Speaker 1: Also media, Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Yet ready for anarchy in Atlanta?
Speaker 3: It should be clear to all Americans that we have
Speaker 3: a very serious left wing terror threat in our country.
Speaker 4: State of the art, organized and well funded activists in criminals.
Speaker 5: On April twenty ninth, twenty twenty five, after almost exactly
Speaker 5: four years of protests, sabotage, encampments, and organizing against the
Speaker 5: construction of a state of the art police training facility
Speaker 5: dubbed copp City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center officially
Speaker 5: opened atop of the South River Forest Intocabb County, Georgia.
Speaker 6: Why two three cuts.
Speaker 7: The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center is open? A handshake
Speaker 7: between Governor Brian Kemp and are relieved Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.
Speaker 5: Getting here has not been an easy journey.
Speaker 7: The opening of the one hundred and eighteen million dollar
Speaker 7: complex for police fire and E nine to one one personnel,
Speaker 7: which includes academic leadership and simulation centers, came after not months,
Speaker 7: but years of public pushback.
Speaker 5: This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I've
Speaker 5: been covering the combined Defend the Atlanta Forest Stop Cop
Speaker 5: City movement on this show since twenty twenty one. I
Speaker 5: first traveled to Atlanta to report on the ground from
Speaker 5: inside of the protest encampments in spring of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 5: and I moved to Atlanta to continue covering the story
Speaker 5: more in depth in twenty twenty three. My coverage has
Speaker 5: tracked the trajectory of the movement as well as my
Speaker 5: ability as a reporter. But this will be my last
Speaker 5: piece on the Stop Cop City movement. Every other reporter
Speaker 5: mini series I've done on Stop Cup City was written
Speaker 5: while the movement was still ongoing and the final outcome
Speaker 5: had yet to be fully determined. Something that set the
Speaker 5: movement in Atlanta apart was the genuine belief that this
Speaker 5: fight was actually winnable, as opposed to the many lofty
Speaker 5: aspirations of other anti police anarchists or leftist struggles. I
Speaker 5: believe that we will win and COP City will never
Speaker 5: be built. Where common turns of phrase and not just
Speaker 5: repeated mindlessly as a protest chant, but deeply believed. But now,
Speaker 5: six months after the grand opening of COP City, I
Speaker 5: want to use this distance to offer a look at
Speaker 5: the whole movement based on interviews and conversations I've had
Speaker 5: with organizers, anarchists, and forest defenders, analyzing the movements rise
Speaker 5: and fall and momentum, and why Atlanta is the bridge
Speaker 5: between the twenty twenty protests during Trump's first term and
Speaker 5: the current expansion of police surveillance, ICE activity and increased
Speaker 5: state repression against quote unquote radical left terrorists. We don't
Speaker 5: have enough time to retread a complete, in depth play
Speaker 5: by play of the movement's history, most of which I've
Speaker 5: already covered in previous episodes, but I will attempt to
Speaker 5: break down the movement into a series of discrete phases.
Speaker 5: After organizers learn about the plans to build COP City
Speaker 5: in April of twenty twenty one, the movement to Defend
Speaker 5: the Atlanta Forest first took form with an opening attack phase.
Speaker 5: Throughout the entire summer of twenty twenty one, with tree
Speaker 5: spiking and sabotage targeting construction equipment on the east side
Speaker 5: of the forest, which a movie studio was planning to
Speaker 5: develop at the time in partnership with local government. To
Speaker 5: quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, early stages of
Speaker 5: the movement were very intentionally defined by lots of sabotage
Speaker 5: and unapologetic militancy. Just absolute, this is what we're doing.
Speaker 5: This is what we're about. This is the goal. If
Speaker 5: you don't like it, that's cool, but then don't be
Speaker 5: a part of this. That was just what we were doing. Unquote.
Speaker 5: In September twenty twenty one, the Atlantic City Council voted
Speaker 5: to approve the Land Lease Ordinance, authorizing the Atlanta Police
Speaker 5: Foundation to use hundreds of acres of city owned land
Speaker 5: in the South River Forest to build copp City. After
Speaker 5: this vote, electoral strategy gets largely eshewed, and soon after
Speaker 5: the next phase fully kicks off that fall with the
Speaker 5: physical occupation of the forest and the start of the
Speaker 5: pressure campaigns targeting subcontractors working on the construction project. To
Speaker 5: again quote from an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, persistent encampment occupation,
Speaker 5: lots of direct action happening, lots of sabotage happening, and
Speaker 5: the cops just not knowing what to do at all.
Speaker 5: Small incursions would get made, but they just had not
Speaker 5: figured out what to do about it yet. There was
Speaker 5: just kind of like free reign unquote. For the first
Speaker 5: half of this occupation phase, the Atlanta police and de
Speaker 5: Cab sheriffs seemed to be stuck in a form of paralysis,
Speaker 5: not knowing how to disrupt the forest encampments or prevent
Speaker 5: equipment sabotage. Meanwhile, the pressure campaign, inspired by the tactics
Speaker 5: of the animal rights group Shack, showed early promise in
Speaker 5: getting some contractors like Reeves Young construction and material suppliers
Speaker 5: to drop out of the cop City project. But after
Speaker 5: this stream of steady success from Fall of twenty twenty
Speaker 5: one to May of twenty twenty two, the police were
Speaker 5: forced to up the ante and started conducting large scale
Speaker 5: raids in the forest to remove force defenders and damage
Speaker 5: encampment infrastructure. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, May of twenty
Speaker 5: twenty two is the end of the paralysis phase for
Speaker 5: the cops. We had our first grid sweep raids where
Speaker 5: the paralysis phase is broken. You're getting your multi agency
Speaker 5: large sweeps where they're really coming in and putting in
Speaker 5: a lot of work. That really leads up to January
Speaker 5: of twenty twenty three, so where Torte got killed unquote.
Speaker 5: Prior to the police killing of Torti Guita during a
Speaker 5: forest encampment raid on January eighteen, twenty twenty three, the
Speaker 5: occupation phase proved highly effective in preventing pre construction, but
Speaker 5: the killing and Tortiguita essentially marked the end of the
Speaker 5: continuous occupation phase. What followed was a period of high
Speaker 5: octane intensity. Let's call this the revenge phase. Quoting an
Speaker 5: Atlanta anarchist, you get this kind of like trading blows
Speaker 5: with the cops repeatedly during that time, and things are
Speaker 5: getting pretty fucking crazy, hitting their highest pitch at March fifth,
Speaker 5: during the South River Music Festival. On March fifth, a
Speaker 5: few hundred people splintered off from the festival and marched
Speaker 5: to the nearby Cop City construction site. The crowd repelled
Speaker 5: police and construction equipment was set on fire. The cops
Speaker 5: retaliated quick, swarming the area with all available units. In Atlanta,
Speaker 5: kettled the festival and eventually arrested twenty three people, charging
Speaker 5: them with domestic terrorism. After the events of March fifth,
Speaker 5: the movement entered an odd limbo phase, with heightened tensions
Speaker 5: among the stop Coop City coalition on the role of
Speaker 5: direct action and sabotage within mass movement actions. During this period,
Speaker 5: police fortified and regularly patrolled the perimeter around the forest.
Speaker 5: Entry became heavily restricted. Following this denial of operating space,
Speaker 5: the forest around the slated construction site was preemptively clear
Speaker 5: cut to both prepare for construction and demoralize the movement.
Speaker 5: But a month later, the bail fund and legal defense
Speaker 5: nonprofit the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, was raided by police and
Speaker 5: were later charged with money laundering and charity fraud. Just
Speaker 5: a few days after the raid, the city Council approved
Speaker 5: a sixty seven million dollar cop City funding package. The
Speaker 5: next day, organizers announced referendum campaign to gather petition signatures
Speaker 5: to put the cop City land lease ordinance on the
Speaker 5: upcoming November ballot. Despite setbacks, there was still energy going
Speaker 5: towards stopping cop City, but it was fragmenting in ways
Speaker 5: that it hadn't really before there was no clear consensus
Speaker 5: on the direction to take the movement. Previous periods of
Speaker 5: shift in the movement were often marked by an organized
Speaker 5: Week of Action, which was a convergence of people from
Speaker 5: all around the country or even the world, who traveled
Speaker 5: to Atlanta to partake in a week's worth of events, actions,
Speaker 5: and protests against cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation, and
Speaker 5: contractors hired to build the facility. The summer of twenty
Speaker 5: twenty three saw the sixth organized Week of Action, but
Speaker 5: it too was caught in this limbo phase and without
Speaker 5: the forest as an operating zone, the Week of Action
Speaker 5: struggled to find its purpose, despite the surge in movement
Speaker 5: participation around the city Hall budget vote earlier that June.
Speaker 5: The next phase was the first to be positively determined
Speaker 5: by the police, the repression phase, which really sets in
Speaker 5: around August of twenty twenty three with the Rico indictment
Speaker 5: charging sixty one people with racketeering, arson, and domestic terrorism.
Speaker 5: State repression then evolved in the form of persistent surveillance
Speaker 5: of activists, house raids, and additional charges, which leads to
Speaker 5: the current trial phase. Quote an Atlanta anarchist quote, I
Speaker 5: think an important aspect of this phase is obviously supporting
Speaker 5: your defendants, preparing for the potential of long term prisoner support,
Speaker 5: and also not letting the state be the one to
Speaker 5: close the book by doing this, because you don't want
Speaker 5: to let them define the near of this forever by
Speaker 5: getting to put their rubber stamp on the end of
Speaker 5: the trial and calling it Otherwise, the movement gets stuck
Speaker 5: in this permanent zombie phase where we're still saying, stop
Speaker 5: cop City is this thing that's happening when it's it's built,
Speaker 5: It's built, it's right there, right like. It doesn't mean
Speaker 5: that we all just go home, but it means that
Speaker 5: you're like a veteran of this battle now and there's
Speaker 5: new shit to do, new stuff to work. One. Even
Speaker 5: in retrospect, people have been largely hesitant to assign blame
Speaker 5: to a specific factor in why the fight to stop
Speaker 5: cop City fell short of achieving its stated goal, But
Speaker 5: we can track a decline in momentum which allowed the
Speaker 5: state to gain the upper hand. For nearly three years,
Speaker 5: state repression tactics failed to disrupt the growing momentum against
Speaker 5: the Cop City project. Forest raids, arrests, and criminal charges
Speaker 5: made little impact. The use of terrorism charges as a
Speaker 5: repression tactic started back in December of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 5: following an encampment raid resulting in six people being charged
Speaker 5: with domestic terrorism. This was the first time that charge
Speaker 5: has been used in Georgia, following its adoption in twenty
Speaker 5: seventeen in response to the whitepremacist mass shooting by Dylan Roof.
Speaker 5: Just a month after domestic terrorism charges were first deployed,
Speaker 5: Tortuguhito was killed by police in another forest raid, but
Speaker 5: this tragedy only seemed to strengthen the resolve of the
Speaker 5: movement to fight cop City, which then only grew. Similarly,
Speaker 5: the clear cutting of the force itself wasn't enough to
Speaker 5: demoralize the people in Atlanta. Rather, the hesitation to build
Speaker 5: on the momentum of a widely publicized direct action like
Speaker 5: March fifth provided this state in opening while the movement
Speaker 5: was stuck in limbo. Throughout this limbo phase, the movement
Speaker 5: was adjusting from intensified momentum and the high octane aspects
Speaker 5: to March fifth, But as the energy tapered down, the
Speaker 5: state jumped on that dip in momentum then delta pretty
Speaker 5: significant blow with the Rico indictment. The Rico charges in
Speaker 5: August of twenty twenty three, followed by the series of
Speaker 5: house raids in February of twenty twenty four, were a
Speaker 5: pretty crippling one to punch that stifled the momentum to
Speaker 5: almost a complete standstill. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist, a lot
Speaker 5: of people will argue their opinions about what was the
Speaker 5: stifling thing. I think some of the more electorally or
Speaker 5: mass movement, big tent minded people would argue that, like
Speaker 5: March fifth takes a lot of the wind out of
Speaker 5: the sails. I think a lot of people would disagree
Speaker 5: with that, just because like you can build on the
Speaker 5: momentum of a March fifth, you can build on like
Speaker 5: a triumphant battlefield victory, it's a lot harder to build
Speaker 5: on just everyone getting more charges and also people getting
Speaker 5: their doors kicked in really early in the morning. It's
Speaker 5: hard to build on that. Despite the Rico charges, acts
Speaker 5: of sabotage did continue, but isolated sabotage alone wasn't enough
Speaker 5: to propel the movement. After the referendum campaign was effectively
Speaker 5: nullified by the state and fall of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: there was a lack of willingness among its organizers to
Speaker 5: engage in serious efforts to get people engaged in mass
Speaker 5: actions or pressure campaigns targeted against elected officials, something multiple
Speaker 5: activists in Atlanta have mentioned to me as a contributing
Speaker 5: factor to the eventual decline in momentum during this limbo
Speaker 5: stage is a sort of failure to prefigure alternative strategies
Speaker 5: and adapt after the forest occupation became impossible to maintain,
Speaker 5: especially considering just how much weight people had put into
Speaker 5: that strategy, but then did not come up with a
Speaker 5: clear next step after the police were able to suppress
Speaker 5: that tactic by completing their ODA loops and improving their
Speaker 5: own strateg The ODA loop is a four step military
Speaker 5: decision making model used across a large variety of professional fields,
Speaker 5: including policing. Step one, observe, gather as much information as possible,
Speaker 5: then orient, synthesize an information with background knowledge, decide on
Speaker 5: the next course of action using that newly synthesized information,
Speaker 5: and finally act and the results of your actions should
Speaker 5: then send you back to step one. Failure to act
Speaker 5: at all or too slowly often ends in defeat. To
Speaker 5: quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote. You need contingency lines, right,
Speaker 5: either things that you're willing to escalate in the current
Speaker 5: line of strategy that you're doing to make it still viable,
Speaker 5: or a complete change in strategy. It could be changed
Speaker 5: in tactics to something new and exciting. Either of those
Speaker 5: are valid options. Doing both of them at the same
Speaker 5: time can be extremely effective. But at the end of
Speaker 5: the day, you have to when the cops start to
Speaker 5: break out of paralysis. An example from any eco defense
Speaker 5: or occupation, whether in Atlanta or somewhere else, when the
Speaker 5: cops start to break out of that paralysis, you have
Speaker 5: to escalate in some way. The occupation, the defense of it,
Speaker 5: has to escalate in some way to prevent them from
Speaker 5: feeling safe coming in or trying to, or the physical
Speaker 5: space of action has to change because now they need
Speaker 5: to recalibrate to oh, shit, like, not only is the
Speaker 5: occupation less assailable than we thought because there's been a
Speaker 5: change in tactics, but there's also a massive uptick and
Speaker 5: shit going on everywhere else and that significantly impedes their
Speaker 5: ability to have an ODA loop to do battle with.
Speaker 5: You can even look at the ice pickups that got
Speaker 5: a lot of attention in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were not
Speaker 5: expecting that many people just to show up. You can
Speaker 5: see when the crowd starts to hit like a critical
Speaker 5: mass of rage and getting really close to those guys
Speaker 5: that they fucking panic. They freak out like it. It's
Speaker 5: very clear, even just in the small amount of their
Speaker 5: faces and their movements that you can see that they
Speaker 5: were panicking unquote. Similar scenes have since taken place in
Speaker 5: Chicago and Portland, and I've seen this before with Bortec
Speaker 5: during the twenty twenty protests in Portland. I think anyone
Speaker 5: who has watched the cops retreat has seen this before.
Speaker 5: But the more the same thing happens, the more you
Speaker 5: get used to it, the more you experiment and find
Speaker 5: ways to adapt and overcome. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote,
Speaker 5: cops panic, and you can see it in the way
Speaker 5: they walk like they weren't ready for that, and next
Speaker 5: time they might be, which means you have to add
Speaker 5: something new, a new spice has to get thrown in,
Speaker 5: a new flavor profile. They'll get used to pushing through
Speaker 5: crowds like that until someone hits them at the end
Speaker 5: of the day, and whether you're like confronting them on
Speaker 5: the ground or trying to get to the neighborhoods ahead
Speaker 5: of time to knock people's doors to get them out.
Speaker 5: Eventually cops will start to find ways to counteract your strategy,
Speaker 5: but eventually you will have to reshift and recalibrate the
Speaker 5: tools you are using to orient back to Atlanta. All
Speaker 5: these instances I've mentioned amount to failing to take advantage
Speaker 5: of key moments, whether that be in the aftermath of
Speaker 5: March fifth, the seeming impossibility of continued forest encampments, or
Speaker 5: of the city's blanket refusal to accept the results of
Speaker 5: the referendum. In these moments, the police and the state
Speaker 5: were able to determine where battle lines were drawn, and
Speaker 5: quite literally so during the quote unquote block Cop City
Speaker 5: protest in October twenty twenty three, where police easily repelled
Speaker 5: a protest march from even reaching the road to the
Speaker 5: Cop City construction site, and the state continued to push
Speaker 5: their lines forward with the joint fbiatf raids on activist
Speaker 5: houses in February twenty twenty four, which further stifled the
Speaker 5: movement and was coupled with months to year year long
Speaker 5: persistent surveillance and intimidation denoted by cops parked outside of
Speaker 5: homes of alleged activists, mobile surveillance and hidden cameras placed
Speaker 5: in front of activist homes and a local community center.
Speaker 5: One of the more frightening incidents came in May of
Speaker 5: twenty twenty four, where a resident of one of the
Speaker 5: homes rated that February woke up in the middle of
Speaker 5: the night to a bright light outside of the bedroom window,
Speaker 5: only to find a lit road flare catching the wooden
Speaker 5: railing of their porch steps on fire. One of the
Speaker 5: things I've been reflecting on regarding Cop City is the
Speaker 5: way people talked about fear as a tool. Frank Herbert's
Speaker 5: Litany against Fear was a common refrain to overcome the
Speaker 5: fear that this state used as a weapon. But the
Speaker 5: first time I heard fear mentioned as an offensive measure
Speaker 5: wasn't in reference to this state using fear. It was
Speaker 5: in early twenty twenty two when I first visited the
Speaker 5: forest encampment, and the anarchists talked about how the police
Speaker 5: were scared of entering the forest, how delusions of Vietnam's
Speaker 5: style booby traps demonstrated that the cups are not impervious
Speaker 5: super soldiers. Instilling fear is a major aspect of police training.
Speaker 5: They are susceptible to emotional impulses like all of us.
Speaker 5: Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote. But while we understand our
Speaker 5: own fear, I think people often fall into the trap
Speaker 5: of not understanding that the state is also afraid of them,
Speaker 5: because the state feels like this monolithic machine, like this
Speaker 5: unassailable entity, that it is not. It's made up of
Speaker 5: people with flaws and emotions who have the same corrozol
Speaker 5: response to being threatened that you or I do. A
Speaker 5: big part of the lessons learned from an has to
Speaker 5: be a willingness to engage with them in a way
Speaker 5: that is personally endangering. That is the single way out.
Speaker 5: They're human and they get scared. The fear that I
Speaker 5: think had them so tight until May of twenty twenty
Speaker 5: two was a fear that manifested itself in a lot
Speaker 5: of paralysis. Fear is a normal human emotion to danger.
Speaker 5: So whether you're the most hardened swat team guy going
Speaker 5: up against the craziest to eco freak in the world,
Speaker 5: fear is a normal reaction to that. But what really
Speaker 5: had them so tight was fear as a matter of
Speaker 5: them being paralyzed by it that they cannot find out
Speaker 5: how to move. And once they did find out around
Speaker 5: May of twenty twenty two, we really start to see
Speaker 5: things change and like they were scared enough in the
Speaker 5: woods to shoot someone to death, like they were still afraid.
Speaker 5: We were able to instill an immense amount of fear
Speaker 5: in our enemy, which is an absolutely necessary tool if
Speaker 5: you're going to be on the very nimble, small green
Speaker 5: team insurgency side of things, you have to make your
Speaker 5: enemy afraid of the dark, but also you have your
Speaker 5: defensive strategy against fear. You would hear all the time
Speaker 5: in Atlanta, the whole let the fear wash over you
Speaker 5: and through you mantra. That was a thing that people
Speaker 5: talked about and said constantly, because you have to find
Speaker 5: a way to move through that paralysis. Eventually, and with
Speaker 5: the help of a multi agency task force, the cops
Speaker 5: in Atlanta were able to move through that fear and
Speaker 5: continue their actions. They were not totally paralyzed by it.
Speaker 5: In contrast, the pseudo paralysis affecting Stop Cop City only
Speaker 5: set in very late into the movement. As a cumulative
Speaker 5: result of a coordinated sequence of oppression tactics. As the
Speaker 5: movement has been winding down and transitioning to court support.
Speaker 5: Something people in Atlanta have had to balance is the
Speaker 5: urge to keep stop Cop City in this sort of
Speaker 5: un alive zombie state where you're still kind of acting
Speaker 5: like it's an ongoing thing, even though the immediate local
Speaker 5: result is pretty clearly finished. But in keeping this kind
Speaker 5: of zombie version of the movement alive, it prevents you
Speaker 5: from actually moving on and internalizing what happened here and
Speaker 5: using that for whatever comes next, which is at this
Speaker 5: point a burgeoning police state and right wing power block.
Speaker 5: Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, internalizing not just in
Speaker 5: terms of like lessons learned and things that you need
Speaker 5: to learn from and skill up on to keep that
Speaker 5: honed combative edge in Atlanta, but to think about fighting
Speaker 5: on a larger scope than just Atlanta. As the cops
Speaker 5: took their lessons learned here nationwide in terms of how
Speaker 5: they're doing repression towards Palestinian liberation movements, towards a lot
Speaker 5: of the way that ICE operations are currently happening. That
Speaker 5: necessitates that we also take our lessons learned here and
Speaker 5: also go to a larger scale with them. Also, if
Speaker 5: you never close the book yourself on this battle that
Speaker 5: you're a part of, which people incurred a massive amount
Speaker 5: of trauma doing at a certain point, this could just
Speaker 5: remain like an open wound on you forever if you
Speaker 5: let it. And it is probably unhelpful to keep seeing
Speaker 5: the movement to stop cop City is doing a rally here.
Speaker 5: Like when it's built, it's there, and now we need
Speaker 5: to move on to other things. We need to move
Speaker 5: on to other things that are larger than Atlanta. There's
Speaker 5: still a police state to engage with here. You don't
Speaker 5: need the container of this struggle to justify going out
Speaker 5: and taking action against the police. And there are other
Speaker 5: things happening in Atlanta. There's ice rates happening in Atlanta
Speaker 5: in the north suburbs of the city. Cop City is
Speaker 5: actively being in and if people want to continue stopping it,
Speaker 5: they'll have to actually stop what the effects are which
Speaker 5: are now happening on a nationwide scale. An early irony
Speaker 5: of the movement was that though cop City was conceived
Speaker 5: as a training ground for police first, it became a
Speaker 5: training ground for anarchists as topcop City became the first
Speaker 5: mass movement following the twenty twenty George Floyd protests. Whatever
Speaker 5: happened in Atlanta would demonstrate what activists have learned from
Speaker 5: the twenty twenty uprising, as well as influence what future
Speaker 5: movements against police expansion might look like. Atlanta Police Chief
Speaker 5: Darren Sheerbaum expressed as much during the Public Safety Training
Speaker 5: Center grand opening.
Speaker 4: Because when Antifa put out its call for individuals to
Speaker 4: rally here in this spot and on Peachtree Street from
Speaker 4: across the nation and literally the globe, we were up
Speaker 4: against a playbook we had never seen. At the Atlanta
Speaker 4: Police Department, we ourselves put out the call for help,
Speaker 4: and no sheriff said no, No police chief said no.
Speaker 4: The Georgia State Patrol, the Department Natural Resources should ste
Speaker 4: by side of this department, as did the FBI and
Speaker 4: the ATF because we all knew that that playbook was
Speaker 4: successful here in Atlanta, Georgia, it would find itself across
Speaker 4: this country and public safety would be stymied wherever we go.
Speaker 5: While Atlanta served as this training ground for anarchists, in response,
Speaker 5: the state also used the movement to test out strategies
Speaker 5: for the next generation of counter insurgency tactics, well before
Speaker 5: the cop City facility was finished being built. Now, with
Speaker 5: this specific localized struggle at completion, both organizers and the
Speaker 5: state are carrying lessons forward as Trump expands police power,
Speaker 5: deploys National Guard, increases ice operations, and continues repression against
Speaker 5: organizers protesting the Palestinian genocide. To quote in Atlanta anarchist quote,
Speaker 5: I think as a matter of reimagining the struggle that
Speaker 5: you're a part of, insurrectionary struggle is often an imaginative one.
Speaker 5: And if you were part of this thing here, you
Speaker 5: are now like a veteran of the fight in Atlanta.
Speaker 5: This thing, like this specific thing that was defend the
Speaker 5: Atlanta force stop cop City, is something to be learned
Speaker 5: from and valued and also moved on from, and to
Speaker 5: move on from while taking lessons learned, experience gained, and
Speaker 5: connections made, and following those things through to their logical conclusion.
Speaker 5: Such that the state has as well. They have taken
Speaker 5: lessons learned from here and followed them through to their
Speaker 5: nationwide logical conclusions. We are necessitated to do that as well.
Speaker 5: That doesn't mean you have given up. It just means
Speaker 5: that there's new shit happening. It's helpful to re imagine
Speaker 5: yourself not as just we're in Atlanta, we're doing stop
Speaker 5: coop City, to now you are engaged in a nationwide
Speaker 5: anti fascist struggle against like a fascist police state unquote.
Speaker 5: This nationwide focus has always been an aspect of Stop
Speaker 5: Cop City. One of the movement's key slogans was cop
Speaker 5: City is Everywhere. Organizers did speaking tours around the country
Speaker 5: to educate about the movement, and thousands of people from
Speaker 5: all around the country and the world traveled to Atlanta
Speaker 5: to participate in weeks of action. The physical fight Top
Speaker 5: cop City also expanded outside of Atlanta with solidarity attacks
Speaker 5: and direct actions as a part of the tertiary targeting
Speaker 5: campaign against subcontractors and insurance companies. This nationwide drift also
Speaker 5: happened on the side of the state, with similar police
Speaker 5: training facilities having been proposed in dozens of other cities,
Speaker 5: and the strategies of repression used in Atlanta have been
Speaker 5: copied on a national level. Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote,
Speaker 5: Now the cops are spreading out and their strategies and
Speaker 5: the strategies of repression both militantly on the ground and legally,
Speaker 5: and even their propaganda and their messaging has gone outwards
Speaker 5: from here, and so too, then must our lessons learned
Speaker 5: both in how we prepare and engage in struggle in Atlanta,
Speaker 5: but also how we make connections to the rest of
Speaker 5: the country. People who came here are now back home
Speaker 5: and will make connections to the people around them. The
Speaker 5: cops in different cities, they have big conferences, They talk
Speaker 5: to each other, they learn from each other. There's no
Speaker 5: reason that we shouldn't be, you know, doing so with
Speaker 5: caution and security culture. Don't have your Atlanta veteran hat on,
Speaker 5: but we have things to learn from each other. And
Speaker 5: if you were here, you've got a lot to potentially
Speaker 5: teach people, even if that was just like here's how
Speaker 5: we fucking run a kitchen where we cook for like
Speaker 5: four hundred people in a day, or here's how we
Speaker 5: sneak around in the middle of the night. This is
Speaker 5: a representative of the Fire and Movement defense at a
Speaker 5: cop City trial press conference from September twenty twenty five.
Speaker 8: The horrors we predicted have come to pass. Federal agents
Speaker 8: now stock communities from coast to coast, masked and unnamed
Speaker 8: snatching people from buses, farms, kitchens, and churches. Who can
Speaker 8: argue now that we were wrong to resist the endless
Speaker 8: expansion of police power, now that Trump commands them, now
Speaker 8: that they are his police. The very people who helped
Speaker 8: lay the groundwork now scramble to distance themselves from his orders,
Speaker 8: his camps, his federal troop deployments. But they built the logistics,
Speaker 8: they funded the training centers, they expanded the surveillance. Liberal
Speaker 8: governments like Atlantis helped pave the way for the descent
Speaker 8: of our country into autocracy.
Speaker 5: As Merlincrats of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund told the New Republic, quote,
Speaker 5: what's happening in Atlanta is a vision of the future.
Speaker 5: This is a test run of a represses playbook that
Speaker 5: authorities on many different levels are experimenting with to discover
Speaker 5: what they can get away with. Let's look at some
Speaker 5: examples of expanding surveillance, increasing police resources, and these strategies
Speaker 5: for counter insertaency that are spreading in the era of
Speaker 5: Trump two point zero. In January of this year, Georgia
Speaker 5: Representative Marjorie Taylor Green introduced a resolution titled deeming certain
Speaker 5: conduct of members of Antifa as domestic terrorism and designating
Speaker 5: Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which the measure justifies
Speaker 5: by referencing multiple instances of protesters in Atlanta being charged
Speaker 5: with domestic terrorism. The Atlanta based surveillance company Flock Safety,
Speaker 5: gained early notoriety for their camera towers placed around the
Speaker 5: slated Copcity construction site in the South River Forest, which
Speaker 5: protesters repeatedly toppled. Flock has grown massively the past four years,
Speaker 5: with over eighty thousand quote unquote AI powered cameras in
Speaker 5: forty nine states. These cameras complete over twenty billion scans
Speaker 5: per month. Flock cameras and license plate readers have spread
Speaker 5: all around the country and are used by all manners
Speaker 5: of agencies, including ICE, as well as Texas sheriffs, who
Speaker 5: have used the nationwide camera network to track pregnant women
Speaker 5: seeking abortions. Border Patrol has used Atlanta's local Flock camera
Speaker 5: network to make over three thousand and two hundred searches
Speaker 5: from January to November twenty twenty five. In April twenty
Speaker 5: twenty five, President Trump signed an executive order titled Strengthening
Speaker 5: and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to pursue criminals and protect
Speaker 5: innocent citizens. This order calls to quote unleash high impact
Speaker 5: local police forces, protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly
Speaker 5: accused and abused by state or local officials, and surge
Speaker 5: resources to officers in need unquote. It directs the Attorney
Speaker 5: General to create a mechanism to have private sector law
Speaker 5: firms provide pro bono legal events to police officers who
Speaker 5: quote unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during
Speaker 5: the performance of their official duties to enforce the law.
Speaker 5: This tries to make it harder for police to be
Speaker 5: held accountable for both civil and criminal misconduct, basically extending
Speaker 5: qualified immunity to the criminal realm. The order also calls
Speaker 5: to use federal resources to increase pay, expand training, and
Speaker 5: strengthen legal protections for police officers, as well as to
Speaker 5: quote seek enhanced sentences for crimes against LA enforcement officers,
Speaker 5: promote investment in the security and capacity of prisons, and
Speaker 5: increase the investment in and collection, distribution and uniformity of
Speaker 5: crime data across jurisdictions. The Attorney General is directed to
Speaker 5: review and remove any previous accountability restrictions placed on local
Speaker 5: or state law enforcement agencies that might unduly impede the
Speaker 5: performance of law enforcement functions. And then finally, quote the
Speaker 5: Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with
Speaker 5: Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate,
Speaker 5: shall increase the provision of excess military and national security
Speaker 5: assets in local jurisdictions to assist state and local law enforcement.
Speaker 5: And shall determine how military and national security assets, training,
Speaker 5: non lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized
Speaker 5: to prevent crime. As the police become further militarized, the
Speaker 5: military prepares to do more policing. One of the executive
Speaker 5: orders from Trump's police takeover of Washington d C contains
Speaker 5: a section directing the Secretary of Defense to quote designate
Speaker 5: an appropriate number of each state's trained National Guard members
Speaker 5: to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization to assist federal, state,
Speaker 5: and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances, and that
Speaker 5: quote a standing National Guard quick reaction force shall be resourced, trained,
Speaker 5: and available for a rapid nationwide deployment unquote. Later, in
Speaker 5: October of twenty twenty five, the Department of Defense sent
Speaker 5: out memos to each state's National Guard mandating that each
Speaker 5: state have their own Quick Reaction Forces operational by January first,
Speaker 5: twenty twenty six, with crowd control equipment and two full
Speaker 5: time trainers by the National Guard Bureau being provided to
Speaker 5: each unit. The units contain, on average, five hundred troops
Speaker 5: per state, ordered to be ready to deploy within eight
Speaker 5: to twenty four hours. The initial portion of the Bureau
Speaker 5: training courses cover how to quote form squad sized riot
Speaker 5: control formations, employ a riot baton as member of a
Speaker 5: riot control formation, how to supervise a riot slash, crowd
Speaker 5: control operation, crowd management techniques, and de domestic civil disturbance training.
Speaker 6: Quote.
Speaker 5: On September twenty second, Trump signed an executive order designating
Speaker 5: Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later, Trump
Speaker 5: signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum seven on Countering Domestic
Speaker 5: Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which calls for a new
Speaker 5: national law enforcement strategy to quote investigate all participants of
Speaker 5: these criminal and terroristic conspiracies and disrupt networks, entities and
Speaker 5: organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can
Speaker 5: intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.
Speaker 5: The memo orders local joint Terrorism task forces to quote
Speaker 5: investigate potential federal crimes relating to acts of recruiting or
Speaker 5: radicalizing persons for the purpose of political violence, terrorism, or
Speaker 5: conspiracy against rights, as well as investigating institutional and dad
Speaker 5: and individual funders, including employees of organizations which are quote
Speaker 5: responsible for, sponsor or otherwise aid in a bet the
Speaker 5: principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct unquote. As previously described,
Speaker 5: the Treasury Secretary will work with the Atorney General to
Speaker 5: quote identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism
Speaker 5: and political violence, and shall deploy investigative tools to examine
Speaker 5: financial flows and coordinate with partner agencies to trace illicit
Speaker 5: funding streams. The memo also instructs the IRS to quote
Speaker 5: take action to ensure that no tax exempt entities are
Speaker 5: directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism unquote,
Speaker 5: and that the IRS shall refer organizations and their employees
Speaker 5: to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.
Speaker 5: Quoting the memo one final time, quote, investigations shall prioritize
Speaker 5: crimes such as the following assaulting federal officers or employees,
Speaker 5: conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to commit offense solicitation to commit
Speaker 5: a crime of violence, money laundering, funding of terrorist acts,
Speaker 5: or otherwise facilitating terrorism arson, violations of the Racketeer Influenced
Speaker 5: and Corrupt Organizations ACT RICO, and major fraud against the
Speaker 5: United States. At Trump's White House ANTIFO roundtable meeting, Seamus Bruner,
Speaker 5: the director of research at the Government Accountability Institute, discussed
Speaker 5: his theory of how a network of NGOs are funding ANTIFA,
Speaker 5: and specifically mentioned Stop Cop City.
Speaker 9: There was an event in Atlanta called Stop Cop City.
Speaker 9: Over sixty rioters were charged with domestic terrorism. These groups
Speaker 9: received money for that from both the billionaire class as
Speaker 9: well as tax payer money.
Speaker 5: So On May one, twenty twenty five, Homeland Security Investigations
Speaker 5: Secret Service and the acting ICE Director rated a home
Speaker 5: in Irving, California, looking for a man who allegedly posted
Speaker 5: flyers around Los Angeles containing the names, pictures, and phone
Speaker 5: numbers of ICE agents with text in Spanish reading careful
Speaker 5: with these faces. In April of twenty twenty three, three
Speaker 5: activists were arrested for allegedly posting flyers identifying a police
Speaker 5: officer connected to the killing of Tortigita on the mailboxes
Speaker 5: in that officer's neighborhood in Barlow County, Georgia, about forty
Speaker 5: miles from Atlanta. The activists were charged with felony intimidation
Speaker 5: and were later added to the Cop City Weako case.
Speaker 5: To circle back to the topic of fear, the targeting
Speaker 5: of people putting up flyers simply identifying cops or anonymous
Speaker 5: ICE agents demonstrates how the state understands as a weapon.
Speaker 5: That's why they did the reco charges, That's why they
Speaker 5: do the house raids, that's why they do overt surveillance
Speaker 5: where you're getting followed around by police. But they are
Speaker 5: susceptible to fear as well. Through their actions, ICE demonstrates
Speaker 5: a high level of fear. They are taking massive steps
Speaker 5: to hide the identities of ICE agents on the ground
Speaker 5: and punishing people who attempt to identify these agents. They're
Speaker 5: complaining about being compared to Nazis and called the Gestapo.
Speaker 5: They're referencing very dubious statistics about an increase in assaults
Speaker 5: against officers, and they are afraid enough to shoot their
Speaker 5: guns at unarmed people more than half a dozen times
Speaker 5: in the past six months. They are scared and as
Speaker 5: evil and super soldiery as they may seem they are
Speaker 5: indeed afraid, to quote an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, unless
Speaker 5: you do something to keep them afraid, Eventually it will stop.
Speaker 5: Unless you change your stread, change course, escalate in some
Speaker 5: way that shatters their ODA loop, they will break free
Speaker 5: of their paralysis and they will find a way through
Speaker 5: their fear. So when that starts to happen, it's time
Speaker 5: to do something new and insane, because you have to
Speaker 5: keep them afraid, because like by every moral right, they
Speaker 5: should be. They should be fucking terrified to leave their homes.
Speaker 5: And if they are too afraid to leave their homes,
Speaker 5: then they can't go out and do their jobs at
Speaker 5: the end of the day. That's their ODA loop right there.
Speaker 5: The scale of fear as a tool of repression is
Speaker 5: always exponentially larger than this scale of physical or legal repression.
Speaker 5: It punches well above its weight. You can look at
Speaker 5: Atlanta as a good example of this, and you can
Speaker 5: even look at some of the arrests made in response
Speaker 5: to Palestinian liberation protests. It takes black bagging six people
Speaker 5: to paralyze six thousand because it's terrifying, because it's scary,
Speaker 5: like it's fucked up. That's a bad thing to have
Speaker 5: happened to you, And like, of course, people are afraid.
Speaker 5: Fear is one of those things that if you're engaging
Speaker 5: an anti fascist struggle, whether you're an anti fascist, whether
Speaker 5: you're an anarchist or whatever, all of us have an
Speaker 5: ethical obligation to ourselves and the people around us to
Speaker 5: push through fear as an emotion, to find ways to
Speaker 5: work with it, because it won't go away, and it shouldn't.
Speaker 5: Fear can also keep you safe, but we are necessitated
Speaker 5: by the political moment we are in to find a
Speaker 5: way to take extensive action in spite of that. Unquote.
Speaker 5: Twenty twenty was a lot of people's first experience with
Speaker 5: mass protest, and some of the people then carry those
Speaker 5: experiences into Copcity. But then for other people, Stop cop
Speaker 5: City was their first experience. And now you have an
Speaker 5: even younger generation of people, the Gen Alpha terrorists, who
Speaker 5: aren't even old enough to have been involved in Atlanta.
Speaker 5: But people are still looking at what happened in Atlanta
Speaker 5: as this bridge gap between twenty twenty and twenty twenty five,
Speaker 5: the movement to Stop Cop City as the bridge between
Speaker 5: these two different eras of uprising and resistance against authoritarianism.
Speaker 5: As the Copsity chapter closes, activists in Atlanta want people
Speaker 5: to carry on what's been learned in the contents of
Speaker 5: their struggle onto whatever the next volume is. Because cop
Speaker 5: City itself is in a sequence of events that have
Speaker 5: happened beyond and longer than what me or anyone involved
Speaker 5: in Copsity has been alive by generations. Cop City is
Speaker 5: not Volume one. Cop City is volume like thirty two,
Speaker 5: but at the same time, it's also the immediate prequel
Speaker 5: to the rise of a nationwide expansion of police power
Speaker 5: and surveillance led by a wanna be right wing strong man.
Speaker 5: Quoting an Atlanta anarchist quote, a big lesson learned from
Speaker 5: Atlanta is that it is way safer to do shit
Speaker 5: in the middle of the night than anything else. We've
Speaker 5: had exactly one arrest made over the years, and arrest
Speaker 5: that's not gone to trial. This is an alleged crime
Speaker 5: of one midnight sabotage action of the dozens and dozens
Speaker 5: and dozens of ursins that have happened, and this arrest
Speaker 5: happened very late into the movement, out of the dozens
Speaker 5: and dozens of attacks that have happened. Only one arrest
Speaker 5: has been made after the fact. Another lesson learned is
Speaker 5: the difficulty of daily counter surveillance and how much that
Speaker 5: requires militancy as a daily practice to again, quote from
Speaker 5: an anonymous anarchist in Atlanta, quote, militant anarchism as a
Speaker 5: daily practice understanding your adversary not just as this thing
Speaker 5: that you meet on the field for twenty minutes of
Speaker 5: action and then you both go home and like call it,
Speaker 5: but that they are constantly pursuing you, That you are
Speaker 5: being like hunted for sport, and you have to evade
Speaker 5: and maneuver constantly. That security culture is a persistent thing
Speaker 5: throughout the years, that you are going to continually keep
Speaker 5: having to be a part of it and do so
Speaker 5: in a very disciplined way. Unquote. A lot of the
Speaker 5: success that Stop Cop City achieved was based on a
Speaker 5: willingness to take an extremely militant approach to pre figurative infrastructure,
Speaker 5: which added longevity to the combative struggle. Both were necessitated
Speaker 5: as symbiotic elements of this same creature. Throughout the Cop
Speaker 5: City struggle, organizers and activists learned that if you're not
Speaker 5: always able to engage in a directly combative fight. Using
Speaker 5: militancy and discipline in their infrastructural projects the same way
Speaker 5: they would in a combative engagement helps prepare for what
Speaker 5: will be necessary when things do turn combative. Quoting an
Speaker 5: Atlanta anarchist quote, the state is this constantly churning machine,
Speaker 5: like it is always trying to acquire new tools and
Speaker 5: equipment and lessons, and we can't just sit still while
Speaker 5: they do this and be like, Okay, Well, at some
Speaker 5: point in four to five years, a flashpoint will happen
Speaker 5: at the place that I live, and I'll go out
Speaker 5: there and I'll be like I was in Atlanta. So
Speaker 5: I'll be good because I remember how to do all that.
Speaker 5: Because if you do nothing for the next four to
Speaker 5: five years, we're just going to be reinventing the wheel
Speaker 5: over and over again, and all the fucked up trauma
Speaker 5: that you incurred doing that won't have been helpful at
Speaker 5: all if you don't remember the skills learned on the ground,
Speaker 5: because all skills atrophy and get weaker over time. Looking
Speaker 5: back at stop Coopa City won't provide all the answers
Speaker 5: to solve the problems facing the country today, especially in
Speaker 5: light of the end result of the movement, but it
Speaker 5: would be a mistake to overlook the ways stop Copacity
Speaker 5: made a legitimate impact on the resulting facility and the
Speaker 5: political situation in Atlanta and beyond. I think there's ways
Speaker 5: of looking at degrees of success the movement had while
Speaker 5: still recognizing its obvious shortcomings, considering the fact that there
Speaker 5: is a facility called the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center,
Speaker 5: but a small group of activists turned a proposed police
Speaker 5: training facility into a national political issue. Its opening was
Speaker 5: delayed by years at at least thirty million dollars over budget,
Speaker 5: and the current facility lacks the full mock city design
Speaker 5: that it initially had, which inspired the cop City namesake.
Speaker 5: Moving forward, both these successes and shortcomings will be internalized
Speaker 5: by thousands of people who traveled to or lived in
Speaker 5: Atlanta and joined in the movement to Stop cop City.
Speaker 5: As Trump now signs executive orders expanding military equipment, federal training,
Speaker 5: and legal protections for police, deploys the National Guard to
Speaker 5: quell civil disturbance, and targets anti fascists, anarchists, and left
Speaker 5: wing activists or ENGOs as domestic terrorists. Quoting an Atlanta
Speaker 5: anarchist quote, What we are seeing is the logical conclusion
Speaker 5: of our adversaries lessons learned in Atlanta, taking the things
Speaker 5: that they learned how to do here, the skills they honed,
Speaker 5: taken to a nationwide scale. This is the logical conclusion
Speaker 5: of that, and there's a reason that they are doing that,
Speaker 5: and if they are doing that, then we should also
Speaker 5: do that. Like there's logical conclusions and escalations of the
Speaker 5: things that we learned in Atlanta, that it would be
Speaker 5: silly for us to not try and push those further,
Speaker 5: including expanding the physical and metaphysical terrain of battle. The
Speaker 5: immediate terrain for Stop Coopcity was obviously the forest and
Speaker 5: now the cop City site itself, but there was also
Speaker 5: the rest of Atlanta and all the other construction sites,
Speaker 5: and then all these subcontractors around the country and everything
Speaker 5: that supplies them. This same model can apply to, say,
Speaker 5: the Palestine protests. There's a network that exists beyond Columbia
Speaker 5: University campus that extends into the weapons manufacturing industry, which
Speaker 5: could be targeted beyond consumer boycotts, like what we saw
Speaker 5: was shack but what we saw in Atlanta, where boycotts
Speaker 5: were an aspect, but by far not the most effective aspect,
Speaker 5: and in fact, forcefully inflicting monetary damage caused a much
Speaker 5: greater degree of hurt to the companies involved in the
Speaker 5: Copsity project as opposed to the infighting caused by a
Speaker 5: waffle House boycott. When reframing what the terrain of battle
Speaker 5: could entail, it is actually intimidating to think about what
Speaker 5: the reality of stopping these things might look like. And
Speaker 5: as soon as you realize that these fights go beyond
Speaker 5: a physical building, it becomes this love crafty and entity
Speaker 5: that exists everywhere, and it's unnerving to contemplate what you'd
Speaker 5: be forced to do to actually realistically confront that. Quoting
Speaker 5: an anonymous Atlanta anarchist quote, it's important to not get
Speaker 5: trapped in the you know, we're doing an occupation on
Speaker 5: college campus. We're just going to keep trying to do
Speaker 5: an occupation on college campus over and over again, and
Speaker 5: the CoP's really good at clearing us up. But now
Speaker 5: maybe this time. And I think a part of the
Speaker 5: struggle here though, for people is when you decentralize like that,
Speaker 5: the thing that you're doing starts to take on a
Speaker 5: much different vibe. It can be everywhere versus this is
Speaker 5: the college campus where we're doing protest. I generally think
Speaker 5: at the end of the day, it starts to feel
Speaker 5: a little bit too much like terrorismy, it starts to
Speaker 5: feel too much like an insurgency, and you see the path,
Speaker 5: you see the Pandora's box start to open up a
Speaker 5: little bit, and you back off because it's scary and
Speaker 5: that this thing will kill you. This thing will try
Speaker 5: and kill you eventually, if you push it far enough,
Speaker 5: it will try and kill you, and I might succeed.
Speaker 5: And like, that's just the reality of engaging with fascism
Speaker 5: combatively as an ideology, it's the reality of engaging with
Speaker 5: advanced capitalism. That was the reality of engaging with the
Speaker 5: police state, one that is well understood in Atlanta and
Speaker 5: in many other places that this isn't a game. You're
Speaker 5: not going to get anywhere, just kind of sitting on
Speaker 5: the same college campus green over and over again, hoping
Speaker 5: for a different result. And as we've seen this year
Speaker 5: with the State Department cracking down on pro Palestine protests,
Speaker 5: just sitting there on the college green doesn't prevent you
Speaker 5: from being black bagged by the FEDS, taken to a
Speaker 5: black site, and deported to close the episode. In September
Speaker 5: twenty twenty four, the Georgia Attorney General's Office dropped the
Speaker 5: money laundering charges against the organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund,
Speaker 5: though the defendants still remained on the reco indictment. Almost
Speaker 5: a full year later, on September ninth, twenty twenty five,
Speaker 5: the defense successfully argued that the State AG's office did
Speaker 5: not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute this sixth sixty
Speaker 5: one defendants under the state's Rico statute due to simple
Speaker 5: procedural error in neglecting to first ask the governor if
Speaker 5: the AG's office could prosecute this case. Judge Farmer found
Speaker 5: that the AG does not have the authority to prosecute
Speaker 5: count one of the reco indictment, the racketeering and conspiracy charges.
Speaker 5: Without the sweeping Rico charges engulfing the sixty one defendants,
Speaker 5: just five defendants would be left with Count two of
Speaker 5: the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which the AG does
Speaker 5: have authority to prosecute, and Count three, the arson charge,
Speaker 5: though Judge Farmer indicated that that charge could also be
Speaker 5: thrown out on a similar technicality. The prosecution is appealing
Speaker 5: this decision, and the defenses argued that the state domestic
Speaker 5: terrorism law violates a constitution and is far too broad
Speaker 5: and should be altered or overturned. Judge Farmer has yet
Speaker 5: to rule on this, but he's expected to very soon.
Speaker 5: Some of the sixty one defendants could face charges individually
Speaker 5: in Fulton in a Cab County, but that remains to
Speaker 5: be seen. The referendum case is still under appeal in
Speaker 5: federal court, and the case against Jack Mazurich is still
Speaker 5: in pre trial. Just because the Cop City trial is
Speaker 5: finally progressing does not mean that movement participants are safe now.
Speaker 5: Quoting an anonymous Atlanta anarchists quote, people should be very
Speaker 5: mindful going into the trial phase that that does not
Speaker 5: mean that they are safe. There is no statute of
Speaker 5: limitations on a lot of this stuff. Like with a
Speaker 5: lot of radical movements, You're gonna have to hold a
Speaker 5: lot of that shit forever. Rely on support structures, rely
Speaker 5: on your community, be careful about who you talk to. Unquote.
Speaker 5: As Stop Coop City becomes history, there will be an
Speaker 5: influx of people trying to define the legacy of the movement,
Speaker 5: whether that's through podcasts, documentaries, a college dissertation or who
Speaker 5: knows how many books are incoming. There already has been
Speaker 5: a true crimification of the movement in certain coverage which
Speaker 5: grossly objectifies the life of Torti Guita, platforms police as
Speaker 5: more objective than movement participants and removes autonomy from key
Speaker 5: subjects to reframe the entire movement around other public facing individuals.
Speaker 5: To quote an Atlanta anarchist one final time quote, I
Speaker 5: think a big lesson from Atlanta, and this is one
Speaker 5: that we actually still have to win at is to
Speaker 5: not let outside forces, whether that be the state or capital,
Speaker 5: define the ending. That is a scope of battle that
Speaker 5: we are still engaged with and still have to win.
Speaker 5: We need to close the book on it ourselves. We
Speaker 5: need to rubber stamp it ourselves. No other entity can
Speaker 5: do that for us. It would be disastrous if they did.
Speaker 5: Unquote this has been it could happen here. See you
Speaker 5: on the other side. This is it could happen here.
Speaker 5: Executive Disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 5: White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
Speaker 5: I'm Garrison Davis today I'm joined by James Stout and
Speaker 5: Robert Evans. Yes, this episode recovering the week of November
Speaker 5: nineteen to November twenty fourth.
Speaker 1: Boy, this year's just blown by yeah fast, Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: They sped up the time stream. You know what else?
Speaker 1: Sped up the time stream watching something on Twitter blow
Speaker 1: up again. We can't seem to stop talking about this
Speaker 1: fucking website, and I'm tired of it. But the big
Speaker 1: news this week from Elon Musk's fucking vanity propagana app
Speaker 1: is see Everything Happen That they introduced a new feature
Speaker 1: to let you know the location of the account and
Speaker 1: also the number of like name changes, like how many
Speaker 1: user name change it's had since the account has started.
Speaker 1: I would say within sort of progressive and liberal circles.
Speaker 1: The common interpretation of what's happened is best summarized by
Speaker 1: this Daily Beast headline, top MAGA influencers accidentally unmasked as
Speaker 1: foreign trolls. No shit Now, As is often the case,
Speaker 1: this isn't entirely accurate. Not to say that there's not
Speaker 1: a shitload of foreign trolls who are making money by
Speaker 1: pretending to be American MAGA influencers. There definitely are. We've
Speaker 1: known about this since well before this Twitter change. One
Speaker 1: of the most prominent people on Musk's Twitter, Ian Miles Chong,
Speaker 1: is a Malaysian man who has never been to the
Speaker 1: United States and publishes nothing but maga content. Now, what's
Speaker 1: happened here? You can find going through there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of threads. There's threads on Blue Sky, threads on Twitter
Speaker 1: threads and various articles that are basically all copies of
Speaker 1: each other that are collecting a bunch of these accounts
Speaker 1: that have been busted, right. One good example would be
Speaker 1: the Magination verified account, which has almost four hundred thousand followers.
Speaker 1: Started in twenty twenty four, it's had five named changes
Speaker 1: since October twenty twenty five, and it is based in
Speaker 1: Eastern Europe non EU.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's mega nation.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: A lot of people have taken to mean like it's Russian,
Speaker 1: right yeah. Another account is the Ivanka News Trump, which
Speaker 1: displays as Ivanka Trump even though it has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with her, which it does note in its Twitter bio.
Speaker 1: The account was started in twenty ten, it has had
Speaker 1: eleven user changes since August of twenty twenty four, and
Speaker 1: it is apparently based in Nigeria. You have to see
Speaker 1: it you're seeing like aload a shitload of stuff like this, right,
Speaker 1: and it's being taken unfortunately. I think this is a
Speaker 1: mistake and I hate to be like the hey, guys,
Speaker 1: stop being happy about this, but you should because you're
Speaker 1: wrong about what's happening here. Most people are like the
Speaker 1: Daily Beast account posts some liberal Twitter account being like
Speaker 1: this is total armageddon for the online right. It's looking
Speaker 1: like half of their large accounts were foreigners posting as
Speaker 1: Americans all along. Now, let me clarify a couple things.
Speaker 1: For one thing, nothing that Elon has done here, Nothing
Speaker 1: that Twitter has revealed has proven that these account exist
Speaker 1: in any particular country. I'm going to explain why a
Speaker 1: lot of people use something called a VPN, and a
Speaker 1: VPN masks the location that you're browsing and logging in from, right,
Speaker 1: and you can use a VPN to look like you're
Speaker 1: posting from almost any country on the planet. And there
Speaker 1: is no evidence whatsoever that Twitter has done anything at
Speaker 1: all to deal with this, right to like make sure
Speaker 1: that they're getting someone's actual location. A bunch of accounts,
Speaker 1: a bunch of like people have pointed out like, hey, look,
Speaker 1: this is saying I'm from a country that I've literally
Speaker 1: never been to, like, here's my information. I'm very transparent.
Speaker 1: And there have also been organizations, including liberal coded organizations,
Speaker 1: that have been mistakenly identified as coming from a country
Speaker 1: that they are not set up. And for example, the
Speaker 1: Planned Parenthood account was showing us from Germany, which has
Speaker 1: ignited this conspiracy theory on the right, the Planned Parenthood
Speaker 1: is some European fucking influence op in the United States. Now,
Speaker 1: they used a VPN because they're in danger because it's
Speaker 1: Planned parent right.
Speaker 5: No, I mean I ran into a very similar situation
Speaker 5: because I mostly use Twitter to look at yowie now
Speaker 5: and when I was in Germany last month, it wouldn't
Speaker 5: let me look at the AWI without putting in my
Speaker 5: government ID for like age verification, sure of course, and
Speaker 5: then the state hits garrison, so obviously a non starter.
Speaker 5: I'm not I'm not. I'm not giving X the everything
Speaker 5: app my government ID to allow me to look at
Speaker 5: YAWI in Germany, so instead I had to put on
Speaker 5: the VPN. So I'm back into States and then I
Speaker 5: can look at the YAWI. So it's basically the same
Speaker 5: situation between me and Planned Parenthood here.
Speaker 1: Yes, I've said often that you and planned parenthood basically
Speaker 1: identical beings. What's happening here is it is worth talking about.
Speaker 1: But it's worth talking about not because we suddenly know
Speaker 1: the truth that it's been revealed about. We don't really
Speaker 1: know anything more than we did before this change came in, right.
Speaker 5: Well except Robert, I mean the biggest the biggest news
Speaker 5: is that the DHS has been a massad operation this
Speaker 5: last time.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's right, Yes.
Speaker 5: Like we've always suspected.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so the the Department of Homeland Security out I
Speaker 1: think it was got listed as having been based in Israel.
Speaker 1: This is not real. This isn't even x fucking up.
Speaker 1: Somebody just edited a screenshot and there's so many of
Speaker 1: these going around, hundreds and hundreds of them, right that
Speaker 1: this just kind of got shuffled in to the flood
Speaker 1: and a lot of people didn't catch it, right, and
Speaker 1: it just gets integrated into people's beliefs about the world. Right.
Speaker 1: This is a standard story with how Twitter works now.
Speaker 1: And this is, by the way, is overall I think
Speaker 1: beneficial to Musk and his kind of people, which is
Speaker 1: that we know less every day about the world. There's
Speaker 1: more disinformation about what's happening. People are less keyed in
Speaker 1: on reality and more just getting locked into different delusions.
Speaker 1: Like that's what the story is here, which is that
Speaker 1: this app and the way that social media in general works,
Speaker 1: particularly in this age, each of these changes, even the
Speaker 1: ones that get celebrated as having revealed something, are just
Speaker 1: fogging up reality, and they're doing it in such a
Speaker 1: way as to make it so that like, no one
Speaker 1: knows anything about what's going on. Right, this is like
Speaker 1: that this is the standard playbook that you've been getting
Speaker 1: out of like authoritarian regimes from forever. Right. What's important
Speaker 1: is not that just their propaganda be out. It's that
Speaker 1: there's not really any any way for there to be
Speaker 1: a consensus reality, because if there's at consensus reality, then
Speaker 1: you can't put together a large enough block of people
Speaker 1: who all believe basically the same things about reality to
Speaker 1: stop what's going on. Right, That's what's happening here, And
Speaker 1: you're wrong if you're looking at this is good. If
Speaker 1: you believe that this has blown up the right and
Speaker 1: that this has done damage to them, they're saying the
Speaker 1: same things about you and about the left. Because a
Speaker 1: shitload of people use VPNs and you can always cherry
Speaker 1: pick a bunch of and I'm not again, none of
Speaker 1: that I'm saying is not saying that they're in a
Speaker 1: shitload Like Elon has specifically incentivized foreign accounts in different
Speaker 1: countries to make money by getting into the US culture war, right,
Speaker 1: that is absolutely a big part of how Twitter works today.
Speaker 5: No denying that.
Speaker 1: What I'm saying is that you don't know any more
Speaker 1: than you did before this came out, because you have
Speaker 1: no way of knowing if any of these accounts are
Speaker 1: based where X is saying they're based because of how
Speaker 1: VPNs work. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's what I've got to say.
Speaker 6: It's incredibly annoying. It's incredibly annoying that we have to
Speaker 6: continue writing about eggs everything. The half of half of
Speaker 6: Blue Sky is people just virtue signaling that are not
Speaker 6: using Twitter, and I'm being mad at Twitter.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the same Honestly, this will get me flat.
Speaker 1: But it's the same thing about like whether people are
Speaker 1: angry about substack or fucking Instagram or Twitter or whatever. Like,
Speaker 1: if you're using social media, you're not doing yourself any favors.
Speaker 1: And they're all pretty supportive of bad things and bad people,
Speaker 1: and we use them anyway because that's the world. Like
Speaker 1: we spend dollars anyway, and let me tell you, dollars
Speaker 1: support some bad things. We pay taxes, and boy howdy,
Speaker 1: I don't like where a lot of those taxes go.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but don't pretend.
Speaker 1: That because you pick the right social media app that
Speaker 1: you're not fucking your brain up and introducing yourself to
Speaker 1: a bunch of things that aren't true. We all do
Speaker 1: it like that's the problem.
Speaker 6: Yes, they're not good for humans, yea broadly. Uh, do
Speaker 6: you want to talk about something else it's not good
Speaker 6: for humans?
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's not talk about fucking X the every goddamn
Speaker 1: thing app anymore.
Speaker 6: No, Unfortunately, I have I have something rubbic which does
Speaker 6: relate to X great everything app. So let's talk about Axios.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, are you guys familiar with axios. It's the
Speaker 6: new satelet for people who hate paragraphs.
Speaker 5: People who love cocaine.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, yeah, for people reading the news while they're
Speaker 6: having a dump. That is what axios is for. They
Speaker 6: shit out news for you to read where you're having a.
Speaker 1: Ship again, which makes cocaine even a bigger part of
Speaker 1: the picture here.
Speaker 5: No, it's it's like it's like the ADHD is like
Speaker 5: ideal news source.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, you do a line, you have to
Speaker 1: go take a ship, you catch up on your news.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's that's what they call productivity. That's the Robert
Speaker 6: Evans grind set, the morning routine that everyone's been off.
Speaker 1: It's really it's really genius of fucking Axios to hit
Speaker 1: that demographic exactly because those people also have a lot
Speaker 1: of money because they're all day traders.
Speaker 5: True true, yeah, yeah, smash, I have I have polymarket
Speaker 5: one to the Califi on the other axios always pulled up.
Speaker 6: That's split screening.
Speaker 1: You have one of those Apple like flat grass glass
Speaker 1: touch screen panels. But it's just for doing coke off
Speaker 1: of you've just.
Speaker 6: Got lines kind off on. Yeah, it's because the metaglass
Speaker 6: is a contact right looping axio screen at Yeah, Axios
Speaker 6: and use that left for people who are taking cocaine.
Speaker 6: Has seemingly been duped into running a Russian wish list
Speaker 6: as a proposed peace plant in Ukraine. Yeah great, This
Speaker 6: is what happens when you do journalism the speed of paranoia.
Speaker 6: But this has come at the same time as Trump
Speaker 6: has proclaimed via truth via the medium of a truth
Speaker 6: on Truth social that Ukraine was not showing fuscient gratitude
Speaker 6: for what we had like eleven month of him failing
Speaker 6: to end the war.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So this twenty eight point plan was first published by Axios,
Speaker 6: and it was pretty much immediately rejected by a number
Speaker 6: of Senators, led by Senator Angus King, who were at
Speaker 6: a security conference in Halifax, Halifax, Canada. Not og Halifax,
Speaker 6: shout out yeah, Halifax Junior. The senators pretty much immediately
Speaker 6: said that the US was not the author of the document.
Speaker 6: Rubio quote made it very clear to us that we
Speaker 6: are recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one
Speaker 6: of our representatives, said Senator Mike Grounds. So what they
Speaker 6: are saying is that the US didn't write to document
Speaker 6: and it was delivered to them, one can safely assume
Speaker 6: by Russia, right Rubio using X the everything app then
Speaker 6: attempted to deny this. So what it appears has happened
Speaker 6: is that this plan was drafted by Russian Special Envoy Dmitriev.
Speaker 6: Probably was Steve Witkoff.
Speaker 1: Sure that sounds right.
Speaker 6: So Wickkoff is Trump's what leads I think he's a
Speaker 6: special envoy to Russia at this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I believe he's an onvoid of Russia. Yeah, Warren
Speaker 1: Zevonn wrote a song about guys like him.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, he has. He has not covered himself in
Speaker 6: glory in his time doing this. He's kind of a
Speaker 6: useful fool. He's formerly like a real estate guy.
Speaker 1: That'll prepare you to deal with Vladimir Putin, having sold
Speaker 1: houses during the subprime mortgage crisis.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty much what he's doing here, right, Like,
Speaker 6: he's consistently been duped and pretty much has become an
Speaker 6: advocate for the Russian point of view a lot of
Speaker 6: the times. In this case, it seems that it was
Speaker 6: then strategically leaked to Axios. Right when Barack Ravid, who
Speaker 6: authored the Axios article, posted it on X the Everything website,
Speaker 6: Steve Witcoff responded saying, quote he must have got this
Speaker 6: from k This is very funny because we have Steve
Speaker 6: Wikoff right negotiating a peace process which affects millions of people,
Speaker 6: and he also doesn't know how to use the DM
Speaker 6: button on X the Everything website.
Speaker 5: To be fair, X the Everything, I've just changed their
Speaker 5: dms and the whole the whole user interface for the
Speaker 5: DMS is completely different. Now you have to put in
Speaker 5: like a pass co and they claim to be encrypted,
Speaker 5: and it's much uglier to look at.
Speaker 6: So in defense in defense of Steve, instead you can
Speaker 6: instead leaks.
Speaker 5: Safe for more secure. Option might just be to do
Speaker 5: it all in public, and.
Speaker 6: To do it in public. Yeah, So so Steve of
Speaker 6: course using a code name there K will never know. Yeah,
Speaker 6: because we can possibly tell the careal Dimitria of my
Speaker 6: my might be using K as a code name, also
Speaker 6: the first letter of his first name. So it seems
Speaker 6: very likely that either Dimitrie of someone else in Russia
Speaker 6: decided to leak this plan to Barakavid or Dave Lawler,
Speaker 6: knowing it would be raised at a press conference of
Speaker 6: belling that Trump, who, according to Wards the Post, seems
Speaker 6: to have very little detailed knowledges and negotiations, would probably
Speaker 6: see this as a quote unquote deal that then he
Speaker 6: could claim for himself. Right, and it worked. I want
Speaker 6: to talk about how Axios's model makes that possible. Right.
Speaker 6: I'm very well aware that Barack Gravid was a member
Speaker 6: of the eighty two hundred unit in Israel. If people
Speaker 6: aren't familiar. That's like a SIGINT Israeli intelligent unit. This
Speaker 6: is widely known. I've seen this being discussed in sort
Speaker 6: of relation to this. The thing is, he doesn't need
Speaker 6: to be nefarious for this to happen, And I think
Speaker 6: the most likely option here is that the Axios model
Speaker 6: is to do insider journalism and then rush to be
Speaker 6: the first to post it on social media and then
Speaker 6: get a bazillion clicks for your seventy eight word article. Right,
Speaker 6: that is how That is their entire business model.
Speaker 5: It is the name of their whole game.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's why they don't use paragraphs. It's news for
Speaker 6: people who are like waiting for their coffee at Starbucks
Speaker 6: or whatever the problem is in this case, states are
Speaker 6: or nonstate actors, right, can effectively place a leak and
Speaker 6: they know that Axios will rush it to press, probably
Speaker 6: in minutes if not ours. And with the way that
Speaker 6: the United States executive branches right now, it seems very
Speaker 6: clear that that they can get it in front of Trump,
Speaker 6: then they're going to get a reaction one way or another.
Speaker 6: So it seems that Rubio was effectively cut out. The
Speaker 6: United States Secretary of State was effectively cut out of
Speaker 6: this whole process. And there's a lot of reporting about
Speaker 6: like I don't want to do kremlinology for the Trump
Speaker 6: White House particularly, but it shows how these news outlets
Speaker 6: that lets to sort of don't fact check the Russia
Speaker 6: price to do everything for social media can effectively be
Speaker 6: used right in a way that the benefits in this
Speaker 6: case Russia, but any number of organizations could do the
Speaker 6: same thing.
Speaker 5: Robert mentioned some kind of like Wartimes warn some kind
Speaker 5: of Wartimes song, and I was wondering, where is the
Speaker 5: country of Zevon? You said, there's like a song about
Speaker 5: Warren Zevon.
Speaker 6: Jesus Garrison, Garrison, get out of here about discrimination in
Speaker 6: the workplace. Ah, I'm going to do a Woody Guthrie
Speaker 6: thing in my next series. And Gary, it's just going
Speaker 6: to sail straight past Garrison. You listen to Johnny Cash Garrison,
Speaker 6: I liked.
Speaker 5: I like Johnning Cash.
Speaker 6: Okay, James Cash, that's what they call me.
Speaker 5: Here's some ads.
Speaker 1: And we're.
Speaker 5: New Doge News for the first time in who knows
Speaker 5: how long the news being. There's no more Doge. According
Speaker 5: to a report in Reuter's, Doge has dispended eight months
Speaker 5: before its scheduled expiration in July of twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 5: When asked about the status of DOJE earlier this month,
Speaker 5: Office of Personal Management director Scott Poor told Reuters quote
Speaker 5: that doesn't exist, adding that DOGE is no longer a
Speaker 5: quote unquote centralized entity.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Boro has also said that the DOGE mandated hiring freeze
Speaker 5: is over and that there's quote no target around reductions unquote,
Speaker 5: meaning that the DOGE era rule of having to fire
Speaker 5: a certain number of people in order to be allowed
Speaker 5: to hire people is no longer in use as well.
Speaker 5: And this isn't really surprising. You have not really heard
Speaker 5: about many DOGE related stuff in a while.
Speaker 1: They haven't been doing anything in a while. Musk has
Speaker 1: basically been out of the center loop of things. But
Speaker 1: also they did the things that they were needed to do, right.
Speaker 1: They like did massacred large portions of government employees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: did permanent damage to the administrative state and cost several
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people around the world their lives through cuts
Speaker 1: in USA.
Speaker 6: Yeah Yeah.
Speaker 5: And like two former DOAGE employees, including big Balls, now
Speaker 5: just work on web design for US government websites, and
Speaker 5: other DOG officials have moved to agencies which they administered
Speaker 5: cuts to a former DOGE team member, Zachary Terrell is
Speaker 5: now the chief technology officer at the Department of Health
Speaker 5: and Human Services, and Jeremy Lewin, who assisted these slashing
Speaker 5: of you say it now overseas foreign assistants at the
Speaker 5: State Department. Yeah, so those guys got jobs out of this.
Speaker 5: All of the people who got fired or got natively
Speaker 5: impacted by the government shutdown are probably not going to
Speaker 5: be coming out as will was mister big balls here.
Speaker 1: Well, and there's some evidence that a number of folks
Speaker 1: who worked with DOGE are now feeling left in the
Speaker 1: wind and potentially in danger because there are a lot
Speaker 1: of people who want these folks to be prosecuted for
Speaker 1: what they did. Yeah, there's definitely talk about that. If
Speaker 1: there's another Democratic administration, we'll see if they would ever
Speaker 1: have the big balls to do it. But there was
Speaker 1: an article in Politico recently, and I'm going to read
Speaker 1: a quote from that Musk had not just been their
Speaker 1: visionary leader for them, he was their protector, the man
Speaker 1: who had an elect direct line to Trump, who they
Speaker 1: believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential
Speaker 1: pardon if the worst came without his presence in Washington,
Speaker 1: they were suddenly exposed. A senior Doze figure named Donald
Speaker 1: Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still
Speaker 1: brothers in arms and that Musk would continue to protect them.
Speaker 1: That led to another protesting and advising guys, seriously, get
Speaker 1: your own lawyer. If you needed he lunch, great, but
Speaker 1: you need to watch your own back. Watch your backs, guys.
Speaker 6: Yeah, these guys would be some of the more like
Speaker 6: presumably very easy to prosecute and like obvious, Yes, another
Speaker 6: democratic administration's.
Speaker 1: Some really obvious crimes in terms of like protection of information,
Speaker 1: you know, like some some pretty obvious rule breaking that
Speaker 1: went on that's not being prosecuted now, but yeah, they're right,
Speaker 1: it could be prosecuted in the future.
Speaker 5: Those like first three four months of the Trump admin
Speaker 5: What it really was just full steam ahead on the
Speaker 5: Silicon Valley version of things, right, like the move fast
Speaker 5: and brave things. Yeah, that's such a wild time to
Speaker 5: look back on, not only just in terms of how
Speaker 5: much damage they did, but the idea that if they
Speaker 5: were going to continue at that pace for the rest
Speaker 5: of the term, the government already is fundamentally different in
Speaker 5: some ways, but like how much worse that would have been? Yeah,
Speaker 5: and if Musk's ego is in part, what's sabotaged that
Speaker 5: from being complete and really kind of doing that more
Speaker 5: like Jarvin inspired project Hubris Uh kills kills a man
Speaker 5: once again. But there is aspects of like the doge
Speaker 5: idea and this government efficiency thing which aren't fully going
Speaker 5: away like this, this still is and aspect of the
Speaker 5: Trump administration there still is like some of those guys
Speaker 5: at the Auspice of Budget Management and the Heritage twenty
Speaker 5: twenty five guys who have a lot of this government
Speaker 5: efficiency quote unquote government efficiency type stuff that they're still
Speaker 5: working on, including at the Education Department, which last week
Speaker 5: the Trump administration took another step towards closing the Department
Speaker 5: of Education by shifting some of its duties to other
Speaker 5: federal agencies, which the admin claims will quote streamline federal
Speaker 5: education activities on the legally required programs, and reduce administrative
Speaker 5: burden unquote. That is going to be done by these
Speaker 5: six new interagency agreements which have been signed with the
Speaker 5: Departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and State.
Speaker 5: The Education Department riting in an announcement that this will
Speaker 5: quote break up the federal bureaucracy, ensure efficient delivery of
Speaker 5: funded programs, activities, and move closer to fulfilling the President's
Speaker 5: promise to return education to the States. So by splitting
Speaker 5: up Education Department duties among four different agencies in three
Speaker 5: different interagency agreements, this is supposed to cut red tape
Speaker 5: and lighten central bureaucracy.
Speaker 6: You have seven entities now what one entity did before.
Speaker 5: The elementary, high school, and post secondary programs will now
Speaker 5: be administered by the Department of Labor.
Speaker 6: That's great.
Speaker 5: We'll nowveresee over thirty billion dollars in education grants aimed
Speaker 5: at trying to boost the number of Americans in the workforce.
Speaker 5: The Department of the Interior will be taking over the
Speaker 5: education departments to Indian education programs and integrating them into
Speaker 5: existing programs administered by the Department of the Interior, with
Speaker 5: quote unquote proper oversight by the Education Department. College childcare programs,
Speaker 5: and foreign medical school accreditation will be administered and overseen
Speaker 5: by the Health and Human Services, and the State Department
Speaker 5: will now oversee all foreign education programs, handle international education grants,
Speaker 5: and fully administer the full Bright program. Justification for this
Speaker 5: State Department takeover of these funds specifically cited five instances
Speaker 5: of grants that were used to fund academic and medical
Speaker 5: research on trans people, writing that these programs have deviated
Speaker 5: from the core mission. Quote. The announcement from the Education
Speaker 5: departments reads that the State Department is quote best positioned
Speaker 5: to tailor foreign education programs with the national security and
Speaker 5: foreign policy priorities of the United States. This partnership provides
Speaker 5: an opportunity to streamline international education program funding and data
Speaker 5: collection measures, consolidate program management, and advance national security interests.
Speaker 6: That's not good.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that doesn't seem great.
Speaker 6: Huh Yeah, this last part is particularly concerning that the
Speaker 6: US previously has done a lot of funding of education
Speaker 6: programs around the world, and to see that pretty much,
Speaker 6: I like, with this current vasion of the State Department,
Speaker 6: I to disappear or become even more straight up propaganda.
Speaker 6: Like it's really worrying. This kind of builds on that
Speaker 6: dose stuff that you were talking about, Like this is
Speaker 6: the end of the State Department doing anything other than
Speaker 6: the propaganda And I guess warmaking well.
Speaker 5: And specifically, like Rubio's focus on education has been to
Speaker 5: crack down on academics, Palaestatian academics, academics who have who
Speaker 5: have protested in support of Palestine. That's specifically what Rubio
Speaker 5: has has talked about in terms of, you know, universities. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so with all the stuff in that statement about you know,
Speaker 5: national security and foreign policy priorities, it's not hard to
Speaker 5: see what they could be gesturing towards. Yeah, as the
Speaker 5: announcements are currently written, a lot of the programs itself,
Speaker 5: at least in the trench transitionary period, remain kind of
Speaker 5: the same. They're shifting who is like quote unquote administering them,
Speaker 5: that's the word they use a lot. But they're not
Speaker 5: cutting funds to these programs at the moment, and they
Speaker 5: do talk about them as like legally required programs. But
Speaker 5: I mean, Carolyn Levitt and Linda McMahon have said this
Speaker 5: is just one step towards well fully sending education back
Speaker 5: to the states.
Speaker 1: Woh.
Speaker 6: This also was sort like in massive disparities in educational
Speaker 6: outcomes state by state in the United States, right, Like,
Speaker 6: we already have that to some extent, but that's only
Speaker 6: going to be exacerbated by this, right, talking about things
Speaker 6: happening between the States. Let's talk about Gregory Buffino, person
Speaker 6: who supposedly patrols the borders of the United States, but
Speaker 6: has more recently been doing internal enforcement for the Border Patrol.
Speaker 6: He gave an interview to AP recently that I was
Speaker 6: just reading. They did confirm, interestingly that like a few
Speaker 6: weeks ago, maybe months ago, we've been talking about Baveno
Speaker 6: and like to work out if he was still chief
Speaker 6: patrol agent in El Centro. It appears that he is,
Speaker 6: but he's also a commander of this operation at large,
Speaker 6: which is their sort of the thing that has moved
Speaker 6: from Los Angeles to Chicago, which is now in Charlotte. Right,
Speaker 6: this sort of internal enforcement operation. He calls his team
Speaker 6: now quote unquote sanctuary busters, and he said that quote
Speaker 6: there will be no more sanctuaries, which kind of does
Speaker 6: build on what I spoke about in our last ed
Speaker 6: right when we spoke about the idea that the reason
Speaker 6: they had targeted Charlotte was because it appeared on that
Speaker 6: CIS map quote unquote sanctuary city or sanctuary jurisdiction, despite
Speaker 6: the passage of legislation in the state which would have
Speaker 6: prevented it doing the things that sanctuaries do. I don't
Speaker 6: want to talk about this ABC investigation into CBP's use
Speaker 6: of licensed plate readers. CBPS has had these for like
Speaker 6: eight or nine years now. I found the twenty seventeen
Speaker 6: piece where they wrote out their justification for use them. Right,
Speaker 6: their use has grown immensely right in it. Yeah, and
Speaker 6: it has grown under both administrations we've I suppose Trump
Speaker 6: administration from twenty to twenty twenty, by the administration twenty twenty,
Speaker 6: twenty eighty four. We spoke actually in an episode that
Speaker 6: I think it was just Robert and I in that
Speaker 6: episode when we spoke about Gavin Newsom. People love that
Speaker 6: episode and they send me great feedback, because, guys, it's
Speaker 6: important that we all know that the only person standing
Speaker 6: up against Trump right now is Gavin Newsom. Everything else
Speaker 6: is pointless. But in that episode, we spoke about how
Speaker 6: many California jurisdictions share license plate reader information with federal
Speaker 6: immigration authorities, even when California law prohibits them from doing so. Right.
Speaker 6: This is kind of one of those these things they grow.
Speaker 6: It's a ratchet.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: Once you give that power to the state, it belongs
Speaker 6: to all of the state, and you can never take
Speaker 6: it back. Automated license to plate readers have been a
Speaker 6: big thing in this kind of the post only twenty
Speaker 6: tendency of democratic mayors in big cities to massively increase
Speaker 6: spending on the police and massively increase police surveillance. We
Speaker 6: have automated cameras on our lampposts here in San Diego
Speaker 6: now right. California has prosecuted one jurisdiction that I'm aware of,
Speaker 6: which is Alcoholone. People will be familiar with alcoholne from Alcoholone.
Speaker 6: Mayor Bill Well's attempt to make a country music song
Speaker 6: about how schools are turning kids trans that is un
Speaker 6: ironically probably the most national use it that ALCOHOLA has
Speaker 6: made for a while. But bundahursued Alcoholone for showing that data.
Speaker 6: My guess is that that is because it's alcoholone, right,
Speaker 6: Because Alcohol is a city where the mayor makes a
Speaker 6: country music song about how schools are turning children trans like,
Speaker 6: it's very obviously like a partisan prosecution. There are many
Speaker 6: other jurisdictions doing this. What Border Patrol does with these
Speaker 6: cameras is it targets quote unquote suspicious activities and then
Speaker 6: it requests stops. Sometimes the stops are not made by
Speaker 6: Border Patrol, but are made by local police. Right on
Speaker 6: the pretext of something like speeding or failing to signal
Speaker 6: before you change lanes, having a break light out could
Speaker 6: be many, many things, right. The ABC piece quoted Deputy
Speaker 6: Joel bab of saying, quote, the beautiful thing about the
Speaker 6: Texas traffic code is there thousands of things you can
Speaker 6: stop a vehicle for. The idea here is not to
Speaker 6: explicitly talk about the license plate readers, right, And the
Speaker 6: fact that they are using these to do predictive surveillance
Speaker 6: is what they call it.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 6: They're trying to highlight like suspicious patterns of vehicle motion
Speaker 6: and stop people. The piece has some they obtained through
Speaker 6: public records requests from a court case, a WhatsApp group
Speaker 6: chat between Border Patrol and Texas officers which the officer
Speaker 6: has shared movement, social media profiles, car rentals, and home
Speaker 6: addresses of people who they were interested in surveilling. Right,
Speaker 6: And it reveals a massive level of surveillance. If you know,
Speaker 6: if you if you're thinking of border patrol and you're
Speaker 6: still under the impression that in America the border can't
Speaker 6: come to you wherever you are, this is another example
Speaker 6: of why that's not true. Right, DHS uses these all
Speaker 6: over the country to include outside of one hundred mile
Speaker 6: border enforcement zone. Right. This piece seems to believe that
Speaker 6: the board one hundred miles zone is it's like a
Speaker 6: legal hard line. It's not. It's an interpretation of a
Speaker 6: quote unquote reasonable distance. There is no hard line stopping
Speaker 6: BP for operating further from the border than that. That
Speaker 6: is just generally where the interpretation of a reasonable distance
Speaker 6: from the border is perceived to fall. Border patrol has
Speaker 6: these cameras at fixed points, so like that would be
Speaker 6: border patrol crossings, you know when you enter or enter
Speaker 6: the enter or leave the country at a port of
Speaker 6: entry and then at checkpoints. Right, people will be familiar
Speaker 6: with checkpoints that live in a border area. And then
Speaker 6: they also have these in mo bile and cover capacities, right,
Speaker 6: And they're using them to find people who might be
Speaker 6: driving near the border or staying and then leaving at
Speaker 6: a strange time, and then they're building a profile of
Speaker 6: those people's movements and using that request stops. Right. It's
Speaker 6: a level of surveillance that I think should be worrying
Speaker 6: to many people.
Speaker 5: And they have access to these like larger integrated camera networks,
Speaker 5: like by Flock Safety, which I've talked about before, including
Speaker 5: I think yesterday's episode. As Flock is like an Atlanta
Speaker 5: based company that rose to prominence through their surveillance around
Speaker 5: the forest where cops that was being constructed. Now Flock
Speaker 5: is all over the country, and Border Patrol has access
Speaker 5: to the Flock system. Yeah, and it's used for a
Speaker 5: whole bunch of other really dubious stuff, including in Texas.
Speaker 5: I think four h four Media did a report not
Speaker 5: too long ago about Texas sheriffs tracking a pregnant woman
Speaker 5: getting an abortion, not in Texas.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, yeah, I can see. Yeah, Texas law makes
Speaker 6: it a crime to leave the state in order to
Speaker 6: get should or something, right, and so that would be
Speaker 6: their I guess their excuse here. But like I think
Speaker 6: we can all see that that's a pretty pretty disgusting
Speaker 6: use of the svealan state. But yeah, these things grew
Speaker 6: massively in the time period between twenty twenty and today,
Speaker 6: and it was not just in Republican jurisdictions. Right, There's
Speaker 6: this like unabated support for state surveillance that we saw
Speaker 6: all over the United States is now being turned against
Speaker 6: migrants and anybody who is suspected of helping them, which
Speaker 6: is not great. Talking of not great, we have an
Speaker 6: obligation to pivot to add I'm happy. I think that's great.
Speaker 6: I love I love having a job. I enjoyed to
Speaker 6: consume products and services.
Speaker 1: That's right, and we're back. How's everybody doing good?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Banging, pretty good, pretty good. I just just finished
Speaker 5: my Asahi smoothie from the Heritage Social twenty twenty four cup,
Speaker 5: So I feel great.
Speaker 1: That's great. Yeah, that's good for you.
Speaker 5: Garrison really coming together, you know, politics from different sides
Speaker 5: coming together to enjoy a smoothie. Not unlike the meeting
Speaker 5: between Zora mum Donnie and Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Oh.
Speaker 6: How long did you plan that for?
Speaker 11: Garrison?
Speaker 5: Like literally five seconds? It just it just came out.
Speaker 6: We don't do smooth transitions here like that.
Speaker 5: Well, you know sometimes do you know who was smooth?
Speaker 11: It was Zora moum.
Speaker 6: Donnie during that meeting, which like a duck's back, like
Speaker 6: a like a seal, that kind of smoothness.
Speaker 5: Trump seemed pretty pretty enamored. Mister mum donnie mayor elect
Speaker 5: mam donnie. Quote, we have one thing in common. We
Speaker 5: want this city of ours to do very well unquote.
Speaker 5: So this was on Friday, Trump and Mum Donnie had
Speaker 5: a private meeting in the White House. Afterwards a thirty
Speaker 5: minute press conference in the Oval Office where Trump was
Speaker 5: sitting down, And so I was kind of looming over
Speaker 5: the side of Trump the whole time, never fully smiling,
Speaker 5: always having a little bit of like a a tiny
Speaker 5: like both sided smirk, but not doing his traditional happy smile.
Speaker 5: He had a very different look in the White House.
Speaker 5: But as soon as the press conference started, it was
Speaker 5: clear that the meeting went very well for Momdannie. Trump
Speaker 5: was exuberant about the man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he seemed really excited. Yeah, it's a little weird,
Speaker 1: but he seemed really excited.
Speaker 5: He stated that they have common ground on getting housing built,
Speaker 5: on affordability, on food and prices coming down, saying, quote,
Speaker 5: there's no difference in party, and we're going to be
Speaker 5: helping him to make everybody's dream come true unquote.
Speaker 6: Everybody's streamftory amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: First, I want to play Zoran's initial statement as the
Speaker 5: press conference started on what they spoke about during this meeting.
Speaker 10: I appreciated the meeting with the President, and as he said,
Speaker 10: It was a productive meeting focused on a place of
Speaker 10: shared admiration and love, which is New York City, and
Speaker 10: the need to deliver affordability to New Yorkers, the eight
Speaker 10: and a half million people who call our city their home,
Speaker 10: who are struggling to afford life in the most expensive
Speaker 10: city in the United States of America. We spoke about
Speaker 10: we spoke about groceries, we spoke about utilities, we spoke
Speaker 10: about the different ways in which people are being pushed out.
Speaker 10: And I appreciated the time with the President. I appreciated
Speaker 10: the conversation. I look forward to working together to deliver
Speaker 10: that affordability for the owners.
Speaker 6: It's one of the posture people with the green line.
Speaker 6: The green line.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, I've seen, yeah, that's going on a couple
Speaker 1: of times.
Speaker 6: They've already they've had that way with it, They've been
Speaker 6: on it. Yeah, yeah, Okay, it does seem tense.
Speaker 1: The vibes in that room must have been very, very weird.
Speaker 5: N Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, no, Zorn's very tense. Trump's
Speaker 5: trying to relax, like bad late.
Speaker 1: Face that you've posted on gas he is, I can
Speaker 1: only it's like a shit eating grin on Trump's face. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like he does seem genuinely happy, thrilled. Yeah, it's weird.
Speaker 6: He likes to be associated with winners.
Speaker 5: This is one of the big things, right A lot
Speaker 5: of I mean, we'll talk about this more. That takes
Speaker 5: okay at this, but but yeah, I think it's very
Speaker 5: clear why Trump's actually having a good time here. Zoron's
Speaker 5: like the most popular politician in the country right now,
Speaker 5: and Trump likes winners. And if anything, Zoron has proven
Speaker 5: to be an underdog that has an enormous capacity for winning,
Speaker 5: and I think Trump does like that, and that, coupled
Speaker 5: with a genuine love for New York, I think Zoron
Speaker 5: was able to navigate around Trump pretty successfully. When asked
Speaker 5: about Zoron being a communist, Trump said, quote, I feel
Speaker 5: very confident he can do a good job. I think
Speaker 5: it's going to surprise some conservative people actually unquote.
Speaker 1: And you should add what he said about liberal people,
Speaker 1: because I thought that was his funniest line.
Speaker 5: Oh then also liberal people, but they already like him
Speaker 5: too or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think they'll be surprised, they'll just be half.
Speaker 5: Yes, they like him because they already like him.
Speaker 1: It was very funny it was very funny.
Speaker 5: Trump also talked about how a lot of Trump voters
Speaker 5: actually voted for Zorn as well, saying quote unquote, I'm
Speaker 5: okay with that, and so I mentioned that yes, one
Speaker 5: in ten Trump voters in New York voted for Zoron
Speaker 5: and Zorn mentioned the end to forever wars and the
Speaker 5: cost living crisis as the driving motivators that voters spoke
Speaker 5: about as he was campaigning. Throughout this press conference, and
Speaker 5: we can assume some degree of the meeting, Zoran was
Speaker 5: very laser focused on New York specifically, and you've even
Speaker 5: seen this in interviews that he's given to like NBC
Speaker 5: and other outlets the past few days, where people are
Speaker 5: asking him about, you know, the Democratic Party as a
Speaker 5: whole and national level, and Zorn repeatedly just goes back
Speaker 5: to affordability in New York. This is like the one
Speaker 5: thing that he's going to keep talking about. He doesn't
Speaker 5: want to talk about any anything else really, And this
Speaker 5: was evident throughout this meeting the way that Zorn would
Speaker 5: would reiterate every question to being about New York. But
Speaker 5: they didn't shy away from talking about the things they
Speaker 5: disagreed on on, like an ideological sense, ICE being one
Speaker 5: of them. Here's one of their exchanges about ICE.
Speaker 12: Resident you've threatened to send federal troops to New York City.
Speaker 12: You both have differences when it comes to ICE agents
Speaker 12: in New York City. On mister Mundonnie, you called ICE
Speaker 12: a rogue government entity. I wonder how you reconcile your
Speaker 12: differences on both of those issues.
Speaker 5: I think we're going to.
Speaker 3: Work them out. And I think that if we have
Speaker 3: known murderers and known drug dealers and some very bad people,
Speaker 3: you know, we want to get them out. And the
Speaker 3: mayor ones have we discussed as a great length actually
Speaker 3: maybe more than anything else. He wants to have a
Speaker 3: safe New York. Ultimately, a safe New York is going
Speaker 3: to be a great New York. If it's not safe,
Speaker 3: no matter how well we do with pricing and with
Speaker 3: anything else, we can talk about anything you want, if
Speaker 3: you don't have safe streets, it's not going to be
Speaker 3: a success. So we're going to work together. We're going
Speaker 3: to make sure that if they they're horrible people there,
Speaker 3: we want to get him out. I think he wants
Speaker 3: to get him out, maybe more than I do, So
Speaker 3: we'll work together.
Speaker 5: They talked about I is at one later point in
Speaker 5: the meeting where you get kind of a peek at
Speaker 5: what some of this conversation may have been like behind
Speaker 5: the scenes, about trying to target any ICE enforcement against
Speaker 5: people who have criminal records rather than these roving raids
Speaker 5: that round up but just swaths of undocumented people like
Speaker 5: the Canall Street raid a few weeks ago. It's still
Speaker 5: not super clear what they are talking about, but there's
Speaker 5: not compromise in this point, like Trump's obviously going to
Speaker 5: try to frame this in a way that strengthens Trump's
Speaker 5: own positions on this, and I think Zoron will do
Speaker 5: the same. Before we discuss I don't want to play
Speaker 5: this the second bit of their discussion because you get
Speaker 5: more of Zoron's angle.
Speaker 10: We discussed ICE and New York City, and I spoke
Speaker 10: about how the laws that we have in New York
Speaker 10: City allow for New York City government to speak to
Speaker 10: the federal administration for about one hundred and seventy serious crimes.
Speaker 10: The concerns that many New Yorkers have are around the
Speaker 10: enforcement of immigration laws on New Yorkers across the Five Boroughs,
Speaker 10: and most recently we're talking about a mother and her
Speaker 10: two children. How this has very little to do with
Speaker 10: what that is.
Speaker 3: We discuss crime more than ice per se. We discuss crime,
Speaker 3: and he doesn't want to see crime, and I don't
Speaker 3: want to see crime, and I have very little doubt
Speaker 3: that we're not going to get along on that issue.
Speaker 3: He wants to and he said some things that were
Speaker 3: very interesting, very interesting as to housing construction, and he
Speaker 3: wants to see houses go up. He wants to see
Speaker 3: a lot of houses created, a lot of apartments built, etc.
Speaker 3: And you know, we actually people would be shocked, but
Speaker 3: I want to see the same thing.
Speaker 5: See that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that worries me a little bit.
Speaker 5: What about that worries you?
Speaker 1: I can tell what Trump's trying to do, which is
Speaker 1: that he really would like to get Mom Donnie on
Speaker 1: his side. And interestingly for Trump, I think he is
Speaker 1: willing to move on some things if he can fundamentally
Speaker 1: get Mom Donnie to agree that ice has a use. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's what he's clearly trying to do, and he's
Speaker 1: clearly trying to portray it as we've already agreed on that.
Speaker 1: And I think that within the context of this meeting,
Speaker 1: because of how the questions were being asked. I don't
Speaker 1: think Zorn got enough of a chance to fully address
Speaker 1: that question. So I'll leave it open to see how
Speaker 1: that is, like how he deals with that in the future.
Speaker 1: But I don't think he got enough of an opportunity
Speaker 1: to push back enough on some of the things Trump
Speaker 1: was claiming here. That does concern me a little bit,
Speaker 1: Like I think it's more a factor of how an
Speaker 1: oval office press conference is structured. But I do think
Speaker 1: that it's like I can see what Trump's trying to
Speaker 1: do well.
Speaker 5: I think what mom Donnie is trying to navigate for
Speaker 5: is if he can put an end to roving ice
Speaker 5: rates that just like that just round up people at
Speaker 5: whether they're at restaurants or from depots, and if there's
Speaker 5: people who are who have been incarcerated, who are incarcerated,
Speaker 5: and if removal operations are specifically against except like what
Speaker 5: one hundred and seventy like serious crimes, and if that
Speaker 5: is a sort of compromise, I guess I don't know.
Speaker 5: He's not an office. Yes, it's it's unclear the way
Speaker 5: that this would this would be enacted. Yeah, but if
Speaker 5: it's an harm reduction measure of stopping ice raids from
Speaker 5: happening or limiting the amount that ICE is able to
Speaker 5: operate as as basically a rodenty within the city. And
Speaker 5: I don't think we know enough to like actually see
Speaker 5: what that will look like yet, because he's not taking
Speaker 5: office for another what like forty five days.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, what he's talking about. When Trump goes about crime,
Speaker 6: crime is what they have always talked about, right, right,
Speaker 6: when they talk about the ICE enforcement, the crimes that
Speaker 6: they are speaking about, very right, they will always give
Speaker 6: the exact ample of the person who's been convicted of
Speaker 6: child abuse, of murder, of domestic violence. Right, But then
Speaker 6: they will also go ahead and say the crossing between
Speaker 6: ports of entry can be prosecuted as a crime, and
Speaker 6: then they will use that as a justification for taking
Speaker 6: anyone right and specifically people who have entered within the
Speaker 6: last two years, many of whom were shipped to New
Speaker 6: York from other states, and saying, well, these people entered
Speaker 6: between ports of entry, which they did after the end
Speaker 6: of Title forty two, right when we return to processing
Speaker 6: people under Title eight, and they will place him in
Speaker 6: actibility to remove all proceedings like that. That is what
Speaker 6: they have been doing for a while. When he talks
Speaker 6: about the sanctuary policies. New York right now doesn't honor
Speaker 6: detainer requests. Right in theory, sanctuary laws prevent and Y see,
Speaker 6: from what I understand, from honoring detainer requests, which would
Speaker 6: be an extra forty eight hour detainer. We haven't, like,
Speaker 6: as Robert said, we haven't really seen enough to see
Speaker 6: you see what he's talking about there, But like, I
Speaker 6: don't know if he's talking about a change to those
Speaker 6: sanctuary policies or not. But yeah, that would be disappointing
Speaker 6: if you did.
Speaker 5: I mean, I don't see there's any indication that he's
Speaker 5: talking about a change to sanctuary policies.
Speaker 6: Well, when he's talking about we can cull them on
Speaker 6: one hundred and seventy serious crimes, right, what does he mean?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think this gets back to the fact
Speaker 1: that a press conference in the Oval Office is not
Speaker 1: going to give you a chance to adequately address an
Speaker 1: issue like this, and I see Trump trying to paper
Speaker 1: over it and move past as quickly as possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I understand why you'd show up for this meeting,
Speaker 1: and I think it was probably, on the balance, the
Speaker 1: right thing to do. But like I am interested to
Speaker 1: see what he does next, because I think Trump is
Speaker 1: going to continue trying to push for accommodations. And it
Speaker 1: is kind of it is wild and unique to see
Speaker 1: that he seems to be willing to move on some stuff,
Speaker 1: but he's willing to move on some stuff because he
Speaker 1: thinks he can get Mom Donnie to soften some of
Speaker 1: his stances.
Speaker 5: I mean stances on what I mean. I mean, I
Speaker 5: don't on ice.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what he's trying to do here. He's
Speaker 1: trying to build a case for that.
Speaker 5: I mean, I guess I don't know the degree to
Speaker 5: which we're using.
Speaker 1: The saying that this is a rogue government agency to
Speaker 1: saying that this is a government agent. That's what Trump
Speaker 1: is trying to push for. Yeah, I'm not saying Mom
Speaker 1: Donnie agreed with that. I think that the nature of
Speaker 1: this meeting did not give him enough time to push
Speaker 1: back on that.
Speaker 5: Sure, sure you have Mum Donnie pointing there towards like
Speaker 5: an instance of like you know, a mother and like
Speaker 5: a child getting affected by this, and like and using
Speaker 5: it as an example of like what they are trying
Speaker 5: to prevent and like focusing on like the stopping ice
Speaker 5: rates from happening, as as like the thing that Mam
Speaker 5: Donnie is pushing for there and Mam Donnie as a
Speaker 5: New York City mayor cannot abolish the entity of Ice,
Speaker 5: and so like the degree in which we're framed that
Speaker 5: a is like Mom Donny's like softening, I think still.
Speaker 5: I mean, yeah, like, as you've said, there's not enough
Speaker 5: here to make a full determination.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I just think that's that's what Trump wants to get
Speaker 1: out of this.
Speaker 6: I think Trump just wants to be associated with this
Speaker 6: guy who is currently, as Garrison said, very popular.
Speaker 1: And it is really wild to see him be so
Speaker 1: deferential to somebody.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean including in this this this
Speaker 5: question about Trump being a fascist, which he handled in
Speaker 5: a very uh, very fascinating way that this is nuts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, are you affirming that you think President Trump is
Speaker 3: a fascist?
Speaker 10: I've spoken about.
Speaker 3: That's okay, Okay, it's easier. It's easier than explaining.
Speaker 5: At Zorn did say yes during that exchange he did
Speaker 5: that he did not he in fact did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he absolutely did. It's one of the most remarkable
Speaker 1: moments in American political history.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 1: If I had any stretch of the imagination.
Speaker 5: As Trump pats on the side. And I mean it's
Speaker 5: it's wild for Trump. This word doesn't mean anything right
Speaker 5: for Trump, like him saying it's easier than explaining. That's
Speaker 5: just indicating to zort On that you don't have to
Speaker 5: do this like little like political game for this reporter
Speaker 5: and be like, you know, we have we have just
Speaker 5: we've disagreed on policies, which blah blah blah. Like Trump's like, no,
Speaker 5: you don't have to do that, it's easy and explaining
Speaker 5: just say it yeah, yeah, which is a sort of
Speaker 5: like a point like against like the media. That's from
Speaker 5: Trump's point of view. It's like you you don't have
Speaker 5: to do you don't have to do like the little
Speaker 5: the little dance for like this like New York Post
Speaker 5: reporter or whatever. Just say that I'm a fascist.
Speaker 6: It's fine. Yeah. And because politics is for him a
Speaker 6: sort of behind closed doors boys club and they yes,
Speaker 6: they both have to go out and then deal with
Speaker 6: the media. But like you can sort of see that
Speaker 6: in this sort of highly viviality that Trump goes for there.
Speaker 6: I'm not saying that Ma'm Damie is less necessarily in
Speaker 6: his boys club. I'm just saying that that is how
Speaker 6: Trump perceives politics.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean he made other references like when when
Speaker 5: Trump was asked if he considers or on a g hottist,
Speaker 5: like someone else in the Republican Party called him, and
Speaker 5: Trump's like, no, I mean, the man sitting in front
Speaker 5: of me is not a too hottest People have to
Speaker 5: say certain things during camp pains, but the man I
Speaker 5: met was today, it's a very rational man. And like
Speaker 5: little lines like that, like people, Yeah, when you're a campaign,
Speaker 5: you have to say things that I think that he's
Speaker 5: getting at a similar point there, But there was multip
Speaker 5: points for this press conference where Trump defended Mamdani against
Speaker 5: like other aggressive questions about his focus on international law
Speaker 5: versus the Constitution, or why Zoron flew to DC instead
Speaker 5: of taking a greener train. Yeah, silly, silly stuff. And
Speaker 5: Trump was like Trump like dismissed these questions if like
Speaker 5: for Zar essentially, I mean like all stand up for you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's something else.
Speaker 6: There are more salient criticisms that there were reasonable criticisms
Speaker 6: you can make of some stuff he's done. Those are them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just gotcha media stuff right, like which which
Speaker 1: it's interesting how well Trump is able to call sort
Speaker 1: of their bullshit. Yeah, always fascinating.
Speaker 5: One of the more hilarious attempts at I gotcha question
Speaker 5: is from Jack Pasovic, who was in the room, who
Speaker 5: asked this.
Speaker 6: God, he must have been having an absolute melt down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he can't be happy about this, Okay.
Speaker 10: I want to know.
Speaker 13: One of the policies as well that Mayor, like Mandomie,
Speaker 13: talked to a number of times about on the campaign,
Speaker 13: was shifting the tax burden for property taxes from what
Speaker 13: he called minority communities to white based communities and putting
Speaker 13: more taxes on white people. I also noticed that in
Speaker 13: your acceptance speech you didn't mention didn't mention anything.
Speaker 5: About America or Christians or white people.
Speaker 13: In general, and so I didn't know if that was
Speaker 13: one of the policies that you guys had spoken about.
Speaker 5: Incredible, Yeah, And Trump's like smiling like a proud of
Speaker 5: father this whole time. As weird question, it's such an
Speaker 5: odds like schizophrenic moment.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's it's weird.
Speaker 1: How much more he seems to like Zoran than like
Speaker 1: his supporters.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I mean a lot of his supports the losers,
Speaker 5: and Zorn's a winner, I mean from his cabinet members. Yeah,
Speaker 5: because they're losers, like like Pete hagg saith Elon Musk,
Speaker 5: they're losing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they're all weeds, I mean JD. Van's right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Zorn's has proved himself to be like an incredibly
Speaker 5: capable figure. There's a little moment as Jack's first asking
Speaker 5: the question where Trump indicates to Zora, like, Okay, you
Speaker 5: you handle this guy, you could you can have fun
Speaker 5: with this. Yeah, and it's it's it's very odd and
Speaker 5: not odd and it's unexplainable. I understand what's happening here.
Speaker 5: Actually I think this is actually very easy to understand,
Speaker 5: but it's just still it feels odd.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, and just give him the adversarial politics was
Speaker 6: so used to.
Speaker 5: Like there's a lot of moments like this, like when
Speaker 5: when Trump's asked if he's gonna cut off federal funding
Speaker 5: to New York, he says, quote, I don't think that's
Speaker 5: going to happen. I think we're gonna help. And this
Speaker 5: is like an indication of like what Zora was trying
Speaker 5: to do in terms of harm reduction in this meeting,
Speaker 5: specifically around raids on National Guard deployment. And on, like
Speaker 5: cutting off federal funds to the city. One of the
Speaker 5: methods I think that Zoron used to help get Trump
Speaker 5: on his side is appeal to like the real estate
Speaker 5: brain that Trump has with mom Donnie's like left wing
Speaker 5: yimby style of policies, talking about rent coming down by
Speaker 5: building housing. And how much that surprised Trump because Trump
Speaker 5: has this conception of people, like of people usually on
Speaker 5: these like left wing positions are very very nimby in
Speaker 5: a lot of ways, and Trump was like surprised by this.
Speaker 5: I guess he hasn't really encountered like a left wing
Speaker 5: yimby before, and this like this like caught him off guard. Yeah,
Speaker 5: there's a good point here where Trump expresses this.
Speaker 3: Now we may disagree how we get there. The rent
Speaker 3: coming down, I think one of the things that really
Speaker 3: gleaned very very much today. He'd like to see him
Speaker 3: come down, ideally by building a lot of additional housing here.
Speaker 3: That's the ultimate way. He agrees with that, and so
Speaker 3: do I. But if I read the newspapers in the stories,
Speaker 3: I don't hear I don't hear that, but I hear
Speaker 3: I heard him say it today, and I think that's
Speaker 3: a very positive step. No, I don't expect. I expect
Speaker 3: to be helping him, not hurting him. A big help
Speaker 3: because I want New York City to be great. Look,
Speaker 3: I love New York City. It's where I come from.
Speaker 3: I spent a lot of years there.
Speaker 6: Now I'm right here, am Ray okay.
Speaker 5: And later Trump clarified that he would feel comfortable living
Speaker 5: in New York under Mam Donnie and compared Mam Donnie's
Speaker 5: popularity to that of Bernie Sanders, as well as how
Speaker 5: supporters of Bernie moved over to Trump and then vice versa,
Speaker 5: and through Trump talking about this, you can start to
Speaker 5: kind of peak behind the current of like how Zorn
Speaker 5: was framing his version of populism, which was able to
Speaker 5: get Trump to be like friendly towards like the economic
Speaker 5: affordability sides of his policy proposals. In talking about like
Speaker 5: the crossover of support between Bernie and Trump and twenty
Speaker 5: sixteen and the crossover support between Trump twenty four and
Speaker 5: Ma'm donnie in twenty twenty five. At one point, Mom
Speaker 5: Donnie did also address the genocide in Gaza.
Speaker 14: As mister Mumdney, you've accused the US government of committing
Speaker 14: genocide and Gaza white. President Trump was working on peace.
Speaker 10: Why that I've spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide
Speaker 10: and I've spoken about our government funding it. And I
Speaker 10: shared with the President in our meeting about the concern
Speaker 10: that many New Yorkers have of wanting their tax dollars
Speaker 10: to go towards the benefit of New Yorkers and their
Speaker 10: ability to afford basic dignity. And what we see right
Speaker 10: now is we're in the ninth consecutive year of more
Speaker 10: than one hundred thousand school children being homeless in our city,
Speaker 10: and there's a desperate need not only for the following
Speaker 10: of human rights, but also the following through on the
Speaker 10: promises we've made New Yorkers. And I appreciated the meeting
Speaker 10: we had and the work that we can do.
Speaker 5: Agree that President Trump didn't do a piece and work
Speaker 5: hard to make the peace because we were hard to
Speaker 5: do with the peace in the Midate East and everywhere.
Speaker 8: What do you agree with that?
Speaker 10: I appreciate all efforts towards peace. And I shared with
Speaker 10: President Trump that when I spoke to Trump voters on
Speaker 10: Hillside Avenue, including one of whom was a pharmacist, that
Speaker 10: spoke about how President Trump's father actually went to that
Speaker 10: pharmacy not too far from Jamaine states that people were
Speaker 10: tired of seeing our tax dollars fund endless wars. And
Speaker 10: I also believe that we have to follow through on
Speaker 10: the international human rights and I know that still today
Speaker 10: those are being violated and that continues to be work
Speaker 10: that has to be done no matter where we're speaking of.
Speaker 1: Man, that's I I that's so complicated, so conflicting.
Speaker 6: That's a lot going on.
Speaker 1: On one hand, it's really good that somebody on record
Speaker 1: said in the White House that the US is enabling
Speaker 1: Israel and continuing a genocide. I'm glad that that happened.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, the fact that it's off roaded
Speaker 1: so quickly to now let's talk about like what we
Speaker 1: want to do for New Yorkers, and it is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not I don't know, it's it's the only way
Speaker 1: this was going to happen at all.
Speaker 5: I suppose it's he's the main It's very no.
Speaker 1: I agree, I agree, but it's totally awkward, like it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's totally a little lot, especially when the topic
Speaker 1: is genocide, right, Like the vote from genocide to housing
Speaker 1: affordability and understand that both the serious issues.
Speaker 6: It's still a tonal shift that is jarring.
Speaker 1: And like, yes, it's absolutely fair to say he's the
Speaker 1: mayor of New York. He has no ability to influence
Speaker 1: US policy in terms of selling arms to Israel, and
Speaker 1: the fact that he brought it up at all is positive.
Speaker 1: But boy, is that is that a wild nit or
Speaker 1: so of talking.
Speaker 5: I think the reason why he brought it up is
Speaker 5: to talk about specifically, like funds that we are sending
Speaker 5: to Israel should not be sent to Israel now, those
Speaker 5: funds that should be being used in the United States
Speaker 5: to do things to help people here. And that is
Speaker 5: like why he brought that up as a seg well.
Speaker 1: And reiterating that Trump supporters often agree with the idea
Speaker 1: that we should not be spending this much money on
Speaker 1: this sending weapons over the world to fund wars overseas.
Speaker 1: It'll be interesting to see if shit continues with Venezuela,
Speaker 1: how that all moves. But I think it's valuable to
Speaker 1: like really slam that home in the White House that like, hey,
Speaker 1: you ran on getting the US out of these kind
Speaker 1: of violent entanglements overseas. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad someone said it.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, it's just weird. This is all a
Speaker 1: very weird meeting.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, the whole thing was jarring.
Speaker 5: I guess. There was another point there where he was
Speaker 5: talking about like like local local New York businesses and
Speaker 5: Trump's father like went to this pharmacy, and I think
Speaker 5: stuff like that is the tactics that he used to
Speaker 5: get Trump to be friendly with him as well as
Speaker 5: Trump later spoke about how in one of the rooms
Speaker 5: that they were meeting and there was a portrait of
Speaker 5: FDR which Trump had personally like picked out of the
Speaker 5: storage faults to hang, and Zorn asked him about the
Speaker 5: portrait and asked if you could get a picture with it,
Speaker 5: and this seemed to please Trump a lot.
Speaker 6: Trum.
Speaker 5: Trump wasn't able to talk about how he picked up
Speaker 5: the picture, and then Trump said a few really interesting things.
Speaker 5: He's like, I guess or it's a big fan of
Speaker 5: FDR and the New Deal, which is phenomenal maneuvering from
Speaker 5: Zor a classic technique to get like democratic socialist politics
Speaker 5: across to someone. Again, there's moments like that stuff with
Speaker 5: stuff of how we talked about like Bernie some some
Speaker 5: you know, the you know, regular populist rhetoric, talking about
Speaker 5: the crossover between you know, voters from between Trump and Mamdannie,
Speaker 5: just his general love of New York and FDR New Deal.
Speaker 5: You can see all these things that were used to
Speaker 5: like navigate through this meeting to get to get Trump
Speaker 5: to actually seed ground on a lot of stuff with
Speaker 5: I think very very minimal concessions, if any, if any
Speaker 5: real concessions even from zor like at all. Like I
Speaker 5: think in general, Trump was the one that moved rhetorically
Speaker 5: throughout this meeting and moved on like actual like actual
Speaker 5: like promises to withhold funds to invade the city with
Speaker 5: National Guard troops. I think Trump was the one who
Speaker 5: actually seeded territory in this meeting. I do not see
Speaker 5: much evidence of things that m Donnie had could have
Speaker 5: personal impact on actually like losing losing ground on those
Speaker 5: things throughout this meeting.
Speaker 6: It is almost important to remember that he has a
Speaker 6: man ARMBI two, has a rhetorical role to play, right,
Speaker 6: and yes, he is Mayor of New York. He is
Speaker 6: also an extremely popular politician at the moment, and like
Speaker 6: when he talks about things like the genocide in Gaza,
Speaker 6: that that has rhetorical value. I'm not saying he can
Speaker 6: go to New York City Council and stop it, but
Speaker 6: like him saying that it is a genocide at the
Speaker 6: White House is important, and like it is important that,
Speaker 6: like when he has this this podium in front of
Speaker 6: the whole world at the White House, so he used
Speaker 6: it to talk about the genocide and he did, But like,
Speaker 6: I don't think we should only think about this in
Speaker 6: terms of New York. Like, it is sure important that
Speaker 6: someone said that, and I hope he keeps using that
Speaker 6: platform he has right now to say that as someone
Speaker 6: who like is definitely looked up to nationally in like
Speaker 6: DSA circles.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think, and this this goes into some
Speaker 5: of the the I guess kind of I mean, some
Speaker 5: of them are critiques, some of them aren't even really
Speaker 5: critiques of this meeting. I think a lot of them
Speaker 5: are people jumping on the opportunity to to just attacks
Speaker 5: or on with no real construction critique there. But then
Speaker 5: there's this kind of relates to these two different forms
Speaker 5: of politics that people use on the left, like politics
Speaker 5: as a form of personal expression, as a form of
Speaker 5: like posturing as a as a form of like maintaining
Speaker 5: of moral purity versus politics as an actual practical method
Speaker 5: of achieving cyst like systematic change, and people engage in
Speaker 5: these two different modes, and there're thing there's a role
Speaker 5: for both of these modes of politics. Actually, I think
Speaker 5: both of these have have a degree of necessity. And
Speaker 5: Zoron has has taken one specific path, and there's the
Speaker 5: others who are who are very clear in having taken
Speaker 5: the other path. And there's there's a bunch of a
Speaker 5: bunch of a bunch of critiques from this meeting quote
Speaker 5: unquote critiques, including from a formal Seattle City councilman who
Speaker 5: is now running for Congress as a socialist, Kashauma sawant quote.
Speaker 5: If I were in Mamdani's position, instead of asking Trump
Speaker 5: to meet me, I would have announced a mass rally
Speaker 5: of tens of thousands of people in New York City
Speaker 5: to protest against ice rates, to declare that New York
Speaker 5: City will not tolerate ice and will fight Trump every
Speaker 5: inch of the way. I will lunch mass campaign for
Speaker 5: free transit and free childcare, and build a militant movement
Speaker 5: to win unquote. These are things Zoran's are already participated in.
Speaker 5: These are things that have happened. Just one more, like
Speaker 5: one more protest that's going to be more effective than
Speaker 5: actually having Trump seed some ground on the scale of enforcement.
Speaker 5: This is part of why I have this like hesitation
Speaker 5: around discussion of Zoran, because I think he's actually doing
Speaker 5: kind of strategic moves to actually limit the amount of
Speaker 5: damage that Trump's able to do in the city. And
Speaker 5: he's doing it through like rhetorical maneuvers, and some of
Speaker 5: that may feel awkward to watch in a like a
Speaker 5: live press conference, but I think the actual end results
Speaker 5: of that have a lot more potential than say, you know,
Speaker 5: a rally of ten thousand people which effectively does nothing.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I mean we've had a bunch of those that
Speaker 6: that is politics is performance right lately like that. Yeah,
Speaker 6: people are very attached to that mode of political engagement
Speaker 6: in the United States, like that that lie you know,
Speaker 6: walking around with signs of shouting, demonstration and political intent.
Speaker 6: It has not been successful in stopping ice grabbing random
Speaker 6: people of the street, I'll just say that.
Speaker 5: And people have been criticizing Zoran just simply for even
Speaker 5: taking this meeting because it's somehow quote unquote like humanizes
Speaker 5: Trump in some way, like Trump doesn't need to be humanized, right,
Speaker 5: Like it's like Zoron's platform by Donald Trump. He is
Speaker 5: the president of the United States. He doesn't he he wins,
Speaker 5: he has that position, he has bought the legitimacy like
Speaker 5: this this, I don't think Zoron being there actually rehabilitates
Speaker 5: Trump's image in a meaningful way. I think what he's
Speaker 5: doing is trying to actually make New York a safer
Speaker 5: and more affordable place to live by doing a kind
Speaker 5: of complicated political maneuver, which I'm sure it's kind of
Speaker 5: upsetting to kind of go through, but he's doing it.
Speaker 5: And the wave of criticism that it's kind of based
Speaker 5: on based on that sort of you know, humanizing argument
Speaker 5: or this stuff on, like why doesn't Zorn just protest
Speaker 5: instead of actually trying to like cut deals or like
Speaker 5: not and cut deals because that sounds so like slimy,
Speaker 5: but like actually like negotiate with the president. And like
Speaker 5: this criticism comes on the tail end like a week's
Speaker 5: worth of very reflexive criticism of Zoran for his retention
Speaker 5: of New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tish, as well
Speaker 5: as advocating against the New York City DSA's endorsement of
Speaker 5: city councilmen and new DSA member she offses primary campaign
Speaker 5: against Congressman Jokim Jeffries. Some of these criticisms, I get
Speaker 5: the jeffersone a little bit more, But some of these
Speaker 5: criticisms I find to be a little odd, mostly considering
Speaker 5: the fact that Zoran has been open about his plan
Speaker 5: to retain Tish for literal months, for literal months, and
Speaker 5: just this week people acted like it was this massive
Speaker 5: betrayal in his like ideological purity or his stated promises,
Speaker 5: which just isn't true. He's been open about this like
Speaker 5: since like last summer, and on the on the Jeffrey
Speaker 5: side of things, I think Zorn's point of view here
Speaker 5: is at a difficult primary campaign and one that's probably
Speaker 5: going to be unsuccessful. Based on the Zoron twenty twenty
Speaker 5: five general vote map, it shows that that'd be very,
Speaker 5: very challenging. But this, this this difficult primary against referees
Speaker 5: would also inhibit Zoron's ability to implement the affordability agenda
Speaker 5: in the city. The New York Times quoted a leaked
Speaker 5: portion of the DSA's endorsement meeting with Zoran saying, quote,
Speaker 5: the choice before us is not whether to vote for
Speaker 5: Chai or Hageeme at the ballot box. The choice is
Speaker 5: how to spend the next year. Do we want to
Speaker 5: spend it defending caricatures of our movement or do we
Speaker 5: want to spend it fulfilling the agenda at the heart
Speaker 5: of that very same movement. Unquote, Zora has a very
Speaker 5: specific focus right now on the New York City government
Speaker 5: and implementing the agenda for New York City and the
Speaker 5: congressional campaign would, in his view, only put more roadblocks
Speaker 5: to that at this point in time, versus, you know,
Speaker 5: keeping a left wing ally in the New York City Council.
Speaker 6: I guess I don't see why they can't do both.
Speaker 6: Like they will be defending caricatures of their movement for
Speaker 6: sure the next forever, right until the Internet and and
Speaker 6: stupid politics the stopping part of a politics which isn't
Speaker 6: coming anytime soon. Like, I think it'd be perfectly possible
Speaker 6: to give that endorsement and still say my job as
Speaker 6: mayor is to do the shit that I promised to do.
Speaker 6: I also endorse this person because I think they're a
Speaker 6: better person than the Keem Jeffries, who has been very poor. Okay,
Speaker 6: I don't I don't see those two things as mutually exclusive.
Speaker 6: We need to talk about MTG, if only very briefly.
Speaker 1: What is there to say.
Speaker 6: That Magic the Gathering has finally reclaimed the acronym? Oh good, Yeah,
Speaker 6: Marjorie Tayler Green leaving politics?
Speaker 5: Well maybe, well she's leaving the house. Is at the end,
Speaker 5: at the end of the year, is leaving the House.
Speaker 5: See what she's announced?
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: It is unclear how she will continue her career.
Speaker 6: Maybe maybe Zoran will be taking her seat. Maybe the
Speaker 6: Trump's new friends.
Speaker 5: I mean, I really don't think he's much interest in
Speaker 5: being in the House of Representatives, especially in Georgia.
Speaker 1: Oh would jesus.
Speaker 6: He has a much more important role now. I guess
Speaker 6: like he's able to do a lot more as executive
Speaker 6: New York than he ever would be as like a
Speaker 6: single rep in Yeah yeah, yeah, but yeah, no more MTG.
Speaker 1: Okay, well great.
Speaker 6: If you want to contact us, do you can reach
Speaker 6: out to us at cool Zone, tips at proton dot me.
Speaker 15: We reported the news, We reported the news.
Speaker 5: Grinder. I hardly this is it could happen here where
Speaker 5: today the it is gay flirting and or harassment, and
Speaker 5: the here is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During the twenty twenty four
Speaker 5: Republican National Convention. I'm gay also known by my undercover
Speaker 5: alias Garrison Davis, and I was lucky enough to be
Speaker 5: one of our on the ground RNZ correspondence. A few
Speaker 5: weeks ago. We provided daily coverage of the GOP Coronation
Speaker 5: festival based on our conversations with delegates, lobbyists, and think
Speaker 5: tank ghoules, and reported on the general trends in rhetoric
Speaker 5: used by popular speakers at the event. We'll have some
Speaker 5: more in depth episodes about those topics in the weeks
Speaker 5: to come, using more of our recorded interviews we collected
Speaker 5: at the convention. But on top of our regular coverage,
Speaker 5: I also had a special assignment that I'm more or
Speaker 5: less assigned to myself. On this show, we often talk
Speaker 5: about right wing extremism and issues facing gay and trans people,
Speaker 5: including the various ways conservatives and Christian nationalists are trying
Speaker 5: to make life harder for queer people, whether through legislation,
Speaker 5: online harassment, and physical violence. As these are two of
Speaker 5: our most frequently covered topics being at the Republican National
Speaker 5: Convention provided me with the perfect opportunity to investigate the
Speaker 5: intersection between conservatism and homosection U. For years, I've heard
Speaker 5: rumors and urban legends about a massive influx of Republicans
Speaker 5: flocking to the gay hookup app Grinder to get laid
Speaker 5: during the RNC. Whether they be twenty year old Republican
Speaker 5: twinks from Miami or fifty three year old self hating,
Speaker 5: closeted gay men from Idaho trapped in loveless marriages, curiosity
Speaker 5: has often gotten the better of me, and I needed
Speaker 5: to know how many homosexual Republicans were actually logging onto Grinder.
Speaker 5: In case you're unfamiliar, Grinder is technically a dating app
Speaker 5: that serves the LGBTQ community, but in actuality, it is
Speaker 5: a mediocre hookup app that mostly serves as a way
Speaker 5: for strangers in their forties to completely unprompted send you
Speaker 5: unflattering pictures of their penis. Grinder was launched in two
Speaker 5: thousand and nine and is arguably the largest and most
Speaker 5: popular gay dating app, especially among men. Grinder has only
Speaker 5: been around for two in person RNCs prior to this point,
Speaker 5: twelve and twenty sixteen. Since all convention activities moved online
Speaker 5: during twenty twenty for the pandemic. So this July, for
Speaker 5: the first time in eight years, Republicans from all around
Speaker 5: the country could gather in one city and once their
Speaker 5: wives fell asleep, log onto Grinder and this episode, I'm
Speaker 5: going to tell you about my RNC Grinder experience. Before
Speaker 5: traveling to the city that was about to be invaded
Speaker 5: by all of the weirdest Republicans in the country, I
Speaker 5: needed to do some prep to help ensure safety and
Speaker 5: success in my investigative endeavor. I hope you queers liked
Speaker 5: that terrible pun. Based on the massive increase in violent
Speaker 5: anti trans rhetoric coming from the GOP, I already knew
Speaker 5: that I would be dusting off my old boy motor
Speaker 5: skills and going undercover as a cisgender male. Although my
Speaker 5: ability to pass as a straight mail is debatable, I
Speaker 5: can at least easily pass as a not quite straight mail.
Speaker 5: My transfeminine fashion taste has been skewed more mask lesbian
Speaker 5: in recent years, so clothing wasn't really an issue. I
Speaker 5: packed up basically all my button up collar shirts, three ties,
Speaker 5: two black suits, and a beige London fog trench coat. Basically,
Speaker 5: the vibe I was going for was half young Republican,
Speaker 5: half Roman towel boy dressed as a nineteen fifties FBI agent.
Speaker 5: I refer to this as Dale Cooper moting. I was
Speaker 5: unwilling to cut my hair to match most of the
Speaker 5: young Republican frat boys, so I settled on styling my
Speaker 5: wavy blonde locks like Baron Trump meets Total Swinton in Constantine.
Speaker 5: I was kind of Gabriel maxing for most of the convention,
Speaker 5: and though most attendees were unable to pick up on
Speaker 5: my dikish undertones, the one day I wasn't wearing a tie,
Speaker 5: I did get she heard by the Secret Service when
Speaker 5: entering the convention through a security checkpoint. They're going woke.
Speaker 5: So that was my general look for the convention. I
Speaker 5: also completely remade my grinder profile for the RNZ for
Speaker 5: simplicity's sake, I got to emphasize my twinking past and
Speaker 5: removed the explicitly non binary transgender aspects of my profile,
Speaker 5: replacing some of my more trans coded photos with pictures
Speaker 5: of my light Yagami and Dale Cooper cosplay. Perhaps next
Speaker 5: RNC I can experiment with discovering how many of the
Speaker 5: RNC attendees are chasers. But for safety's at sake, I
Speaker 5: went to more stealth, both online and in person at
Speaker 5: RNC related events. For my main profile picture, I chose
Speaker 5: a pretty basic photo of me with disheveled hair, wearing
Speaker 5: a light gray shirt and thin black tie, looking just
Speaker 5: frankly exhausted. I chose the simple yet elegant user name Twink,
Speaker 5: and for my bio wrote gen z in town for Convention,
Speaker 5: which I thought was pretty funny and signals to people
Speaker 5: that yes, I am here for the R and C,
Speaker 5: but leaves the exact reason why still a bit mysterious.
Speaker 5: So this was my bait. On my way to the airport,
Speaker 5: I was already dressed for the part, as I says
Speaker 5: expected the flight from Atlanta to Milwaukee would be part
Speaker 5: of the whole RNC experience. I arrived at the gate
Speaker 5: and the vibe shift was immediate. Older white men with
Speaker 5: even whiter hair wearing a mix of poorly tailored suits
Speaker 5: and country club polo shirts fit for the driving range.
Speaker 5: They all kind of looked like my Republican grandfather. The women, meanwhile,
Speaker 5: regardless of age, were all cause playing their favorite female
Speaker 5: Fox News anchor with bleached blonde hair. There were a
Speaker 5: handful of delegates as well as Republican super fans wearing
Speaker 5: Trump buttons and mega hats, just really excited to be
Speaker 5: going to the convention, the way a NERD would be
Speaker 5: excited to go to San Diego Comic con. Others at
Speaker 5: the gate were more subdued, perhaps not wanting to attract
Speaker 5: too much attention in the Atlanta airport, but I could
Speaker 5: still overhear them getting into quiet small talk about their
Speaker 5: RNC expectations and in hushed tones, asking others at the
Speaker 5: gate if they were going to the convention. And that's
Speaker 5: what everyone called it, not the Republican Convention, not the
Speaker 5: GOP convention or the RNC the convention. As I was
Speaker 5: bording the plane, an older woman with straw like blonde hair,
Speaker 5: sitting a few rows in front of me waved me
Speaker 5: and asked, young man, are you going to the convention.
Speaker 5: I gave my best yes, ma'am, took my seat, and
Speaker 5: then heard her remark to her friend about how happy
Speaker 5: she was that more young people are attending the convention,
Speaker 5: and I would suspect she would be quite disappointed to
Speaker 5: learn why I was attending the convention and what I
Speaker 5: was doing there, mainly trying to collect as much information
Speaker 5: about these weird RNC Grinder Republicans as I can. And
Speaker 5: you will hear more about those weird Grinder RNC Republicans
Speaker 5: after the break. This episode is brought to you in
Speaker 5: part by the top Gun soundtrack, which I was listening
Speaker 5: to as I was coming down from adderall while writing
Speaker 5: the second half of this episode, as well as these
Speaker 5: products and sponsors. Okay, back to the Grind. Most convention
Speaker 5: activities took place in the Piser Forum, which it took
Speaker 5: about four days to learn how to pronounce. This venue
Speaker 5: is usually home to the NBA team, the Milwaukee Bucks,
Speaker 5: and this is where I would do most of my
Speaker 5: Grinder cruising so I could see other profiles within the
Speaker 5: radius of the convention area. Every time I walked into
Speaker 5: the Pfiser Forum, which was multiple times a day for
Speaker 5: four days in a row, I would find a little
Speaker 5: corner or a place to sit and discreetly boot up
Speaker 5: Grinder and refresh my feed to see what profiles were
Speaker 5: in my proximity. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Grinder, one
Speaker 5: of its more terrifying features is the proximity detector telling
Speaker 5: you what users are near you, whether that be five
Speaker 5: miles away or five feet away. Every night, when I
Speaker 5: got back to the hotel after recording with Robert and Sophie,
Speaker 5: I would once again check a Grinder to see if
Speaker 5: any unlucky delegates were put up in the hotels by
Speaker 5: the airport. The hotel we were staying at was also
Speaker 5: home to the Idaho and North Dakota delegates, and though
Speaker 5: I don't believe anyone from our hotel was on Grinder,
Speaker 5: save for maybe an anonymous profile or two, there definitely
Speaker 5: were RNC attendees at some of the nearby hotels roughly
Speaker 5: fifteen hundred feet away from my bed. The Grinder proximity
Speaker 5: detector was quite useful to me and locating profiles active
Speaker 5: around the footprint of the R and C, as well
Speaker 5: as when sorting through all my messages back home to
Speaker 5: confirm who attended the rn C from out of state.
Speaker 5: Because Milwaukee is about six hundred and fifty miles away
Speaker 5: from Atlanta, if someone's distance marker was substantially different from that,
Speaker 5: I could assume that they were in Milwaukee for the
Speaker 5: R and C from out of state. Even if I
Speaker 5: wasn't able to confirm through any brief text exchange. I've
Speaker 5: also done my best to follow up with certain profiles
Speaker 5: to rule out possibilities of secondary traveling or other random
Speaker 5: reasons for why the distance markers might not line up exactly.
Speaker 5: And I think I have it narrowed down pretty well. Okay,
Speaker 5: you've been very patient, and now I think it's time
Speaker 5: to read through the highlights from my grinder in box.
Speaker 5: And I gotta say I think I started off pretty strong.
Speaker 5: While attending the RNC kickoff party the night before the
Speaker 5: convention officially started, I got one of the very first
Speaker 5: messages I received from a twenty one year old Republican
Speaker 5: with the profile picture that's just a close up picture
Speaker 5: of a dark suit with a dark blue shirt and
Speaker 5: magenta tie, already horrendous vibes. He asked me if I
Speaker 5: was quote unquote with the GOP and I said I
Speaker 5: was attending with friends, and then I got no further response.
Speaker 5: I saw this guy online throughout the convention, and then
Speaker 5: after the convention was over, he moved like three hundred
Speaker 5: miles away, so I'm pretty sure he was there for
Speaker 5: the RNC. I got a message from someone who identified
Speaker 5: himself as a local conservative of quote but not a
Speaker 5: hardcore Republican unquote, and he was excited the convention was
Speaker 5: in town, hopeful that he would quote meet my future
Speaker 5: husband unquote. The first chaser I encountered with the bio
Speaker 5: looking for some lady dick to feel in my ass,
Speaker 5: saw through my CIS gender disguise and messaged me cock
Speaker 5: question mark. I got one other message from a chaser
Speaker 5: who was pretending to be Tea for Tea, who asked
Speaker 5: me if I was in town for Kitsu Khan, an
Speaker 5: anime convention in Green Bay. A nice local messaged me,
Speaker 5: quote hope you're finding what you're looking for, smiley face,
Speaker 5: which was very nice and just kind of amusing if
Speaker 5: you consider that he thought I was just a gay
Speaker 5: Republican looking for some other gay Republican. Another local with
Speaker 5: the name Older for Young sent me the message quote boomer,
Speaker 5: who will talk politics with you or we can just fuck.
Speaker 5: I asked him if the quote unquot talk politics pickup
Speaker 5: line works very often, and he replied quote less often
Speaker 5: than I would hope for on here zero unquote. He
Speaker 5: mentioned that he had noticed some convention attendees on the app,
Speaker 5: telling me that they have infiltrated grinder. He then asked
Speaker 5: me what exact hotel I was staying at, So that
Speaker 5: was the end of that conversation. A minority of the
Speaker 5: Milwaukee locals who messaged me identified themselves as conservatives and
Speaker 5: were largely excited that the RNC was in town. They
Speaker 5: vicariously questioned me about how the convention was going, as
Speaker 5: most were disappointed that they themselves cannot attend. One such fellow,
Speaker 5: who described Trump's first RNC entrance as electric and a
Speaker 5: very emotional moment for him and the entire crowd unquote,
Speaker 5: would have liked to attend, but he was busy working
Speaker 5: at the hospital because they needed quote extra staffing just
Speaker 5: in case unquote. Now, the worst profile picture I found
Speaker 5: was an older guy wearing a baseball camp and one
Speaker 5: of those half faced skull masks like Adam Offfen used
Speaker 5: to wear. He said he was from Florida and claimed
Speaker 5: to be in town not for the RNC but to
Speaker 5: visit family, and mentioned that Vance had completely sold out
Speaker 5: his morals for the VP spot. This guy's politics were impenetrable.
Speaker 5: Maybe this was just like your average Florida independent, very
Speaker 5: baffling fella. A younger guy messaged me asking you're a
Speaker 5: Republican and I said not really, putting it lightly, and
Speaker 5: he never got back to me. I did find a
Speaker 5: thirty one year old chaser named Greg who I do
Speaker 5: believe was attending the convention and his bio read quote
Speaker 5: anon come drain Me trans CD as crossdresser sissy fem
Speaker 5: to the front of the line. I asked, you like
Speaker 5: trans and he responded yes. We had no further conversation.
Speaker 5: I did talk with two other people who happened to
Speaker 5: be covering the convention, including one guy who thought I
Speaker 5: was with CNN because the Grinder proximity sensor put me
Speaker 5: near the CNN area when I was actually using Grinder
Speaker 5: at the Heritage Foundation party. And lastly, really the only
Speaker 5: guy I saw who openly claims to be attending the
Speaker 5: RNC in his public bio was a thirty two year
Speaker 5: old from Shreveport, Louisiana with the user name suck me
Speaker 5: Off one Word. He described the convention as exhausting but
Speaker 5: awesome and told me he was quote proud to support
Speaker 5: President Trump unquote and called Trump's speech on the final
Speaker 5: day amazing. A lot of the RNC speakers, including Trump,
Speaker 5: talked about Corey Competour, the man who was killed at
Speaker 5: the Trump rally during the attempted assassination. So after mister
Speaker 5: sucked me off talked about how awesome Trump's speech was,
Speaker 5: I just replied to him, poor Corey, and he messaged
Speaker 5: me back Corey Who, and that he told me what
Speaker 5: exact hotel he was today. Now, part of the danger
Speaker 5: of trying to use Grinder directly in the middle of
Speaker 5: the RNC, even discreetly, is that even if I'm hunched
Speaker 5: over on my phone, there is a non zero chance
Speaker 5: that some passer by or persons sitting right above me
Speaker 5: might catch a glimpse of an unsolicited dickpic that fills
Speaker 5: my phone screen as I try to check my messages.
Speaker 5: And this is simply a non negotiable part of the
Speaker 5: Grinder experience. Whatever you do, grainy, unflattering, bizarrely angled photos
Speaker 5: of some balding, forty three year old married man will
Speaker 5: appear in your inbox. Ordinarily, I would check the profile
Speaker 5: first to see who might be sending me a photo
Speaker 5: to weed out the undesirable prospects before even considering to
Speaker 5: open up a DM. Unfortunately, multiple factors prevented me from
Speaker 5: doing this. For one, this was research, so I needed
Speaker 5: to collect the most amount of data possible. But moreover,
Speaker 5: even if I still wanted to vet for applicable profiles
Speaker 5: in my dms, this was impossible without opening up to
Speaker 5: each DM individually and clicking through to their profile from
Speaker 5: the chat log. Due to one of the many glitches
Speaker 5: I experienced using Grinder at the RNC, about halfway through
Speaker 5: the week, the app started crashing pretty frequently. But the
Speaker 5: main glitch I had to deal with, which has since
Speaker 5: been fixed, is that I could not access anyone's profile
Speaker 5: from the DM's page. I had to click into each
Speaker 5: individual chat log to open up a user profile, which
Speaker 5: meant I had to look at a lot more unsolicited
Speaker 5: Dick pics before even being able to check anyone's profile.
Speaker 5: So there I was watching Ted Cruise's speech, sitting underneath
Speaker 5: about fifty Republicans and right next to both of my bosses,
Speaker 5: scrolling through an endless stream of dick pics to see
Speaker 5: who was local and who was here for the rn C,
Speaker 5: hoping that whatever Republican voter from Alabama wasn't looking over
Speaker 5: my shoulder at the plethora of dimly lit hog But
Speaker 5: I was far from the only one reporting issues with
Speaker 5: the app during the rn C around mis day. On Tuesday,
Speaker 5: the second day of the convention, over one thousand users
Speaker 5: reported a Grinder outage in the Milwaukee area on the
Speaker 5: website down Detector. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote on the
Speaker 5: final day of the r and C that quote reports
Speaker 5: that the Grinder app crashing increased by more than ninety
Speaker 5: percent in the past forty eight hours across the country unquote.
Speaker 5: The down detector heat map showed Grinder outages in Chicago,
Speaker 5: Los Angeles, and New York, as well as a hot
Speaker 5: spot of outages in Milwaukee near the end of the convention,
Speaker 5: indicating users were experiencing issues with the app, possibly due
Speaker 5: to an increase in activity, and you will hear more
Speaker 5: about that activity after this ad break. This episode of
Speaker 5: It Could Happen Here is brought to you in part
Speaker 5: by the Challenger's soundtrack remix by Boys Noise, which I
Speaker 5: was listening to as I wrote most of this episode
Speaker 5: while on the plane back to Atlanta. This episode is
Speaker 5: also brought to you by these products and services. We
Speaker 5: once again returned to the grind. We got to keep
Speaker 5: on grinding. We're almost done, but we got to grind
Speaker 5: a little more. Just one more grind bro I swear
Speaker 5: about addictors. One more grind broachs one more grind. During
Speaker 5: the influx of reports about the Grinder app breaking during
Speaker 5: the RNC, a post from the Twitter account for the
Speaker 5: Halfway Post went extremely viral, bolstering claims of a massive
Speaker 5: increase in activity. Quote breaking, an executive of the gay
Speaker 5: dating app Grinder says, the Republican National Convention is quote
Speaker 5: basically Grinder's super Bowl unquote. This quote from a Grinder
Speaker 5: executive went super viral, prompting discussions all over the Internet
Speaker 5: about five different articles and even disgraced former New York
Speaker 5: Congressman George Santos commented on the phenomenon content warning, gay Republican.
Speaker 14: So executives are calling the RNC convention the Grinder super Bowl. Folks. Look,
Speaker 14: I'm openly gay, no qualms about it. Proud conservative Republican.
Speaker 14: I met my husband on Grinder and we've been together
Speaker 14: for six years going on seven, married.
Speaker 6: For almost three. Let me tell you something.
Speaker 14: Just come out the closet, boys, come on, it's fun.
Speaker 1: You can be.
Speaker 14: Gay and conservative, but look, Grinder's already out of you anyway.
Speaker 14: Based on the hits and guess who's in town. It's
Speaker 14: all you conservatives.
Speaker 11: Bye.
Speaker 5: Now, I certainly did observe a lot of blank or
Speaker 5: anonymous profiles, at least more than I'm used to. I
Speaker 5: also received messages containing variations of hay sexy from at
Speaker 5: least five accounts that have since been deactivated. And this
Speaker 5: does line up with a report from a Milwaukee area
Speaker 5: Grinder user who spoke with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel saying
Speaker 5: that he noticed a major bump in anonymous users. Quote.
Speaker 5: On any given day, you'll go on there and see
Speaker 5: a headless torso or a blank profile, said the source,
Speaker 5: who did not want to be named. The Grinder user said,
Speaker 5: on a normal day, you'll encounter maybe ten users with
Speaker 5: no public profile. But Thursday, when he checked the app,
Speaker 5: he said he stopped counting at fifty blank profile photos unquote. Now,
Speaker 5: we don't have any official data yet on Grinder usage
Speaker 5: near the twenty twenty four rn C, only the down
Speaker 5: detector reports which our users submitted. But we do at
Speaker 5: least have data from the last in person convention in Cleveland, Ohio,
Speaker 5: all the way back in twenty sixteen. A Vice article
Speaker 5: by Candice Brian spoke with sources from Grinder and wrote
Speaker 5: that quote, Grinder usage near the Quick and Loans Arena
Speaker 5: showed a sixty six percent increase during the r and C.
Speaker 5: Other active destinations including Times Square, Capitol Hill, Disneyland, South Beach,
Speaker 5: and Trump Tower showed no comparable increase in active users. Unquote.
Speaker 5: Many of the local twinks and trains certainly were concerned
Speaker 5: about possible RNC freaks hiding on the app. People would
Speaker 5: often first ask me if I was a Republican or
Speaker 5: why I was in town before trying to hit on me.
Speaker 5: One such twink told me, quote, I would be surprised
Speaker 5: if you were a delegate or something, but I had
Speaker 5: to check. As the week progressed, more locals told me
Speaker 5: that they had found a handful of out and proud
Speaker 5: patriots online, but really not many. In fact, multiple Milwaukee
Speaker 5: locals I chatted with on Grinder did claim to notice
Speaker 5: an uptick in users, but mostly recognizable local users who
Speaker 5: were online for the same reason I was, to see
Speaker 5: if there was an influx of closet Republicans. Someone told me, quote,
Speaker 5: for the record, it's like three times busier here than normal.
Speaker 5: Everyone is out to see what the Republicans are up
Speaker 5: to and the chasers have come out of the woodwork unquote.
Speaker 5: Far from being the app's super Bowl. According to WECE,
Speaker 5: the twenty sixteen rnc's sixty six percent bump in activity
Speaker 5: is less than one half of the increase in Grinder
Speaker 5: activity that was seen at the last in person DNC,
Speaker 5: an event which was also a whole day shorter i'llreage
Speaker 5: from wece. Quote. However, from Sunday to Monday, the week
Speaker 5: of the Democratic National Convention, there was an even higher
Speaker 5: one hundred and forty eight percent increase in activity around
Speaker 5: the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia unquote. It's also worth
Speaker 5: noting that of that sixty six percent increase in activity
Speaker 5: around the twenty sixteen r and C, only about forty
Speaker 5: percent of those users were visiting Cleveland, most were locals. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: sixty percent of Grinder users active near the DNC in
Speaker 5: Philadelphia were visiting the city. Oh, and that quote from
Speaker 5: a Grinder executive calling the RNC Grinder's super Bowl, as
Speaker 5: well as George Sandos's other claim about Grinder purposely outing
Speaker 5: gay conservatives. Both of those claims originate from Twitter satire accounts.
Speaker 6: It is totally made up, pure fiction.
Speaker 11: It's fiction.
Speaker 6: It's fiction.
Speaker 9: We made it up.
Speaker 1: We made this one up.
Speaker 6: It's a made up tail, it's a total fabrication. It
Speaker 6: never happened.
Speaker 5: It's an urban legend that never happened. So no, the
Speaker 5: RNC is not grinders a super Bowl. I got messages
Speaker 5: from over one hundred and fifty different people. Over ninety
Speaker 5: percent of the messages I received and profiles visible online
Speaker 5: even while inside the Pfizer forum were from locals completely
Speaker 5: unaffiliated with the RNC, and any boost activity that can
Speaker 5: be attributed to people visiting for the RNC is a
Speaker 5: minuscule drop in the bucket compared to the proverbial orgy
Speaker 5: festival of out of town gay Democrats who travel to
Speaker 5: the DNC, And like, if you think about this logically,
Speaker 5: this shouldn't at all be surprising. The Republican Party has
Speaker 5: spent the past two years screaming about how all drag
Speaker 5: queens are child groomers, and though this was the first
Speaker 5: year the GOP has removed opposition to gay marriage from
Speaker 5: their party platform, they have massively increased their opposition to
Speaker 5: and attacks against trans people and really any display of
Speaker 5: a visible queerness like come on this is the Republican party.
Speaker 5: There's this kind of fucked up cultural conception that homophobic
Speaker 5: politicians must be so because they are secretly gay. And
Speaker 5: while there is the occasional like Lindsey Graham or repressed
Speaker 5: homosexual preacher, this is not the norm and all Republicans
Speaker 5: being secretly gay is not the driving force of legislative homophobia.
Speaker 5: It is an ideological drive, largely in furtherance of hegemonic
Speaker 5: Christian nationalism, and now for people like Elon Musk and more,
Speaker 5: young Republicans of fascistic notion of reproductive futurism built on
Speaker 5: fears that young people white people aren't having enough white babies,
Speaker 5: which they partially attribute to society becoming more accepting of
Speaker 5: gay and trans people, resulting in people having less reproductive
Speaker 5: or heterosexual sex. Never mind the fact that queer and
Speaker 5: trans people are often times can and do have children,
Speaker 5: which still doesn't seem to please these conservatives, as it
Speaker 5: doesn't align with their traditionalist view of the family unit.
Speaker 5: So No Grinder wasn't flooded with closeted Republicans because there
Speaker 5: simply isn't that many closeted Republicans that are going to
Speaker 5: be attending the RNC, and while there may not be
Speaker 5: as many Republicans as I thought there might be, I
Speaker 5: do believe that I have the bump in activity, albeit
Speaker 5: a smaller bump than rumored. Basically figured out based on
Speaker 5: my anecdotal experience and the reports of a handful of
Speaker 5: local Grinder users and journalists I talked with who were
Speaker 5: online during the twenty twenty four rn C, and considering
Speaker 5: the twenty sixteen Grinder data, I can report that merely
Speaker 5: a small minority of activity was due to ordinary RNZ attendees.
Speaker 5: The majority of activity was from locals who either regularly
Speaker 5: used Grinder or were specifically curious about who might be
Speaker 5: online during the RNC. I observed two more groups that
Speaker 5: would contribute to any noticeable increase in activity. Not everyone
Speaker 5: who attends the RNC are guests or delegates. A lot
Speaker 5: of people work at the convention center or work tech,
Speaker 5: and a sizeable chunk of people are like myself researchers, posters,
Speaker 5: or journalists who attend conventions like this for work. And lastly,
Speaker 5: the final group that fills out the bump in Grinder activity,
Speaker 5: one that for some reason didn't really expect to see
Speaker 5: upon arrival, but in retrospect makes total sense. Are cops
Speaker 5: so many cops? There were so many cops online at
Speaker 5: the RNC, just like delegates or reporters. They are coming
Speaker 5: to town from all around the country. There was cops
Speaker 5: or state troopers from Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, California, Indiana,
Speaker 5: and many more states, as well as US Capitol Police,
Speaker 5: Secret Service, TSA, DHS, and FBI. They were all in
Speaker 5: town as a part of the security detail. A few
Speaker 5: of the guys that messaged me I can absolutely confirm
Speaker 5: are one hundred percent police or some kind of military police.
Speaker 5: A thirty three year old cop or military guy quote
Speaker 5: looking for sexy bottoms with the tag's jock, military discreete
Speaker 5: and weightlifting, as well as many pictures of him in
Speaker 5: the gym. Said it in his bio that he was
Speaker 5: quote really into slim, skinny toned, and muscular people. He
Speaker 5: messaged me saying, Hey, now, I got a lot of
Speaker 5: haze in my inbox, which is not unusual for Grinder.
Speaker 5: You will probably mostly get hay as a message as
Speaker 5: well as just like, you know, a picture of someone's penis,
Speaker 5: but between a penis and hey, those are probably the
Speaker 5: two most received messages you will get on Grinder. There
Speaker 5: was another guy with a username DL military who said
Speaker 5: in his bio he was working security for the week
Speaker 5: and that Grinder messages had completely broke for him and
Speaker 5: to instead message him on Snapchat. The DL in DL
Speaker 5: military stands for down low. It's a tag that only
Speaker 5: the worst people on Grinder will use, mainly like self
Speaker 5: hating gay men who are closeted, and it's download because
Speaker 5: they don't want to be like publicly seen being gay.
Speaker 5: Just absolutely the worst. We do not fuck with DL,
Speaker 5: both literally and figuratively. There were a bunch of other
Speaker 5: non locals who I would describe as cop types. I
Speaker 5: can't one hundred percent say for sure that they are cops,
Speaker 5: but they have like the look, you know, like the look,
Speaker 5: the cop look. I don't know. They could also be
Speaker 5: like a bodyguard or work in private security. But one
Speaker 5: of these cop looking guys message to me asking if
Speaker 5: I was a trans guy, which I always love to see.
Speaker 5: It means I'm doing gender very well. And a few
Speaker 5: other cop types sent relatively boring messages. So yeah, a
Speaker 5: lot of cops, which is not completely surprising considering the
Speaker 5: fact that basically half the cops in the country were
Speaker 5: at the Republican National Convention in some form or another.
Speaker 5: A few final notes, Now, this really make up a
Speaker 5: sizable chunk of the Grinder population. But after saying I
Speaker 5: was just covering the RNC, a couple people on Grinder,
Speaker 5: just completely unprompted, told me that they were attending the
Speaker 5: protests against the RNC. Please do not do this. That's
Speaker 5: a horrible idea for multiple reasons. You gotta stop talking
Speaker 5: about your political activities on dating apps, especially Grinder, especially
Speaker 5: at the RNC. Horrible idea. Do not do this. And
Speaker 5: despite my lazy attempt at a young Republican disguised online profile,
Speaker 5: a few too many people did recognize me from Twitter
Speaker 5: or the pod, but they were very nice. They gave
Speaker 5: me some recommendations for what gay bars to check out
Speaker 5: after conventioned hours, and one person told me this interesting
Speaker 5: anecdote that I'd like to share. Quote, I don't think
Speaker 5: Trump is going to win. I can missed for Hillary
Speaker 5: in twenty sixteen, and at least here it doesn't feel
Speaker 5: the same unquote. I thought that was a little interesting
Speaker 5: tibit that I received at probably round three am on Grinder,
Speaker 5: So there you go. Well, anyway, that was my RNC
Speaker 5: grinder experience. I'm sorry to report it is not the
Speaker 5: hotbed of closeted Republicans that we mean it to be.
Speaker 5: It's mostly local gaze, a few reporters and a few
Speaker 5: more cops. I do not think I'll be reporting on
Speaker 5: the DNC grinder, but I am curious to see if
Speaker 5: there is a sizable increase in activity as compared to
Speaker 5: the RNC Grinder, So I guess I will maybe posted
Speaker 5: by that on Twitter at Hungry bow Tie if you
Speaker 5: want updates on that. Anyway, stay safe out there. Be
Speaker 5: careful if you're ever on grinder. Please especially don't tell
Speaker 5: someone covering the RNC that you're attending any protests. But
Speaker 5: in general, be careful on these types of dating apps
Speaker 5: and I will see you on the other side. Message
Speaker 5: from Quickie Grinder said you were super close yesterday, wasn't stocking?
Speaker 5: I promise? Message from birthday present emoji I almost thought
Speaker 5: you were Josh Thomas. Message from anonymous wait are you
Speaker 5: pro or anti Republican? I'm not gonna lie. I mainly
Speaker 5: asked your politics because I thought you were cute, but
Speaker 5: I didn't want to hit on a Trumper message from
Speaker 5: older for young aren't all the delegates propositioning you? You're cute?
Speaker 5: Message from anonymous? Why establish a detlitarian state if I
Speaker 5: can't breed It's a dictator message from suck me off?
Speaker 5: I'm down for anything.
Speaker 11: Lol.
Speaker 5: Are you supporting Trump? Ha? Ha?
Speaker 6: Cool media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to you can Happen Hear a podcast trying to
Speaker 2: figure out why some of the most powerful people in
Speaker 2: the world to everyone to think that they're gamers. It
Speaker 2: is it is your host me along with me as
Speaker 2: Garrison Davis.
Speaker 5: I I've I've played a video game before. I'm not
Speaker 5: very powerful, but I I.
Speaker 2: Too, have played many several video games.
Speaker 5: See I wouldn't. I wouldn't say several. I've I've played
Speaker 5: like a few many. I have played too many, simply
Speaker 5: too many video games. So okay, this is this.
Speaker 2: Is in some ways kind of a lighter episode, because
Speaker 2: Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing.
Speaker 5: Is something going on out there.
Speaker 2: It's all really bad, and one of the people who's
Speaker 2: been making everything really really bad is Elon Musk, who
Speaker 2: has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers, the
Speaker 2: PayPal guy, the PayPal guy, the owner of x.
Speaker 5: I've I've been I've been locked in my uh in
Speaker 5: my gamer cave for the past like five months. I've
Speaker 5: not left. I'm just hearing about this now. Yeah you might.
Speaker 5: You might.
Speaker 2: You might know of him as the guy who paid
Speaker 2: another guy to play Path of Exile two for him.
Speaker 5: We will get to that. See, I don't play those games.
Speaker 5: Those games are gay. I only play Nintendo Mecca games
Speaker 5: and hell Divers too, like a loser's that's reasonable, that's reasonable.
Speaker 5: Those are those are? Those are fine games. Oh and Sonic?
Speaker 2: Oh god, okay, pushing aside the subject to Sonic. So okay,
Speaker 2: I want to take a look a bit about why
Speaker 2: this sort of matters and why all of these fucking
Speaker 2: really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to
Speaker 2: be gamers.
Speaker 5: And I think the place to start here is with
Speaker 5: the fact.
Speaker 2: That gaming is in one hundred and eighty four point
Speaker 2: three billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is an extremely
Speaker 2: annoying guy but is also right, points out that this
Speaker 2: is more money than TV, movies and music combined. So
Speaker 2: this is the largest entertainment market in the world by
Speaker 2: such an astounding margin in terms of.
Speaker 5: Just dollar value.
Speaker 2: Right, something like three billion people play video games. It's
Speaker 2: mostly mobile game which makes the story I'm about to
Speaker 2: tell very weird because the actual people who play these
Speaker 2: games again, it's it's a lot of mobile games, and
Speaker 2: it's also mostly people who are women and non white.
Speaker 2: And yet, however, Comma, when people think about like the
Speaker 2: gamer TM, you are not thinking about.
Speaker 5: That, yeah, like as a political class.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, you know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah,
Speaker 2: you're thinking of a bunch of weird in cell right
Speaker 2: wing dipshits who are white and suckass. And this is
Speaker 2: in large part because gamer Gate was sort of the first,
Speaker 2: like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as
Speaker 2: a political identity. And obviously this is you know, this
Speaker 2: is a fascist movement.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 2: Part of the reason this works, and we're gonna be
Speaker 2: getting more into why this sort of works later, but
Speaker 2: part of the reason this works is that this is
Speaker 2: an extremely large group of people because it's new, no
Speaker 2: one has sort of defined it as a political identity before,
Speaker 2: and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure
Speaker 2: about their ident He is a gamer because this is
Speaker 2: a relatively new medium, which is why everyone fucking either
Speaker 2: wants their games to be like treated like movies or
Speaker 2: some shit, or they want it to be sports because
Speaker 2: those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money,
Speaker 2: and then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so the effect of this is that the
Speaker 2: cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to
Speaker 2: these people. And this is true actually really both on
Speaker 2: the left as much as it is on their right.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of like sort of political figures.
Speaker 2: I don't know, you're sort of like online people who
Speaker 2: come out of gaming, like like h Bomber guy, I
Speaker 2: guess an example, like Hassan. To some extent, there's just
Speaker 2: like a lot of people who are like gamers and
Speaker 2: then by sort of like become political. But on the
Speaker 2: other hand, gaming has always been like a not always
Speaker 2: but has traditionally been an extremely right wing space. Oh god, Garrison,
Speaker 2: I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit
Speaker 2: this is. Have I told you the story about Kabob
Speaker 2: the German No, oh boy? Okay, So back in the
Speaker 2: dawn of Time, I played a lot of Hearthstone as
Speaker 2: a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like good.
Speaker 5: Is that like a resource management type game for like
Speaker 5: gay autistic people.
Speaker 2: No, this is this is the World of Warcraft card game.
Speaker 5: Okay, that's that's even more embarrassing. Yeah, really bad, really bad.
Speaker 2: I think I think I peaked at like two K
Speaker 2: Legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top
Speaker 2: like half a percent of players in the world's digital
Speaker 2: collectible card video game. Come on, oh yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 2: two k legend DNA is like fucking shitter ranks.
Speaker 5: It's bad.
Speaker 2: I was never like good, good at it. I was
Speaker 2: just like, okay, kind of but you know, this is
Speaker 2: like a thing that I did growing up, and something
Speaker 2: I remember is like all of the fucking Heartstone streamers
Speaker 2: and these are like really big streamers would play music
Speaker 2: from this guy they called Kobob the German and it
Speaker 2: turns out that his actual name was removed Kobob because
Speaker 2: he was a fucking German neo Nazi.
Speaker 5: Well many such cases, yeah.
Speaker 2: For people who like are not aware of of like
Speaker 2: mid twenty tens German fascism. Remove Kabob is like a
Speaker 2: slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of.
Speaker 5: Turkish people in Germany.
Speaker 2: So great stuff, great stuff, this is just was just
Speaker 2: sort of like the water you were swimming in if
Speaker 2: you were a gamer in like the twenty tens. Now,
Speaker 2: this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed
Speaker 2: kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these
Speaker 2: tech CEOs like who want to be thought of as gamers.
Speaker 2: And so the two examples we're gonna look at are
Speaker 2: Sam bank and Freed's and this is this is really
Speaker 2: technically on both sides of the political spectrum. Right, We're
Speaker 2: gonna look at Sam Banker Freed, and we're gonna look
Speaker 2: at Elon musk are new Overlord.
Speaker 5: I guess.
Speaker 2: So we're gonna start with Sam Bankon Freed, and you know,
Speaker 2: as we go through what's happening here, we're gonna sort
Speaker 2: of unravel why it's so important to them to be
Speaker 2: seen as gamers. And I guess it is important to
Speaker 2: note like Sam Bankman Fried like is I guess like
Speaker 2: he is a gamer in the sense that like he's
Speaker 2: like addicted to video games effectively and just plays them
Speaker 2: fucking literally constantly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he looks the part too. No offense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, before before he was put in prison for
Speaker 2: twenty five years for fraud.
Speaker 5: Well, probably not anymore. He's probably gonna get part of God.
Speaker 5: Maybe we'll see, we'll see. I don't know. Crypto vote,
Speaker 5: it's the most valuable voting block. Now all young Americans
Speaker 5: are too poor to open bank accounts, so they put
Speaker 5: all their money in crypto. So now they're gonna vote
Speaker 5: for whoever makes line go up.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna become the joker. So okay, then think about
Speaker 2: Sam Megan Frieda. For people who have forgotten who SBF is.
Speaker 2: He is the guy who was the founder of FTX,
Speaker 2: which was like a crypto change that was actually effectively
Speaker 2: a giant scam where he took everyone's money and betted
Speaker 2: on the stock market and lost it. And you know,
Speaker 2: Robert did a behind the bassardes on him. And one
Speaker 2: of the things that happens constantly is he's just like
Speaker 2: always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dogshit
Speaker 2: game called Story Big Bralgy Meetings. He is a League
Speaker 2: of Legends addict, which is like as as as any
Speaker 2: gamer will know, a person who plays League of Legends
Speaker 2: all the time, like one of the worst categories people
Speaker 2: who's ever existed. And one of the things that that
Speaker 2: SBF did as as a sort of pr thing right,
Speaker 2: was let the author Michael Lewis of the Big shorts,
Speaker 2: We're Gonna get the moneyball in a second, blindside other books.
Speaker 5: Reparatable financial advice books, is what I'm hearing.
Speaker 2: But you know, like a very very powerful, influential and
Speaker 2: wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along
Speaker 2: and and Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him.
Speaker 2: But this is something that like ICBF was like, you know,
Speaker 2: was like projecting right in order for this to be
Speaker 2: the image of him was him as like the gamer.
Speaker 2: And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis right,
Speaker 2: because he just like doesn't understand someone who just has
Speaker 2: ADHD and plays vide games all the time and doesn't
Speaker 2: give a shit. So you play video games stream meetings
Speaker 2: like no one has ever been like this. I have
Speaker 2: no idea what you mean. I actually don't play video
Speaker 2: games stream meetings because it is too obvious.
Speaker 5: But I play I play video games a once a week.
Speaker 5: That's that's that's kind of my Oh.
Speaker 2: God, this is the one part about Sam bankmon Free
Speaker 2: that's relatable to me. I play so many video games.
Speaker 2: It is my like antidepression strategy basically, like when I
Speaker 2: need to not think for a while, there's just MEO
Speaker 2: playing actually pat the faxtyle too. One of the games
Speaker 2: that we're gonna be fucking talking about today, something.
Speaker 5: That I play a lot of.
Speaker 2: I've done so much fucking gaming, Like God, I used
Speaker 2: to play this game called Smite, which is like a
Speaker 2: it's like a mob but like League of Legends but
Speaker 2: like third person. And I played so much Smite that
Speaker 2: they were pro showing my casual games. When when the
Speaker 2: Zoomer Revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they
Speaker 2: execute b I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know that's reasonable.
Speaker 2: Like I can't argue with that.
Speaker 5: I'll inform the council. I can't our next folks council meeting,
Speaker 5: I'll bring it to the table.
Speaker 2: But you know, so, so what what What what happens
Speaker 2: with this sort of thing is that is that Michael
Speaker 2: Lewis's image of SBF becomes as this gamer who's doing
Speaker 2: these completely incomprehensible things. He's mind must be so unbelievably brilliant. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 2: because he's just like playing fucking video games all the time.
Speaker 2: And and this gets to one of the aspects of
Speaker 2: why these people do this this sort of like pretending
Speaker 2: to be a gamer thing and and like and like
Speaker 2: SBF like is a gamer, right, but like why why
Speaker 2: they make us part of their cultural image, which is
Speaker 2: that a lot of the traditional media people, even though
Speaker 2: gaming is an enormous industry, it's it's extremely profitable and
Speaker 2: is enormously culturally powerful, it doesn't have the same kind
Speaker 2: of critical culture around. It doesn't exist that you would
Speaker 2: see or something like movies or.
Speaker 5: Like respectability in some way, except in like the reversed
Speaker 5: Sam Bankman freedway, where like the schlubbiness is part of
Speaker 5: what makes him like an extent your genius, right, like
Speaker 5: like like that era of like Silicon Valley guy. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's like he's he's so different, right, Like he's he's
Speaker 5: he's not like put together, and this like shows how
Speaker 5: he's like a new and innovative thinker. So it's like
Speaker 5: it's kind of like a double edged sword in like
Speaker 5: that specific way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, this is all a feedback loop, right, because
Speaker 2: like part of it not being respectable is that someone
Speaker 2: like Michael Lewis, right, who was like as establishment of
Speaker 2: a journalist as there's ever been these people don't play
Speaker 2: video games. They're one of the figures people who just
Speaker 2: like don't game. Are these like traditional mainstream sort of
Speaker 2: access journalists, right, And so they run into this shit
Speaker 2: and they have no fucking idea what the hell is
Speaker 2: going on, And it's just really really easily just sort
Speaker 2: of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer, like,
Speaker 2: you know, you like, you show a gamer like a
Speaker 2: League of Legends addict, and they will instantly be able
Speaker 2: to just like read this person like a fucking book. Also,
Speaker 2: by the way, gaming addiction like is like kind of
Speaker 2: a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here, but also
Speaker 2: like League of Legends makes you a worse person. It
Speaker 2: simply does. You just get mad all the time. I've
Speaker 2: known too many League Legisp players of my goddamn life.
Speaker 2: Holy shit, terrible game.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but arcane though, right, All right, oh god.
Speaker 2: Okay, We're gonna take an ad break, and then when
Speaker 2: I come back, I'm gonna explain part of why this worked,
Speaker 2: which is the unique incompetence of Michael lewis Well.
Speaker 5: I look forward to that. I love hearing about unique incompetence.
Speaker 2: So we are back now, Okay, Obviously. Part of the
Speaker 2: reason this works too is you know, as I've been
Speaker 2: talking about, right, like these these really out of touch
Speaker 2: sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an
Speaker 2: enormous market.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special
Speaker 2: case because he is really truly an unbelievably glible dumbass.
Speaker 2: And to get an understanding of this, I'm gonna go
Speaker 2: into something that Lewis in theory understands a lot better,
Speaker 2: which is sports.
Speaker 5: So Lewis has.
Speaker 2: Written two of the most famous books ever written about sports,
Speaker 2: right He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're
Speaker 2: gonna be talking about, which I'll get to in a second.
Speaker 2: And he wrote The Blindside, which is another book that
Speaker 2: they talk about on Behind the Bass Riaging listen to that,
Speaker 2: But I want to go in on Moneybomb. Moneyball is
Speaker 2: supposed to be this book about how this underdog athletics
Speaker 2: team invented like baseball metrics, and they use sabermetrics to
Speaker 2: like like build this roster out of nothing that like
Speaker 2: went to the playoffs and did really well, and and
Speaker 2: like I'm not going to get into the extent to
Speaker 2: which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland
Speaker 2: A's team, Like whatever. I'm not gonna argue about baseball statistics.
Speaker 2: What I will argue about is that one of the
Speaker 2: characters in this fucking book, right, who's one of the
Speaker 2: sort of like underdog geniuses and like Michael Lewis loves
Speaker 2: to find, right, is this guy named Paul Pedesta. He
Speaker 2: is he is like one of the main figures in
Speaker 2: this book. He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach. Basically,
Speaker 2: what baseball team is this?
Speaker 11: Oh?
Speaker 2: This is the Oakland Athletics. Are now the last Vegas
Speaker 2: Athletics or some shit. I don't know that they moved
Speaker 2: to Vegas. I don't know what they're called the athletics now. No, no,
Speaker 2: they are originally called the athletic I don't know what
Speaker 2: they're called now. They've always been the well except what
Speaker 2: just calls them the Oakland A's. They've been the A's forever.
Speaker 2: But yeah, they've they've they've also been stolen. Las Vegas
Speaker 2: has now stolen both the football team and the baseball
Speaker 2: team of Oakland.
Speaker 5: Oh see, I was thinking of the football team. Yeah,
Speaker 5: because I was like, wait a minute, didn't didn't Las
Speaker 5: Vegas Thetors go there too.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, they stole both of them.
Speaker 5: That's what I was thinking. And I am more of
Speaker 5: a baseball head than a football head.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so okay, unfortunately we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 2: football here. So this guy, right, Paul Padesta's like one
Speaker 2: of these sort of geniuses she later goes on to be.
Speaker 2: It's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in
Speaker 2: the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely
Speaker 2: wretched the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns. Now to get
Speaker 2: an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are. My
Speaker 2: opening savment for him on the Browns is it is
Speaker 2: genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns
Speaker 2: over the course of two seasons, going one in thirty one,
Speaker 2: which is a feat of like just absolutely sucking shit
Speaker 2: that is unrivaled in any other major American sports. I
Speaker 2: think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth, no
Speaker 2: one is going to fucking go one in thirty one
Speaker 2: in two clus two seasons of football. Again, so again,
Speaker 2: that is a one in fifteen season followed by an
Speaker 2: owen sixteen season. The second oh to sixteen season ever
Speaker 2: unclear how responsible for this he is. But what he
Speaker 2: is responsible for is the Shaun Watson trade. Okay, it's
Speaker 2: like mea, why the fuck you're talking about this? Part
Speaker 2: of this is also like these people are just evil.
Speaker 2: Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get
Speaker 2: an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists
Speaker 2: mostly have accused him of sexual assault. He is like
Speaker 2: one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which
Speaker 2: is a league of a lot of people who absolutely
Speaker 2: fucking suck shit. So so that that's the first thing
Speaker 2: you have to understand about Watson's that he is just
Speaker 2: really fucking like morally reprehensible, right. He is like a
Speaker 2: bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended
Speaker 2: him for a season. And Paul Podesta, who again is
Speaker 2: the guy whom Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting,
Speaker 2: is like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is
Speaker 2: going to set up this deal for his team to
Speaker 2: trade for DeShawn Watson, who've been on the Texans, and again,
Speaker 2: like Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be
Speaker 2: for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds, Nia.
Speaker 5: Do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans.
Speaker 2: It is a team from Houston, Texas.
Speaker 5: That's all you need to know about this. And they
Speaker 5: traded this guy. Hey, at least it's not Austin. No
Speaker 5: offense to our Austin listeners.
Speaker 2: They fucking traded this guy, right, and popadest to orchestrates
Speaker 2: this trade that is three is it is the worst
Speaker 2: trade in the history of football.
Speaker 5: It is three first.
Speaker 2: Round picks, two thirds, two third round picks, and a
Speaker 2: fourth round pick. And they hand this guy, who, again
Speaker 2: I kind of emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right,
Speaker 2: they hand him two hundred and thirty million guaranteed dollars,
Speaker 2: the largest guaranteed salary the history of the NFL. So okay, So,
Speaker 2: how does Deshaun Watson, like again, this guy who's being
Speaker 2: held up by the guy who is now laundering being
Speaker 2: a gamer as like the great symbol of sort of
Speaker 2: like cultural like being a rogue outsider.
Speaker 5: Right, how does.
Speaker 2: Deshaun Watson his greatest fucking project due on the field.
Speaker 2: So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately.
Speaker 2: It is second season, in weeks one through five out
Speaker 2: of out of seven hundred and fifty nine quarterbacks. Since
Speaker 2: the year two thousand, to start weeks one through five
Speaker 2: out of again seven hundred and fifty nine quarterbacks, he
Speaker 2: ranks seven hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty nine EPA for dropback seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: three out of seven hundred and fifty nine. They traded
Speaker 2: three first round picks for this guy. He has a
Speaker 2: mind boggling an EPA of negative point three, which means
Speaker 2: every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make
Speaker 2: a pass, they are expected to get point three less
Speaker 2: points than an average team would.
Speaker 5: How did you trick me into being on a sports episode?
Speaker 5: I only agreed to this because I thought it was
Speaker 5: video game. Don't worry.
Speaker 2: We're we're we're we're almost We're almost done with the
Speaker 2: sports part of it. But there, I promise there is
Speaker 2: actually a reason why I'm doing this, which is which
Speaker 2: is the argument that's that that sports and the sports
Speaker 2: and gaming actually serve very very similar cultural roles for
Speaker 2: the right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, of course, yes, I understand that. I can I
Speaker 5: can see that.
Speaker 2: Yes, also, I've always wanted to fuck you can played
Speaker 2: about this on area, and this is this is the
Speaker 2: best fucky chance I've ever gonna get.
Speaker 5: So Jesus fucking because it's like what I talk about
Speaker 5: like movies or something. Is this, yes, yes, this is
Speaker 5: what it feels like. Is this what I sound like?
Speaker 5: Yes it is.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely what you sound like. So this guy
Speaker 2: is like a generationally awful quarterback. They sign away basically
Speaker 2: the entire future of this team hand this guy who
Speaker 2: is a serial sexual predator two hundred and thirty million dollars.
Speaker 2: And this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects
Speaker 2: you to think is like a fucking analytics genius. And
Speaker 2: this all comes back to again, like you know, the
Speaker 2: sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is
Speaker 2: that they're like picked on, like by the jock or whatever. Right,
Speaker 2: That's that's like that's like the fundamental base of their
Speaker 2: mythology that there's are like oppressed by this.
Speaker 5: But like it's just like.
Speaker 2: The same masculinity bullshit all the way down, And you
Speaker 2: can watch, like, just like the worst people in fucking history,
Speaker 2: this trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that
Speaker 2: they're fucking geniuses by using both of these fucking affects.
Speaker 2: So I want to read something, you know in looking
Speaker 2: at the way that this stuff functions, the way that
Speaker 2: gaming functions, like specifically in the culture, and you know
Speaker 2: why these people choose to use gaming as like you
Speaker 2: knows as the sort of affect they're trying to project
Speaker 2: into the world. I want to read something by a
Speaker 2: friend of the show, Vicky Osterwel and a piece called
Speaker 2: game Boys. Video games also emerge at a time when
Speaker 2: technology facilitates an increasingly administered life in which alienation and
Speaker 2: isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice
Speaker 2: is a form of control. An unbounded economic competition produces
Speaker 2: widespread anxiety to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and
Speaker 2: boredom that one was mastered to live under current economic conditions.
Speaker 2: Games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable
Speaker 2: of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non
Speaker 2: normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play
Speaker 2: that point towards the horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games
Speaker 2: provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in
Speaker 2: the social hierarchy. They give white men aggrandizing power inventions
Speaker 2: fantasies that modulate their sense of self importance under conditions
Speaker 2: that disempower them, but they are also capable of giving
Speaker 2: everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist
Speaker 2: patriarchal capitalism. This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers,
Speaker 2: and fans have found space in and around games, despite
Speaker 2: the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and
Speaker 2: widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played
Speaker 2: by CIS men. So, I think the important thing here,
Speaker 2: and this is something important to remember both for Sambap
Speaker 2: been freed and also for the construction of right wing
Speaker 2: gaming movements in general, and for what we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about with Elon Musk, is that gaming is content
Speaker 2: tested ground right. As much as we think of gamers
Speaker 2: as like right wingers right, there are a lot of
Speaker 2: what you would call to like traditionally sort of left
Speaker 2: looming demographics that play video games and have made spaces
Speaker 2: here because as much as they are in some ways
Speaker 2: like this force of discipline that like is something that
Speaker 2: you learn, the kinds of like, ability to tolerate boredom
Speaker 2: and repetition and things like that that you know you
Speaker 2: use for fucking work, they're also a thing that people
Speaker 2: use to like escape the fucking hell world totally. And like,
Speaker 2: I mean I know this, right, Like I am fucking
Speaker 2: like I'm a Chinese, chances remen better, he's better at
Speaker 2: video games, and both the people have been to be
Speaker 2: fucking talking about in the story, right.
Speaker 5: Like, well, I heard, I heard his Path of Exile
Speaker 5: character was actually quite advanced.
Speaker 2: But oh, we're gonna we're gonna talk about the Path
Speaker 2: of Exile character fucking next, you know. But but I mean
Speaker 2: it's it's worth mentioning like speed running, right, which is
Speaker 2: a very very trans genre.
Speaker 5: Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games. Uh yeah, it depends.
Speaker 2: It depends a lot on the genre. But yeah, like
Speaker 2: competitive fighting game like yeah, Melee, I'm gonna briefly mention
Speaker 2: Sonic Fox, who is a black, non binary furry who's
Speaker 2: like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time,
Speaker 2: incredibly beloved, the only person in history ever to beat
Speaker 2: someone thirteen to zero in a first to eleven absolute legends, right,
Speaker 2: But you know, these are the people that these sort
Speaker 2: of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out
Speaker 2: so they can use gaming as like as a sort
Speaker 2: of cultural force. And this functions both in gaming and
Speaker 2: also fuck it in real life. Right now, these people
Speaker 2: are in power, and you know who else is in power.
Speaker 2: It's a product and services to support this podcast.
Speaker 11: All Hail, we are back now.
Speaker 2: Obviously, the other part of this, you know, we've talked
Speaker 2: of it. We've talked mostly sort of about racial politics,
Speaker 2: but there's there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming.
Speaker 2: And you know the thing about gaming, right is that
Speaker 2: it is to some extent a tool that people use
Speaker 2: to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the
Speaker 2: violence of the gender system. And like I am also
Speaker 2: doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy
Speaker 2: nazi like gamer dipshit.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, that's why I hooed up f F seven
Speaker 5: remake Hysteric Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm
Speaker 5: feeling sad.
Speaker 2: But you know what the problem with what's happening here
Speaker 2: right is that like the right, like that we're experiencing
Speaker 2: violence and different ways, but it's like the systemic violence
Speaker 2: from the gender system that it is the same system.
Speaker 2: But these people's solution to is to blame it on women, right,
Speaker 2: and this is you know, I had a conversation with
Speaker 2: Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is
Speaker 2: sort of drawn from and like I would compare it
Speaker 2: to like, you know, lots and lots of people deal
Speaker 2: with social isolation, right and and deal with this violence,
Speaker 2: but like you know, on the other hands, most of
Speaker 2: us don't become mass shooters.
Speaker 5: Most most Yeah, I would say, that's that's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, and so and so we can look at
Speaker 2: the structural forces that produces people and also just go
Speaker 2: like fuck them, like eat shit, like I'm sorry, you've
Speaker 2: you've become Nazis, like fuck off.
Speaker 5: Skill issue in some ways among other environmental factors.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, but but also a lot of times
Speaker 2: these people aren't fucking like they're not dealing with shit
Speaker 2: at all, mostly, right, I mean, like yeah, like okay,
Speaker 2: like Elon Musks weird insecurity is to some extent because
Speaker 2: of the gender system, right, but like also he is
Speaker 2: the richest man in the world, He's the most powerful
Speaker 2: man live, He's one of the most powerful people who.
Speaker 11: Has ever lived.
Speaker 2: And he still has the same sense of like aggrievement
Speaker 2: that powers all these people. And this is like one
Speaker 2: of the key things of like the gamer mythos, right,
Speaker 2: is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed
Speaker 2: by like jocks or whatever.
Speaker 5: And now it's it's been shifted to this not anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now now they believe that they're that they're being
Speaker 2: oppressed by like fucking women in minorities, right.
Speaker 5: And and it's actually the people who are actually doing the
Speaker 5: oppression is now all of the doge nerds at the
Speaker 5: top of the system. Now it's it's been we have
Speaker 5: we've had we've had a we've had a full Uno reverso.
Speaker 2: But the thing is, these people have always been at
Speaker 2: the top of the fucking system, right and like, but
Speaker 2: but it's an it's this feeling they have of their
Speaker 2: of them being the ones who are oppressed, that like
Speaker 2: you know, made them into the shock troopers that we
Speaker 2: saw with Gamergate. If you're gonna read one vikiosc wral thing,
Speaker 2: and I'm signing her a lot because I think she's
Speaker 2: done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games,
Speaker 2: which is a field that I feel like we just
Speaker 2: haven't done much critical shit with. Like, I mean, there's
Speaker 2: been lots of stuff about working conditions in the games, industry,
Speaker 2: which are fucking terrible and it's good, but like as
Speaker 2: a medium, there hasn't been anywhere near as much critical
Speaker 2: engagement with it as there's been with like film or music.
Speaker 2: But if you're gonna read one thing from her, read
Speaker 2: a piece called goon Squad, which is about the sort
Speaker 2: of like fascist reaction to the really broken state of
Speaker 2: Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven when it came out. And one
Speaker 2: of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers
Speaker 2: are being i mean literally being used as like scabs
Speaker 2: and pinkertons against people who make video games, and you know,
Speaker 2: and this expands out to like workers more broadly, they're
Speaker 2: literally being used to silence anyone who st talks about
Speaker 2: the problems with like this game that like when Cyberpint
Speaker 2: twenty seventy seven came out, it was literally giving people
Speaker 2: seizures because it was it had just like fucking strobing
Speaker 2: flashes and bullshit in ante they didn't warn anyone about because it.
Speaker 5: Was a broken, shitty game.
Speaker 2: And you know, they're also used for just like anti
Speaker 2: queer and like anti feminist rasping campaigns, and that's that's
Speaker 2: how they're sort of mobilized in real life too, And
Speaker 2: and that gives you an insight into why these people
Speaker 2: sort of like do this signaling, right, is that they're
Speaker 2: also like signaling to their base that like I am
Speaker 2: one of you, et cetera, et cetera, like you should
Speaker 2: fucking support me for this shit now. Pivoting a little bit,
Speaker 2: so when I was first talking about this episode, I
Speaker 2: kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman as at of Sam
Speaker 2: Bankman freed, because like.
Speaker 5: Man, they said, yeah, many such cases.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like the last, the last fucking white boy scammer
Speaker 2: named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white
Speaker 2: boy scammer named Sam. And it turns out though I
Speaker 2: looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing
Speaker 2: this like gamers stick thing, like specifically in interviews with
Speaker 2: Elon Musk.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now. And
Speaker 2: this brings us to the man who has spent the
Speaker 2: most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which
Speaker 2: is Elon Musk.
Speaker 5: And Elon Musk is like not really a gamer, I
Speaker 5: would say, like he sort of plays video games. He's
Speaker 5: a Kenemine user, he's a Twitter power user. He is
Speaker 5: the shadow President.
Speaker 2: Yeah, theis man of the world, bridges man who's ever lived.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also, he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he
Speaker 2: is like in a he's an elite video game player
Speaker 2: in like multiple games. He's obsessed with this.
Speaker 5: He's also I believe the term is a meme. Lord
Speaker 5: h if I'm reading this right.
Speaker 2: Oh god, what one of his path of xtyle two
Speaker 2: characters I didn't put in this script because it's actually
Speaker 2: not the one we're going to talk about, but one
Speaker 2: of his characters in that game was named Kekius Maximus.
Speaker 5: So like, this is the level of mind that uh,
Speaker 5: that is one of his favorite names. In his White
Speaker 5: House office, he has a he has a Kechius Maximus
Speaker 5: portrait hanging behind his desk. There's an AI generated image
Speaker 5: of like pet bite the Frog and like and like Roman,
Speaker 5: like like Caesar.
Speaker 2: At higher I hate everything.
Speaker 5: So yeah, this is the guy who does the country now.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Oops.
Speaker 2: So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at
Speaker 2: video games, and the preface to everything we're going to
Speaker 2: get to you is that he has actually he's like
Speaker 2: for a long time been doing a like I'm a
Speaker 2: gamer thing. So his kind of problems, and I think
Speaker 2: really the origin of the weird paying people to make
Speaker 2: him look like he's good at video games thing that
Speaker 2: we're gonna get you in a second. This is something
Speaker 2: that that Blue Sky user gay Dog reminded me of
Speaker 2: because I'd forgot he has so many gaming scandals I'd
Speaker 2: forgotten about this one, which is that he at one
Speaker 2: point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring,
Speaker 2: which is very difficult game, and he had two different
Speaker 2: shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's like over encumbered,
Speaker 2: Like it's okay, like the best expianation I've tried to
Speaker 2: I figured out for Like how bad at this game
Speaker 2: he is? Is that posting this build on Twitter is
Speaker 2: the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at
Speaker 2: my fucking sports car. It's stepping into like the shittiest
Speaker 2: call you've ever seen, and then like slamming the accelerator
Speaker 2: with the parking break on.
Speaker 5: Hey, I love the masdamiata Like that's that's like the
Speaker 5: game of Criminals.
Speaker 2: And everyone who looked at it immediately was like, this
Speaker 2: is the dumbest man who has ever lived. This man
Speaker 2: has no idea what the fuck he's doing. He is
Speaker 2: just like like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about
Speaker 2: this game, like just baffling incomprehensible bullshit. And this was
Speaker 2: like kind of a scandal for him. It wasn't like
Speaker 2: a huge one, but like especially like this is one
Speaker 2: that sort of broke on to the left a lot,
Speaker 2: and people were giving him shit about it. So the
Speaker 2: next time he wanted to brag about having been good
Speaker 2: at video games, he very clearly like paid someone else
Speaker 2: to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Diabo four.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna talk about Diebow stuff much because I'm
Speaker 2: a Path of Exile player, not diable player, the diable
Speaker 2: and Path vax Ale like Fairy much the same kind
Speaker 2: of game basically, like you click somewhere and your character
Speaker 2: goes there and you click other things that it does attacks.
Speaker 2: But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one
Speaker 2: of like the best Path of Exile two players in
Speaker 2: the world, and he was doing this on his alt account,
Speaker 2: which is has to handle. It's Cybergamer for twenty but
Speaker 2: the all the e's are threes, So with CYB three
Speaker 2: r G A M three R four twenty Wait wait.
Speaker 5: Wait, wait, say say that again.
Speaker 2: It's at CYB three r GA M three R four twenty.
Speaker 5: So I think I found something. I think the four
Speaker 5: to twenty at the end is actually a reference to
Speaker 5: Hitler's birthday April twenty damn it.
Speaker 2: So okay, he like claims to have one of the
Speaker 2: like the best characters in hardcore, which is in mode
Speaker 2: of Path of Exile, where if he died once you
Speaker 2: get kicked out of it. So it's very hard to
Speaker 2: like prove that he actually did this. He like does
Speaker 2: a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile,
Speaker 2: like on a Twitter live stream, and it is immediately
Speaker 2: obvious that, like he has no idea what he's doing.
Speaker 2: Like it's not just obviously people who play the game.
Speaker 2: I hadn't played Path of xel To at this point, right,
Speaker 2: I had only played the original one like a decade ago,
Speaker 2: like a little bit of it, And I took one
Speaker 2: look at what he was doing and immediately was like,
Speaker 2: this guy has never played this game before, like has
Speaker 2: no idea what he's fucking doing. Like it was so
Speaker 2: unbelievably obvious, Like he like walked past one of those
Speaker 2: valuable currencies in the game, just like walked past it.
Speaker 2: Didn't notice it. It's like staggeringly obvious anyone who plays
Speaker 2: video games. This guy has no idea what the fuck
Speaker 2: he's doing. And this actually explodes on him, and eventually
Speaker 2: he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level
Speaker 2: his Path of exel to account and then he claims
Speaker 2: that he never claims.
Speaker 5: That it was his path of xl too account.
Speaker 2: And this Jenny Weinley has been a real problem for
Speaker 2: him because it pissed off like the entire gaming scene.
Speaker 2: So you have videos with like millions of views. Some
Speaker 2: guys like Asthmagold, who was like a he's a very
Speaker 2: famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass like is
Speaker 2: like a turbo right winger, like spends his time screaming
Speaker 2: about how like black people in video games is dei
Speaker 2: and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry
Speaker 2: and fucking asthma Goold is watching this video and being
Speaker 2: like this guy is a lying piece of shit, what
Speaker 2: the fuck? And like everyone fucking reacts like this. It's
Speaker 2: genuinely wild. I've never actually seen people like react to this,
Speaker 2: to like to elon like this and like like again,
Speaker 2: like this is his allies on the right taking one
Speaker 2: look at this and being like, wait, this guy's just
Speaker 2: like lying.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 2: What's interesting about about this to some extent is that, like, again,
Speaker 2: his whole thing here is he's trying to like pretend
Speaker 2: that he's like a pro gamer or whatever, but his
Speaker 2: affect is still largely targeted towards non gamers in the
Speaker 2: sense that like, there's no way, I mean, okay, I
Speaker 2: guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant
Speaker 2: that he believed that he could just pretend to be
Speaker 2: a top of Little Pets of Path of Exile on
Speaker 2: a stream using someone else's account, but like, there's no
Speaker 2: way anyone who plays video games could fall for that,
Speaker 2: And a lot of people he talks to you about
Speaker 2: the stuff, for people like Joe Rogan who aren't like
Speaker 2: gamer TM people, right, it's like a lot of it's
Speaker 2: a lot of people who aren't gamers, and he's like
Speaker 2: sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's
Speaker 2: really on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to
Speaker 2: his sort of fascist bass, but on the other hand,
Speaker 2: he's trying to use the sort of like cultural cachet
Speaker 2: of of gaming as like this sort of renegade right
Speaker 2: wing phenomena to like launder his reputation. Except he fucked
Speaker 2: up because he, you know, spent all of this time
Speaker 2: trying to like pretend to be a gamer. But the
Speaker 2: thing about gamers is that, like there is literally an
Speaker 2: entire genre of video like on YouTube that is very
Speaker 2: very popular. That is just like people exposing people who
Speaker 2: cheated video games, cheated record to video games. And Elon
Speaker 2: has walked just like directly into this bear trap, right.
Speaker 5: And that means we got him, folks, mission accomplished. Wrap
Speaker 5: it up, We beat Elon, got him. It's over. He's
Speaker 5: he's been cast out of civil society for the high
Speaker 5: crime of pretending to play a video game. He has
Speaker 5: lost all respect among among the farthest reaches of the right.
Speaker 5: So what's next? We have what he has? He has
Speaker 5: one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.
Speaker 5: Is this about the one video game he hasn't played?
Speaker 5: Which is the funniest Elon Musk gamer story in my opinion?
Speaker 5: Which which are you which? What are you talking about?
Speaker 5: That's the one that that that he he had to
Speaker 5: publicly announce that he he does not play GTA five. Oh,
Speaker 5: that was funny. I forgot about that because he doesn't
Speaker 5: like quote unquote doing crime and g t A five
Speaker 5: quote required shooting police officers in the opening scene just
Speaker 5: couldn't do it unquote. Oh, I really forgot about that.
Speaker 5: So that that proofs that at least he has some integrity. God. Now,
Speaker 5: some some gamers might be sick individuals acting out you know,
Speaker 5: violence power fans, but at least Musk has some integrity
Speaker 5: to not harm police officers in GDA five. That really
Speaker 5: shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this,
Speaker 5: you know, at times strange behavior.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's also like that's also him signaling to like
Speaker 2: a different like the weird Christian part of the bass.
Speaker 2: That's like, oh, violence and video games is bad, which
Speaker 2: because he's trying to single to all of his groups simultaneously,
Speaker 2: and all of them are like, this guy is a
Speaker 2: fucking loser who sucks ass and we hate him.
Speaker 5: It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy
Speaker 5: because again he is the most powerful man in the world. No,
Speaker 5: but it is mildly amusing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But so that there is a sort of serious
Speaker 2: note to this, which is that like the pushback he
Speaker 2: is getting here is like I think actually kind of
Speaker 2: is significant. So the last thing I want to talk
Speaker 2: about it is is him pretending to have been like
Speaker 2: a quake pro which the thing that he did, and
Speaker 2: there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber
Speaker 2: Carl Jops was like his thing is like people who
Speaker 2: fake who like fake things in video games basically, and
Speaker 2: he is like not a leftist. He's like like a
Speaker 2: center right guy basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly
Speaker 2: how far right he is. But he did a video
Speaker 2: about about Elon claiming to be a quack player and
Speaker 2: what he found so is Elon like apparently did actually
Speaker 2: play in an early quake tournament, but none of the
Speaker 2: good players were there, and he he came his team
Speaker 2: came in second, but they came in second because they
Speaker 2: had better WiFi than everyone else and so they had
Speaker 2: less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into
Speaker 2: a team that also had good WiFi and then he
Speaker 2: got destroyed, which I just I just think it's funny, right,
Speaker 2: That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he
Speaker 2: he he has this thing claiming that he's like a
Speaker 2: fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more
Speaker 2: money than everyone else until he ran some much who
Speaker 2: had the same amount of money that he did and
Speaker 2: just got destroyed. But the reason I bring this up
Speaker 2: is that like at the end of this video, jobstays
Speaker 2: like goes on this whole thing about how and this
Speaker 2: is this is like a stronger statement against Elon mustin
Speaker 2: I have seen from anything in the mainstream press where
Speaker 2: he literally goes on a thing where he says, yeah,
Speaker 2: every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here
Speaker 2: is a lie, and because he is just obviously lying
Speaker 2: out of his ass, but literally everything in a field
Speaker 2: that I know, this means that I literally can't trust
Speaker 2: him when he says anything about any other fucking field
Speaker 2: that I don't know. And this is a real shift, right.
Speaker 2: I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon
Speaker 2: Musk is just clearly a liar about this, and so
Speaker 2: you should not be able to trust anything else he
Speaker 2: fucking says. This is a larger degree of pushback than
Speaker 2: anything else ever fucking seen outside of like the left about.
Speaker 5: What Elon Musk is doing.
Speaker 2: And like just the willingness to just be like this
Speaker 2: guy is a fucking just just a serial liar, like
Speaker 2: everything says is a lie. He literally calls him a
Speaker 2: con like, says that his activity is like a con man.
Speaker 2: He says the things that he's saying are like either
Speaker 2: liars or delusional. There is a kind of like shift
Speaker 2: happening right now where people like really are turning on him.
Speaker 2: There's day that happened literally today where Ubisoft. You know,
Speaker 2: ubi Soft is a famously like not a leftist company,
Speaker 2: right like thea've done a lot of horrible, fucked up
Speaker 2: sexual assault stuff. So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one
Speaker 2: of their games has a black guy as like a
Speaker 2: character in it, and literally the official Assassin's Create accounts
Speaker 2: replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what
Speaker 2: the guy playing your Path of Axile two account told you?
Speaker 2: And like replied and replied to a thing about Hassan
Speaker 2: like we we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space,
Speaker 2: right This thing that had been like a really really
Speaker 2: consistent base of support with people like Elon is kind
Speaker 2: of fracturing against him and is sort of being polarized
Speaker 2: against him by just like the fact that he's just
Speaker 2: is so obviously cynically pandering to them, and how unbelievably
Speaker 2: transparent it is. And like obviously, like I don't think
Speaker 2: like the gamers are going to like fucking rise up
Speaker 2: or whatever. But the actual serious point to all of this,
Speaker 2: other than like looking at the ways of fascism, like
Speaker 2: why these people do this and like gamers is like
Speaker 2: a demographic that's important to these people, is that, like
Speaker 2: the way that you destroy a coalition by this isn't
Speaker 2: necessarily bypping everyone over to your side, right, that.
Speaker 5: Doesn't happen that often.
Speaker 2: But one of the ways you can do this, and
Speaker 2: this is this is, you know, to take a really
Speaker 2: really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the
Speaker 2: October Revolution. They got their opponents to allies to stay
Speaker 2: home and that was enough enough. People just staying on
Speaker 2: the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks like came for Currency's
Speaker 2: government was enough for them to take power. And I
Speaker 2: think like the actual, like the actual serious points of
Speaker 2: this is that the only way that we get out
Speaker 2: of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these
Speaker 2: people's coalitions so that when the confrontation with these people comes,
Speaker 2: there are enough people who would be their supporters who
Speaker 2: just fucking stay home that they can, they can be stopped.
Speaker 5: So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the
Speaker 5: start of gamer Gate two.
Speaker 2: Gamer Gate two is already happening, damn it.
Speaker 5: This is gamer Gate three. This is an open call
Speaker 5: to begin gamer Gate two point five right now on.
Speaker 5: Behalf of me along, becaure you at me a oh no,
Speaker 5: and then hopefully and I'll finally usher in the American
Speaker 5: Bolshevik revolution after we get enough gamers just to stay
Speaker 5: home or even better rise up right. We can we
Speaker 5: can make some kind of graphic with like a fist
Speaker 5: holding a controller or a keyboard. If you're a nerd
Speaker 5: about it.
Speaker 2: Gamers are the cosacks. We've got to get them to
Speaker 2: knock back the regime. That's actually the Fembry revolution where
Speaker 2: they stood down.
Speaker 5: But you know, same point, same point. Come on me
Speaker 5: a geez fuck, I am one of.
Speaker 2: The biggest things of Like people need to remember that
Speaker 2: that Lenin did not overthrow the czar. He overthrew Kerensky,
Speaker 2: who was kind of a socialist guy who was run
Speaker 2: the provisional government in between the first Okay, we're done,
Speaker 2: we're done here, We're done here, we're sucking out, we're leaving.
Speaker 5: What games are you playing? What games are I playing?
Speaker 5: Pathovaxyle too.
Speaker 2: Don't play Rotato it will consume your life. Okay, play
Speaker 2: rebo Quest. Robo Quest is great. Rob Request dares to
Speaker 2: ask the question, what if like the art style of
Speaker 2: Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice. But
Speaker 2: also you're doing a roguelike with like Doom's combat.
Speaker 5: That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that.
Speaker 5: Then I do Hell Divers too. Nearly every Monday. Armored
Speaker 5: Corps six Course six rules. Love that game. Love that game.
Speaker 5: Sonic X Shadow Generations, Final Fantasy, Sevin, and I'm waiting
Speaker 5: for Mecca Break to come out for like their their
Speaker 5: official release now that the beta's closed. Unfortunately, the character
Speaker 5: selection is very gooner coded.
Speaker 2: Many many such cases, so I made.
Speaker 5: Sure to make the smallest the smallest chest size available
Speaker 5: on my on my model. But the gameplay is fun.
Speaker 5: This has been it could happen here.
Speaker 2: I good lord, they pay me for this.
Speaker 5: I had to. I had to watch so.
Speaker 2: Many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking clips of of
Speaker 2: of Elon. Must thank playing video games for this.
Speaker 1: Oh hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes. Every
Speaker 1: week from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 2: It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 5: You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: You can now find sources for it could Happen Here
Speaker 1: listed directly in episode descriptions.
Speaker 5: Thanks for listening.