speaker 5: used the AI collective tools to organize and incite violent
Speaker 5: and criminal acts. Something else I want to emphasize is
Speaker 5: that Palestine Action, the UK-based organization, is described as a
Speaker 5: foreign terrorist organization in the Treasury Department's announcement about sanctions
Speaker 5: regarding the AI collective. And in that same announcement, sanctions
Speaker 5: were also imposed on Palestine Action, which the Treasury Department
Speaker 5: accused of supporting, quote, numerous acts of terrorism. But as
Speaker 5: of recording, Palestine Action has not been officially designated as
Speaker 5: a foreign terrorist organization.
Speaker 9: And then one thing from me, the Trump administration moved
Speaker 9: ahead this week with its plans to rescind the 2001
Speaker 9: roadless rule. which blocks road building in inventory roadless areas
Speaker 9: of national forests, not in wilderness areas or national parks,
Speaker 9: as some people have been reporting. The new rule was
Speaker 9: proposed on August 18th with a public comment period beginning
Speaker 9: that day. The justification that they're going for with this
Speaker 9: is it will prevent wildfires. And I believe they're going
Speaker 9: for like it will allow fuel mitigation to prevent wildfires.
Speaker 9: It's worth noting that there were already provisions in the
Speaker 9: roadless rule to allow for like thinning of small diameter timber.
Speaker 9: What they didn't do is add budget to do that.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 9: So like if they were making a serious attempt to
Speaker 9: do fire mitigation in so much as that is something
Speaker 9: we can prevent, which I don't think it is, then
Speaker 9: they would have added budget, but they haven't done that.
Speaker 9: It's just worth pointing out that the construction of roads
Speaker 9: will allow people to get into areas that were harder
Speaker 9: for them to get into before. And the thing that
Speaker 9: tends to start wildfires is people. So people being in
Speaker 9: these areas will allow people to start fires in these areas.
Speaker 9: I'm going to cover this more in depth on natural
Speaker 9: causes in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to
Speaker 9: flag it because the comment period will probably end soon
Speaker 9: after I do my episode. So if you want to
Speaker 9: comment and so much that matters anymore, I'll include a link.
Speaker 6: So in other news that has thus far wound up
Speaker 6: not really being news, President Trump has declared, quote, economic D-Day?
Speaker 6: in his attempt to end the war in Iran, win
Speaker 6: the war in Iran. So in theory, economic D-Day is
Speaker 6: supposed to be a bunch of what are called secondary sanctions.
Speaker 6: Secondary sanctions are not just sanctions on a country, but
Speaker 6: are sanctions on any country that does trade with the
Speaker 6: first country, in this case, Iran. The specific focuses here
Speaker 6: are supposed to be, quote, cryptocurrency, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. Now,
Speaker 6: the issue here is that if you are going to
Speaker 6: do secondary sanctions against countries that trade with Iran, the
Speaker 6: actual largest target here would be China. Now, reporters repeatedly
Speaker 6: asked Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, who is nominally the person
Speaker 6: supposed to be running these sanctions, if he was going
Speaker 6: to name which countries there were going to be secondary
Speaker 6: sanctions against. Besant refused repeatedly. So these sanctions were supposed
Speaker 6: to begin later this week, but the administration has been...
Speaker 6: I don't know if slow-walking them is the term, but
Speaker 6: they have refused to actually impose any. They are claiming
Speaker 6: that they are not imposing any because they are giving
Speaker 6: countries time to comply voluntarily. But as of Wednesday, August 26th,
Speaker 6: there have been no actual sanctions imposed. Every conceivable joke
Speaker 6: comparing this to D-Day has already been made. Then he actually,
Speaker 6: by the press corps, in an unexpected bit of bravery,
Speaker 6: there were several members of the press corps in various
Speaker 6: press conferences asked, hey, so D-Day was a surprise and
Speaker 6: you're announcing this. Can you explain this conflict? And he
Speaker 6: got a bunch of non-answers.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 9: Maybe this is the giant inflatable set of sanctions that
Speaker 9: they are using to draw attention from the actual set
Speaker 9: of sanctions.
Speaker 6: James, you unfortunately know significantly more about D-Day than every
Speaker 6: single person in this administration combined.
Speaker 8: Oh my God.
Speaker 9: It's a thing that they make you do when you're
Speaker 9: a British man in your 30s.
Speaker 6: But if any sanctions actually come down, from this, we
Speaker 6: will let you know.
Speaker 7: But as.
Speaker 6: Of Wednesday, August 26th, this is another failed attempt to
Speaker 6: win the war in Iran that seems to have been
Speaker 6: called off before it began. Speaking of tariffs... So the
Speaker 6: other big piece of big tariff news is something that
Speaker 6: we talked about a few weeks ago, which is the U.S.
Speaker 6: 's attempt to impose 50% tariffs on a broad swath
Speaker 6: of Canadian goods. Ever since then, the U.S. and Canada
Speaker 6: have been in trade negotiations over these tariffs, and these
Speaker 6: negotiations have completely fallen apart as Canada has walked away
Speaker 6: from the table. Now, there are a bunch of reasons
Speaker 6: why these specific negotiations broke down completely. I'm going to
Speaker 6: go through some of them. One of the big ones
Speaker 6: is that one of the biggest sources of cross-border trade
Speaker 6: between the US and Canada is the fact that in
Speaker 6: a similar way to the US and Mexico, there is
Speaker 6: a lot of cross-border trade revolving around US auto manufacturing, right?
Speaker 6: And Canadian auto manufacturing, a lot of Ford, General Motors,
Speaker 6: stuff like that. A lot of trucks are produced in Canada.
Speaker 6: The US was negotiating reducing the tariffs on Canadian automobiles
Speaker 6: to 15%, but they were only doing this for cars
Speaker 6: and not trucks. And so they wanted to leave the
Speaker 6: truck rate at 50%. And there were a whole bunch
Speaker 6: of very, very fancy trucks that American consumers buy and
Speaker 6: that Canada makes that would still have 50% tariffs.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: This is one of the things that normally when these
Speaker 6: kind of Trade battles have happened before. Automotive stuff has
Speaker 6: been written out of them almost immediately because it's terrible
Speaker 6: for a bunch of American companies. But the administration was
Speaker 6: refusing to back down on this. And, you know, the
Speaker 6: Canadians walked out. They have wooden alcohol tariffs that are
Speaker 6: already in effect. There are going to be more tariffs
Speaker 6: coming on September 8th. More bafflingly, one of the big
Speaker 6: things that Trump has been on is trying to restart
Speaker 6: the Keystone XL pipeline.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Which Carty is like, no, we're not doing this pipeline
Speaker 6: unless we get a better trade deal. But then in
Speaker 6: a truly startling set of proposals, the U.S. wanted to
Speaker 6: be able to set Canadian steel tariff rates?
Speaker 7: Sure.
Speaker 6: The nominal argument here is that the U.S. is trying
Speaker 6: to like, quote unquote, stop the import of the flood
Speaker 6: of cheap steel from countries like China and And they
Speaker 6: could only do this if the Canadian steel tariff rate
Speaker 6: matched the American steel tariff rate.
Speaker 5: But the goal for this.
Speaker 7: Was for the U.S.
Speaker 6: To be able to review and set Canadian tariff rates
Speaker 6: and make sure that they match American tariff rates on
Speaker 6: other countries. Which, this is the kind of stuff you
Speaker 6: do to a colony?
Speaker 5: 51st state.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Can confirm. Very colonial thing to do.
Speaker 3: Shocking from America.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've never seen a country do this, try to do
Speaker 2: this to another sovereign country like Canada.
Speaker 6: Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I don't think we did this to Iraq. I've never
Speaker 6: I've never seen anything like this.
Speaker 7: It's it's bizarre.
Speaker 2: The insistence that like, yeah, we have any sort of
Speaker 2: say in their international policy is de facto making Canada
Speaker 2: trying to make Canada agree that they're a colony.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah. It's very weird the way this is being written
Speaker 6: about in the American press, where they're like, oh, well,
Speaker 6: this is Canadian autonomy and sovereignty has become a political issue.
Speaker 6: And yes, obviously, there's no country on earth that would
Speaker 6: agree to this.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 6: Even the staunchest American, like Saudi Arabia, would not agree
Speaker 6: to let the U.S. dictate its tariff policy.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 3: It's absurd.
Speaker 6: And this has managed to accomplish the absolutely staggering feat
Speaker 6: of uniting... Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney with Doug Ford,
Speaker 6: the right-wing premier of Ontario.
Speaker 5: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 6: And also, because these people just hate winning, I don't
Speaker 6: have another explanation for this other than racism. Canadian negotiators
Speaker 6: claimed that the U.S. was trying to intervene in Canadian
Speaker 6: policy about the digital promotion of French films. which is
Speaker 6: a direct attack on Quebec.
Speaker 3: On the Quebecois.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and a bunch of very, very important legal protections
Speaker 6: in Quebec about the French language. So they have somehow
Speaker 6: managed to unite a political coalition of Doug Ford, the
Speaker 6: Quebec separatist, And the ruling.
Speaker 5: Liberals, all of whom- It's pretty insane. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 6: They're just going systematically through every single conceivable political bloc
Speaker 6: in Canada and pissing them off. So these negotiations obviously collapsed. Obviously,
Speaker 6: the Canadians walked away. Obviously, there was almost total support
Speaker 6: in Canadian society for doing this.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Canadian nationalism is at an all-time high. This is really
Speaker 5: just carrying over the sort of trends that we saw
Speaker 5: in the last Canadian election where Carney saved the Liberals
Speaker 5: from total and utter demise by feeding into this sense
Speaker 5: of nationalism based on being under threat from Trump. And
Speaker 5: the guy who was running for the Conservative Prime Minister
Speaker 5: was too associated with Trump and so that really hurt them.
Speaker 5: And it built this really big coalition in Canada to
Speaker 5: push back against the conservatives as a way of pushing
Speaker 5: back against Trump and really put forward the Liberal Party
Speaker 5: as this counterforce to Trump's America and the attempted incursions
Speaker 5: into Canadian sovereignty, which Trump is still trying to do.
Speaker 5: And it's impressive how much Carney's been able to hold
Speaker 5: on to that coalition while ruling. It's been over a
Speaker 5: year now. and stuff like this shows that it's, if anything,
Speaker 5: only gotten stronger in recent weeks during these negotiations. Pulling
Speaker 5: together Doug Ford, the Liberal Party, and the Kebukwa into
Speaker 5: one united bloc is like an unprecedented... a piece of
Speaker 5: like national unity.
Speaker 2: The fact that other Canadians are backing up the Quebecois
Speaker 2: after fucking Trump tried to make restrictions that like the
Speaker 2: French language and can't like that.
Speaker 3: That's nuts.
Speaker 5: The fact that I'm going to be on the side
Speaker 5: of the Quebecois as like a Midwest Canadian.
Speaker 3: It's nuts.
Speaker 5: Very impressive by Trump.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And I think what's interesting about this, right, is that like,
Speaker 6: you know, throughout Canadian history, there's been a bipartisan series
Speaker 6: of debates that have cut across the You know, like
Speaker 6: as cut across every political party, there have been factions
Speaker 6: in both about whether the extent to which Canada was
Speaker 6: going to be sort of a branch plant economy of
Speaker 6: of the United States. And that's just over. Everyone at
Speaker 6: this point has has, you know, sort of unified and saying, no,
Speaker 6: we're not going to continue doing this, you know, to
Speaker 6: sort of cap this off. One of the demands from
Speaker 6: the Trump negotiators were that Canada would end this program.
Speaker 6: It's been doing of this sort of this sort of
Speaker 6: by Canadian program. where they've been doing something that the U.S.
Speaker 6: also has been doing for ages of encouraging people and
Speaker 6: encouraging government contracts to go to Canadian companies, which has
Speaker 6: been intensified in response to sort of what I think inaccurately.
Speaker 6: And I can't believe I'm saying this in regards to
Speaker 6: Canada as American imperial aggression. And Canadians have refused to
Speaker 6: do this. And instead, this has been intensifying attempts to
Speaker 6: sort of do whatever is possible to try to decouple
Speaker 6: the US and Canadian economies. Obviously, that's not something that's
Speaker 6: particularly possible in a macro sense, just because of the
Speaker 6: reliance on both, you know, oil exports and also the
Speaker 6: way that the auto sector is intertwined. But this has
Speaker 6: become economic policy in a way that would have been
Speaker 6: unthinkable even like five years ago.
Speaker 5: In specific, like the Buy Canada campaign to push for
Speaker 5: consumers just to buy products made either by Canadian companies
Speaker 5: or made in Canada has been a massive success.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Talking with my family in Canada about this, like this
Speaker 5: is penetrated into all parts of the country, including like
Speaker 5: the conservative Alberta province where my family lives, where, yeah,
Speaker 5: this is like a big thing. It's hard to understate
Speaker 5: how much of an impact that has had in the
Speaker 5: country's consuming habits in the past year and a half.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Trump has the ability to do this in an
Speaker 9: incredible number of countries, actually. He has created some fantastic alliances.
Speaker 9: He's been great for the maple syrup business.
Speaker 5: Let's go on ad break and then return for more news.
Speaker 3: Ads for poutine and maple syrup coming up.
Speaker 5: From your mouth to Katya's.
Speaker 3: Not at the same time. Maybe at the same time now.
Speaker 3: Maybe that's all they have.
Speaker 5: Carlos, welcome.
Speaker 7: Hello.
Speaker 5: What is your special segment for us this week on
Speaker 5: executive disorder?
Speaker 3: There was an American colony segue that was hanging right there.
Speaker 3: You know what?
Speaker 5: My bad.
Speaker 7: From the soon-to-be colony of the U.S., Canada, to the
Speaker 7: current colony, Puerto Rico, on Wednesday, the U.S. Department of
Speaker 7: Agriculture declared that 26 out of the 78 municipalities in
Speaker 7: Puerto Rico were undergoing a drought disaster. Per the AP,
Speaker 7: more than 33% of the archipelago is under extreme drought,
Speaker 7: and another 30% is experiencing severe drought. So I should
Speaker 7: say that this emergency declaration has been a long time coming,
Speaker 7: and I wouldn't be surprised if it gets extended to
Speaker 7: other municipalities. Puerto Rico has been experiencing pretty bad water
Speaker 7: problems since forever, but they became particularly acute last year
Speaker 7: when more than half a million people lost water because
Speaker 7: of a broken pipe. Earlier this year, another break caused
Speaker 7: about 300,000 people to lose water, more or less. In
Speaker 7: my area, which is kind of outside of the metro
Speaker 7: where it's been most affecting, we lost water for about
Speaker 7: 10 days early in the summer. And now, because of
Speaker 7: a mixture of aging infrastructure that hasn't been fixed and
Speaker 7: a continuing drought, it looks like that might be the
Speaker 7: case again soon. At least we're stockpiling as much water
Speaker 7: as we can. So to talk about the infrastructure problems
Speaker 7: real quick, part of it is really due to how
Speaker 7: bad the system is. We lose about 60% of the
Speaker 7: water produced by the local water utility before it gets
Speaker 7: to people's homes, which is... It's become normal to us,
Speaker 7: but it's kind of crazy to say to other people,
Speaker 7: at least in my experience when I've talked about it
Speaker 7: with others. And quite a few of the reservoirs that
Speaker 7: feed us water have not been dredged in years. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and part of the reason the drought is going on
Speaker 7: is because of the super El Nino, which has been
Speaker 7: causing temperatures across pretty much the whole world to go up.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So I also want to talk about two pretty big
Speaker 7: investigations published by Aura Bogalo of Injustice Watch, one in
Speaker 7: collaboration with Wired and the other in collaboration with The Intercept.
Speaker 7: To kind of set the scene, Illinois has this thing
Speaker 7: called the Trust Act, which generally prohibits law enforcement in
Speaker 7: Illinois from participating in immigration enforcement. This includes not detaining
Speaker 7: or not continuing to detain any person based solely on
Speaker 7: whether they have an immigration detainer. They are not supposed to, quote,
Speaker 7: assist in any capacity with an immigration agent's enforcement operation
Speaker 7: unless required to by a judge's warrant or a federal law.
Speaker 7: Several other states have laws like this, essentially making them
Speaker 7: sanctuary states. However, as Bogada writes, this hasn't really stopped
Speaker 7: local officials from collaborating with immigration enforcement. In one case,
Speaker 7: a Riverton police officer ran the name of a 31-year-old
Speaker 7: immigrant for a law enforcement database due to a traffic
Speaker 7: infraction only to get a phone call from the FBI
Speaker 7: almost immediately. The FBI agent was trying to see how
Speaker 7: he could help ICE detain the guy, the man who
Speaker 7: was stopped. The solution came from an outstanding state warrant
Speaker 7: the man had out for him. The police officer technically
Speaker 7: was not detaining him on an immigration base, but the
Speaker 7: outcome was the same. Per Borgato's reporting, since Trump came
Speaker 7: into office, officials from at least 75 agencies across Illinois...
Speaker 7: have collaborated with immigration officials by feeding them information. This
Speaker 7: has led to at least 150 people being put into
Speaker 7: the immigration system throughout Illinois, even though as a sanctuary state,
Speaker 7: it's ostensibly not supposed to do that. In another exchange
Speaker 7: reported by Injustice Watch, a Tinley Park officer was asked
Speaker 7: by an ICE agent for quote-unquote lead data on a
Speaker 7: person the officer had stopped for speeding. The officer responded
Speaker 7: with a bunch of information about the guy, including his
Speaker 7: address and phone number. and also told the ICE agent that, quote,
Speaker 7: his crew is doing work in Tinley Park currently. There
Speaker 7: are several examples of this kind of wink and nod
Speaker 7: collaboration by local officials with immigration enforcement for a variety
Speaker 7: of different ways, including emails or housing detained migrants at
Speaker 7: the request of the U.S. Marshals, then releasing them into
Speaker 7: ICE's hands. The second story published by Bogalo is much
Speaker 7: the same, but focused on county prosecutors' role in enforcing
Speaker 7: immigration law. Per her story, quote, state's attorney's office in
Speaker 7: one out of every six Illinois counties acted as valuable
Speaker 7: assets of federal immigration enforcement, sharing sensitive personal data about
Speaker 7: the people they were prosecuting without criminal warrants, public disclosure,
Speaker 7: or legislative oversight, and with no accounting of how often
Speaker 7: it happened or who was affected, end quote. Some of
Speaker 7: this came from simply answering when DHS agents came calling,
Speaker 7: while some prosecutors volunteered information of their own volition. In
Speaker 7: Marion County, one assistant state's attorney emailed the information of
Speaker 7: a man in a case he was prosecuting only for
Speaker 7: ICE to respond, quote, The same prosecutor, per Injustice Watch,
Speaker 7: emailed the same ICE agent within 20 minutes after flagging
Speaker 7: the first person, saying, quote, It's worth noting that per Bogado,
Speaker 7: more than half of Illinois state attorney's offices said they
Speaker 7: had no record of contacts with ICE. However, what I
Speaker 7: wanted to highlight here was that even in states people
Speaker 7: would consider, quote unquote, safe because they're sanctuary states or
Speaker 7: sanctuary cities, the mechanism of the state continues to collaborate
Speaker 7: with immigration enforcement under the table. We've seen this in
Speaker 7: a bunch of places already, mainly for state, local, and
Speaker 7: municipal police officers doing this exact same type of thing
Speaker 7: across the country.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 7: But the prosecutor's thing, as far as I know, is
Speaker 7: pretty new, especially at this scale that Pogado reported on. Right.
Speaker 7: So this kind of wink and nod collaboration is likely
Speaker 7: happening across the board in the United States. And we'll
Speaker 7: be hearing stories like this probably for years to come.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think like.
Speaker 9: People should be aware, I guess, I just want to
Speaker 9: say really briefly that like sanctuary jurisdiction laws are not
Speaker 9: necessarily doing what people think they are doing.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Like cops are going to cop.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 9: And you see this all the time with like when
Speaker 9: they put into the queries they put into flock, when
Speaker 9: people look at their flock hot list and they just
Speaker 9: put like investigation or crime as the reason why. Like
Speaker 9: that is what's happening there, right? When your jurisdiction tells
Speaker 9: you that these flock cameras aren't going to be used
Speaker 9: for immigration. When the cop just puts in investigation, you
Speaker 9: have no idea what it's being used for, right?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Absolutely. And I should also flag that a bunch of
Speaker 7: sanctuary cities have specific ways in which they'll collaborate with
Speaker 7: immigration enforcement. So, for example, a big thing is Operation
Speaker 7: Stone Garden, where they... use municipal, state, and local cops
Speaker 7: to patrol the border. And sometimes, ostensibly, it's not supposed
Speaker 7: to be for immigration enforcement, but I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 7: it's happened across the U.S. where it's being used to
Speaker 7: enforce immigration.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, like look at NDAs, right? Like that's in
Speaker 9: theory a trespass thing. Top of it being, I guess
Speaker 9: it's a federal trespass in that instance because it's a
Speaker 9: military installation. For a citizen, that would be like a
Speaker 9: trespass thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are a bunch of these ways.
Speaker 9: The California Values Act has all these carve-outs in addition to,
Speaker 9: as far as I'm aware, never having led to a prosecution.
Speaker 9: These sanctuary city laws of a cop or a prosecutor
Speaker 9: or sanctuary jurisdiction laws, they don't have teeth.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and insofar as sanctuary city laws did anything under
Speaker 6: the first Trump administration, it wasn't because of the laws themselves.
Speaker 6: It was because of the mass resistance to it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we don't fix this with sanctuary laws. And I
Speaker 9: think anyone who's telling you that that is the case
Speaker 9: is either lying to you or unaware.
Speaker 7: Exactly.
Speaker 9: I want to talk a little bit about some documents
Speaker 9: that the Deportation Data Project has obtained by Freedom of
Speaker 9: Information Act request. And they show us some data about
Speaker 9: ICE detentions. One of the things they show is that
Speaker 9: ICE is focusing more and more on people with no
Speaker 9: criminal record rather than as a claim focusing on people
Speaker 9: with convictions. As of July, the majority of ICE arrests
Speaker 9: were people with no convictions and no pending charges. This
Speaker 9: comes in the same week as the Fourth Circuit. Post-Chevron
Speaker 9: ruled that if a person's criminal conviction is vacated for
Speaker 9: any reason, that eliminates immigration consequences coming from that conviction.
Speaker 9: That would only be in the Fourth Circuit right now, right?
Speaker 5: It was reported today in a few outlets that that
Speaker 5: July had the highest number of ICE arrests, almost 50,000.
Speaker 5: That's correct.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 9: And it's very interesting. June saw the previous record, right?
Speaker 9: And then July saw an even higher record. Specifically, I'm
Speaker 9: looking at detention bookings there.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 9: So it is possible that someone could be booked in
Speaker 9: having previously been detained once, right? Like we can't sum
Speaker 9: all of these months together. It's unlikely, but like Flores,
Speaker 9: the Flores settlement governs detention of minors. But I don't
Speaker 9: think there's a prohibition on re-detention under Flores, as I
Speaker 9: understand it. So yeah, as you said, these are the
Speaker 9: highest numbers that we've seen in this Trump administration. The
Speaker 9: data set I was looking at goes back to 2022,
Speaker 9: but I would be shocked if there were pre-2022 numbers
Speaker 9: that were higher than this. So I think it's probably
Speaker 9: pretty safe to say these are the highest numbers ever.
Speaker 9: It's interesting to break it down by state, which I did.
Speaker 9: A lot of that increase came in Texas and Florida.
Speaker 9: If you graph the number of bookings by state by month,
Speaker 9: you see huge spikes in Texas and Florida. Texas has
Speaker 9: always been the highest rate. It's a vast state. It
Speaker 9: has a large migrant population. You have support from local
Speaker 9: law enforcement. But the Florida peak was particularly notable, as
Speaker 9: were Arizona and Georgia. California, by contrast, didn't go up
Speaker 9: as much. And I want to get in a little bit.
Speaker 9: I'm going to go through some more data and tell
Speaker 9: us more about what this tells us about how ICE
Speaker 9: is going about things now. The number of people in
Speaker 9: detention is lower than its peak of January this year.
Speaker 9: This is probably due to the all-time high number of
Speaker 9: book outs from detention in July. The vast majority of
Speaker 9: those were removals. Some of them, people who bonded out,
Speaker 9: the vast bulk of those are going to be removals.
Speaker 9: We can also see certain detention facilities growing in population,
Speaker 9: notably Camp East Montana a few months ago. I reported
Speaker 9: on the GAO report, Government Accountability Office report, which highlighted
Speaker 9: how terrible conditions were there. As far as I know,
Speaker 9: it's still called Montana, not Montagna. I don't know if
Speaker 9: that's just they don't have the capacity to add accents
Speaker 9: or if maybe they're going for something else there. Overall,
Speaker 9: this data shows that the ice surge in July was
Speaker 9: really huge. And it shows us a little bit about
Speaker 9: this home and era approach, right? They're not doing what
Speaker 9: Bovino did, which was gratuitously using violence and crowd control
Speaker 9: and a highly visible militarized presence in blue states. They
Speaker 9: are doing this in red states as well. And they're
Speaker 9: doing it in a less sort of confrontational way. Not
Speaker 9: that it's not confrontational to grab someone and tear their
Speaker 9: family apart.
Speaker 3: Of course it is, right?
Speaker 9: But Bovino was trying to manufacture media moments. Yeah, less
Speaker 9: of a public spectacle, I guess. Yeah, Bovino has been
Speaker 9: about the spectacle for years, right? Like he had, in
Speaker 9: the Biden administration, he had social media people on his
Speaker 9: payroll in the El Centro sector and video content creators.
Speaker 9: So like, Homan is going about this differently, but clearly
Speaker 9: he is very effective at what he is trying to do.
Speaker 9: And it has been harder for people to oppose, said
Speaker 9: Pavino's like flood a city with Border Patrol guys in
Speaker 9: plague carriers approach.
Speaker 3: DHS OIG, that's the.
Speaker 9: Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security,
Speaker 9: has also released a report this month detailing how the
Speaker 9: focus on deportation, so all costs, has impacted the fentanyl market.
Speaker 9: So the report, which looked at how HSI, that's Homeland
Speaker 9: Security Investigations, has used expensive technologies, spoiler, it hasn't, concluded that, quote,
Speaker 9: As ICE shifted priorities towards immigration enforcement, HSI's level of
Speaker 9: effort on fentanyl declined from fiscal year 2024 to 2025.
Speaker 9: Fentanyl investigations decreased by 24%, investigative hours spent countering fentanyl
Speaker 9: decreased by approximately 30%, and fentanyl seizures decreased by 39%. Indeed,
Speaker 9: there are fewer HSI agents doing fentanyl investigations now than
Speaker 9: there were in some years under Biden. which is remarkable
Speaker 9: when you look at how massive the budget for DHS is, right?
Speaker 9: And how aggressively they've been recruiting people.
Speaker 5: Well, no, James, they have to infiltrate the Sunrise Movement meetings.
Speaker 5: That's more important for national security.
Speaker 9: They're sitting in cars outside memorials to Alex Peretti taking pictures.
Speaker 9: The report also looked at a school called Raven. The
Speaker 9: N is lowercase, the rest is not. You could ask
Speaker 9: me why and I wouldn't be able to tell you.
Speaker 9: It's a group of analytical tools It stated that, quote,
Speaker 9: from fiscal years 2022 to 2025, HSI spent more than
Speaker 9: $ 150 million developing the Raven platform.
Speaker 3: It was not widely used.
Speaker 9: Most of the offices surveyed abandoned using it altogether and
Speaker 9: complained that it, quote, did not work and.
Speaker 3: Quote, crashed. Hell yeah.
Speaker 7: We love to see it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it goes into like, I think this is probably
Speaker 9: something that we can, we're going to see more, right,
Speaker 9: as we continue like massively inflating the budgets of these
Speaker 9: agencies that they will just do things that end up
Speaker 9: being like a bridge to nowhere. But their attempt at
Speaker 9: some like highly sophisticated analytical tool platform that would generate
Speaker 9: leads seems to have completely, well, it's failed.
Speaker 3: They're not using it anymore. That's interesting.
Speaker 5: Something I did not mention in yesterday's episode about the
Speaker 5: ICE surveillance, in Minnesota, is DHS's use of Clearview AI
Speaker 5: to do some analysis of suspects, which identified people with
Speaker 5: similar names but are different human beings in the Clearview
Speaker 5: AI reports when they were looking into anti-ice protesters.
Speaker 9: Yeah, maybe this is what led to the famous case
Speaker 9: of Olivia Rodrigo getting detained at the border a few
Speaker 9: years ago.
Speaker 6: It used to be humans detaining a second guy named
Speaker 6: John Smith on the Do Not Fly list. Now it's automated. Yeah,
Speaker 6: those people have lost their jobs and it's very sad.
Speaker 6: But yeah, they love to use AI, right? They use
Speaker 6: AI in their surveillance towers at the border. I'm sure
Speaker 6: we'll see a bunch of money thrown at AI shit
Speaker 6: that will end up going nowhere in the next two years.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I would not be surprised if some of
Speaker 5: the budget increases that they have received might go to
Speaker 5: some of the things that I will discuss in the
Speaker 5: next segment after this ad break. Alright, we are back.
Speaker 5: Let's return to our show's namesake. because there's a big
Speaker 5: update on Trump's March executive order to restrict mail-in voting.
Speaker 5: Earlier this week, the Supreme Court lifted one injunction blocking
Speaker 5: parts of this executive order. But as of recording, there
Speaker 5: is another injunction in a separate case that still remains
Speaker 5: in place. However, these injunctions relate to different parts of
Speaker 5: the same executive order. So the entirety of the order
Speaker 5: is not blocked by courts, and parts of it may
Speaker 5: now be able to go into effect possibly before the midterms.
Speaker 5: Let's start by talking about the injunction that the Supreme
Speaker 5: Court just lifted. A group of 23 states sued the
Speaker 5: government over Trump's executive order on mail-in voting for infringing
Speaker 5: on the state's authority to administer elections. a district court
Speaker 5: agreed and blocked the executive order. But on Monday, the
Speaker 5: conservative majority ruled 6-3 in a shadow docket, unsigned ruling,
Speaker 5: finding that the states and the lower court lacked the
Speaker 5: legal authority to block the executive order because no harms
Speaker 5: have yet come as a result of the executive order. What? Basically,
Speaker 5: it was too soon to file a challenge because the
Speaker 5: order hadn't yet gone into effect.
Speaker 8: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5: And the plaintiffs had yet to suffer any injury.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And like, that's the whole fucking point of the shadow docket.
Speaker 5: It's based on the idea that the applicant faces serious,
Speaker 5: irreparable harm if the emergency order is not granted. Like
Speaker 5: the main example of this is like if someone's facing
Speaker 5: execution on death row, but under the logic of the
Speaker 5: conservative justices in this court ruling, such an inmate wouldn't
Speaker 5: have the grounds to stay their execution because they haven't
Speaker 5: died yet. It's completely batshit. This is not how these
Speaker 5: rulings usually work. And having this ruling on the shadow
Speaker 5: docket itself is just like insults to injury. The majority
Speaker 5: wrote that the state's supposed concrete injury was in fact
Speaker 5: only a, quote, unduly long chain of inferences. So this
Speaker 5: ruling from the Supreme Court will now allow DHS to
Speaker 5: create and send, quote unquote, state citizenship lists to each
Speaker 5: state 60 days ahead of upcoming federal elections, cataloging each
Speaker 5: person in every state who DHS believes is eligible to vote. Now,
Speaker 5: the Supreme Court does note that, quote, states are not
Speaker 5: required to use the lists, unquote. But just the existence
Speaker 5: of these lists and the creation of them could be
Speaker 5: incredibly troubling. Of course, they could be used in the future.
Speaker 5: But as James has discussed, we do not have a
Speaker 5: single list of U.S.
Speaker 8: Citizens.
Speaker 5: And the idea that DHS might be trying to, and
Speaker 5: in fact is now allowed to make such a list,
Speaker 5: for a specific purpose, could have a lot of far-reaching ramifications,
Speaker 5: even beyond elections.
Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's also important to know that as of the Supreme
Speaker 5: Court's new ruling, the Attorney General will now, quote, prioritize
Speaker 5: the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of state and
Speaker 5: local officials or any others who issue federal ballots to
Speaker 5: ineligible voters. So even if states are not required to
Speaker 5: use these citizenship lists from DHS, Trump is still effectively
Speaker 5: compelling states to follow these lists or else they could
Speaker 5: face prosecution.
Speaker 7: Yep.
Speaker 5: In the ruling, the conservative majority wrote that the lower
Speaker 5: court concluded states did suffer a present injury because it
Speaker 5: required them to, quote, begin planning now how to comply
Speaker 5: with the order, unquote. But the Supreme Court stated that states, quote,
Speaker 5: cannot manufacture a standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves
Speaker 5: based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is
Speaker 5: certainly not impending this is wild this is a wild
Speaker 5: thing to say that states are only suffering harm because
Speaker 5: they're trying to figure out how to comply with the
Speaker 5: order as written and they're just doing that to themselves
Speaker 5: as opposed to that being imposed from the president Right.
Speaker 9: So the suggestion is that they would just be like,
Speaker 9: we'll not comply, see you in court when this comes in,
Speaker 9: I guess.
Speaker 3: That would be how they should approach this.
Speaker 5: And that is maybe what they are going to do
Speaker 5: going forward, because there is now a new lawsuit, which
Speaker 5: I will discuss in a second, regarding some of these issues. Okay.
Speaker 5: And again, the whole argument from the conservative court is
Speaker 5: that basically no harm has yet been done, so they
Speaker 5: can't file a challenge. However, because this is a shadow
Speaker 5: docket ruling, the court did find that this injunction would
Speaker 5: cause the government to likely suffer irreparable harm if the
Speaker 5: stay isn't granted.
Speaker 6: I love our just like cartoon Calvin Ball ruling legal body.
Speaker 5: Yeah. It's one of the most cartoon rulings I've looked at.
Speaker 5: And we've looked at a lot of cartoon rulings this year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's almost the only rulings we get anymore.
Speaker 7: Oh man, yeah.
Speaker 5: Now, the court does note, quote, the court's disposition of
Speaker 5: this application does not mean that any measure taken by
Speaker 5: the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful.
Speaker 5: On that score, time will tell. But the order itself
Speaker 5: does not harm the state's So the district court lacks
Speaker 5: justification to bar the government from trying to implement it, unquote.
Speaker 5: So they admit that in the implementation of this executive order,
Speaker 5: it might violate the constitution, right? The government, the federal
Speaker 5: government might violate laws, but just the order as written
Speaker 5: can't do anything because it's just text. It can't actually
Speaker 5: do anything. So you can't challenge it. So that's all bad,
Speaker 5: but let's talk about kind of the other half of this.
Speaker 5: So this ruling did not address the part of the
Speaker 5: executive order requiring the post office to review the eligibility
Speaker 5: of voters before sending them an absentee ballot. And there's
Speaker 5: a separate injunction by the same lower court judge blocking
Speaker 5: the Postal Service from implementing their proposed rule change in
Speaker 5: accordance with Trump's executive order. This executive order directed the
Speaker 5: Postal Service to, quote, initiate a proposed rulemaking that includes several,
Speaker 5: quote unquote, proposed provisions, including a new requirement that outbound
Speaker 5: absentee ballots feature a unique barcode to facilitate tracking. And
Speaker 5: Trump told the Postal Service to not mail any ballots
Speaker 5: to people who are not on a list of eligible U.S.
Speaker 5: citizen voters. Now, in the Supreme Court's ruling on that
Speaker 5: other injunction, the conservative majority wrote, quote, If the Postal
Speaker 5: Service's final rule harms the states, they may challenge that rule. And, well, well, well,
Speaker 5: last Friday, the Postal Service outlined and published their new
Speaker 5: final rule. Quote, The rule introduces new mail piece preparations
Speaker 5: requirements and data reporting standards for federal ballot mail that
Speaker 5: must be satisfied prior to presenting outbound federal ballot mail
Speaker 5: for acceptance into the mail stream. Unquote. So the new rule...
Speaker 5: requires states to use standardized mail-in ballot envelope designs to
Speaker 5: be compatible with automated processing to display a consistent election
Speaker 5: mail logo and an intelligent mail barcode. State and local
Speaker 5: election officials will also have to use a new federal
Speaker 5: ballot mail portal to administer absentee ballots. And this portal
Speaker 5: will be used for two things. This is like a
Speaker 5: digital portal. State officials will use the portal to certify
Speaker 5: the design of of their new envelopes in accordance with
Speaker 5: the new requirements and must provide the name and address
Speaker 5: of the voter as found on the outbound federal mail
Speaker 5: ballot envelope, the issuing state and the barcode on the
Speaker 5: outbound and return federal ballot mail envelopes prior to presenting
Speaker 5: an outbound federal ballot mailing for acceptance. So that's the data.
Speaker 5: states have to submit to the postal service. It is
Speaker 5: a name, address, the barcode, and the state. That does
Speaker 5: not go as far as what Trump's executive order wanted
Speaker 5: the postal service to go, but this is going to
Speaker 5: be a new step or at least a new process
Speaker 5: to do some of the same steps that have already
Speaker 5: been kind of been done in like an ad hoc manner.
Speaker 5: And rather than this following a 60-day deadline as set
Speaker 5: in Trump's executive order, the postal service's final rule contains
Speaker 5: an optional 90-day notice for for states to tell the
Speaker 5: Postal Service that they'll be using mail-in ballots, and a
Speaker 5: recommended 30-day soft deadline to upload voter data into this
Speaker 5: new portal before the Postal Service will accept any mail-in ballots.
Speaker 5: And importantly, if states do not follow the new proposed rulemaking,
Speaker 5: the Post Office just will not accept mail-in ballots. Quote,
Speaker 5: the Postal Service will generally not accept outbound federal ballot
Speaker 5: mailings unless compliance with the rule's new standards has been verified.
Speaker 5: meaning they have to up that data into the portal
Speaker 5: and have these new envelopes. Now, the rule does note, quote,
Speaker 5: the Postal Service will not play any role in determining
Speaker 5: voter eligibility, maintaining voter rolls, or counting ballots, unquote. So
Speaker 5: they're not directly, as of how this rule is written,
Speaker 5: they're not going to be directly reviewing citizenship lists when
Speaker 5: they receive those ballots, but they will have the name
Speaker 5: and the address and the state and the barcode. And
Speaker 5: even if the Postal Service themselves will not be verifying eligibility,
Speaker 5: that doesn't mean Trump officials won't ever use this new
Speaker 5: centralized mail-in ballot portal database for other purposes in the future.
Speaker 5: The published final rule says that the after the government
Speaker 5: obtains timely relief from the lower court injunction in preparation
Speaker 5: for the 2026 election, which has yet to happen as
Speaker 5: of recording. But on Wednesday morning, a few hours ago,
Speaker 5: 23 states have sued over the final rule, over this
Speaker 5: new rule, as the Supreme Court told them they could
Speaker 5: once this rule was published. So again, this rule does
Speaker 5: not go as far as what Trump wanted, but it
Speaker 5: does open the door for certain things. And combined with
Speaker 5: the DHS citizenship lists and the Attorney General being able
Speaker 5: to prosecute people who do not essentially follow those lists
Speaker 5: at the state level, this could be combined with aspects
Speaker 5: of Trump's executive order to make mail-in voting more difficult
Speaker 5: and introduce very, very, very severe penalties for states that
Speaker 5: don't follow what the executive order is outlining.
Speaker 9: Yeah this is great this has been part of the
Speaker 9: project for a while right like yeah attacking elections has
Speaker 9: been the thing that has been like the cost of
Speaker 9: entry into the Republican Party yeah since 2020.
Speaker 2: They hate the idea of people voting yeah.
Speaker 3: Like a free and fair election is something you have
Speaker 3: to be opposed to.
Speaker 2: Like that's the most disgusting thing that a conservative can imagine.
Speaker 9: Today yeah I'm sure like If I had to guess,
Speaker 9: we will see a lot more visible ice stuff again,
Speaker 9: give it a couple months, you know, right before the election.
Speaker 3: That wouldn't shock me at all. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Quick update here. After recording, a federal judge lifted that
Speaker 5: final injunction blocking parts of Trump's executive order. So now
Speaker 5: the administration is fully cleared to implement aspects of that
Speaker 5: order ahead of the midterms. That new 23-state lawsuit.
Speaker 5: Will target the Postal Service's final rule, which can now
Speaker 5: be implemented following the lifting of the injunction. For our
Speaker 5: last section, let's turn to the U.S. military. Let's start
Speaker 5: with Carlos.
Speaker 7: The oceans around the U.S. have once again become killing
Speaker 7: fields because the U.S. military carried out two strikes against
Speaker 7: vessels in the Pacific and the Caribbean that it alleges,
Speaker 7: without publishing any proof, were trafficking drugs. The first strike
Speaker 7: was in the Pacific on Sunday, and it was the
Speaker 7: first one of these strikes in roughly two months. Meanwhile,
Speaker 7: the second was in the Caribbean on Tuesday. Per The Guardian,
Speaker 7: this brings a total to 68 strikes with an overall
Speaker 7: death toll of at least 227 people since the strikes
Speaker 7: began in September of last year. These strikes come at
Speaker 7: the same time as the U.S. announced that Colombia, Guatemala,
Speaker 7: and Honduras agreed to allow joint military operations against criminal
Speaker 7: groups on their soil. It's worth noting that, per The Guardian,
Speaker 7: Guatemala denied reaching such a deal. Ecuador launched these operations
Speaker 7: earlier in March, and right before we started recording, the
Speaker 7: Ecuadorian police announced that it had dealt a, quote, strong
Speaker 7: blow against organized crime through operations Factoría and Jericho with
Speaker 7: international cooperation of the DEA and Southcom that led to
Speaker 7: the arrest of 43 people.
Speaker 5: Robert, do you want to close this out?
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So as I'm going to guess everybody remembers, about six
Speaker 2: months ago, Iranian strikes crippled a U.S. base in Bahrain
Speaker 2: and damaged a major logistics hub. This is part of
Speaker 2: why the Abraham Lincoln has been running short of supplies
Speaker 2: and has been just out of a bunch of stuff
Speaker 2: because they had to redirect and move supply. We talked
Speaker 2: about this last week to the base in Diego Garcia.
Speaker 2: One of the other things that happened after that base
Speaker 2: in Bahrain was struck is that the U.S. Navy found
Speaker 2: themselves planning a hasty evacuation for roughly 1,300 family members
Speaker 2: of servicemen and women, as well as civilian employees of
Speaker 2: the Department of Defense that worked at the base. If
Speaker 2: you aren't super familiar with how the U.S. military's overseas
Speaker 2: footprint works, we've got a shitload of bases all over
Speaker 2: the world, and those bases all fall into two broad groups.
Speaker 2: You've got ones that are large and safe enough for
Speaker 2: soldiers to bring their families and to host large numbers
Speaker 2: of full-time live-in civilian employees, and you've got bases that
Speaker 2: are considered too close to the action for all of
Speaker 2: that to be safe. These DOD communities of civilians are
Speaker 2: like little chunks of suburban America transplanted to locations across
Speaker 2: the globe. They have their own schools, bars, clubs, and
Speaker 2: grocery stores. Most of my family grew up around the
Speaker 2: air bases that we have on Okinawa, and even during
Speaker 2: the Vietnam War, there was never any chance that people
Speaker 2: living there would come into direct danger, unless, like, there
Speaker 2: was a nuclear war, but then who gives a fuck? Iran, however,
Speaker 2: has the ballistic missile capacity in order to strike these bases,
Speaker 2: and this has been the case for years, for a
Speaker 2: long time. They've been able to hit these bases in
Speaker 2: Bahrain and other parts of the Middle East that they've
Speaker 2: been hitting lately, but they've restrained themselves historically because in
Speaker 2: previous iterations of this conflict, Both sides abided by certain
Speaker 2: lines and rules. Trump threw the whole playbook out, and
Speaker 2: it turns out that none of our facilities within missile
Speaker 2: range of Iran were hardened and ready to be shot
Speaker 2: at by missiles. There had not been, and it would
Speaker 2: have been extremely expensive to do that for all these bases,
Speaker 2: and nobody really thought it was necessary. And even when
Speaker 2: we started a war with Iran and knew that there
Speaker 2: was a chance they were going to start retaliating, There
Speaker 2: was so much arrogance within the administration about both our
Speaker 2: missile defenses and about Iran's lack of capability that I
Speaker 2: don't think they thought it was possible that we would
Speaker 2: get struck in any meaningful way. So the evacuation from
Speaker 2: Bahrain was chaotic and poorly executed.
Speaker 3: Laura Corte reported.
Speaker 2: On this in an August 21st article for Stars and Stripes,
Speaker 2: which is a newspaper owned by the Department of Defense
Speaker 2: that is, at least on paper, editorially independent. And we'll
Speaker 2: talk a little bit more about that later. But from
Speaker 2: that article, quote, Early in the war, a mass text
Speaker 2: message went out to evacuees directing them to contact the
Speaker 2: Navy Marine Corps Relief Society, a nonprofit that aims to
Speaker 2: assist military families during emergencies. However, when one spouse called
Speaker 2: the phone number listed in the announcement, they were connected
Speaker 2: with the National Bank of Canada.
Speaker 7: The spouse said.
Speaker 2: That gives you an idea of just how piss poor
Speaker 2: the planning was. Like no one checked. I'm guessing they
Speaker 2: probably had some AI like throw shit together for people,
Speaker 2: but nobody was like prepared to evacuate these people. And
Speaker 2: even once they knew they had to, Nobody took the
Speaker 2: care to make sure that these folks got correct information.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: And I'm not asking you, the listener, to sympathize with
Speaker 2: a bunch of families of servicemen and women who are, again,
Speaker 2: participating in an illegal war against Iran. What I am
Speaker 2: asking you to do is look at what this says
Speaker 2: about the lack of planning and understanding of what we
Speaker 2: were getting into when Trump and his cronies started this war.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: Here's another quote from that article. Some evacuees say they
Speaker 2: have spent tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket
Speaker 2: for basic living expenses. Others are sleeping on the floors
Speaker 2: of temporary housing while their cars and furniture are stranded
Speaker 2: in Bahrain or aboard ships unable to leave the region.
Speaker 2: Many say the prolonged displacement has taken an emotional toll
Speaker 2: and worry about its long term effect on their family's
Speaker 2: financial and emotional well-being. We literally have been making this
Speaker 2: up as we go because nothing is conceived to go
Speaker 2: on for this length of time. Vice Admiral Kurt Renshaw,
Speaker 2: commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, said on Wednesday
Speaker 2: at a virtual town meeting, when you've got the commander
Speaker 2: of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command being like, well, we're
Speaker 2: making up the evac plan and how to take care
Speaker 2: of these people as we go because we never thought
Speaker 2: that we would have to care about this. That's a
Speaker 2: bad fucking sign, right?
Speaker 7: So U.S.
Speaker 2: Naval Forces Central Command are an absent. was based in Bahrain, right?
Speaker 2: That's where their headquarters were. And we've had to move
Speaker 2: the HQ. I think it's floating right now. But none
Speaker 2: of the civilian staff who are critical to keeping it
Speaker 2: going are working wherever they've got it right now. And
Speaker 2: it's unclear where they're going to relocate to because, again,
Speaker 2: nobody knows fucking anything because they didn't plan for any
Speaker 2: of this. Furthering the confusion, the Washington Post recently reported
Speaker 2: that top Pentagon officials are currently considering a massive drawdown
Speaker 2: of U.S. military presence in the After the war ends. Now,
Speaker 2: I find this interesting because this reporting came out the
Speaker 2: exact same time Trump started threatening slash promising to make
Speaker 2: the Strait of Hormuz a US territory and charge tolls,
Speaker 2: which would obviously necessitate an expanded US presence in the region.
Speaker 2: This report was put together by people within the Pentagon
Speaker 2: who were kind of acting on their own recognizance. They
Speaker 2: were not ordered to do this. So this is basically
Speaker 2: a result of people who are somewhat smart in the
Speaker 2: Pentagon going, We cannot maintain all these bases with the
Speaker 2: increased level of hostility and knowing that Iran now can
Speaker 2: and will strike them. We need to reduce our capacity
Speaker 2: because we cannot defend all of these bases or keep
Speaker 2: them safely operational. Whereas Trump is just blasting off and
Speaker 2: we're going to take the straight and hold it. So
Speaker 2: you have inside the Pentagon people saying we absolutely cannot
Speaker 2: hold on to all of our current possessions in the
Speaker 2: Persian Gulf. And Trump just sort of making whatever fucking
Speaker 2: statements he wants to make. Per the Washington Post, one
Speaker 2: of the key areas the Defense Department is assessing is
Speaker 2: whether to pull back troops from the Persian Gulf, where
Speaker 2: America's large overseas military bases have been battered for months
Speaker 2: by Iranian strikes. And the damage to these facilities has
Speaker 2: prompted a once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its
Speaker 2: presence in the region. The Defense Department has already signaled
Speaker 2: that it might not rebuild bases as they were before
Speaker 2: the conflict. Now, again, this review was not ordered by
Speaker 2: Pete Hegseth. This is the thinking of sober and prudent
Speaker 2: people who remain at the Pentagon, and they have to
Speaker 2: do it on their own because they know that none
Speaker 2: of their bosses are going to order this, right? If
Speaker 2: it becomes immediately obvious that, oh, we actually have to
Speaker 2: do a drawdown, they'll get the order like they did
Speaker 2: with the evacuation of Bahrain, and they'll just be told
Speaker 2: to figure it out suddenly. So people are trying within
Speaker 2: the Pentagon to make sure they have a fucking plan together,
Speaker 2: knowing that no one in charge is going to plan
Speaker 2: things out properly. And there's a lot of funny quotes
Speaker 2: from that article. I'm going to read another here. Before
Speaker 2: the start of the war in February, U.S. Central Command
Speaker 2: evacuated many of its bases, judging them too vulnerable to
Speaker 2: Iranian missiles and drone attacks to maintain normal staffing levels.
Speaker 2: Some of the shifts away from the major Gulf facilities
Speaker 2: might last after the war, a person familiar with the
Speaker 2: posture adjustment said. Iran thinks we are in the traditional places,
Speaker 2: the person said, declining to specify the changes so as
Speaker 2: to not put U.S. service members at risk. And we
Speaker 2: are not. And then the article immediately goes on to.
Speaker 3: Say, six U.S.
Speaker 2: Service members were killed in a March strike on Port Shuaiba,
Speaker 2: a military facility in Kuwait, and more than 200 U.S.
Speaker 2: facilities have been damaged or destroyed during the conflict. I
Speaker 2: just find that clash between, well, we moved our stuff
Speaker 2: before the war, so Iran doesn't know where our stuff is.
Speaker 2: They think that we're in one place and we're in
Speaker 2: the other, and it's like, well, then they hit and
Speaker 2: killed and wounded a bunch of guys, because actually they
Speaker 2: had a pretty good idea of where we were.
Speaker 9: I was just thinking, as you mentioned those bases, Rob,
Speaker 9: I don't know if you saw this article Tweet, Zeet,
Speaker 9: maybe we're supposed to call it, by Barry McCaffrey, who
Speaker 9: was like... Was a US general, commanded US forces, I think,
Speaker 9: in the first war in the Persian Gulf, right?
Speaker 7: Right, right.
Speaker 9: In my judgment, the US armed forces have probably permanently
Speaker 9: lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases. Iran now poised
Speaker 9: to control access to the Gulf states. US will have
Speaker 9: to negotiate new access into Western Saudi Arabia, Israel, Southern Europe.
Speaker 3: God, that's bad. It's sometimes just so revelatory to pull
Speaker 3: out and be like.
Speaker 7: Oh, fuck.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like a change in the global order of things.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6: The age of uncontested US hegemony is over, and it
Speaker 6: was ended for absolutely no reason other than a bunch
Speaker 6: of people hate Iran and thought they could just instantly
Speaker 6: win a war.
Speaker 9: Yeah, like we wound up to take a haymaker and
Speaker 9: ended up missing and falling over and hitting our head.
Speaker 9: It's like a fighting analogy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is kind of funny to think that like...
Speaker 2: The British Empire lost its largely uncontested power and wealth
Speaker 2: in a lot of areas because there was like a
Speaker 2: nightmarish war that cost millions and millions of people their lives.
Speaker 2: And Britain burnt a shitload of its treasure and young
Speaker 2: men fighting it. And there was another war not that
Speaker 2: long later in just the day. And whereas the U.S.
Speaker 2: was just like, I don't know, what if we just
Speaker 2: shoot ourselves in the dick for no reason?
Speaker 5: Let's see if that works.
Speaker 7: Swing and a miss. It's great. The patterns of empire change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that Stripes article is just there's I'll read
Speaker 2: one last quote from it just for an idea of
Speaker 2: like what this is doing to the families of these people.
Speaker 2: One spouse of an active duty sailor who requested anonymity
Speaker 2: for fear of reprisal said the repeated displacement has traumatized
Speaker 2: her children. The family first fled to a U.S. base
Speaker 2: in Germany where donations from the local military community helped
Speaker 2: them set up a temporary household. They were later told
Speaker 2: they had to relocate again, this time to the United States.
Speaker 2: She said her kids are developing serious behavior issues as
Speaker 2: a result of the move and that the youngest now
Speaker 2: barely recognizes her husband during video calls. This is all
Speaker 2: really bad. There's a lot of ugly quotes in that article.
Speaker 2: And again, this is a Defense Department-owned newspaper. Within hours
Speaker 2: of that Stripes article being published, the Pentagon went after
Speaker 2: the supposed editorial independence of Stars and Stripes. They basically
Speaker 2: wound up firing the editor in chief, the publisher and
Speaker 2: the reporter who wrote that article, Laura Corte. The editor
Speaker 2: who stood by Laura is Eric Slavin. And I think
Speaker 2: that's why he lost his job because he refused to
Speaker 2: throw her under the bus. And I do applaud them
Speaker 2: both for doing the right thing. But that is also
Speaker 2: noteworthy that Stripes has always had a degree of independence.
Speaker 2: They have reported on things that the Pentagon, the DOD
Speaker 2: didn't want them to because they're reporting on like actual
Speaker 2: issues that like troops and their families are facing, you know,
Speaker 2: and that's an important thing for that community to have.
Speaker 2: And one thing this signals is that that does not
Speaker 2: exist anymore, nor no degree of independence can be allowed
Speaker 2: when it threatens the propaganda.
Speaker 3: Anyway, that's what I got. Good stuff.
Speaker 5: Carlos, where can people find more of your journalism online?
Speaker 7: You can find me pretty much on every social media platform.
Speaker 7: My at is vaquero2xl. It's V-A-Q-U-E-R-O-2-X-L.
Speaker 5: And on It Could Happen Here.
Speaker 7: Yeah. As well as it could happen here. That is true.
Speaker 7: I forget that. But yes, I just spoke with James
Speaker 7: about U.S. colonialism.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: How it started. And now it looks like it might
Speaker 7: be ending. We'll see.
Speaker 3: We're pivoting in a different direction.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there we go.
Speaker 5: What a heartwarming story. I guess there is hope for
Speaker 5: the future.
Speaker 3: That's what we do here at CoolZone Media.
Speaker 2: That's what we do.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: If you want to email us, you can do it.
Speaker 9: CoolZoneTips at Proton.me. Should I list the categories of emails
Speaker 9: I will not be responding to? Because they grow every fucking...
Speaker 9: Just don't be weird in there. It's for tips about news.
Speaker 7: Don't be weird.
Speaker 3: Don't be weird.
Speaker 5: Don't be weird in there. I think that's enough said.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This is not the place to flirt with people or...
Speaker 2: It might be the place to tell us your conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: Tell us your conspiracy theories. All right, episode's done. No,
Speaker 2: don't tell us your conspiracy theories. That's going to be horrible.
Speaker 5: Send all your conspiracy theories to at James Stout.
Speaker 9: Do you know how much I fucking work already?
Speaker 6: Anyways, put a trans girl on your couch.
Speaker 5: We reported the news.
Speaker 7: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 10: It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 8: Thanks for listening.