Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
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Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me James today,
Speaker 1: and I'm joined by my friend and yours, Charles McBride,
Speaker 1: documentary filmmaker, humanitarian activist, writer. And you've just been in Palestine,
Speaker 1: is that right, Charles, Yeah, just got back like a
Speaker 1: week and a half ago. Nice, welcome, Welcome to America
Speaker 1: and the Free Damn, that's a rough transition. Actually, thank
Speaker 1: you for Thank you for joining us so soon after
Speaker 1: you got back. So there's a lot to talk about, right,
Speaker 1: Like I feel as if, in like legacy me the
Speaker 1: year when there is less discussion of Palestine recently, maybe
Speaker 1: just because I'm seeing so much domestic US coverage like
Speaker 1: twenty four to seven, right, we're in another like Trump
Speaker 1: news cycle. But yeah, especially with reference to the West Bank. Actually, like,
Speaker 1: can you look update people on the last maybe you know,
Speaker 1: maybe in the time you were there, and then what's
Speaker 1: suspected what's happening in the West Bank.
Speaker 3: I think that's going to be even less coverage. Sure,
Speaker 3: So I've taken two tricks for the West Bank in
Speaker 3: the past year. Yeah, So August of last year May
Speaker 3: of this year. I noticed a rapid deterioration just between
Speaker 3: those two time periods. So, I mean it was bad
Speaker 3: last year when we went. That was right when I
Speaker 3: was when my team went there to begin our documentary,
Speaker 3: they had just launched this new operation in the West Bank,
Speaker 3: which was pretty much the largest ground operation they launched
Speaker 3: Israelis had launched since the second Endebata, and it was
Speaker 3: targeted at the northern refugee camps of Focam, Nurse Shams,
Speaker 3: and Jeanine. A lot of people know Janine, they've heard
Speaker 3: that in the news, you know, it's relatively familiar. Not
Speaker 3: a lot of people realized that the situation in Tokyoom
Speaker 3: and in Norsham's is quite similar, and those three camps
Speaker 3: in particular were targeted by the IDF operation. On the
Speaker 3: second trip, we couldn't even We couldn't even get to
Speaker 3: those places, not with the unrep personnel that we were
Speaker 3: supposed to go with our documentaries on UNRUTH, the United
Speaker 3: Nations Relief Works Agency for Palatign refugees. And last time
Speaker 3: we were there, they were able to bring us to
Speaker 3: the camp. They showed us where the Israelis had you know,
Speaker 3: bulldozed their facilities and done various air strikes in the camp.
Speaker 4: This time they.
Speaker 3: Couldn't even take us there. So we went to other
Speaker 3: camps and said camp everyone's spirits were low. Lots of
Speaker 3: people were talking about West Bank annexation as if it
Speaker 3: seemed like an inevitability.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I actually spent some time inside forty eight
Speaker 3: on this trip, and I went down to Yafa and
Speaker 3: to Tel Aviv and interviewed some long time kind of
Speaker 3: liberal journalists from RITZ and they we're just talking about
Speaker 3: how the shift in Israeli society over the last year
Speaker 3: has been quite marked as well, particularly around the question
Speaker 3: of just generally ethnically cleansing Gaza, which was something that was,
Speaker 3: according to his telling, like really only heard in very
Speaker 3: right wing circles like Kannis circles over the past a
Speaker 3: couple decades and is now just pretty routinely heard across
Speaker 3: the spectrum Israeli society that the best solution to this
Speaker 3: is should just deport everyone from Gaza.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's pretty bleak, Like I mean, I guess the
Speaker 1: process of manufacturing consent has been pretty pretty successful and
Speaker 1: pretty complete in that sense, Like just the dehumanization of
Speaker 1: Palestinian people has been pretty successful at least there. I
Speaker 1: guess if people aren't familiar, we should just like explain
Speaker 1: that Palestine is well. The areas which are now like
Speaker 1: legally allotted to Palestinians, I guess, are not contiguous, right,
Speaker 1: Jaza in the West Bank at different areas separated by Israel,
Speaker 1: and like the bulk of what you have seen in
Speaker 1: the last two years has been Israel's war on the
Speaker 1: people of Gaza, but the West Bank is a different
Speaker 1: and larger area which has also seen significant israelly like
Speaker 1: military aggression and violence from settlers, right, like a paramilitary aggression.
Speaker 1: I guess you could call it. People I think maybe
Speaker 1: will have heard of ANRA or maybe will at least
Speaker 1: be familiar with seeing it. Can you explain, like what
Speaker 1: the agency does. It's a unique agency, right, like it
Speaker 1: doesn't work anywhere else in the world. It's quite a
Speaker 1: unique thing to this Israel Palestine context.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so ANRA is probably the most controversial UN agency,
Speaker 3: and that has everything to do with the context in
Speaker 3: which it was founded. It was explicitly set up in
Speaker 3: coordination between the United States, the newly founded State of Israel,
Speaker 3: and the Arab League coming to the United Nations and
Speaker 3: presenting a plan to deal with the displacement of seven
Speaker 3: hundred thousand Palestinians from their home as a result of
Speaker 3: Nakba in nineteen forty eight. So out of that context,
Speaker 3: it's designed as a temporary aid refugee organization. It actually
Speaker 3: it's set up before un HCR, so it's mandated specifically
Speaker 3: for the Palestinians, and the Palestinians don't end up falling
Speaker 3: under un HDR when it's established. So there's a lot
Speaker 3: of particularities about UNRA that make it different from other
Speaker 3: UN agencies, which is also something that the Israelis like
Speaker 3: to highlight because they're engaged in a multi decade credibility
Speaker 3: campaign against UNRA.
Speaker 4: But to the extent that it is.
Speaker 3: Almost entirely staffed by Palestinians, it is quite different than
Speaker 3: other un agencies, which typically involve multinationals international personnel. Now,
Speaker 3: a lot of the higher leadership at UNRA is still
Speaker 3: kind of your same international diplomats, but in the words
Speaker 3: of the Zionist academic that I interviewed for this documentary,
Speaker 3: most of those have quote unquote gone native. So most
Speaker 3: of the international diplomats do tend to, you know, obviously
Speaker 3: be quite sympathetic to the conditions which the Palestinian staff
Speaker 3: are are working under. So my documentary is a it's
Speaker 3: an investigative documentary to some extent, and it uses the
Speaker 3: frame narrative of the Israeli allegations that UNRA had been
Speaker 3: infiltrated by Hamas and that UNRA personnel had taken place
Speaker 3: in the October seventh massacre. Yeah, it uses that as
Speaker 3: a hook and a frame narrative to talk about what
Speaker 3: is this organization?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Why did it go from something that was set up
Speaker 3: as a temporary relief organization to seventy seven years later?
Speaker 3: It is responsible for maintaining the livelihood and well being
Speaker 3: of five point nine million registered Palestinian refugees, not only
Speaker 3: in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but also
Speaker 3: in Syria. In Lebanon and in Jordan. So the politics
Speaker 3: of it get very hazy very quickly. But it's kind
Speaker 3: of an inconvenient thing for everyone because the organization was
Speaker 3: explicitly designed to end right after a few years. But
Speaker 3: the assumption was after a few years there would have
Speaker 3: been a political resolution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. There
Speaker 3: has not been, and here we are seventy six, seventy
Speaker 3: seven years later and we're still at that point, so
Speaker 3: un still exists.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of the ironic things we've found when filming this
Speaker 3: documentary is that everyone involved in this process wants this
Speaker 3: organization to go away. Yeah, Israelis, the Palestinians, the staff themselves.
Speaker 3: The only thing they disagree on is when and under
Speaker 3: what conditions?
Speaker 4: Why?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's Yeah, it's very interesting, like as
Speaker 1: refuge agencies go, because, like just I was recently reading
Speaker 1: Sally Hayden's or rereading Sally Hayden's book about the refugees
Speaker 1: in Libya. Right, it's called My Fourth Time We Drowned.
Speaker 4: It's an excellent bok.
Speaker 1: If people haven't read it, that you read it, very
Speaker 1: good audiobook as well. Like that they incorporate some of
Speaker 1: the voice notes you got from the refugees, which I
Speaker 1: think is good, and as it's typical of United Nations
Speaker 1: refuge you workers in many areas, the bulk of them
Speaker 1: end up living or spending a lot of time in Tunisia, right,
Speaker 1: like not in Libya and coming in like in you know,
Speaker 1: the typical image that you see of the United Nations
Speaker 1: is like a bunch of people in white land cruisers, right,
Speaker 1: and they pull up and they do their thing and
Speaker 1: they leave. They're not either part of the population or
Speaker 1: or even with the population. And they're often criticized for
Speaker 1: this around the world, right, and they're very susceptible to
Speaker 1: like state narratives, right like in Libya there's there's all
Speaker 1: kinds of evacuations of corruption or like sort of state capture.
Speaker 1: I guess, so an agency that's supposed to be international
Speaker 1: and supposed to be impartial, and they're supposed to above
Speaker 1: all things, advocate for refugees, right, And sometimes you can
Speaker 1: see at tension between the IOM and the UNHCR of
Speaker 1: this kind of shit. It's different with under a right
Speaker 1: like like they are from what I've heard from Palestinian friends,
Speaker 1: like more respected by Palestinian people. Because of the work
Speaker 1: that they do and the value that they provide.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I would say, like trust in HONRA
Speaker 3: is probably higher than in the Palestinian authority. The PA
Speaker 3: is largely seen as a contractor or subcontractor for Israel, right,
Speaker 3: and UNRA is seen, you know, as flawed. I mean,
Speaker 3: there are a lot of Palestinians who are deeply critical
Speaker 3: of UNRA, particularly the constant efforts it takes to sort
Speaker 3: of remain neutral on all of these political questions. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you know, inefficiencies that are going to come with
Speaker 3: any multinational institution in Goo. Yeah, of course, but in
Speaker 3: general they seem to I mean, at this point, we've
Speaker 3: interviewed dozens of people who had various relationship whether they
Speaker 3: had gone to UNRAS schools or they had taken you know,
Speaker 3: they had been to unrehealth clinics, and by and large
Speaker 3: they they preferred these and they saw the value in UNRA.
Speaker 3: They liked the unraschools, they liked the unrahealth clinics. UNRA
Speaker 3: is largely responsible for the fact that Palestinians are one
Speaker 3: of the most literate populations in the Middle East, and
Speaker 3: many of them speak English incredibly well. I mean like, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's wild talking to an eight or nine year old
Speaker 3: girl who grew up in a refugee camp and she's
Speaker 3: speaking to me in perfect English talking about how she
Speaker 3: wants to move to Los Angeles and become an actress.
Speaker 3: And it's just it's wild. And that's kind of a
Speaker 3: testament to what Unner has done. And that's very inconvenient
Speaker 3: for Israel because when you educate a lot of refugees
Speaker 3: who can then learn English and turn around and speak
Speaker 3: to the world in very eloquent ways about the nature
Speaker 3: of their oppression and their suffering, it becomes an ideological
Speaker 3: barrier to your particular political project.
Speaker 1: Right, And this is one of the things that has
Speaker 1: distinguished the genocide in Gaza in terms of like how
Speaker 1: it's been perceived in the US at least, Right, is that, like,
Speaker 1: you have a very literate population that is able to
Speaker 1: articulate what is happening directly via social media and to
Speaker 1: traditional media, right, like to people like yourself making documentaries
Speaker 1: like this is distinct from populations like I think of
Speaker 1: the Rahinga right, you know, I speak to Rahinga people
Speaker 1: pretty often, but I don't think most Americans see Rahingah
Speaker 1: folks if they go on TikTok or Instagram and you know,
Speaker 1: as a result, I think people would have cared as deeply.
Speaker 1: You know, people would have been in the streets for that.
Speaker 1: But that communication wasn't that And yeah, it is extremely inconvenient.
Speaker 1: If your project isn't an ethno state, right and you're
Speaker 1: willing to cleanse areas of other ethnicities to build your
Speaker 1: ethno state in it, which is what's happening, then it's
Speaker 1: very convenient. If there's people you're trying to cleanse can
Speaker 1: talk to the world, you know, in the language of
Speaker 1: the world, understands and very eloquently and make their case
Speaker 1: for not being ethnically cleansed. Yet, No, it is tribute
Speaker 1: to the work that animal has done. You know what,
Speaker 1: I guess we should do. I guess we should take
Speaker 1: an advertising break right now. So let's do that.
Speaker 4: Wean't come back.
Speaker 1: All right, we are back. Let's talk about the alternative
Speaker 1: to UNRA. Alternative is a wrong word. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: the attempt to make an end run around unrisk existence
Speaker 1: by installing this fascicle NGO. I guess you could call
Speaker 1: it an ADO or like aid provider. This is a
Speaker 1: Gaza Humanitarian Fund people who aren't familiates, synthetic alternative. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this sute. This is like the zin of UNRA, you know. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what's going on with the guy? But let's talk
Speaker 1: about what it is and what it claims to do first,
Speaker 1: and then we'll talk about how it's not doing it
Speaker 1: very well or at all, like people are fucking dying
Speaker 1: in droves.
Speaker 4: Yeah, mil high View.
Speaker 3: UNRA maintains most of the aid going in and out
Speaker 3: of Gaza. Everyone I know in the humanitarian world has
Speaker 3: had to interface at least to some degree with UNRA
Speaker 3: during the aid process, and that's difficult because it has
Speaker 3: been essentially been declared a terrorist by the Israeli government
Speaker 3: and has been banned from operating inside what Israel considers
Speaker 3: to be its territory, including occupied East Jerusalem and increasingly
Speaker 3: in the West Bank. They're trying to limit its operations
Speaker 3: and in Gaza they say they can't work with them
Speaker 3: because they're Hamas. So it's the UNER people are quite
Speaker 3: confused because they they've had to deconflict with the Israelis
Speaker 3: for this entire time and recently as a result of
Speaker 3: this law. It's actually become illegal under Israeli law for
Speaker 3: the Israelis to coordinate with UNRA, and so the UNRA
Speaker 3: people don't have been actually they don't really understand what's
Speaker 3: going to happen. There's been some limited coordination, but still
Speaker 3: we talk to people who are very high up in
Speaker 3: the organization and they essentially had no idea what the
Speaker 3: Israelis were planning to do to replace UNRA or to
Speaker 3: coordinate with them in Gaza, and so they just kept
Speaker 3: kind of doing their thing until the Israelis literally made
Speaker 3: them stop in certain instances. Right My documentary is called
Speaker 3: the War on UNRA, and part of this war has
Speaker 3: been the propaganda efforts and the Israelis going after this
Speaker 3: organization and everyone in the humanitarian aid world's sort of
Speaker 3: been asking the question, well, what are you going to
Speaker 3: do to replace it? This is an organization that deals
Speaker 3: with like two million people in Gaza and like three
Speaker 3: million in the West Bank. Not all of those are
Speaker 3: registered with UNRUPP, but it's dealing with all the refugee
Speaker 3: camps there in Gaza itself is a refugee camp like
Speaker 3: it only exists as such as a result of the
Speaker 3: knack Buck because it's where they put all of the
Speaker 3: displaced people who weren't in Jordan. Yeah, and so the
Speaker 3: Israelis basically had the backskins Wall, and they're like, okay, well,
Speaker 3: we have to come up with some alternative to this
Speaker 3: because we can't come out and say, actually, our main
Speaker 3: goal is to depopulate Gaza and settle it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so they cooked up this idea of the
Speaker 3: Gaza Humanitarian Fund, which was kind of this public private
Speaker 3: partnership backed by the Israelis and the Americans, and the
Speaker 3: intention was to entirely subvert not only UNRUB but the
Speaker 3: entire UN infrastructure that goes into the Gaza strip. For instance,
Speaker 3: every UN agency in the world actually piggybacks off of
Speaker 3: the World Food Program because they're always the first ones in.
Speaker 3: So it's WFP infrastructure, trucks, you know, vehicles, everything like
Speaker 3: that that goes in first, and then UNHCR, UNISEF, all
Speaker 3: this thing they're piggybacking, coordinating with WFP. In this instance,
Speaker 3: WFP is coordinating with UNRA. The Israelis one died not
Speaker 3: only bypass UNRA. They want to just put the entire
Speaker 3: UN system out of that. So to do that, they
Speaker 3: formed this sort of collaborative partnership under the management of
Speaker 3: the Israelis, which was supposed to be kind of an
Speaker 3: amalgam of all of these different private NGOs. And I
Speaker 3: don't want to get too much into the specifics of
Speaker 3: like who sort of was involved in that, but a
Speaker 3: lot of people kind of took them at face value.
Speaker 3: This is they wanted this to be a real solution,
Speaker 3: and so they offered to help and kind of set
Speaker 3: up this system which was supposed to be overseen entirely
Speaker 3: by the Israelis and the Americans from a security perspective.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of those was Jake woodho was the founder of
Speaker 3: Team Rubicon, which is an organization that does a fair
Speaker 3: amount of excellent work all around the world. She resigned
Speaker 3: from the Godza Humanitarian Fund a day before it launched
Speaker 3: and went on record saying we cannot actually do this
Speaker 3: while keeping to humanitarian principles of humanity and neutrality, which
Speaker 3: was a signal to the world that this was a
Speaker 3: highly politicized project, which is precisely what the World Food
Speaker 3: Program under the leadership of radical leftist activist Cindy McCain
Speaker 3: has been saying about this from the start, and une
Speaker 3: Philipe Lazarini, the head of UNRA, said, this is a
Speaker 3: clearly political sized event under the only the UN system
Speaker 3: is the only one capable of actually dealing with this
Speaker 3: in a humanitarian way. All those concerns were brushed aside.
Speaker 3: American contractors were brought in and the results were relatively predictable.
Speaker 3: We've seen at this point two pseudo massacres, I mean,
Speaker 3: the first one with that full Palastinians were killed, and
Speaker 3: just this morning, twenty seven Palastinians were killed at a
Speaker 3: GHF distribution after gunfire was opened up on them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're recording on the third a Gene so that
Speaker 1: was when this second massacre occurred. And yeah, like I mean,
Speaker 1: just today, as we're recording this, I've seen that Boston
Speaker 1: Consulting Group again like not exactly, like a bastion of wokeness,
Speaker 1: has terminated this relationship with the Guards Humanitarian Foundation, Right,
Speaker 1: Like the kind of conceit that this is a replacement
Speaker 1: for UNRAH to begin with was somewhat fascical, right, But
Speaker 1: people who were prepared to go along with that, either
Speaker 1: because they can make money doing it or because they
Speaker 1: thought this was the only way to stop people starving,
Speaker 1: are still deciding that, having seen the way that this
Speaker 1: is run, it's not worth it, right, right, And there's
Speaker 1: also some political heavy handedness going on with this, one
Speaker 1: of the most obvious features being specific aid distribution points
Speaker 1: in the south of Gaza, which are designed to bring
Speaker 1: you know, whereas UNRA and WFP were going to people,
Speaker 1: they were trying to get food through as much of
Speaker 1: the Kazas trip is possible, including people who wanted to
Speaker 1: return to their homes in the north, the JCHEF is like, nope,
Speaker 1: you starving population will need to make the journey to
Speaker 1: this distribution point. And this distribution point only, which you know,
Speaker 1: has the political effect of depopulating these areas that you
Speaker 1: know Israel is operating in. Yeah, which of course is
Speaker 1: also that criticism. There's some videos going around so Impalstinians celebrating, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, the relief efforts of the of the JHEF.
Speaker 1: I think some of them have been like verified by Reuters.
Speaker 1: You know, Israeli media is making hey of that. You know,
Speaker 1: people praising Trump in Gaza, right, which you know, these
Speaker 1: people are starving and they're very happy to get aid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that like everything is above board and cool. Right,
Speaker 1: it means that like the people who need to food
Speaker 1: got feed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and that's the political complexity. The situation
Speaker 3: is that the people of Gaza have just been abandoned
Speaker 3: by everyone, right, I mean, there's there's there's a lot
Speaker 3: of criticism to be a had of how Hamas has
Speaker 3: handled this. There's a lot of criticism to be had
Speaker 3: of obviously the way in which Israel has behaved and
Speaker 3: the UN system and the international system. So I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm glad that like some of them are getting food. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that is that is an improvement off of none of
Speaker 3: them getting food. But everyone in the AID world is
Speaker 3: starting to go on record saying the main problem is
Speaker 3: Israel preventing AID from going into the Gaza strip. And
Speaker 3: actually I want to harp on that a little bit
Speaker 3: because the reason that has been given primarily for that
Speaker 3: is that Hamas is stealing the aide. Every time they're
Speaker 3: asked about this, they go back to, well, we want
Speaker 3: to get aid to people Gaza. Unfortunately Hamas keeps stealing
Speaker 3: the aid and so we can't allow it. We need
Speaker 3: to allow us to trickle in. Yeah, that's interesting for
Speaker 3: two reasons. First of all, the yet to provide any
Speaker 3: evidence that that's actually occurring. And second, because all humanitarian
Speaker 3: experts agree that even if that was the case, say
Speaker 3: everything Israel said about Hamas was true, and they were stealing,
Speaker 3: you know, ninety ninety five percent of the aid that's
Speaker 3: coming in and selling it back. The humanitarian solution to
Speaker 3: that would be to flood the strip with so much
Speaker 3: aid that it would literally be impossible for them to
Speaker 3: like to stop that, which we can't do, Like it
Speaker 3: would be possible for us to flood the Gaza Strip
Speaker 3: with so much aid that it would be like an
Speaker 3: abundance of food. So the decision not to do that
Speaker 3: is a political one.
Speaker 1: Yes, definitely, Like I was going to say, on the
Speaker 1: face of it, it doesn't matter. There are lots of situations,
Speaker 1: to be clear, where people steal aid. It's undesirable, of
Speaker 1: course it is. But yeah, the solution is more aid,
Speaker 1: not like unfortunately the aid has been stolen, so now
Speaker 1: then children must have. Yeah, that only works if you're
Speaker 1: prepared to accept the outcome in which little children die
Speaker 1: of starvation.
Speaker 4: Which the Israelis are.
Speaker 3: They're perfectly I mean this near was a University of
Speaker 3: Pennsylvania poll. I'm not saying eighty four percent of Israelis
Speaker 3: are in favor of the idea of just simply either
Speaker 3: killing or displacing everyone in the Gaza strip eighty four percent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's wild to see, Like it's been such a
Speaker 1: strange couple of years in that sense, right, because more
Speaker 1: people in this country are aware of the plight of
Speaker 1: the people of Palestine than ever have been, and more
Speaker 1: people are engaged with it. That is mostly good. Some
Speaker 1: people have been gaged it in a way which is
Speaker 1: far from good, right, Like, I don't think there's really
Speaker 1: very much to be gained. Fucking throwing molotov cocktails people
Speaker 1: in Boulder is not making anything better for anyone. It's
Speaker 1: just making everything danger more dangerous for everyone. And it's
Speaker 1: fucking stupid.
Speaker 3: And I would extend that to gunning down yes, so
Speaker 3: would I. Yeah, Israeli a couples outside of the Jewish
Speaker 3: Museum in DC. I don't think that's necessarily the best
Speaker 3: way to help people in Gaza. No, Like, yeah, standing
Speaker 3: outside the vent for Jewish people and fucking shooting random people,
Speaker 3: it's not that. Again, it doesn't make anyone safer, it
Speaker 3: makes all of us left safe, and like, it does
Speaker 3: nothing to stop people dying and starving in Gaza, and
Speaker 3: that's it's not the crux of the problem, I guess,
Speaker 3: but like that is a problem, right that people are
Speaker 3: engaging with Gaza, but nothing is helping people here know
Speaker 3: how bad it is that children are starving in Gaza,
Speaker 3: But that hasn't changed the fact that children are starving
Speaker 3: in Gaza. In fact, like you know what I've said,
Speaker 3: it's a lot of times like I moved her in
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight, and I had engaged with the
Speaker 3: movement before that in the UK, right and the situation
Speaker 3: passtime to be was very different then, but like it
Speaker 3: wasn't something that people had heard of here for the
Speaker 3: most part, unless you were within like certain leftist or
Speaker 3: sort of people of maybe they're like Middle East an
Speaker 3: extraction would know about it. Of course, now people do know,
Speaker 3: and all over the world people know, and we've seen
Speaker 3: huge marches. Right, Like the situation is worse than it's
Speaker 3: ever been, I mean not ever being the knuck Bowl
Speaker 3: was pretty fucked too. But as the world looks on, right, like,
Speaker 3: the gender side continues and people continue dying, and seemingly
Speaker 3: the acceptance of the Gardis Humanitarian Foundation by states of
Speaker 3: the world. Is really troubling, right, Like, we're concentrating this
Speaker 3: starving population in a small area. It's contrary to everything
Speaker 3: that humanitarian principles stand for. And I know we don't see.
Speaker 3: I mean, there is a very ready alternative. It's whether
Speaker 3: anyone is willing to step up and tell Israel to
Speaker 3: stop stopping aid and the god like this could end
Speaker 3: at least in my estimation, like very quickly. Right, we
Speaker 3: have enough aid and even aid in the region to
Speaker 3: feed all those people right now if we needed to. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: there's there's there's tens of millions of pounds of food
Speaker 3: rotting and warehouses and Jordan and Egypt right now just
Speaker 3: waiting to go across the border.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and people dying.
Speaker 3: It's the lack of political will, mostly on behalf of
Speaker 3: the United States, you know, but also I think the
Speaker 3: members of the Abraham Accords and the EU. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: a devastating indictment. And I think the interesting thing about
Speaker 3: it is it truly pulls the mask off of the
Speaker 3: quote unquote rules based world order. Yeah, the US led
Speaker 3: rules based world order, because you just I mean, it's
Speaker 3: just so obvious that no matter how many people want
Speaker 3: this terrible thing to end. That we're seeing this very
Speaker 3: obvious genocide is being livestream to our phones. The powers
Speaker 3: that be are too invested to to let it stop.
Speaker 3: You know, they're they're into the hill. We've already seen
Speaker 3: the degree to which the United States is compromised in
Speaker 3: its media and government storytelling in relation to Israel Palestine.
Speaker 3: Did the long unwillingness of people to speak up about
Speaker 3: this followed by the very rapid turnaround of people who
Speaker 3: are now rats fleeing the ship. Yeah, they're seeing the
Speaker 3: unmistakable reality of this genocide. And you know, it's like
Speaker 3: everyone says, once this is done, everyone will pretend they
Speaker 3: were against it from the start. And you're now starting
Speaker 3: to see that, right, you know, with like the former
Speaker 3: White House Press secretary.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah Miller, Right yeah.
Speaker 3: Miller was like, yeah, they've been committing war crimes than
Speaker 3: they were doing it while I was there. But I
Speaker 3: didn't speak on my behalf. I was speaking on behalf
Speaker 3: of the United States government.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, the old the old Numberg defense.
Speaker 4: M hmm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, They're like, I was just doing my job thing,
Speaker 1: which like is not actually don't actually an excuse for
Speaker 1: participating in war crimes and like should have been an
Speaker 1: excuse for apologizing or excusing them, right.
Speaker 3: I know that you guys have talked about and that
Speaker 3: we'll have spoilers for this, but I know you guys
Speaker 3: have recently had a series Unpacking and Or, which is
Speaker 3: my favorite TV show. Yeah, and I was just so
Speaker 3: happy that they snuck that one line in about when
Speaker 3: Cyril asks what they're doing here and she just says
Speaker 3: following orders.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: How often are we going to hear that in the
Speaker 1: next few years?
Speaker 4: I guess? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so predictable, right, Like every time this happens, right,
Speaker 1: And this isn't the first time the United Nations has
Speaker 1: basically allowed it. Genocide tappened right under its nose. No,
Speaker 1: and it will probably won't be the last because, as
Speaker 1: you said, right, like, the idea that we have a
Speaker 1: rules based world order, it's a lie. It's a myth
Speaker 1: that exists to make people feel better and feel like
Speaker 1: this stuff couldn't happen again. But like you know, we
Speaker 1: have ICC warrants for people who are traveling freely around
Speaker 1: the world. It doesn't matter that the ICC can't enforce
Speaker 1: its own warrants, right, Like you could say something to
Speaker 1: war crime, it doesn't matter. No one's the war police
Speaker 1: aren't going to go and arrest all the people doing it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's mostly just kind of a Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 3: of a placebo. I'm not really sure what the function
Speaker 3: it serves. I mean, I'm not a big international institutions enjoyer,
Speaker 3: Like I'm deeply skeptical of the United Nations in almost
Speaker 3: every one of its aspects. My team and I've talked
Speaker 3: several times about the point that this documentary has that
Speaker 3: weirdly like it's improved our trust in international and geos
Speaker 3: just because we're seeing like the degree to which UNRA
Speaker 3: is operating on increasingly less budget every year and still
Speaker 3: managing to be effective.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think a huge part of that is again, it
Speaker 3: is staffed by the local population who are from these areas,
Speaker 3: and they have a duty and a commitment to care
Speaker 3: to their people.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But in general, no, I mean, I don't understand what
Speaker 3: the point of the UN is if you don't give
Speaker 3: it the US military, Like I mean, if as an anarchist,
Speaker 3: I don't believe that this is a great solution to things.
Speaker 3: But like, if you wanted to enforce the UN, you
Speaker 3: would need the World Police, Like you would need to
Speaker 3: just use the United States to like hunt down these people. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and utilize it's eight hundred military bases in every country
Speaker 3: to enforce these rules.
Speaker 1: And we don't really yet we allow these things to happen.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I'm not the big international institutions enjoy either.
Speaker 1: Like I've seen the UN be fucking useless in most
Speaker 1: continents that people live on. I would really like it, though,
Speaker 1: if they would do something to stop the suffering of
Speaker 1: the people of Palestine. Like, it doesn't mean I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be happy. It doesn't mean I'm not happy when I
Speaker 1: speak to guys from PK, guys that who we've had
Speaker 1: on our show several times, right, Like when they talk
Speaker 1: to us about like where should we send money, They'll
Speaker 1: be like, oh, Unroawa able to get my family some
Speaker 1: food this week or whatever. Like I'm happy to hear that,
Speaker 1: and I'm glad that they're there, Glad that they were
Speaker 1: there at that time. I guess, So, like what does
Speaker 1: the future hold? The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation seems to be
Speaker 1: falling apart within a very short period of this whole
Speaker 1: thing being stood up, which is unsurprising, right, can you explain, like,
Speaker 1: what does it take for a that lives up to
Speaker 1: basic humanitarian principles to get in there?
Speaker 3: I think that's a really difficult question to answer because
Speaker 3: we have bribed so many options.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean truly.
Speaker 3: I mean the last time I think I was on
Speaker 3: this podcast, it was to talk about my colleagues and
Speaker 3: the World Central Kitchen who got killed in Gaza. That
Speaker 3: was an attempt to try and alleviate the suffering of
Speaker 3: Palestinian people, and it had predictable results. You know, there's
Speaker 3: all these groups have been operating and there to the
Speaker 3: extent that they can, and the result has been too little,
Speaker 3: too late. And everyone is saying, from Sidney McCain at
Speaker 3: the World Food Program, to Philip Plazarreni to you know,
Speaker 3: DeAndre like from the private sector, everyone is saying, the
Speaker 3: reason this is a problem has nothing to do with moths.
Speaker 3: It has everything to do with about that Israel is
Speaker 3: restricting the amount of aid doing to the Gaza strip.
Speaker 3: And now everyone's waking up and asking the obvious question
Speaker 3: of like, well, why are they actually doing that? And
Speaker 3: in the answer corresponds to those polls we see that
Speaker 3: indicate that, you know, yeah, fifty percent of Israeli society
Speaker 3: is open to killing everyone in the Gaza strip. Eighty
Speaker 3: four percent are open to displacing them all. This is
Speaker 3: just what Israel wants, and I think the humanitarian world
Speaker 3: is slowly swallowing that very difficult pill. And I don't
Speaker 3: I can't really tell you what comes next outside of
Speaker 3: a political resolution.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which seems higher and how to come by in
Speaker 1: the current international climate, Like certainly it's not coming from
Speaker 1: the US, right, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, like something to watch would be that
Speaker 3: Senator Welch from Vermont introduced a bill to immediately refund
Speaker 3: UNROW Okay, yeah, and it has it has a House
Speaker 3: a correlate with I think, yeah, woman Jiapaul and a
Speaker 3: few others who are trying to kind of push that through.
Speaker 3: I mean, the United States funds three hundred million dollars,
Speaker 3: which is about over a third of un annual budget,
Speaker 3: and we've restricted that funding for the past year and
Speaker 3: a half.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so if we restore.
Speaker 3: That, I think that would be a big signal to
Speaker 3: Israel that like, we're not playing ball anymore.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I just think when you have a rubber stamp Congress
Speaker 3: and a fascist president, that's probably unlikely to pass.
Speaker 1: That's a big reach. Yeah, yeah, I actually think this
Speaker 1: is an area where elected officials to the right of
Speaker 1: Trump support its on this one. I think, like, you know,
Speaker 1: I spend a lot of time in rural East County
Speaker 1: San Diego, right, Like, I talk to people who have
Speaker 1: very different politics to my own. Yeah, it's a nice
Speaker 1: way of saying that, but like I've had people who
Speaker 1: straight up I'm sure voted for Trump be like, man,
Speaker 1: they're letting little children stuff, like what the fuck is wrong?
Speaker 1: You know, Like, like, I think it's an area where
Speaker 1: a more sensible politics would be able to build consensus.
Speaker 3: But here we are, right, yeah, I mean there is
Speaker 3: no opposition. Like the Democrats are not an opposition party.
Speaker 3: They're just happy being like the junior partners in fascism.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're having a little party today where they're giving
Speaker 1: out tacos because they're trying to somehow encourage Trump to
Speaker 1: go ahead with more sanctions and tariffs and more genocides.
Speaker 1: I guess, like I don't quite know what the Trump
Speaker 1: always chickens out think, like, well, I'm glad he's stick
Speaker 1: it out with the tariffs, isn't Isn't that a good thing. Yeah, like, yeah, like,
Speaker 1: what are you trying what are you trying to say here?
Speaker 1: I think maybe I don't want to confront what they're
Speaker 1: trying to say. But this is a thing that like
Speaker 1: at the current time, like it needs state action to
Speaker 1: stop it. Yeah, we do not have an organization which
Speaker 1: which is able to mobilize people in such a way
Speaker 1: that they can stop it, like and that is it's
Speaker 1: really desperate if you care, right, because the states of
Speaker 1: the world very clearly for decades and decades and decades
Speaker 1: have been unconcerned with Palestinian people and their wellbeing and
Speaker 1: they're not doing shit about it now. I think there
Speaker 1: are still people who are able to make a meaningful
Speaker 1: benefit to the lives of people in the West Bank.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: I understand why people are hopeless when they look at
Speaker 1: what's happening, you guys, And I understand why it seems
Speaker 1: bleak and it seems like there's nothing you can do.
Speaker 1: Are there things that like concrete actions, organizations, groups that
Speaker 1: you think people can engage with and we've heard from
Speaker 1: some of them on the show before, right to be
Speaker 1: in a solidarity way or to help people in the
Speaker 1: West Bank.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think like, I honestly, I think
Speaker 3: there are people who could probably better answer this question
Speaker 3: from me who've actually gone and done protected presence operations
Speaker 3: in the West Bank.
Speaker 4: I know that they're like the people.
Speaker 3: In Massafayata are often asking for foreigners to come and
Speaker 3: do that, and a lot of people will go through
Speaker 3: like Jordan Valley Solidarity or ism or something like that.
Speaker 3: I'm usually one to discourage foreigners from jumping feet first
Speaker 3: into a HoriZone with great intentions and no knowledge of
Speaker 3: the language or everything that's going on. Yeah, but there
Speaker 3: does seem to be a genuine call from amongst the
Speaker 3: pales in community in the West Bank to have people
Speaker 3: who are willing to physically get in between you know,
Speaker 3: Alsinian villages and settlers and the IDF. Yeah, so that
Speaker 3: is a concrete thing you can do. That's a dangerous
Speaker 3: thing to ask somebody to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think it's something people should rush into, right, Like,
Speaker 1: we've interviewed people who have been shot.
Speaker 4: Doing yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: A young woman was killed doing that, Yeah, aishunar Agi.
Speaker 3: She was shot yeah, feet away from my friend who
Speaker 3: was just in the West Bank, and he just got
Speaker 3: banned from the entire territory for ninety nine years, And
Speaker 3: I was talking to him about that because I wonder about, like,
Speaker 3: you know, my work, and sometimes I feel like I'm
Speaker 3: not going far enough in my solidarity because I'm doing
Speaker 3: this investigative documentary and I'm not physically putting my body
Speaker 3: on the line. Yeah, sure, but I can still go
Speaker 3: to the country, Like my support for the Palestinians is
Speaker 3: still ongoing. So I think people need to ask themselves,
Speaker 3: do I want to take one drastic measure to like
Speaker 3: show this is my solidarity with alsign in an instant,
Speaker 3: whether it's joining like a flotilla that might get airstrikes,
Speaker 3: or you know, setting yourself on fire outside of the Israeli embassy,
Speaker 3: or do I want to like contribute in the ways
Speaker 3: that I can as best I can. I mean, I'm
Speaker 3: a storyteller, right, So I said, I need to find
Speaker 3: a story that I can tell about the Palestinian that
Speaker 3: will humanize them in the eyes of people who are
Speaker 3: not naturally sympathetic. And I think a lot of people
Speaker 3: think that they need to be putting their body on
Speaker 3: the line. Or it's like I talk about this with
Speaker 3: disaster relief all the time, Like disaster happens and people
Speaker 3: see you on the TV, they're like, I need to
Speaker 3: be wearing a high viz best and distributing a box
Speaker 3: of aid to someone. It's like, no, you probably don't. Actually,
Speaker 3: like the thing that you can best do to help
Speaker 3: people is probably the skill that you've been perfecting in
Speaker 3: your own career as well as like in your own life. Right,
Speaker 3: if you're good at spreadsheets, you can help people get
Speaker 3: access to housing. Yeah, one hundred percent. You know, if
Speaker 3: you're good, if you're good at lifting things, then maybe
Speaker 3: you should be lifting boxes. But like, I have a
Speaker 3: friend who's the Emmy Award winning director of photography, and
Speaker 3: he's like, I have a and I can lift everything's
Speaker 3: and like show me where to go? And he was
Speaker 3: hitting me up the entire like first two weeks of
Speaker 3: the LA fires, being like where should I go? And
Speaker 3: I was like, me, you're an Emmy Award winning videography.
Speaker 3: Tell the story of the fires, find the survivors, like,
Speaker 3: bring their stories to life and let the world see
Speaker 3: what our community looks like. And he did that and
Speaker 3: it went amazing. Yeah, So, like I think people should
Speaker 3: think about when they want to help. You know, if
Speaker 3: you are a saramicist, or you sow or you're a musician,
Speaker 3: write a song about gods. Like, there's so many ways
Speaker 3: to help that don't involve physically putting yourself in between
Speaker 3: a settler and they're in for and a Palestinian family
Speaker 3: whose language you can't speak.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree. Like there's and we see that
Speaker 1: with border stuff, right, like everyone wants to do high
Speaker 1: k out to the border and drug water or you know,
Speaker 1: everyone wanted to in Kumba, right, like the other people
Speaker 1: wanted to help us, and people did help us, and
Speaker 1: it was amazing, it was really beautiful. But like people
Speaker 1: were also able to help the skills they had, like
Speaker 1: making jewels and selling it or maybe doing a benefit gig. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a long tradition of anarchists benefit gigs, Like it's
Speaker 1: a thing that we do, do a zine, yeah, like
Speaker 1: you're upon concert, you know, yeah, yeah, many many such
Speaker 1: cases like within doing that, there's the intangible benefit of
Speaker 1: showing people that people care about them, like all around
Speaker 1: the world. I remember, you know, just recently I saw
Speaker 1: people from the Karini Nationalities Defense Force, Right, so one
Speaker 1: of the revolutionary organizations in Miamma making a statement about
Speaker 1: solidarity to people of Palestine and to their children, and
Speaker 1: you know that they too have experienced their children being killed,
Speaker 1: they too have experienced these bombing runs and state oppression,
Speaker 1: and that like they see them and they care about them,
Speaker 1: and even in their own time of war. That's like
Speaker 1: the front in Karini State is hot right now that
Speaker 1: they are still thinking of the people of Palestine. I
Speaker 1: saw Palestinian people were very touched by this, right, like
Speaker 1: it does Obviously you can't eat someone's good thoughts, but
Speaker 1: like there are things you can do, like because yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't be down there right now giving people a
Speaker 1: sandwich as much you'd like to, and for some people
Speaker 1: that's either not possible or maybe just not the best
Speaker 1: use of their time. And like, I think it's a
Speaker 1: really good message to everyone's good at something. Do you, like,
Speaker 1: find the thing that you're good at and use it
Speaker 1: to help people? I think is really valuable. Is there
Speaker 1: anything else you'd like to share with people before you
Speaker 1: finish up here?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I just think I would.
Speaker 3: This was a dark conversation because I don't really see
Speaker 3: a way out of this humanitarian situation. But I think
Speaker 3: there's a degree to which that's been the case from
Speaker 3: the start, Right, The real trick of the imperial thought
Speaker 3: machine is that the pace of oppression outstrips our ability
Speaker 3: to understand it. Yeah, to quote theory twink charisenemic. But
Speaker 3: don't lose hope, right, because the world does care about
Speaker 3: Palestine more than it ever has. Yeah, they feel that
Speaker 3: the people there feel our love, they feel our solidarity,
Speaker 3: and that is not valueless, right, Like, yeah, no human
Speaker 3: is useless. Who lightens the burden of another. I was
Speaker 3: depressed as hell coming back from this recent drop the
Speaker 3: Palace sign, and I went to the mountains and that's
Speaker 3: we met with a bunch of people who were just
Speaker 3: really energetic about like Palestinian solidarity and and really cared
Speaker 3: about it. And it was like, yeah, it was so
Speaker 3: nice to go from that and just be able to
Speaker 3: tell my Palestinian fans like, hey, by the way, we
Speaker 3: just spent an entire week talking about what we can
Speaker 3: do to alleviate to some small degree the suffering that
Speaker 3: your people are going through.
Speaker 4: That matters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like every small act, every little thing, right, the
Speaker 3: small deeds of ordinary folk.
Speaker 4: That's what keeps the darkness is bay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's really prescient. Often, like refugees will say
Speaker 1: to me, Sientias will say to me. In the last
Speaker 1: six months now, I guess that they think Americans don't
Speaker 1: care about them anymore, And that really fucking breaks my heart,
Speaker 1: like more than I can express with words, because I
Speaker 1: care about those people so much, and like it does
Speaker 1: make a difference when they see people doing things, and
Speaker 1: they can be small things, but like I know how
Speaker 1: my set lifts up somebody in talk times, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: because I've been with them in pretty dark times. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it does make a difference. And like if that's what
Speaker 1: you can do, then then people shouldn't think as valueless.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and also UNI pressure people, you know, continue to
Speaker 3: make people embarrassed for believing in genocide. Call your congressmen
Speaker 3: and remind them that they are their shills and cowards.
Speaker 3: I think a lot about you know, you mentioned like
Speaker 3: nineteen you mentioned World War two earlier. I mean, if
Speaker 3: we had had TikTok in the age of Dakau and
Speaker 3: Treblinka and Oschwitz, I think about like the American government
Speaker 3: knew about the final solution, We knew that the box
Speaker 3: cars were going to these extermination camps, and we refuse
Speaker 3: to bomb them. Yeah, we focused on military targets. If
Speaker 3: we've been able to live stream you know, some from
Speaker 3: inside Auschwitz, and we were also able because of pro
Speaker 3: public or whatever, to find out that FDR was choosing
Speaker 3: not to bomb the concentration camps, there would have been outrage.
Speaker 3: There would have been a huge amount of outrage I
Speaker 3: think in the American population as there is in Gaza.
Speaker 3: And that's an important thing. It's something we have access
Speaker 3: to now we can put that external pressure onto people
Speaker 3: and make them uncomfortable. That's what brought down South African apartheid.
Speaker 3: Like it's the it's the BCGS pulling out of the
Speaker 3: Gaza Humanitarians Fund. Yeah, basically, British companies just got so
Speaker 3: embarrassed to work with South Africa that they just eventually stopped.
Speaker 4: And that's what brought.
Speaker 1: Down, right, Yeah, because people wouldn't shut the fuck up
Speaker 1: about it, right, They wouldn't let them do other stuff
Speaker 1: and be like we're not talking about that today. And
Speaker 1: like people in the case of South Africa wouldn't play
Speaker 1: sports with South Africa until it fucking stopped doing its apartheid. Right,
Speaker 1: Like I was gonna say it was global like a boycott,
Speaker 1: It wasn't quite global. It's Rael was not boycotting apartheid
Speaker 1: South Africa. But yeah, that stuff does make a difference. Charles,
Speaker 1: when's your documentary coming out? Where could people find it?
Speaker 1: What can they view it on?
Speaker 3: I'm still in the editing phace, so I think give
Speaker 3: me two months and I will have a better idea
Speaker 3: of when it's coming out. I'm hoping like before Autumn
Speaker 3: dam twenty twenty five. It is a time Emily piece, right,
Speaker 3: it has some some relevance that's time sensitive. But you
Speaker 3: can follow it on on Instagram. It's just at the
Speaker 3: war on Unra you n RWA.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and my personal account also posts a lot about it.
Speaker 3: That's Charles McBride with a y. Yeah, and it's the
Speaker 3: same on substack TikTok YouTube.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like child said, you don't have to be there
Speaker 1: getting an m full pointed at you to make a difference,
Speaker 1: and so like, yeah, I would encourage people to do
Speaker 1: the little things to you. They're not that's small actually,
Speaker 1: but just yeah, the things that aren't going to Palestine necessarily.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Yeah, and like take heart, you know, don't despair.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, find some joy, welcome to it could happen
Speaker 6: here A podcast about it happening here, which, if you
Speaker 6: are paying attention to the news today is Los Angeles,
Speaker 6: not just LA but largely LA right now, which over
Speaker 6: the course of the last couple of days while we
Speaker 6: were off for the weekend, has broken out into.
Speaker 2: A series of protests and cop riots that are kind
Speaker 2: of consuming national news. The federal government has activated the
Speaker 2: California National Guard and asserted federal control over them. Governor
Speaker 2: Newsom is kind of pushing back against that, although not
Speaker 2: in a way that I am convinced or I've seen
Speaker 2: any evidence of matters at this point. The United States Marines,
Speaker 2: a group of I think about five hundred from Camp Pendleton,
Speaker 2: which is down near San Diego, have been activated as well,
Speaker 2: which is a probable violation of pose coma tadas, so
Speaker 2: that was kind of unclear to me the extent which
Speaker 2: they're in theater at this point. Largely, all of these
Speaker 2: actions have been ineffective in making the protests go away
Speaker 2: at this point. What sparked them was a series of
Speaker 2: ice raids that took about two thousand people into custody
Speaker 2: and brought a bunch of Los Angelinos out in Paramount,
Speaker 2: California who were met by the police, the LAPD providing
Speaker 2: crowd control to Homeland Security HSI agents. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 2: the gist of what went down. Things have just kind
Speaker 2: of escalated from there. Yesterday probably four to six thousand
Speaker 2: people in the street as opposed to five hundred or
Speaker 2: so the day before. So things have continued to escalate
Speaker 2: and the LAPD and their police have had no real
Speaker 2: luck in containing the demonstrations. We'll see how long that
Speaker 2: situation lasts. But yeah, that's where we are right at
Speaker 2: this second. More or less, things are continuing evolve today,
Speaker 2: will have evolved since Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, by the way, we're recording this on Monday, this
Speaker 7: will probably be coming out like Monday night, Tuesday morning. Yeah,
Speaker 7: so who fucking knows what will have happened by then.
Speaker 7: This is like about one pm Pacific time when we're
Speaker 7: recording this. I want to start also by going back
Speaker 7: to that National Guard deployment, because that national the federalized
Speaker 7: National Guard deployment is hideously illegal. Oh yeah, like unbelievably illegal.
Speaker 7: I cannot emphasize enough. This is like constitution shatteringly illegal. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and the way this is being reported in the media
Speaker 7: is fucking hideous. They are just straight up lying about it.
Speaker 7: So okay, So Trump has not declared the Insurrection Act yet, right.
Speaker 2: No, they activated a directive that Trump signed cited ten
Speaker 2: USC one two four six, which is a specific provision
Speaker 2: within Title ten if the US Code on Armed Services.
Speaker 2: That provision allows, or part of that provision allows for
Speaker 2: the federal government to deploy National Guard forces quote, if
Speaker 2: there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against
Speaker 2: the authority of the government of the United States. So basically,
Speaker 2: the claim being made by the administration here was that
Speaker 2: the federalization of the California Guard was justified by the
Speaker 2: fact that the people of Los Angeles, which at the
Speaker 2: point this was done was somewhere less than a thousand.
Speaker 7: Of them five hundred people, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And were an open rebellion because they had yelled at
Speaker 2: a bunch of ice officers for a while. That was
Speaker 2: the situation.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, and also it's worth noting too, even if there
Speaker 7: was a rebellion, which there isn't. He also can't use
Speaker 7: that section because it's in coordination with the governor. You
Speaker 7: could only do what if the governor is working with you,
Speaker 7: and the governor, like Newsome, is being a real piece
Speaker 7: of shit. About this for again, like.
Speaker 1: The president of the LAPD has been Yeah.
Speaker 7: But it's like he's been sitting the LPD up, but
Speaker 7: he hasn't given permission for the federal government to use
Speaker 7: the California National Guard. They're just doing it, right, This
Speaker 7: is like they've just stolen a state national Guard. And
Speaker 7: Neustroom's response has been, because he fucking hates protesters so much,
Speaker 7: has been like, oh this is bad, Am I gonna
Speaker 7: like do anything about the fact that, like, again, every
Speaker 7: single law about how the National Guard is supposed to
Speaker 7: be used, it's just been torn the fuck up.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: No, like fucking MPR and like a bunch of the
Speaker 7: Maintiam media reporting about this has just been saying that, oh, well,
Speaker 7: he used this provision and it's like, no, he didn't.
Speaker 7: Like he did not he explicitly every single part of
Speaker 7: the thing that lets you use this provision, none of
Speaker 7: the conditions have been fulfilled, which means he's not using it.
Speaker 7: He's just saying shit and doing it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2: And the activation of the US Marines is based on
Speaker 2: like heg Seth posted a tweet being like I've got
Speaker 2: marines ready in Camp Pendleton, which like there's absolutely no
Speaker 2: constitutional justification for no, especially since the National Guard had
Speaker 2: just been put in for deploying active duty US Marines
Speaker 2: into this situation. Absolutely not, it's all super like for
Speaker 2: one thing, the the situation that they're in right now
Speaker 2: in terms of like what we've seen from the National
Speaker 2: Guard yesterday was like they're not very effective at this, right.
Speaker 2: They fairly quickly after being deployed started using, you know,
Speaker 2: firing impact munitions at the crowd, attacking the crowd in
Speaker 2: the same way that the LAPD had done.
Speaker 1: Nothing.
Speaker 2: That was like, I would say, an escalation beyond how
Speaker 2: the fucking cops were active.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: But National Guard is bad at handling these kinds of things, right.
Speaker 2: Their force organization is not meant to be able to
Speaker 2: be split up into small enough units the way the
Speaker 2: cops are in enough areas, Like they're just not meant
Speaker 2: for this sort of thing.
Speaker 1: It's not how they're.
Speaker 2: Meant to be deployed to counteract protests, so you wind
Speaker 2: up just kind of keeping them in this big blob
Speaker 2: of guys who you don't have good Like they're sleeping
Speaker 2: on floors in government buildings right now.
Speaker 1: Because the Quartering.
Speaker 2: Act exists, which is amazing, and because there's not much
Speaker 2: in the way of organization behind deploying them, and they
Speaker 2: don't know they're not I mean neither the police generally
Speaker 2: well trained with their impact munitions, but these guys certainly aren't.
Speaker 2: And they freak out at the drop of a hat
Speaker 2: like they're like worse at it than the LAPD, and
Speaker 2: the LAPD.
Speaker 1: Is, you know, not good at it, they're just good
Speaker 1: at hurting people.
Speaker 2: So you've just kind of got this large, brittle group
Speaker 2: of guys who you can plunk down in an area
Speaker 2: while protesters continue to gather in groups all around the city.
Speaker 2: And the more stories of shit like a blob of
Speaker 2: National guardsmen fucking up protesters you get, the more people
Speaker 2: are coming out and the less controllable the situation becomes.
Speaker 7: And it seems like we're seeing the very beginning stages
Speaker 7: of people actually learning tactical lessons from twenty twenty and
Speaker 7: twenty twenty four with the poal sign encampments. Yeah, which
Speaker 7: is like, yeah, like, if you concentrate all of your
Speaker 7: people in one spot, police departments are very very good
Speaker 7: at massing the whole bunch of people and rolling you over.
Speaker 7: Ian We've known this since twenty twenty. If you are
Speaker 7: at a whole bunch of different spots at the same time,
Speaker 7: they're terrible at responding to that. And that's kind of
Speaker 7: what's been happening. Yeah, there's been a unch are protests
Speaker 7: popping up in different places. It's been very effective at
Speaker 7: sort of like preventing that kind of like one giant
Speaker 7: sweep mobilizations that were like destroying the student encampments.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm looking at based on reporting from CBS News,
Speaker 2: about seven hundred US Marines have been activated from the
Speaker 2: twenty nine Palms base near San Diego, which is, per
Speaker 2: Jim Laporta, who's a defense reporter, widely considered to be
Speaker 2: one of the worst bases to be stationed at in
Speaker 2: the entire military. Are being deployed to Los Angeles right now.
Speaker 2: So that's just great.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Someone asked Trump what would it take for him
Speaker 7: to use to authorize the deployment of the US military
Speaker 7: on American soil, and he said, that's just that's up
Speaker 7: to me, which is not how any of this works. Yeah,
Speaker 7: Like that's just pure military dictatorship stuff. If Trump is
Speaker 7: just able to like use the military just do whatever
Speaker 7: the fuck he wants. That is just that is the
Speaker 7: constitution gone, That is the pretense of democracy gone. It
Speaker 7: is real bad now. It hasn't happened yet, but there
Speaker 7: has been a bunch of extremely alarming other shit that's happened.
Speaker 7: So the cops arrested the president of California SEIU, which
Speaker 7: is the service workers union in California, very very large union.
Speaker 7: Not a super billetant one.
Speaker 2: No, And David Huerta isn't who you'd call like a
Speaker 2: particularly militant leftist.
Speaker 7: No, he's just like a he's just like a kind
Speaker 7: of like a Democratic Party labor guy. And they just
Speaker 7: like arrested him outside of outside of one of the
Speaker 7: initial protests where he.
Speaker 1: Was injured him quite badly too.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, like beat the shit out of him. And
Speaker 7: then he's still being held in in a federal detention building.
Speaker 7: They're they're they're charging him with with federal felony conspiracy
Speaker 7: to impede an officer. And again this is this is
Speaker 7: the this is the head of like one of the
Speaker 7: largest unions of California.
Speaker 2: No, and they're they're justifying it in part based on
Speaker 2: the charging documents because they saw him texting on his
Speaker 2: phone outside and assumed he was texting to like a
Speaker 2: protester to give them more.
Speaker 7: Yes, right, Like it's like fucking cortoon cloud. But like
Speaker 7: the actual effect of this again is that they have
Speaker 7: like one of the they have like the president of
Speaker 7: one of the largest unions in the state, like yes,
Speaker 7: in a federal detention building. So, I mean there's obviously
Speaker 7: been like unions are pissed about it. There hasn't been
Speaker 7: any kind of large scomobilization from them yet. But if
Speaker 7: there was one possible thing you could do to actually
Speaker 7: get Seiu outfits ass and like show up to shit,
Speaker 7: it's this. We don't know exactly what's going to happen.
Speaker 7: The reporting that I've seen so far has suggested that
Speaker 7: there is actually a kind of heartening degree of cross
Speaker 7: union support for like, holy shit, the Feds like just
Speaker 7: grabbing the president of a union is in fact bad.
Speaker 7: We're gonna have to see exactly how that plays out.
Speaker 7: But like he's still fucking in there. Maxine Walters like
Speaker 7: tried to enter the facility to check on him. This
Speaker 7: has happened with a bunch of different congress people who
Speaker 7: have tried to enter this one in LA and a
Speaker 7: couple of other ttention facilities. They are all being denied,
Speaker 7: which is unhinged.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially since they have oversight over facilities like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Other news for from today that's just come out in
Speaker 2: the last less than a day, the government has deployed
Speaker 2: MQ nine reapers I think at least two of them
Speaker 2: over Los Angeles. These are the drones that are that
Speaker 2: we were using overseas to shoot hell fire missiles of people.
Speaker 1: That's not what they're being used for here. They're being
Speaker 1: used for surveillance.
Speaker 2: The last time this was done was in Minneapolis in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Outside of their use.
Speaker 2: For surveillance over the border, but there's MQ nine's over
Speaker 2: an American city surveilling protesters. Speaking of that, there's also
Speaker 2: just been like the threat of surveillance being used against protesters.
Speaker 2: Kind of The most chilling example from yesterday was an
Speaker 2: LAPD helicopter flying low over a crowd, shining a spotlight
Speaker 2: on them and saying like I've seen, we can see
Speaker 2: all of you.
Speaker 1: We're going to come.
Speaker 2: I'm going to come to your houses later, like you're
Speaker 2: all on camera and I'm cut, like specifically I'm going
Speaker 2: to cut. We're coming to your houses.
Speaker 1: Later, Yeah, it's police state shit. Like, yeah, it's police
Speaker 1: state shit.
Speaker 2: Now do I believe that they actually have the ability
Speaker 2: to No, they don't actually, but yeah.
Speaker 7: That said, like where if you're going to one of
Speaker 7: these protests, we're a fucking mask, yes, like I don't know,
Speaker 7: like both for COVID, but like also Jesus fucking Christ,
Speaker 7: like their flag petator truts over these protests, like wear masks.
Speaker 7: Good lord, do you know what else wants you to
Speaker 7: buy masks?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast perhaps,
Speaker 2: and we're.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So I also want to talk a bit about the
Speaker 7: specific conditions that caused all of this stuff, because I
Speaker 7: think the reporting on it has been really bad. So
Speaker 7: there were two thousand arrests from ICE on Tuesday. They
Speaker 7: rested two thousand people on Wednesday. I think these are
Speaker 7: like national numbers, the numbers like very specifically in LA's
Speaker 7: are these several hundred people have been being held in
Speaker 7: just horrifying conditions. You know, some of them are being
Speaker 7: held in federal attention centers, but they're also just being
Speaker 7: held in like the basements of these fucking buildings because
Speaker 7: there's not enough room to hold this many people. You know,
Speaker 7: I mean, even the conditions and the regular attention center
Speaker 7: are terrible. But like the immigration lawyers who people were
Speaker 7: able to reach and talk to, are talking about hundreds
Speaker 7: of people in rooms designed for thirty. There's no cots,
Speaker 7: They're sleeping on the ground. Sickness is spreading, there's not
Speaker 7: enough food or water. Conditions are fucking horrifying. A lot
Speaker 7: of the people who are in there, you know, the
Speaker 7: ones that we've been able to get any kind of
Speaker 7: contact with from their lawyers. A lot of these people
Speaker 7: cannot be deported because there are people who have been
Speaker 7: granted stay of deportation by the US government, which means
Speaker 7: they cannot be deported. But I said, just fucking kidnapped them. Anyways.
Speaker 7: There's videos you can see from the protesters outside the
Speaker 7: buildings will and there's something I remember from Occupy Ice
Speaker 7: in twenty eighteen that's just fucking harrowing, is that, like
Speaker 7: when you're outside these buildings sometimes you can hear the
Speaker 7: people inside shouting, and it's fucking harrowing. And with these ones,
Speaker 7: there's a bunch of videos if you can see that
Speaker 7: the people inside the buildings are trying to like shine
Speaker 7: lights out of windows so that people know that they're inside.
Speaker 7: It's fucking horrifying, And I think just how bad this is,
Speaker 7: Like how bad it was that like all of these
Speaker 7: fucking people in their fucking tanks just rolled up and
Speaker 7: started kidnapping people has just kind of been lost in
Speaker 7: all of this discourse about the protest. It is like, no,
Speaker 7: this is what was happening, Like this is straight up
Speaker 7: soldiers are just taking people on the night, Like that's
Speaker 7: what this is, you know, And this has been happening
Speaker 7: all over. There was also a huge sort of protests
Speaker 7: have started at this home depot where okay, so this
Speaker 7: is where this is where we would get into the
Speaker 7: point where like it's kind of difficult to see what's
Speaker 7: going on. Ice claims that they were just staging a
Speaker 7: bunch of people. The private whole ind Security said to
Speaker 7: the BBC that there was no raid on this home
Speaker 7: depot planned and that they were just staging there. I
Speaker 7: don't don't believe that, because these people live, were a living.
Speaker 5: It is their job. They are police.
Speaker 7: It is their job as a cop to lie to you.
Speaker 7: It is a constitutionally protected thing that they have according
Speaker 7: to the Supreme Court, which is absolutely ridiculous, but I
Speaker 7: am pretty sure they're lying about that. But regardless, there's
Speaker 7: you know, like their approtest started off and then like
Speaker 7: the cops just started tear gassing the people who were protesting. Yep,
Speaker 7: this massive rage at a home depot.
Speaker 2: Now there was another kind of noteworthy event is when
Speaker 2: ICE showed up in force they got There were kind
Speaker 2: of two different actions. There was one down at a
Speaker 2: federal building where people attacked in dissembled barricades at the
Speaker 2: same time as people showed up to go after the
Speaker 2: ICE caravan. Ice officers were pelted in their vehicles with
Speaker 2: a number of objects. Yeah, and again this is the
Speaker 2: kind of thing that makes it a lot more difficult.
Speaker 2: I mean that just appears operational operationally to be true
Speaker 2: for them to crack down when they're expecting, you know,
Speaker 2: action in one direction and it comes in multiple at
Speaker 2: the same time. There was another instance earlier in the
Speaker 2: protest where ICE officers were surrounded by a crowd and
Speaker 2: cut off for about eight hours while the LAPD refused
Speaker 2: to respond to them, and they eventually had to land
Speaker 2: a black Hawk on the street in order to resupply
Speaker 2: because they were out of water and I think running
Speaker 2: low on munitions.
Speaker 1: Which they then used with.
Speaker 2: Reckless abandon So yeah, there's also as I'm looking right now,
Speaker 2: just as about two hours ago, a US Marine Age
Speaker 2: one Z viper attack helicopter was filmed flying low over
Speaker 2: Los Angeles. So it looks like we've got active duty
Speaker 2: US Marine Corps forces in the city. Unclear if they're
Speaker 2: directly engaging with anyone. I haven't really heard of a
Speaker 2: lot of activity today, but yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, My guess is things will intensify, you know, as
Speaker 7: the day goes on and as we sort of roll
Speaker 7: into night, because how some people sort of start getting
Speaker 7: off work and when temperatures start coming down a bit.
Speaker 2: That's the open question right as to like what's going
Speaker 2: to happen. The last couple of days we saw numbers escalate,
Speaker 2: but now it's Monday, people have work and there's more true.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, it's not clear to me that that's
Speaker 2: going to happen, that this is going to be like
Speaker 2: a yeah, we'll see. I'm seeing a lot of early
Speaker 2: comparisons to twenty twenty, and it's not clear to me
Speaker 2: that that's going to happen. One thing to note is
Speaker 2: that kind of at the top so far we've had
Speaker 2: four to six thousand people out in the street in Layah,
Speaker 2: which is not you know, compared to twenty twenty numbers.
Speaker 2: And while we've seen some sympathy demonstrations, I mean here
Speaker 2: in Portland, I don't think it got larger than forty
Speaker 2: or so people. There was another you know somewhere less
Speaker 2: than one hundred people in San Francisco that some a
Speaker 2: good chunk of them got.
Speaker 1: Kettled the other day. But not mass demonstrations yet in
Speaker 1: other cities.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, it hasn't. It hasn't like really kicked off
Speaker 7: everywhere yet. And it's also interesting because like these protests
Speaker 7: are kind of coming off of the back of a
Speaker 7: couple of like scattered things. We talked about this on
Speaker 7: executive Disorder, but there were a there's a very big
Speaker 7: confrontation in Minneapolis last week. There's another one in Chicago
Speaker 7: where they like attacked a bunch of Chicago aldermen, which
Speaker 7: was a time. The way it's been going is like
Speaker 7: you get a giant raid and it pisses people off
Speaker 7: and there's a flare up, and the flare ups have
Speaker 7: been getting larger, but it hasn't been like a sustained thing.
Speaker 7: It's largely been reactive to these kind of large raids,
Speaker 7: and you know that's not necessarily like the recipe for
Speaker 7: a sustained thing. However, the term administration, their target goal
Speaker 7: for the number of arrests a day is three thousand,
Speaker 7: so like they're trying to intensify the number of rags
Speaker 7: they're doing and how sort of like aggressive and like
Speaker 7: militant they are. And I think that might be a
Speaker 7: thing that causes this to accelerate as we go, as
Speaker 7: we head into like next weekend, because if they're still
Speaker 7: doing this, right, like if feds are if suddenly like
Speaker 7: like hundreds of FEDS are in Chicago again and they're
Speaker 7: like grabbing people out of like Logan Square, right, or
Speaker 7: you know, they're they're trying they're doing this in like
Speaker 7: in New York, they're doing this in like other places.
Speaker 7: I think it could start to escalate, but right now
Speaker 7: it's still very much unclear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and that's where I stand to on
Speaker 2: this is like I don't actually know what's going to
Speaker 2: happen with this demonstration, but I think that, you know,
Speaker 2: one possibility is certainly that this continues to escalate and
Speaker 2: that you just get more and more people out consistently
Speaker 2: the others that it kind of peters out from this point.
Speaker 2: If it continues to escalate, then the state is or
Speaker 2: the FEDS are in a situation where they have committed
Speaker 2: to continuing the escalation chain and there's not much for
Speaker 2: them to go once they've got active duty soldiers in
Speaker 2: the streets, but just actually shooting at people with live rounds,
Speaker 2: assuming that they can't stop the demonstrations with a show
Speaker 2: of force, and likewise, there's not much else for people
Speaker 2: to do but either back down and stop coming out,
Speaker 2: at which point the administration will take a victory lap
Speaker 2: and say that like, look, this works, and this will
Speaker 2: become their standard go to whenever a city erupts is
Speaker 2: immediately nationalize the state National Guard, bring out life troops. Right,
Speaker 2: that's what will happen everywhere. That's going to become the
Speaker 2: new norm. Or people will continue escalating and yeah, Like
Speaker 2: in that case, the situation is, like do people escalate
Speaker 2: to deploying more force. Do they have that real option
Speaker 2: right or does the kind of stress of responding with
Speaker 2: that sort of force largely with soldiers that this is
Speaker 2: not the primary thing they signed up to do. Do
Speaker 2: they start like stop obeying orders. You know, these are
Speaker 2: the kind of things that we would then be looking
Speaker 2: at to see, right, Like that's kind of where there's
Speaker 2: a couple of different places it can go from here.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Another possibility is that, like if we see an instance
Speaker 2: of like, okay, in order to try and crack down
Speaker 2: on this, they authorize the use of deadly force against
Speaker 2: a chunk of demonstrators and people get killed, then do
Speaker 2: you see this kind of thing erupt in cities all
Speaker 2: around the country like we saw in twenty twenty, right,
Speaker 2: in which case, again things get very because there's not
Speaker 2: there's not a lot of the US army. Really, there
Speaker 2: are a lot of cops, but compared to the US population,
Speaker 2: there's not even that any cops, right, and widespread enough
Speaker 2: discent like this, you know what would force some very
Speaker 2: difficult decisions from the federal government and from the administration, right,
Speaker 2: And that's kind of our best case scenario is that
Speaker 2: you get enough people out in enough cities that like
Speaker 2: it is just crashing the US economy, right, and there's
Speaker 2: no real way to lock down the unrest, and you
Speaker 2: start getting National Guard refusing to respond to deployment orders
Speaker 2: as well as active duty soldiers like refusing to respond
Speaker 2: right like these are. That's the kind of thing we're
Speaker 2: looking at in terms of like a potential best case
Speaker 2: scenario here. I don't know where things are going to head.
Speaker 2: I think maybe a likelier possibility is not that we
Speaker 2: hit that that situation right now, but that we start
Speaker 2: to see, like as this kind of peters out, the
Speaker 2: administration puts out a victory lap, and then we start
Speaker 2: to see you demonstrations responding in other cities, and maybe
Speaker 2: there's kind of a slower tempo of escalation here.
Speaker 1: But I don't know.
Speaker 2: I want to say that my hope is that they
Speaker 2: overplayed their hands here, but I just don't know that
Speaker 2: that's clear, in part because we haven't seen the scale
Speaker 2: of mobilization by people that is clearly going to be
Speaker 2: impossible for them to respond to.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: I am still expecting that we're going to get a
Speaker 7: really large escalating series approachest this summer. It's June that
Speaker 7: I am. It is June ninth as we're recording this,
Speaker 7: right is going to be a long, hot summer. Right,
Speaker 7: regardless of whether this is the one or whether it
Speaker 7: Peter's out here, I think it is absolutely possible that
Speaker 7: this Peter's out and this isn't the one. I don't
Speaker 7: think it's very likely that this Peter's out the Republican's
Speaker 7: sake a victory lap, and then we don't get more
Speaker 7: protests this summer. Yeah, at this scale or larger, Yeah,
Speaker 7: I think I think that's very unlikely. We should take
Speaker 7: an at break and that I want to talk a
Speaker 7: little bit about some of the tactics we've been seeing,
Speaker 7: because they're very funny.
Speaker 1: Ah, and we're back.
Speaker 2: I should probably note very quickly that, like obviously, one
Speaker 2: thing that happens when shit like this goes down is
Speaker 2: that you get people posting on the.
Speaker 1: Internet their thoughts about this.
Speaker 2: One of the more prominent posters on Twitter in the
Speaker 2: new musc Era has been the menswear Guy, who made
Speaker 2: a couple of statements that I don't entirely agree with
Speaker 2: about Like, I mean, in general, support protests, but I
Speaker 2: don't support you know, violent protests what I would call
Speaker 2: some kind of mish interpretations of the civil rights movement,
Speaker 2: but also like not something I would I don't. I
Speaker 2: don't care that much if people are wrong on the internet.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, he did have a straight up poster
Speaker 7: meltdown where he was like yelling about someone's like breakup
Speaker 7: to say that they're insufficiently devoted because they didn't stay
Speaker 7: with this person, to like keep them in the curry.
Speaker 7: There is melt on base.
Speaker 2: Shit, but like, but matters, people melt down, posters melt out.
Speaker 2: What I think what matters is that like he made
Speaker 2: a post later, a longer one, talking about the fact
Speaker 2: that he was undocumented, his family was undocumented because you know,
Speaker 2: they came to initially Canada after the tet offensive and
Speaker 2: entered the US through a porous border, and talking about
Speaker 2: the way in which being undocumented has like affected his
Speaker 2: entire life. And now the vice president and the DHS
Speaker 2: account put us in a picture of like spy kids
Speaker 2: of a kid with like a little like computer tracker
Speaker 2: thing on his eye, and Jade Vance made a post
Speaker 2: being like basically, we're going to deport the menswear guy
Speaker 2: for his posts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, which is fucking hideous.
Speaker 2: Which is it's just like again another example of the
Speaker 2: ridiculous level of government repression that we're looking at here,
Speaker 2: like where the federal government is like targeting themselves based
Speaker 2: on posts that make people angry.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and well it's basically post on Twitter. Yeah too, like,
Speaker 7: and like that's also an important thing of like, if
Speaker 7: you're not on Twitter, it is harder to get the
Speaker 7: eye of the state on you if you are on Twitter. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 7: the Vice president can be posting fucking unhinged reply images
Speaker 7: to someone talking about deporting you, like Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah,
Speaker 7: is a horrifying level of repression. The sort of mirror
Speaker 7: to this is the stuff we've been seeing on the ground.
Speaker 7: Right there's a video going around of a like a
Speaker 7: pretty right wing at like Australian journalists who's just like
Speaker 7: talking about the protests.
Speaker 2: And like maybe twenty feet their back turned to a
Speaker 2: police right line, it's.
Speaker 7: More like like fifteen. The guy like the end of
Speaker 7: the right line just like turns and shoots.
Speaker 2: Her very casually about no protesters close to her, absolutely,
Speaker 2: no question, no no chance that he was aiming at
Speaker 2: someone else, zero chance, no chance that he thought that
Speaker 2: she was attacking him. Just shot a lady in the
Speaker 2: back of her thigh with an impact mutition for no reason.
Speaker 7: The most on hinge part of this, well, okay, the
Speaker 7: most on hinge part of this was that they fucking
Speaker 7: did this. The second most On Hinge. Part of it
Speaker 7: was that her fucking like her fucking outlet in the
Speaker 7: description of the video said that they appeared to be
Speaker 7: targeting a profire, like appear to be targeting a protests, Like, no,
Speaker 7: they weren't. Man, there's this really amazing thing with the
Speaker 7: American press were like they are incapable of objectively describing
Speaker 7: the thing that a cop does because if they described
Speaker 7: the thing that the cop does, it looks like anti.
Speaker 1: POA everyone can see yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and so they have to just lie about it
Speaker 7: and be like, oh, it was Colon Crush is like, no,
Speaker 7: with your own eyes you can see, but the headline
Speaker 7: is lying.
Speaker 2: This is not questionable. This is not an arguable point.
Speaker 2: This is not debatable. Oh, the footage is objective.
Speaker 5: Enob watched the video.
Speaker 2: It's like, okay, guys, he just shot her because he
Speaker 2: wanted to, because he thought it was funny, Like that's
Speaker 2: why he did it, we know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And like this kind of shit just continues to happen,
Speaker 7: Like the press has learned nothing from twenty twenty. They're
Speaker 7: still doing all the stupid snography shit. There's actually been
Speaker 7: shit the cops I've done in this protest that I've
Speaker 7: never actually seen before, which is a new one, because
Speaker 7: by by the time I was like, I was like
Speaker 7: a few weeks of twenty twenty, I had seen basically everything, right, Like,
Speaker 7: I'm doing this for like fucking ages. I've seen the
Speaker 7: cops trample people with horses before. I had never seen
Speaker 7: them trample a guy and beat him with the same
Speaker 7: person on a horse. Yeah, beating a guy and trampling
Speaker 7: them with the horse at the same time. That's a
Speaker 7: new one. Good fucking God. That's also and I think
Speaker 7: it's actually is this worth understanding? Is that, like that
Speaker 7: is the points of police horses, Like the reason they
Speaker 7: have them is so they can trample people with them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's to run people over with them.
Speaker 7: Yes, Yeah, And it's it's real fucking bad. That's that's
Speaker 7: hideous and shit like this has been happening this whole time.
Speaker 7: There's been a bunch of journalists who have really been
Speaker 7: really severely injured by impact munitions.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one guy who got shot in the skull with
Speaker 2: a you can tell it's a forty millimeters round because
Speaker 2: of the indent that left in his skull.
Speaker 7: Yeah, those things are like the size of your fist and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're just they're they're massive, and they're not they're
Speaker 2: not even meant to be fired directly. When you're shooting
Speaker 2: at people, you're supposed to shoot them up at the
Speaker 2: ground and bounce them into people.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Now, no cop has ever done this.
Speaker 1: They don't use them that way. I've had a used
Speaker 1: on me, like I'm sorry.
Speaker 7: Yeah, this this munition has never been used like that,
Speaker 7: no single time.
Speaker 2: That's and that's the general truth of riot munitions. And actually,
Speaker 2: I don't know if this guy was shot with a
Speaker 2: with a with a rubber around or a foam round.
Speaker 2: I think they probably shot him with a grenade, which
Speaker 2: you're also not supposed to shoot at people, but again
Speaker 2: they do all.
Speaker 5: The time, which also kills people a lot.
Speaker 2: Guy very nearly died in Portland a few years back
Speaker 2: from that. Only his bike helmet saved him.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, like this is this is a This is one
Speaker 7: of the most common ways people get killed in protests
Speaker 7: is by the cops shooting them. Yeah, like ture gas
Speaker 7: cans specifically, especially like in Turkey, this is a huge thing.
Speaker 7: Like a bunch of people got killed by by you
Speaker 7: gonna keep my trus canisters. Yeah, However, Coma. There has
Speaker 7: been a bunch of extremely funny and like pretty effective
Speaker 7: tactics people have been using. One of which I've never
Speaker 7: seen before that is fascinating is people were calling wimos,
Speaker 7: which are these like driverless yes, yes, yeah.
Speaker 5: So they would use the app to.
Speaker 7: Call winmos to places they wanted to set up roadblocks,
Speaker 7: stop police cars going through, and stop ice cars going through,
Speaker 7: and then they would light them on fire. And they
Speaker 7: did this to so many of these cars that the
Speaker 7: LAPD called Wimo and told them to shut it down
Speaker 7: because they were like, literally, it's it's it's a self
Speaker 7: driving flaming barricade.
Speaker 2: Well, and I think white people were doing it is
Speaker 2: in part because like they like the board started spreading that,
Speaker 2: like the police, were you getting footage from wimo, right,
Speaker 2: So they were like, well, these are surveillance machines and
Speaker 2: yeah if you if you show up, you light one
Speaker 2: on fire and there's this flaming barricade.
Speaker 1: Yeah yep.
Speaker 7: And then and then then people figured out that you
Speaker 7: could just like, oh, we could just bring these to
Speaker 7: places like this. This is a self deploying flaming barricade.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And and the other thing that that's interesting about it too,
Speaker 7: is it's another one of these examples that you see
Speaker 7: in protests of like people have this tendency to think
Speaker 7: of riots as these like really spontaneous things that nobody's
Speaker 7: like thinking about a lot. But the thing about why
Speaker 7: mows is that, like, if you've like walked in a
Speaker 7: city that has these things, these things have tried to
Speaker 7: run you over at least once. Yeah, Like there's there's
Speaker 7: a verileles angle. There's also the angle that these things
Speaker 7: are trying to fucking kill you all the time. And
Speaker 7: so and this is like, you know, this is a
Speaker 7: very common like like first thing that happens in the
Speaker 7: riot is like people burn down the thing that has
Speaker 7: been trying to fucking kill them this whole time. Yeah,
Speaker 7: so this is this one, except they figured out how
Speaker 7: to turn it into flaming card barricades.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I don't know, I guess we should end this
Speaker 2: with assuming things do kind of get get bigger, or
Speaker 2: assuming things get bigger later. Yeah, and you're watching this
Speaker 2: and either you head out soon and wind up you know,
Speaker 2: being at a protest, or that happens later. There's a
Speaker 2: couple of things to keep in mind. One of them
Speaker 2: is especially as we hit the summer. There's always trade
Speaker 2: offs when we talk about like different kinds of body
Speaker 2: armor that you may or may not want to have,
Speaker 2: right you know, the two broad types are soft ballistic
Speaker 2: armor and hard ballistic armor. When we talk about like
Speaker 2: ballistic body armor that can that is resistant to bullets,
Speaker 2: downsides to both of those are expense no reliable body armour,
Speaker 2: and I'm talking about NIJ certified body armour, which you
Speaker 2: should always shoot forard. None of that is ever cheap.
Speaker 2: Some is cheaper than others. Soft body armor is really
Speaker 2: all you need for riot munitions. It doesn't stop the
Speaker 2: pain as much as hard body armour. I've been hit
Speaker 2: in hard body armor by impact munitions by like foam
Speaker 2: rounds and stuff and barely felt it, whereas being hit
Speaker 2: with them in soft armor is still pretty painful. However,
Speaker 2: hard body armor, like the stuff that stops rifle rounds,
Speaker 2: can shatter when hit by impact munitions, and again, because
Speaker 2: it's a significant expense, means you might not have that
Speaker 2: hard body armour anymore. The other thing keeping counters that
Speaker 2: when you're talking about like armor for your body, if
Speaker 2: you're worried primarily about impact munitions, it doesn't have to
Speaker 2: be ballistic. Stuff like football pads, hockey pads works very
Speaker 2: well against soft munitions.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 2: Again, there's a huge trade off and potentially a safety
Speaker 2: trade off if it's one hundred and ten degrees where
Speaker 2: you are, like the danger of wearing any body armour
Speaker 2: and how much it slows you down, and how the
Speaker 2: odds of it causing you to have heat stroke or
Speaker 2: whatever can be significantly higher than like whatever you'd gain
Speaker 2: in protection. However, there are some things you should never
Speaker 2: go into a situation like this without in terms of armor.
Speaker 2: One of those is a helmet. Again, there are ballistic
Speaker 2: helmets that are resistant to pistol rounds. There are no
Speaker 2: helmets that exist that will reliably stop rifle rounds at
Speaker 2: by close range with a rifle. We're talking within a
Speaker 2: couple hundred meters, right, Those don't exist. They can stop
Speaker 2: maybe a ricochet or a glancing blow. They're good for shrapnel,
Speaker 2: they're good for pistols. That's what helmet ballistic helmets are for,
Speaker 2: and those are great for police riot rounds. A ballistic
Speaker 2: helmet is a really good thing to have if they
Speaker 2: are shooting rubber rounds or shooting grenades. Directly at people.
Speaker 2: It is not, however, the only thing you need or
Speaker 2: the only thing that could provide safety. It's not ideal
Speaker 2: to have like a bump helmet or a bike helmet
Speaker 2: as opposed to a ballistic helmet, or like a bike
Speaker 2: helmet as opposed to a bump helmet. These are different things.
Speaker 2: A bump helmet is higher rated than like a standard
Speaker 2: bike helmet. A motorcycle helmet is also pretty robust.
Speaker 1: A bumper.
Speaker 2: A motorcycle helmet is better to have if you're being
Speaker 2: shot at with non lethal or less than lethal whatever
Speaker 2: you want to call them munitions, but all of those,
Speaker 2: any kind of helmet is better than your bare skull
Speaker 2: when police are shooting into a craft. So where something
Speaker 2: even if it's a ten dollars fucking bicycle helmet, if
Speaker 2: that's all you can get where that, don't go into
Speaker 2: a situation like this without a helmet. Bring something like
Speaker 2: a fucking camelback or whatever that you can have on
Speaker 2: your back and drink water from regularly, as well as
Speaker 2: bottles of water that you can use to wash out
Speaker 2: tear gas. Only use water to wash out tear gas water.
Speaker 2: And if you catch people being like milk works. Tell
Speaker 2: them you are wrong. Don't use milk.
Speaker 7: No friends, corets, lovers, your family. He can be the
Speaker 7: generation that stops using milk for tear gas.
Speaker 4: You can do this.
Speaker 1: You don't need to make cheese and your eyes only.
Speaker 5: You can set people. For the love of God, it
Speaker 5: doesn't work anytime.
Speaker 2: And if somebody starts talking about well, no, you know,
Speaker 2: actually it's just like if you eat something spicy and milk.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no, none of that's right. I'm
Speaker 1: telling you none of that's right.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: Some people do use something called law, which is like
Speaker 2: a mixture of I think it's an an answer or
Speaker 2: something like that.
Speaker 1: I think exactly what's in law, And yeah, that can
Speaker 1: be effective, but don't use it. Just use water. Use water.
Speaker 1: Use water. Just use water.
Speaker 2: If you are if you have some degree of like
Speaker 2: professional medical treatment, and you decide law is better, do
Speaker 2: whatever you want doctor right, but like, don't you listening,
Speaker 2: use water right?
Speaker 5: Just water. Look melt ice into water.
Speaker 1: Clean water.
Speaker 2: It's idea from something like guess anyway whatever. When it
Speaker 2: comes to mace, water eventually will get mace out. Mace
Speaker 2: is way different from tear gas. Tear gas. With water,
Speaker 2: you can be back to functional in a couple of minutes, right,
Speaker 2: if you wash your eyes out. I've been tear gas
Speaker 2: like two hundred fucking times, and I'll tell you it
Speaker 2: never takes that long to get your eyes functional again.
Speaker 5: Assuming.
Speaker 2: The other thing you want to note is that if
Speaker 2: you're going into a tear gas situation, if you wear contacts,
Speaker 2: don't glasses only, right, because you do not want to
Speaker 2: have mace or tear gas in your eyes. When you
Speaker 2: have contacts, it can cause permanent debilitating damage.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: They may need to surgically remove your fucking contacts where
Speaker 2: you're goddamn glasses. You can, and I have worn contacts
Speaker 2: with like a full face respirator or a full face
Speaker 2: gas mask. But there are still dangers there, including that
Speaker 2: if you are wearing a full face mask or a
Speaker 2: gas mask or something like that and the police catch you,
Speaker 2: they will pull that up and mace you underneath your mask.
Speaker 2: It's happened to a bunch of people I know. And
Speaker 2: if you're wearing contacts under there, you can get in
Speaker 2: very bed shape. There are easy ways to make glasses
Speaker 2: holders if you've got a spare pair of lenses inside
Speaker 2: a mask like that. Anyway, the other thing to note
Speaker 2: is that mace is not the same as tear gas.
Speaker 2: Mace fucks you up for much longer. You are going
Speaker 2: to be out of commission for at least probably twenty
Speaker 2: to thirty minutes with mace. In the best case scenario,
Speaker 2: enough water will eventually wash out mace, right, It will
Speaker 2: eventually deal with it, but not on any kind of
Speaker 2: short timeframe. Right, It's going to take you a while
Speaker 2: to get enough mace out of your eyes that way. Ideally,
Speaker 2: you get to a place where you have access to
Speaker 2: something like a faucet or a hose, and you use
Speaker 2: dawn dish soap is the best thing to use. That's
Speaker 2: going to remove the surface thing. There's a better thing
Speaker 2: for this, but I'm talking about if you don't have
Speaker 2: access to specialized things or like baby shampoo, right, something
Speaker 2: like that. Ideally, dish shop next would be something like
Speaker 2: baby shampoo, right, with a good amount of water. The
Speaker 2: very best thing for mace is a specific wipe that's
Speaker 2: made to be used for this, and this does also
Speaker 2: help for tear gas. It's called pseudocon Wipes sud e
Speaker 2: coo inn. You can buy it off of Amazon right now.
Speaker 2: They're not expensive. And carry a couple of packs. You
Speaker 2: generally want to like take what's in there in two
Speaker 2: different pieces and use one to kind of wipe away
Speaker 2: from your eyes, and then the other to clean your
Speaker 2: face up afterwards, once you've removed the bulk of the material.
Speaker 1: Pseudocon wipes are the best thing to use with mace. Anyway.
Speaker 1: That's a quick and.
Speaker 2: Dirty guide to what kind of stuff is useful for this.
Speaker 2: And as always, water water, water, Yeah.
Speaker 7: And the one last thing I want to add is
Speaker 7: that there is there is one more scourge that you
Speaker 7: can end in this generation. Stop getting kettled on bridges.
Speaker 7: I swear to God. Don't cross the bridge. Do not
Speaker 7: don't be like my action is we're going to hold
Speaker 7: a bridge. Every single time there's one of these goddamn protests,
Speaker 7: like ten thousand people get a rest on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Speaker 7: It happens every time. The thing with bridges is that
Speaker 7: if the police cut off both ends, you are now
Speaker 7: stuck on the bridge. Don't go onto the bridge, simply
Speaker 7: do not. Like I'm not even gonna give normally the
Speaker 7: speech that I give here is about like, oh well,
Speaker 7: if you've here on a bridge, make sure you can
Speaker 7: hold one side of it. No, no, no, no, no
Speaker 7: fuck that. No bridges. Don't go on bridges. We can
Speaker 7: stop as a society. We have the technology. Don't get
Speaker 7: don't get kettled on a bridge. It is so fucking
Speaker 7: easy you simply don't go on the bridge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, and that's that's the episode for today. Everybody
Speaker 2: use water, don't get kettled on bridges.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Good luck everyone, Good luck, Hi everyone, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. It's me James today and I am lucky
Speaker 1: to be joined again by make We're going to talk
Speaker 1: today about and just like right off the top, this
Speaker 1: is going to be a sad episode. Not much good
Speaker 1: happens to migrants in Libya. A lot of bad stuff happens.
Speaker 1: And if you someone who prefers not to hear about
Speaker 1: like violence or sexual violence or incarceration, there's probably some
Speaker 1: other stuff I'm overlooking, this might not be the episode
Speaker 1: for you, and that's fine. But Mick, how you doing. Hi, James,
Speaker 1: I'm goods I'm good. That was an uplifting intro, wasn't it.
Speaker 1: I felt like that was a really positive way to
Speaker 1: start the show.
Speaker 4: Yes, definitely, definitely, but probably very warranted because it's not
Speaker 4: going to be a fun episode. Like there's torture, there's imprisonments,
Speaker 4: there's some slave months. It's horrible. Yeah, Libya is probably
Speaker 4: one of the worst countries in the world to be
Speaker 4: a migrant at the moment, if not the the worst. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean you have a whole industry, a whole part
Speaker 1: of their economy that is predicated on enslaving migrants lately
Speaker 1: selling people and all of the other kinds of violence
Speaker 1: that come from that.
Speaker 4: Exactly. There's I think over twenty or thirty different facilities
Speaker 4: with varying degrees of government involvement in those facilities, and
Speaker 4: it's very hard to pinpoint exactly like where does the
Speaker 4: government and where does this human trafficking business begin? Right,
Speaker 4: It's similar to like early mid Soviet Union, where there
Speaker 4: was so much organized crime happening within the government that
Speaker 4: it was also impossible to distinguish like where one began
Speaker 4: and where the other ended. Yeah, like which was which
Speaker 4: exactly it was under breast nev I think, but don't
Speaker 4: don't quote me on that.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so give us a lad only. Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, maybe I guess if people have been not listening,
Speaker 1: why are we talking about Libya.
Speaker 4: Well, on May eighth, that was reported that the Trump
Speaker 4: administration was considering deporting migrants to this North African country,
Speaker 4: which is a new low. Like the bar is buried
Speaker 4: and these motherfuckers just grabbed a shovel. I don't think
Speaker 4: it's possible to exaggerate just how cruel this would be
Speaker 4: if it were to happen. As I said earlier, Libya
Speaker 4: is probably the worst country in the world to be
Speaker 4: a migrant at the moment. And to illustrate that, I'm
Speaker 4: going to briefly quote from this twenty twenty two the
Speaker 4: International article Men, women and children returned to Libya returned
Speaker 4: in this case meaning that they tried to cross the
Speaker 4: Mediterranean and were picked up by the Libyan coast guards.
Speaker 4: Returned to Libya face arbitrary detention, torture, cruel and inhumane
Speaker 4: detention conditions, rape and sexual violence, extortion, forced labor, and
Speaker 4: unlawful killings. Instead of addressing this human rights crisis, the
Speaker 4: Libyan Government of National Unity now called the GMU, continues
Speaker 4: to facilitate further abuses and trench impunity, as illustrated by
Speaker 4: its recent appointment of Muhammad al Koha as Director of
Speaker 4: the Department for Combating Illegal Migration, which we will be
Speaker 4: referring to as the DCIM from now on to make
Speaker 4: that entire list. Somehow worse, there has been extensive documentation
Speaker 4: from human rights groups that strongly suggest that the DCIM
Speaker 4: works together with non governmental militias, making the latter responsible
Speaker 4: for at least six unofficial detention centers, although it is
Speaker 4: reasonable to assume that there might be more.
Speaker 1: So reporting out of Libya is hard to understate it. Yes,
Speaker 1: Sally Hayden has an exlent book called My Fourth Time
Speaker 1: We Drown that like, one of the things I like
Speaker 1: about it is it explains like her journalistic process, and
Speaker 1: it's people who are detained in places where they can't
Speaker 1: get out, clubbing together to get one message out on
Speaker 1: the one phone that one person smuggled in in part
Speaker 1: right lake because someone had the battery, someone had the
Speaker 1: screen or whatever, and someone else had a simcard and
Speaker 1: like that way could they could get a message out.
Speaker 1: But it's everything that we hear about. We can assume
Speaker 1: that there is probably a lot more of it happening
Speaker 1: that we haven't heard about, or at least some more
Speaker 1: of it happening that we haven't heard about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the worst part about this is that it's knowing
Speaker 4: that it's probably worse and it's probably more extensive than
Speaker 4: we know, because Yeah, as you said, Libya is a
Speaker 4: hard country to do this kind of reporting, and I
Speaker 4: am assuming that it's not very safe for a journalists
Speaker 4: to just go there and go talk to people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And like at the end of the day, you're
Speaker 1: not just as I'm sure you'll explain, You're not just
Speaker 1: fucking with the Libyan government. You're fucking with the European
Speaker 1: Union is absolutely complicit in this. They ain't coming to
Speaker 1: save you. We'll get to that how work. The EU
Speaker 1: is complicted in both funding and in actions. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: let's first get this onto the proper context. We're going
Speaker 1: to dive a bit into the history of Libya because
Speaker 1: that played a major part in how this situation is
Speaker 1: right now. So we'll start by talking about the former
Speaker 1: dictator Muamar Kadaffi. He took control of Libya through a
Speaker 1: military coudetta and ruled it from nineteen sixty nine up
Speaker 1: until he faced mob justice in the Libyan Civil War
Speaker 1: in twenty eleven. He is or was accused of human
Speaker 1: rights violations and cracking down heart on dis scent and opposition.
Speaker 1: Initially was on the list of states which sponsored terrorism,
Speaker 1: but from two thousand and four onwards he slowly began
Speaker 1: to rekindle ties with a number of countries, with one
Speaker 1: of the main champions for rehabilitation being Italy, the former
Speaker 1: colonial power that had occupied Libya. So to no one's
Speaker 1: surprised we're bringing in colonial here now, James, you get
Speaker 1: three guesses as to what one of the cooperations was
Speaker 1: between Libya and Italy. Well, I could get many things. Ray,
Speaker 1: there's some stories about good Affi and Berlusconi, but we
Speaker 1: won't talk about those. Was it preventing migrants crossing the
Speaker 1: Mediterranean Sea?
Speaker 4: Yes, that is true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, something the Italians loved to do.
Speaker 4: It was happening back then as well. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 4: really weird relationship between Italy and Libya. That's also kind
Speaker 4: of fascinating. But then we're going to get all the
Speaker 4: way off topic if we dive into that.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, somewhere between two thousand and four and two thousand
Speaker 4: and five, Libya was supplied with money and equipment to
Speaker 4: help stem the flow of illegal migration coming from Africa.
Speaker 4: Kadaffi himself said in twenty ten that this was to
Speaker 4: prevent the laws of European cultural identity to a new
Speaker 4: Black Europa, after Libya was paid fifty million euro for
Speaker 4: this purpose that same year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, based anti colonial. Yes, I'm sure there's a
Speaker 1: good aff he did nothing wrong movement that exists on
Speaker 1: some corner of Reddit that I haven't oh got that
Speaker 1: plummeted into yet. But yeah, this guy was a third.
Speaker 4: I cannot find a stick long enough that I would
Speaker 4: touch that community with, to be honest. That's also something
Speaker 4: that plays in here, and that I think if you
Speaker 4: read a lot of human rights reports you come across it.
Speaker 4: But there's also like a distinct form of racism for
Speaker 4: sub Saharan or like Eastern African people. Definitely, Yeah, that's
Speaker 4: also going to play into this. It's just a smorgas
Speaker 4: board of bad stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean for people who perhaps grew up in the
Speaker 1: United States, you know, for their own received veried education
Speaker 1: in school about African geography and politics, like this can
Speaker 1: be hard to grasp. Right, Like Africa is sometimes perceived
Speaker 1: as a country, not a continent in sort of discourse
Speaker 1: in the United States, and that's again, like it's not
Speaker 1: people's fault, like it's in nature. Our education is just
Speaker 1: failing people. But yeah, if you're not familiar, rarely view
Speaker 1: it's called in North Africa and like great replacement style.
Speaker 1: Racist conspiracies absolutely exist in North Africa about people from
Speaker 1: Sub Saharan Africa, either that the parts of Africa that
Speaker 1: are beneath the Sahara Desert and in the which you
Speaker 1: could find by looking at them that. But yeah, like
Speaker 1: just because this is in Africa, like racist shit is
Speaker 1: absolutely going down.
Speaker 8: No.
Speaker 4: I think it was highlighted a bit when the president
Speaker 4: or Prime Minister of Tunisia was cracking down on migration
Speaker 4: that there was also like a very distinct racism against
Speaker 4: against Sub Saharan Africans.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but it is.
Speaker 1: It's a global thing where it because racist is a
Speaker 1: social construct and it's not like an inherent thing that
Speaker 1: that you You'll hear this a lot. You know, I've
Speaker 1: worked in Hispanijula a lot, right, the island that contains
Speaker 1: hating Dominican Republic, the island which receives millions of dollars
Speaker 1: from the United States to reinforce the border between two
Speaker 1: nations that make it up. You will hear this reference
Speaker 1: to Haitian people as black from Afro Caribbean Dominican people, right,
Speaker 1: And this idea that there's this racial distinction between the two,
Speaker 1: that it's a nature of race, right, it's it's such
Speaker 1: a construct between mobilized to create a power dynamic.
Speaker 4: And that's a whole other topic of discussion because I
Speaker 4: identity and race are so intermingled but also so fluid.
Speaker 4: Yeah that you could talk for hours about it, but
Speaker 4: that's not why we're here. Yeah, a warming up ties
Speaker 4: with Libya as a pragmatic approach from the EU as
Speaker 4: it lies just on the doorstep of fortress Europe, but
Speaker 4: also marked the start of set fortress to start externalizing
Speaker 4: its borders into Africa, slowly working towards keeping migrants and
Speaker 4: refugees from setting food on European soil, which would entitle
Speaker 4: them to apply for asylum. So even that's that that
Speaker 4: step that's encoded in European law, we're trying to like
Speaker 4: circumvent by just making sure that they don't cross the Mediterranean.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: So sometime later, when the civil war began during the
Speaker 4: Art Spring, Yeah, Libyan dissidents got rid of the sex
Speaker 4: best that was more Mar Kadaffi so the world became
Speaker 4: a slightly better place after that. Currently, there are two
Speaker 4: major factions fighting over power in Libya, although there are
Speaker 4: numerous other groups involved. To dive into this would probably
Speaker 4: take up most of the episodes, so I will leave
Speaker 4: that aside. Yeah. The first of the major factions is
Speaker 4: the GNU. The Government of National Unity, led by Prime
Speaker 4: Minister Abdul ahmit de Deba, even fills the north west
Speaker 4: of Libya, including the capital Tripoli. The other faction is
Speaker 4: led by US Libyan National Khalifa Hafta, who commands the
Speaker 4: Libyan National Army or LNA, who expressed loyalty to the
Speaker 4: elected governments and are therefore often referred to as the
Speaker 4: ho R the House of Represented Sentatives. I will try
Speaker 4: to be consistent with these acronyms, but no guarantees. Unsurprisingly,
Speaker 4: after I was mentioned in accusations made in twenty three
Speaker 4: for his militia's treatment of migrants, with some reports indicating
Speaker 4: that they or he may be profiting of the smuggling SAM.
Speaker 4: We pretty much got a warlord over there with an
Speaker 4: army at his disposal who's not disincentivized not treat migrants
Speaker 4: as things for his own profit. Yeah, right, Another fun
Speaker 4: fact that reveals how absolutely fucked up the situation is
Speaker 4: the capture and subsequent release of infamous warlord Osama Ala
Speaker 4: Musti by Italy. Al Masri had outstanding warrants from the
Speaker 4: International Criminal Court due to him having the triply branch
Speaker 4: of detention centers backed by the Special Defense Force, both
Speaker 4: of which are used of atrocities and war crimes during
Speaker 4: the Civil War. He was captured in Turin after a
Speaker 4: soccer match. The ICC requested he be arrested, but they
Speaker 4: too based tribunal declines to approve prove it, after which
Speaker 4: I must relyos for his knies back into Libya Jesus.
Speaker 1: So yeah right, we love our ICC and then not
Speaker 1: following through on it, Yeah right, Like the ICIC does
Speaker 1: not in fact have an army that it can send
Speaker 1: out to people who completely ignore it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a body that doesn't have any power to
Speaker 4: really enforce decisions. I know that the current Dutch Prime
Speaker 4: Minister said of Benjamin Nett and Yahoo that they could
Speaker 4: just ignore the outstanding warrant for his arrest, that Yao
Speaker 4: could just visit the Netherlands, which, like, I don't even
Speaker 4: know what to say about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, this is the nature of what you're
Speaker 1: talking about in an extent, right, like the ICC's rulings,
Speaker 1: and all human rights only exist insofar as they are
Speaker 1: convenient to the powerful states in the world.
Speaker 4: It's very much it rules for d but not for
Speaker 4: me kind of attitude.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I find it extremely disheartening and I feel myself
Speaker 4: growing more cynical because of this world that I grew
Speaker 4: up in and I'm slowly seeing that all the rules
Speaker 4: and all the great things that I was taught in
Speaker 4: school are kind of not rules but more like guidelines. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that only applied to certain people. It's really
Speaker 1: heartbreaking to see. Like I mean, I've heard it a
Speaker 1: lot from people, right, but especially from Burmese people. They
Speaker 1: really educated themselves an international law. When they were going
Speaker 1: out to protest. At first, they talk about the r
Speaker 1: twop like the responsibility to protect, which is it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter to concept in international law that I've allowed someone
Speaker 1: to intervene, and like they thought, this is the international law,
Speaker 1: it's the world law, so someone's going to do it,
Speaker 1: and like no, you know, over the months that they
Speaker 1: were in the streets, over the thousands of deaths that
Speaker 1: they've seen now they've come to realize that that that
Speaker 1: law isn't there to protect them, that there's no one
Speaker 1: who's coming to save them, and that's led to them
Speaker 1: building a very unique and beautiful revolution. But at the
Speaker 1: same time it's costs thousands of innocent lives. It's heartbreaking
Speaker 1: to see their faith being misplaced in this institution. It
Speaker 1: doesn't care about it.
Speaker 4: We can talk very high and mighty about all these
Speaker 4: laws and whether in war or whether but refugees, but
Speaker 4: in the end, very often they just seem worth as
Speaker 4: much as the paper they're written on. Yeah, exactly, It's
Speaker 4: okay to become cynical after that realization. Yeah. So, while
Speaker 4: the conditions for migrants were getting noticeably more horrible in
Speaker 4: the aftermath of the twenty eleven intervention by NATO, it was,
Speaker 4: as we said earlier, by no means the start coulduff
Speaker 4: be very much used migration as leverage to gain concessions
Speaker 4: and standing among European governmental bodies. Exploitation of migrants was
Speaker 4: already reported by Human rights WROTS back in two thousand
Speaker 4: and nine in a similar vein the fact that the
Speaker 4: Libyan Coast Guard routinely picks up migrants in the international
Speaker 4: waters to return them to Libya has also been documented
Speaker 4: as early as two thousand and nine. How Frontecs is
Speaker 4: involved with that will get to that later. These processes
Speaker 4: and dynamics were very much already in play prior to
Speaker 4: Cadulphie meeting his maker. This kidnapping of migrants, because I
Speaker 4: don't think there's a better or a harsher word for it,
Speaker 4: is an explicit violation of international European and Italian law.
Speaker 4: Non reviolment, which is the principle in these laws, means
Speaker 4: that no refugee shall be returned or expelled to a
Speaker 4: territory against their will where their freedoms and life are threatened.
Speaker 4: From January first, twenty nineteen to June thirtieth, twenty twenty,
Speaker 4: Libya received sixty one point six million euros as part
Speaker 4: of the European Union Integrated Border Management Assistance Mission mandate,
Speaker 4: with an explicit focus on establishing state security structures in
Speaker 4: the country. Funding is meant to help stem migration to
Speaker 4: Europe with strengthening the border management, law enforcements and criminal
Speaker 4: justice systems of Libya. Emphasis is placed on disrupting the
Speaker 4: networks that operate the smuggling and trafficking of persons. We
Speaker 4: already discussed. These institutions are directly or indirectly contributing very
Speaker 4: often to the exploitation and enslaverment of refugees. So that's
Speaker 4: sixty one million euros that has indirectly gone through those
Speaker 4: very systems that enslave and torture people. Yeah. So the
Speaker 4: many liberal authorities often have direct links to militias or
Speaker 4: organized crime groups that engage in these practices. Authorities in
Speaker 4: the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior, the Department
Speaker 4: to Combat Irregular Migration, the Libyan Coast Guard, and the
Speaker 4: Special Deterrence Force have all been implicated. It has gotten
Speaker 4: so bad that even the Ministry of Defense employs Coast
Speaker 4: Guard units that are made up of militias who profit
Speaker 4: from these human rights abuses. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Fastical to think that like you could throw some money
Speaker 1: at this problem and not just like more empowered these people.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's even I think when we talked last year
Speaker 4: about this, I think Rose from Migrant mentioned it. But
Speaker 4: the Libyans get paid twice because first they get paid
Speaker 4: to make sure that to return these migrants back to Libya,
Speaker 4: but then they can also get paid for selling them
Speaker 4: into slavery. What do you even say to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's genuinely unfavorable for a lot of
Speaker 1: people than twenty twenty five. People are absolutely being captured
Speaker 1: and sold into slavery. That is occurring.
Speaker 4: Yes, I've read some Human Rights Watch accounts of people
Speaker 4: who were imprisoned for sometimes years and then made to
Speaker 4: work in one way or another. For whoever ran that
Speaker 4: particular detention center and the one that I'm thinking of
Speaker 4: right now, after six years, I think that person was
Speaker 4: able to buy himself away from the authorities than his
Speaker 4: boat was captured within thirty minutes after he got off
Speaker 4: the boat, Libya got back to a different attention center
Speaker 4: where he spent four days, and I think after that
Speaker 4: he got another chance on the boat, and I think
Speaker 4: he was rescued by a volunteer or human rights organizations
Speaker 4: who are also patrolling the sea north of Libya.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we interviewed some of them talking of patrolling the seas.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is an advert for a boat.
Speaker 4: Yes, there will be a frontact at right now for
Speaker 4: all the European listeners.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, all right, we are back.
Speaker 4: So we left off with just briefly mentioning how the
Speaker 4: Libyan state functions as part of this almost an organized
Speaker 4: crime syndicated profits from the abusive innocent people, and this
Speaker 4: is in a way not really surprising. Back in eighty five,
Speaker 4: academic Charles Tilly already argued that the states as a
Speaker 4: form of social organization, it's pretty much indistinguishable from an
Speaker 4: organized crime group. Yeah. I'll make sure that the sources
Speaker 4: in the description below if anyone is interested, But for
Speaker 4: those who don't want to read it, in very short,
Speaker 4: they're both major organizations over which you have very little control,
Speaker 4: and if you don't pay them the taxes or protection
Speaker 4: money that they want, then people will show up to
Speaker 4: break your legs. That's the two sentence explanation of that article. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I like that. After the principle of non refoulment has
Speaker 4: been violated, refugees are brought to detention centers in theory
Speaker 4: under the supervision of the DCIM. In practice, this does
Speaker 4: not hold up. There are no official or verified numbers
Speaker 4: of how many centers there are or how many people
Speaker 4: are even held captive. They are Libyan numbers, just somewhere
Speaker 4: between seventeen to thirty five facilities holding over seven thousand people.
Speaker 4: Human rights groups have questioned these numbers and argued that
Speaker 4: the number is likely between ten twenty thousands people being
Speaker 4: held captive. The reality is that we simply don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 4: we don't know exactly how many facilities there are to
Speaker 4: hold these people, and we don't know how many people
Speaker 4: are in them. Human rights watchers or UN delegates often
Speaker 4: don't get the full picture even if they go there
Speaker 4: to visit and inspect the places. There was one part
Speaker 4: of what I read where they would only be allowed
Speaker 4: during the day, but then at night is when most
Speaker 4: of the horrible stuff happens. Yeah, So still there's very
Speaker 4: much a process of trying to not show what is
Speaker 4: being done there. People in these detention centers are held
Speaker 4: indefinitely and lack any sort of legal processes or procedures
Speaker 4: to determine their status. In fact, according to a twenty
Speaker 4: nineteen RUN report, there is no official procedure to assess
Speaker 4: asylum status in Libya, meaning that in the legal sense,
Speaker 4: these categories absolutely meaningless.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: On top of that, there's also a lack of a
Speaker 4: process for exiting entertainment, so that that's an entire procedure
Speaker 4: that is just done at the whim of whoever happens
Speaker 4: to control like that particular facility.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that could be someone who has just like
Speaker 1: seized it by arms from whoever controlled it last, right, exactly.
Speaker 4: There's sometimes facilities are abandoned and they can become official.
Speaker 4: There's also been reports of the government rating like unofficial centers,
Speaker 4: but then recapturing those people and put them in official centers.
Speaker 1: Great, that'll make it better.
Speaker 4: It would be funny if it wasn't so fucking horrible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's bleak.
Speaker 4: The DCM closed down five centers that had a history
Speaker 4: of human rights violations. This act, however, had little effect
Speaker 4: on holding abuses. Reports of beatings and torture continued as
Speaker 4: some official centers closed by the DCIM quickly became unofficial
Speaker 4: sites reopened and operated militia's. Yeah. For example, the Buisa
Speaker 4: Official Attention Center in Sawiya was ordered to close due
Speaker 4: to reports of sexual abuse taking place. He reopened a
Speaker 4: day later and operated under a new name managed by
Speaker 4: armed groups. DTAEE explanation was seamlessly transferred from official to
Speaker 4: unofficial banners, helping empower militants and criminal actors in the region.
Speaker 4: So we're now going to take a deeper look at
Speaker 4: these centers. I found an amazing article by Nadia aldayon
Speaker 4: Aaron Anfinson and Graham Anfinson in there, and James that
Speaker 4: this Israel the Journal of Human Trafficking, which is an
Speaker 4: actual academic journal that exists.
Speaker 1: Jesus, Yeah, I mean I guess. Yeah. If there's the thing,
Speaker 1: someone has written a PhD di station about it, it
Speaker 1: makes sense.
Speaker 4: I imagine this journal is just one or two articles
Speaker 4: and for the rest it's just pictures of Jeffrey Epstein
Speaker 4: and Andrew Tage, just back to back to back. Because ah, yeah, again,
Speaker 4: would would be funny if it.
Speaker 1: Wasn't so fu Yeah, yeah, I can't. I can't imagine
Speaker 1: working as an editor at the Journal of Human Trafficking
Speaker 1: is a job that like you have that is like
Speaker 1: the like the special Force selection cause of mental health. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you you are facing all the challenges that can
Speaker 1: be thrown in a person.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I'm sure there's like a psychologist like on
Speaker 4: standby at the journal just to make sure like that
Speaker 4: that the people running guitar roll right. Yeah. So these
Speaker 4: academics distinguished between three types of centers, official meaning they
Speaker 4: are run by the state in so far as that
Speaker 4: means anything. Of course, then there are the two unofficial types,
Speaker 4: which I will call semi official and officious. Semi official
Speaker 4: centers are those run partially by state forces in cooperation
Speaker 4: with local groups, militias, or other non state actors. Official
Speaker 4: centers are those run entirely by non state forces. What
Speaker 4: conditions in official centers are air quotes better than the
Speaker 4: latter two. It's by no means a good place to be.
Speaker 4: None of these three categories are exempt from all the
Speaker 4: violence being done to people. All three have been named
Speaker 4: and implicated in abuses and violations. According to the authors,
Speaker 4: there are about twenty one official sites, twelve semi official,
Speaker 4: and twenty two of vicious sides, with one reportedly being
Speaker 4: run by ISIS in Naphalia back in twenty fifteen. Cool
Speaker 4: ISIS had a stronghold in Libya back in the day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And the fact that ISIS might have been involved
Speaker 4: in human trafficking is the least surprising thing here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean they were trafficking people into the Islamic State,
Speaker 1: into their what their so called caliphate, right, Yeah, this.
Speaker 4: Is progressed, and now trafficking people away from it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: this is a small victories. Of all these sites that
Speaker 4: I just mentioned, a remarkable amount is Intriqually, the capital
Speaker 4: of Libya. Sometimes these sites overlap with areas with known
Speaker 4: prostitution rings. The researchers found at least nine such networks,
Speaker 4: with the majority of the sex slaves being from Sub
Speaker 4: Saharan regions to East Africa. Jesus, they are mostly women,
Speaker 4: but it also happens to men. Libya has no laws
Speaker 4: or procedures to criminalize male sex trafficking, while man are
Speaker 4: still the minority. I do think it's worth mentioning. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 4: that is also something that happens and most likely underreported on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's something you'd really struggle, Like the
Speaker 1: nature of masculinity and like its toxicity makes it hard
Speaker 1: for people to come forward to you and say this
Speaker 1: is happening to.
Speaker 4: Me, right exactly, And it makes that that process becomes
Speaker 4: even harder if there is no legal framework to stand.
Speaker 1: On, yeah exactly, there's like there's nothing to say like
Speaker 1: this is that at least you can say what's happening
Speaker 1: to you is wrong. It's perceived as a crime, right, Like,
Speaker 1: if that's not there, it's no like, how can I
Speaker 1: support this person, Right, who do you direct that person to?
Speaker 1: Like exactly anybody who has been trafficked and forced into
Speaker 1: sex work, like, and I've spoken to migrants for whom
Speaker 1: that has been the case. Like, there's a great deal
Speaker 1: of stigma they have to overcome, which they shouldn't have to, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not none of what's happened to them is their choice,
Speaker 1: but it's very difficult for them to talk about it,
Speaker 1: and it's very unlikely for them to really be able
Speaker 1: to get any form of accountability for the people who
Speaker 1: did this to them.
Speaker 4: And that's in.
Speaker 1: Settings outside of Libya, like in Libya, fucking good luck,
Speaker 1: I imagine.
Speaker 4: Like, I think that's just a problem in general, not
Speaker 4: just in Libya. Yeah, it's arguably much worse than Libya.
Speaker 4: But yeah, even in countries that we're much more familiar with,
Speaker 4: this is happening, and it's still very hard to obtain
Speaker 4: the accountability from the perpetrators that any better world would
Speaker 4: be happening. Yeah, So I am now going to quote
Speaker 4: for the article for the next batch of horrors for
Speaker 4: women and girls. Various degrees of sexual violence were commonplace
Speaker 4: facilities that did allow some angio access barred visitations at night,
Speaker 4: which is when many severe abuses occurred. Detention center operators
Speaker 4: performed systemic rape on women and teenage girls on a
Speaker 4: nightly basis. Those that resisted were threatened with death. Others
Speaker 4: were killed by severe sexual assault and rape. Impregnations by
Speaker 4: the detention center of officials also occurred. So yeah, I'm
Speaker 4: going to briefly cite the accounts of someone who has
Speaker 4: been for that. Afni, which is a pseudonym. An eighteen
Speaker 4: year old Somali woman told me very softly that she
Speaker 4: was gang raped by smugglers multiple times near the end
Speaker 4: of the two years she spent confined in a smuggler
Speaker 4: warehouse in Kufra. Released from the warehouse and dispatched the
Speaker 4: Tripoli defend for herself. When she became pregnant, Aufne gave
Speaker 4: birth to a little girl, depending on handouts and help
Speaker 4: from strangers to survive. She told me that when she
Speaker 4: decided to attempt to see Crossing with her daughter, they
Speaker 4: ended up in another nightmarriage smuggler warehouse, where one of
Speaker 4: the smugglers refused to find food for her baby unless
Speaker 4: Afne had sex with him. Her daughter died when she
Speaker 4: was seven months old.
Speaker 5: God oh what a fucking leak thing.
Speaker 4: Yes, the entire article that that quote was frob is
Speaker 4: like rife with crimes like this. Yeah, right, is horrific stuff.
Speaker 4: I'll make sure that it's in the notes below if
Speaker 4: you would want to read that. Yeah, and absolutely no
Speaker 4: shame with people don't want to read this because it
Speaker 4: is fucked Yeah. Yeah, you didn't have to expect yourself
Speaker 4: to all this. You don't have to know every detail
Speaker 4: that is to care about people. I think it's okay
Speaker 4: not to read it. Yeah. Ah, so I want to
Speaker 4: close this particular censure budget brutally driving this point home.
Speaker 4: But like women and teenage girls are being raped to
Speaker 4: death over there on a systemic level. Yeah, and I'm
Speaker 4: fucking disgusted with the fact that the EU is still
Speaker 4: sending money there that is indirectly facilitating this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've mean fucking well, it gets on it's high
Speaker 1: horse about like gender and quality and women's rights and
Speaker 1: such things, and then like unless it's the inconvenient gender
Speaker 1: equality of migrants, right, or that the rights of migrants.
Speaker 4: Which yeah, I need a cigarette now. Fuck.
Speaker 1: It's the fucking worst thing that I deal with talking
Speaker 1: to people about work. It's like people who have survived
Speaker 1: sexual violence, or like people who can reasonably expect to
Speaker 1: encounter it and making this journey because they think that
Speaker 1: it's their only option anyway.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's not that people who undertake this journey
Speaker 4: to a batel of life that they want are unaware
Speaker 4: of the risks.
Speaker 1: It's despite the risks that they're just doing it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the same in the Americas, rightly, people understand that
Speaker 1: they're you know, I mentioned this in my Darien Gap episode,
Speaker 1: but very young children are subject to sexual violence, which
Speaker 1: also sometimes results in their death. Yeah, and like they
Speaker 1: understand that the world is at such an exaggerated level
Speaker 1: of inequality that people are willing to take those risks
Speaker 1: because that's the way the only way that they feel
Speaker 1: they can secure a safe future for their children.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It is a level of courage that I cannot fathom.
Speaker 5: Yeah, me need that.
Speaker 4: The best I could do was just acknowledge that I
Speaker 4: can't fathom it. But that's also like a very bitter
Speaker 4: built to swallow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is like I uh, you know, I attend
Speaker 1: wars for work sometimes, and the women who take on
Speaker 1: the migration, especially when not that men are not subect
Speaker 1: to sexual violence. Say ah, but it's probably more likely
Speaker 1: for women to experience it. The women who take on
Speaker 1: the migration journey alone or with their children. Those people's bravery,
Speaker 1: Like I can't fathom being that brain. I can't imagine
Speaker 1: how one can be that courageous dedicated to one's child.
Speaker 1: And we talked in our podcast recently about Primrose who
Speaker 1: came with her daughter, Like that's someone I'm still like
Speaker 1: just in awe of, you know, like you don't see
Speaker 1: that kind of courage and dedication and just like ability
Speaker 1: to push through things that are horrific with this goal
Speaker 1: in mind of reaching the United States, Like it's and
Speaker 1: it continues to be something that I struggled to find
Speaker 1: words to express obviously, but it's really something.
Speaker 4: I want to say something, but just speechless, Yeah much
Speaker 4: to say, you know who else should be speechless?
Speaker 1: Is it the products and services to support this podcast?
Speaker 4: I sure hope. So it's just two minutes of silence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hopefully it'll just be a little moment for quiet
Speaker 1: contemplation for all of Yeah. There, all right, we're back.
Speaker 1: We've we've had a glass of water, and we're going
Speaker 1: to keep doing the podcast anyway.
Speaker 4: Yes, rehydrates a bit. Yeah. Yeah, so in terms of
Speaker 4: like explicit accounts, that was it. Okay, Yeah, so if
Speaker 4: someone had to skip over that part, that part of
Speaker 4: the episode should be done. You can start listening again. So,
Speaker 4: as of this recording, They're Missing Migrants Project who tracks
Speaker 4: migrant depths and those who become missing. Between our quotes,
Speaker 4: approximately thirty two thousand people are either dead or missing
Speaker 4: and presumed death in the Mediterranean that I have been
Speaker 4: confirmed Jesus. The overwhelming majority of these people drowned while
Speaker 4: attempting the crossing. Two five hundred and eighty two of
Speaker 4: these cases were registered in twenty twenty four. Last year,
Speaker 4: roughly seventy thousand people attempted the crossing, according to statistics
Speaker 4: from the European Commission. This may not appear as a
Speaker 4: lot of deaths compared to the crossings, but this figure
Speaker 4: does not take into account deaths on the journey towards
Speaker 4: the crossing. I was not able to verify how the
Speaker 4: number of seventy thousand was made up, as the EU
Speaker 4: website I got it from is a collection of data
Speaker 4: from different countries and agencies who register it. What do
Speaker 4: you think is safe to assume and let me emphasize
Speaker 4: assume here is that people captured by Italian multice cypriots
Speaker 4: or Libyan coastal authorities is included in this number, so
Speaker 4: that those are people who've attempted the crossing and then
Speaker 4: are taken back to Libya, possibly undertaking the journey again. Right,
Speaker 4: Because yeah, I know you've stressed this a few times,
Speaker 4: but a number one does not mean that it's just
Speaker 4: a single person. It can be the same person who
Speaker 4: tries to cross multiple times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, people will repeat crossings. I think we reach
Speaker 1: a point where the numbers are not and not that
Speaker 1: every point of these people is a person, right, But like,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be any less pissed off if it was
Speaker 1: fifty thousand, Like.
Speaker 4: After a certain amount, it just becomes a number because
Speaker 4: we just can can't imagine how many people that is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like we shouldn't ever have to conceive a thirty
Speaker 1: two thousand people drowning, right, that it's not a thing
Speaker 1: that in the twenty first century that we should allow
Speaker 1: to happen as a society, and like, yeah, this shit,
Speaker 1: Like you know, I've participated mutilat along the border and
Speaker 1: very familiar with death at the border, but The scale
Speaker 1: of this is unfathomable even to someone who's spent a
Speaker 1: decent amount of time across the migrant trails of the Americas.
Speaker 1: Two thousand and five hundred two deaths in a year, like.
Speaker 4: That's a small village.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4: On the other yearly basis, yeah, it's a decent size
Speaker 4: city if you take that thirty two thousand number.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's like a mid sized music festival of
Speaker 1: people who didn't need to die.
Speaker 4: Yes. I checked the website called Info Migrants, and they
Speaker 4: estimate that the Libyan Coast Guard alone has returned again.
Speaker 4: Air quotes around twenty one thousand migrants are caught during
Speaker 4: a crossing attempt, So the vast majority of these people
Speaker 4: end up back in the detention centers we discussed earlier.
Speaker 4: So that's around one for every three and a half
Speaker 4: people being captured.
Speaker 5: Jesus.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. There was at some point a video making
Speaker 4: the rounds, and it was this African woman on a boat,
Speaker 4: filmed with like a mobile phone, and she was just
Speaker 4: crying and she's just saying like, Hey, if the Libyan
Speaker 4: Coast God shows up, I'm jumping overboard. No way am
Speaker 4: I going back there?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've seen that.
Speaker 4: That is one of those statements that I will immediately believe.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people have self immolated in those detention centers like
Speaker 1: said is dead, misery and their desire for the world
Speaker 1: to see them. I guess I can understand why someone
Speaker 1: would just rather stop being so.
Speaker 4: The little calculation I just made that leaves us with
Speaker 4: forty nine thousand people making the crossing, of which eighty
Speaker 4: two diets, resulting in forty six thousand, four hundred people
Speaker 4: entering Europe through the Libyan roots. Again, these are approximations.
Speaker 4: More exact numbers will never know. Yeah. I tried to
Speaker 4: track money and expenditures a tiny bit to see how
Speaker 4: the EU is dealing with this. It's not one of
Speaker 4: my strong suits. I want to be upfront with that.
Speaker 4: I was able to find that between twenty twenty and
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three, THEEO granted at least one hundred and
Speaker 4: five million euro under the European Integrated Border Management Assistance Mission.
Speaker 4: This is money that is directly going to Libya for
Speaker 4: assistance in managing our border. This number does not include
Speaker 4: money directly or indirectly given to Libya from individual member
Speaker 4: states or from the budget of the Euse Border Agency FRONTACS.
Speaker 4: The latter has seen an absolute massive increase in their budgets. Yeah,
Speaker 4: from around two hundred and fifty billion in twenty sixteen
Speaker 4: to over eight hundred and forty billion in twenty twenty three. God.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a vast increase.
Speaker 4: Yes. And what's relatively recently been happening is that rather
Speaker 4: than have their own vessels in the sea, they are
Speaker 4: using air reconnaissance in the form of drones or other
Speaker 4: airborne vehicles spot spot boat boats or thingies with migrants,
Speaker 4: and then they give that information to the Libyan Coast
Speaker 4: Guard they can pick them up right. And this is
Speaker 4: where the eu IS, I would say, directly complicit in
Speaker 4: like the abuse that that that's happening in Libya.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
Speaker 4: Because we know what it is likely to certainly going
Speaker 4: to happen to the people that are picked up by
Speaker 4: the Libyan Coast Guard.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you're saying, like Helebin coasted ALcom here pick
Speaker 1: up these people, you know what's going to happen to
Speaker 1: those people. Again, it's not good. And they keep doing
Speaker 1: it despite it being more than a decade of evidence
Speaker 1: at this point abusive migrants.
Speaker 4: Italy, in particular, as the country receives a lot of
Speaker 4: migrants from Mediterranean crossings, is keen on helping Libya in
Speaker 4: terms of training, material and funding. Additional agreements between the
Speaker 4: two countries shut another uncomfortable light on the dynamic. There
Speaker 4: was first the EU Libya slash Italy Libya Memorandum of
Speaker 4: Understanding signed in twenty seventeen. It saw an enhanced enhancement
Speaker 4: of military insecurity related to trying to prevent migrants from
Speaker 4: making a crossing advertently or inadvertently trying to make Libya
Speaker 4: their final stop and trap them there under the conditions
Speaker 4: that we just discussed. That agreement is a continuation of
Speaker 4: the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Corporation that was signed
Speaker 4: by Libya and Italy back in twenty eighth which described
Speaker 4: the corporation in detail VISV combating illegal migration from Libya
Speaker 4: to the EU. We also have the Multi Declaration from
Speaker 4: twenty seventeen, which only strengthened unbacked governmental organs within the EU,
Speaker 4: as well as a commitment to further assist Libya in training,
Speaker 4: in providing funding and technical assistance. Those are the main
Speaker 4: purposes of disagreements to prevent people from passing the prestigious
Speaker 4: gates of Fortress Europe, because politically, we'd rather add them
Speaker 4: to the mortar with which those walls are built Jesus.
Speaker 4: And it is these conditions that Washington ghouls thought would
Speaker 4: be a suitable place to send migrants to who do
Speaker 4: not speak the language, know the people have legal representation
Speaker 4: or assumably even have the money to do anything. We've
Speaker 4: barely spoken of the civil war that is still going
Speaker 4: on there, yeah, with like fighting in the capital of
Speaker 4: Troopoli happened like two weeks ago. We haven't spoken about
Speaker 4: any legal or law related issues that these people would
Speaker 4: invariably run into were they to be deported to Libya.
Speaker 4: It's the umpteen for example of colonialism, militarism from states,
Speaker 4: war wandering, and the transfer of problems to another place
Speaker 4: or to another generation. Very much like climate change, actions
Speaker 4: such as these will have immense direct and ripple effect
Speaker 4: that our children, anchorant children will learn the consequences of.
Speaker 4: And the last bit I've added because let's hope that
Speaker 4: no one is going to be sent Olivia from the States,
Speaker 4: but I can very much imagine that those people will
Speaker 4: face the same horrors that they will have to create
Speaker 4: their own little communities just to be able to get by. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I can imagine some people might might run into ISIS
Speaker 4: over there and become radicalized. We could also get like
Speaker 4: small pockets of people who just write a survived but
Speaker 4: are still stuck there and grow resentment. There is no
Speaker 4: real way to estimate what the consequences are going to
Speaker 4: be of deporting people there other than that like the
Speaker 4: cruelty is happening that Washington grules are aiming for.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I think that the point is to hurt these people
Speaker 1: as much as possible in the moment, and then there
Speaker 1: isn't really to a long term thought process beyond that.
Speaker 1: Like I guess I would like to say that people
Speaker 1: were enraged at the thought of the United States sending
Speaker 1: migrants to Libya, and they should be. I'm glad that
Speaker 1: they were, but they should also be in rage at
Speaker 1: the reality of the European Union doing it every single day. Yes,
Speaker 1: way more than twelve people, and like you should care
Speaker 1: about that too, especially if you're in Europe, like you know,
Speaker 1: obviously I am a person from Europe. I think it's easy,
Speaker 1: like for people to get this kind of smug social
Speaker 1: democracy kind of like, oh, look at the Americans, they're
Speaker 1: so fucked up. Not saying things a un fucked up
Speaker 1: here they are, but like the EU is doing some
Speaker 1: fucked up shit to migrants, and like people in Europe
Speaker 1: should be in the streets about that too.
Speaker 4: Definitely, this is just the biggest of all the issues.
Speaker 4: But there's also abuses and human rights violations happening in
Speaker 4: the Balkans for the people who take that crossing. There's
Speaker 4: people who try to cross from a rock quote to Spain. Yeah,
Speaker 4: who also encounter again, not as bad as the things
Speaker 4: we just talked about, but by no means good.
Speaker 1: Yes, definitely shouldn't be happening.
Speaker 4: I don't even want to use words like good or
Speaker 4: bad because like they tend to lose all meaning. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like less bad doesn't necessarily mean good. Yeah, that doesn't,
Speaker 4: it means less worse. And yeah, there are there are
Speaker 4: places to make that crossing that are less worse than Libya.
Speaker 3: But still, yeah, that doesn't mean any of it is desirable, yeah,
Speaker 3: or like that we should accept any of it. No, No,
Speaker 3: people should be fucking mad about all of this.
Speaker 4: And I also I would like to have to go
Speaker 4: back a little bit about what you said about like
Speaker 4: this buck European the social democracy. Yeah, like that's definitely
Speaker 4: an attitude that's not uncommon among Europeans. But then again,
Speaker 4: we very often fail to look into our own backyards. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And also Europe tends to be politically a few years
Speaker 4: behind the US. But we've also seen a rise in
Speaker 4: autocratic regimes like Victor Orbon. Yeah, massive example, Maloney and
Speaker 4: Italy is another one. But also in my own country
Speaker 4: of the Netherlands, they try to bypass parliament in order
Speaker 4: to make an emergency law to make sure that migrants
Speaker 4: wouldn't enter the Netherlands, And as we speak, they're threatening
Speaker 4: to stop the government formation if no stricter measures against
Speaker 4: migrants are being taken.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So it's these little seeds of like autocracy that are
Speaker 4: almost more worrying because it's these little steps that happen
Speaker 4: and before you know it, things are getting worse quick Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like, anyone who pays attention to the US can see
Speaker 1: that the vehicle on which fascism was delivered to us
Speaker 1: is being delivered to us. A better way of saying
Speaker 1: it is anti micro sentiment, right, Like that is how
Speaker 1: this country built the toolkit that is now being used.
Speaker 1: And you know, the rest of the world should pay
Speaker 1: attention to that, I hope. Yeah, we should see it
Speaker 1: as a warning sign, not as a manual. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a good weapon it Yeah, unfortunately it's being used as
Speaker 1: a manual by certain European governments. Yeah, so thank you
Speaker 1: for sharing that traumatic piece, for reporting that. I think
Speaker 1: that's that's rough.
Speaker 4: I would say you're welcome if it was. It's a
Speaker 4: fucking grim to say that at the end of all that. Yeah. No,
Speaker 4: I'm happy that I read a lot and put it together.
Speaker 4: I'm also going to have to find a puppy and
Speaker 4: cuddle the puppy for a few hours. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's all I have for now. Great, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's all I got to Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: I ain't coming. That was a big one.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to It could Happen Here a podcast that
Speaker 2: was originally about the theoretical possibility of mass civil conflict
Speaker 2: and coming militarized authoritarian regime and is now about the
Speaker 2: reality of that happening to different communities at different speeds
Speaker 2: all around the country, and right now Los Angeles is
Speaker 2: where we're focused.
Speaker 5: On.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as you've probably heard from the news or from
Speaker 2: the episode we did earlier this week, Los Angeles, Californi
Speaker 2: has been in a state of what the president declared insurrection,
Speaker 2: where most people would declare fairly small protests based on
Speaker 2: the overall size of the city, topping out at maybe
Speaker 2: four to six thousand people on Sunday, and the President
Speaker 2: is called a National Guard, He's called in the Marines,
Speaker 2: and we called in James Stout to head up to
Speaker 2: Los Angeles and look at the scene.
Speaker 1: James, that's right, Yeah, the alternative to the United States
Speaker 1: Marine Corps. Yeah, so I've just got back from LA
Speaker 1: I was there on Monday night, obviously covering the protests.
Speaker 1: I got there mid morning, I guess. But at that
Speaker 1: point the SEIU were having a rally. Yeah. The rally
Speaker 1: was for the release of David Huerta, who was released
Speaker 1: on bail. I believe after that, not while the rally
Speaker 1: was going on, and from there, like I basically sort
Speaker 1: of started walking around downtown LA. I guess there was
Speaker 1: this really weird kind of phenomenon where you'd like go
Speaker 1: down to a place and you'd see one hundred people
Speaker 1: shouting cops, Feds, troops or some combination of the three. Right,
Speaker 1: pretty often around the Federal building, it's weird. At the
Speaker 1: front entrance, like where the entrance was, you had like
Speaker 1: a initial presence of the front line with National Guard
Speaker 1: with maybe it looked like it was maybe like NCOs
Speaker 1: or something. You had loaded service weapons, and then other
Speaker 1: soldiers had shields in it and like old school wooden
Speaker 1: button sticks, right, just just a long long ass stick.
Speaker 1: Basically around the other side you had LAPD at the
Speaker 1: front and National Guard behind them, and then across the
Speaker 1: street from that you had California Highway Patrol and their
Speaker 1: riot squad. And then in another location I think it
Speaker 1: was at City Hall, you had l a Sheriff's so
Speaker 1: like literally every agency that can claim any jurisdiction. Right,
Speaker 1: there was also a DHSRPF FPS like to literally every
Speaker 1: every federal and local agency that could send cops sent cops.
Speaker 5: It wouldn't surprise.
Speaker 1: Me to hear that there were more than a thousand cops,
Speaker 1: like maybe it was hundreds, But it was hard to
Speaker 1: get a handle on because every street you went down,
Speaker 1: every corner you turned, you ran into another wall of cops.
Speaker 1: Right with ten or fifteen cars behind them. They were
Speaker 1: constantly driving around until you know, I stayed until about
Speaker 1: two in the morning, and it's protest obviously, like as
Speaker 1: I'll explain later, kind of escalated, I guess, and as
Speaker 1: police violence escalated. In the evening, you'd see these convoys
Speaker 1: of cop cars just hauling ass through downtown periodically every
Speaker 1: hour or so, like running lights and sirens, like a
Speaker 1: dozen or so cop cars just booking it through downtown. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's very hard to get a sense of like
Speaker 1: who they are, what they were doing. They closed all
Speaker 1: the freeway entrances and exits, which like I took the
Speaker 1: I took the train up trying to be a mass
Speaker 1: transit enjoyer, and it made it a fucking nightmare to
Speaker 1: get anywhere, right, Yeah, that makes sense, Like anyone who
Speaker 1: lives or works in downtown LA will have experienced this already,
Speaker 1: but like it. And then throughout the fuck in the evening, right,
Speaker 1: you've got people coming up to you being like, hey,
Speaker 1: I live in little Tokyo. I can't get back because
Speaker 1: there's a wall of cops and they keep throwing tear gas.
Speaker 1: Relates any suggestions, Yeah, I can't get home. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: and unfortunately, like you know, not much we can suggest.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, because it's southern California,
Speaker 1: you know, the United States, really people who can't afford
Speaker 1: a place to live or sleeping on the street, and
Speaker 1: they're getting tas too, and they're getting flashbag too. I
Speaker 1: remember like we were up by LAPDHQ at one point
Speaker 1: and I seen this guy sleeping on a bench and
Speaker 1: the cops were pushing up the street and I was
Speaker 1: just trying to sort of take a position where I
Speaker 1: could take a photograph, you know, when I saw him sleeping,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, should I wait, wake this guy?
Speaker 1: You know, I don't want him to get a nasty
Speaker 1: surprise and wake up to a wall of robocops. And
Speaker 1: at that point the cops opened up with whatever they
Speaker 1: were shooting that time, forty milimeter, thirty seven milimeter. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Most of what I've hearded is like a mix of
Speaker 2: pepper balls and yeah forty milimeter yeah, yeah, grenades and
Speaker 2: rubber rounds.
Speaker 1: Some foam, Yeah, some foam. I found some Safari Land
Speaker 1: thirty seven milimeter foam casings on the ground. Oh nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And yeah, mostly what it was, you know, LPD have
Speaker 1: those green forty milimeters launchers with the eotex on top,
Speaker 1: and that was what yeah, looks down the barrel of
Speaker 1: a few times. And so if the evening went on right,
Speaker 1: you'd get larger groups and they become like, you know,
Speaker 1: more vocal, I guess in their protesting. At one point,
Speaker 1: people having like a street dance party. Occasionally people would
Speaker 1: would throw a firework or set off a firework, and
Speaker 1: then sporadically and like without really any clear kind of signal,
Speaker 1: at some point clearly the whole area was declared a
Speaker 1: lawful assembly. I'm guessing it's very hard to actually hear
Speaker 1: when they're saying stuff on the l rad unless it's
Speaker 1: directly like pointed at you. But I heard some signed
Speaker 1: kind of ol rat had an awful as MBI announcement
Speaker 1: at some point. And Yeah, Periodically you'd come around a
Speaker 1: three corner and be like one hundred hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: two hundred people protesting right, and then the cops would
Speaker 1: toss a flashbang or a tear gas, loose off a
Speaker 1: few rounds, push thirty yards and then stop and then
Speaker 1: do that again ten fifteen, twenty thirty minutes later, and
Speaker 1: they keep doing that, and then they push people back
Speaker 1: past these various buildings which had cops like stationed in place,
Speaker 1: like on the parapet of the building or on the
Speaker 1: courtyard outside, who would then also fire at them. So
Speaker 1: the protest never really got a chance to centralize. People
Speaker 1: didn't really get a chance to centralize in one place.
Speaker 1: And you know, like to have a sense of how
Speaker 1: many numbers of protesters there were was hard because every
Speaker 1: torny you turned, there were more people and there were
Speaker 1: more cops. So like it was a bit broken apart.
Speaker 1: And I think that was the goal of the policing
Speaker 1: operation right to flood the city, was cops to shut
Speaker 1: it all down, to make get hard to get there, yep,
Speaker 1: make it hard to gather there.
Speaker 2: I still don't get the sense. And this is what
Speaker 2: it sounds like from what you've said that most of
Speaker 2: what is being done effectively is not the National Guard
Speaker 2: and certainly not the Marines.
Speaker 1: It's the federal and local police.
Speaker 2: And their game plan here is if they assuming things
Speaker 2: calmed out in Los Angeles, which is probably the safe
Speaker 2: bet right now, every time they get over a certain
Speaker 2: threshold of protesters a couple of hundred one thousand or
Speaker 2: so in a city, you know, do the same thing, right,
Speaker 2: Like deploy the military national or federalized the national Guard,
Speaker 2: get them out there, right, like that's that's where they're headed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so, Like I don't know if LA
Speaker 1: will back down, to be clear, Like LA's a city
Speaker 1: of what like like four million people.
Speaker 2: And eighteen nineteen million in the greater Los Angeles metro area.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like it's uh, I know right, Like I had
Speaker 1: these I had good conversations with a lot of people
Speaker 1: who are out there protesting. Want to go you to
Speaker 1: ad Like I said, we were really well were by everyone,
Speaker 1: which was nice. Like it wasn't the same crowd as
Speaker 1: folks I've seen in twenty twenty, Like no one was
Speaker 1: in black block, right of course, and then it was
Speaker 1: very young people and like a number of them approached
Speaker 1: I was for a time, I was with Charles McBride
Speaker 1: and like some other oh yeah yeah, colleagues and friends
Speaker 1: like people I've known for years. Right, we cover the
Speaker 1: same kind of shit, And people would come up to
Speaker 1: us and just be like, hey, it's good that you
Speaker 1: guys are here, thank you for staying here. After we
Speaker 1: got fucking tear guests, Like people should understand that was
Speaker 1: happening like the unprompted people would would come and say
Speaker 1: thank you, which was nice, you know, and like we
Speaker 1: didn't really face any any hostility for being there. But
Speaker 1: people when I spoke to them, like there was a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of people I spoke to were
Speaker 1: very young, and they would say that they were the
Speaker 1: citizen kid of parents who either were you know, like
Speaker 1: permanent residents or visa holders or you know, they're very
Speaker 1: I'm sure some of them had undocumented parents. I can't
Speaker 1: remember speaking to anyone who said that, but I'm sure
Speaker 1: that given the numbers of people and the number of
Speaker 1: times I heard like, I'm the citizen child, so I
Speaker 1: should be here showing up for my family and my community. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. Yeah, And like it's gonna be hard
Speaker 1: to back those people down because they were fucking angry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a real palpable sense of like fuck you would look
Speaker 1: very present throughout. People were also afraid, Like it's not
Speaker 1: people who are necessarily used to this, right, And like
Speaker 1: you said, the police response is an overwhelming use of violence, right, indiscriminately.
Speaker 2: Shooting it people from what what's the what's the furthest
Speaker 2: distance you were seeing them fire it people from.
Speaker 1: I mean I probably saw them taking one hundred meter shots,
Speaker 1: I'm guessing.
Speaker 5: Which is very long range for this sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean so at one point when we've got
Speaker 1: pushed back past the LAPDHQ there, they had the whole
Speaker 1: sort of front face of it, and they led off
Speaker 1: a bunch of shots towards myself and some others. I
Speaker 1: just sort of got down behind some cover there and
Speaker 1: started filming. And then there was a group of young
Speaker 1: people who were in one of those kind of classic
Speaker 1: LA three corner open quad more things. Yeah. So they're
Speaker 1: basically in a U shaped container right with only one
Speaker 1: way in and one way out, and right there's glass
Speaker 1: stores around it like that, you know, there's all the
Speaker 1: shopping bits people go shopping, and there's pillars in the middle,
Speaker 1: and the cops are just unloading from a distance of
Speaker 1: maybe one hundred meters from labd HQ. I think into
Speaker 1: these people who are effectively like in a like fish
Speaker 1: in a barrel right there, They're in a container where
Speaker 1: they is the only way out is the direction the
Speaker 1: cops are shooting from. There was a small outlet on
Speaker 1: the other side, which eventually they were able to take.
Speaker 1: That meant they had to cross across like a four
Speaker 1: lane road while being shot at by the cops, and
Speaker 1: the cops just kept shooting at them there, like it
Speaker 1: wasn't like they shot a couple of times that they
Speaker 1: clearly shot, reloaded, shot, reloaded, And I was filming from
Speaker 1: the other side, but you could see these projectiles whacking
Speaker 1: out like reinforced glass in the front of these business
Speaker 1: at head height, not breaking the glass and falling on
Speaker 1: the ground, punching a hole straight through. You know, they
Speaker 1: get coming with serious force even at that distance. And
Speaker 1: like those people weren't presenting a throat twenty one right,
Speaker 1: like like they had retreated into that building after the
Speaker 1: cops shot their first volley and the cubs just kept
Speaker 1: shooting at them. I saw a lot of that throughout
Speaker 1: the night, Like it didn't seem like, you know, anyone
Speaker 1: was like, Okay, now is the time for you guys
Speaker 1: to fire, you know, like they just just sporadic pot
Speaker 1: shots throughout the evening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we're gonna continue talking about what's going on
Speaker 2: in Los Angeles and what we think is going to
Speaker 2: happen next.
Speaker 1: But first, here's some ads. Fuck and we're back.
Speaker 2: So if you read like the manuals these people are
Speaker 2: supposed to follow how they're supposed to utilize the riot
Speaker 2: control weapons that they use. There's a couple of things
Speaker 2: that you see. One of them is that there's supposed
Speaker 2: to be like a bladder of escalation before which they
Speaker 2: start utilizing force at range. And the other is that
Speaker 2: there's certain ways they're supposed to use these munitions, like,
Speaker 2: for example, you're not supposed to shoot people with rubber bullets.
Speaker 2: You're supposed to bounce them off of the ground and
Speaker 2: into people, because otherwise they're not really less than lethal. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we're seeing a lot of cases of people who've had
Speaker 2: at least several that I can count, I think three
Speaker 2: of people having surgically removed different like rubber and foam rounds,
Speaker 2: and it doesn't look like they're abiding by kind of
Speaker 2: any of the rules by which, per their own documentation,
Speaker 2: they're supposed to practice.
Speaker 5: Right, I mean, yeah, that's what I saw.
Speaker 1: Some of them even have ear techsic on their launches,
Speaker 1: which I don't know why you'd want an ear take
Speaker 1: if you were skipping it off the ground.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's a different rounds they're using, but like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the overwhelming. What I saw was just like zero to
Speaker 1: one hundred, right, Like they'd push, they'd throw a TAA
Speaker 1: gass or a flash bang and then you just hear
Speaker 1: like pop pop pop pop pop pop pop. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of them unloaded, and like raising the forty
Speaker 1: milimeters launcher to the shoulder and pointing it to someone
Speaker 1: two feet away, Like like I saw a lot of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we'd be going down the streets trying to
Speaker 1: find a different angle, trying to find where we could
Speaker 1: stand and do our jobs as press right and come
Speaker 1: around the corner and just just get forty milimeters pointed
Speaker 1: at you. I didn't see any skipping shit off the ground. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did see businesses getting their windows punched out by
Speaker 1: things that the police were shooting at people like yeah,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure we're one not getting blamed on protesters. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly right. I Mean I saw CNN last night was
Speaker 1: picking up fucking phone but on rounds and being like
Speaker 1: these are what they're throwing at the cops, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: it just remarkable. I mean I did see L A.
Speaker 4: S D.
Speaker 1: And National Guard with rifles with magazines in the maguel
Speaker 1: and you know they had a round chamber.
Speaker 5: Doesn't matter, does it. No, you're a second away from
Speaker 5: chambering around, right exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the IDF carries with an empty chamber and it
Speaker 1: hasn't stopped them killing a whole lot of.
Speaker 5: People, has it.
Speaker 1: The presence of lethal force was closer than I've seen before.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Look, I'm familiar with seeing overwatch at these things. Right,
Speaker 1: someone would what you would colloquially referred to as a
Speaker 1: sniper on a rooftop. But it's not overwatching if you're
Speaker 1: just in the back of a pickup truck with an
Speaker 1: M four right, look at it, an unmagnified optic, like
Speaker 1: you're not You're not over watching shit, you just have
Speaker 1: lethal force right there. And I saw that a number
Speaker 1: of times, right from the National Guard and then la
Speaker 1: SD they did the whole l rad like go home.
Speaker 1: It's been declared an an awful assembly thing. But then
Speaker 1: there wasn't that kind of scaled use of force that,
Speaker 1: like you say, it is supposed to be there. There
Speaker 1: wasn't really much in way of like we're going to
Speaker 1: start shooting now, and like, of course that means that
Speaker 1: if you're an unhoused person, if you've arrived at if
Speaker 1: you're if you're a local person just trying to get home,
Speaker 1: it's very possible you can just walk past and get
Speaker 1: tear guest. Like at one point, right they were opening up,
Speaker 1: and like I'd been looking for a place for use
Speaker 1: of bathroom for a while because fucking southern California, right,
Speaker 1: like there are no public bathrooms.
Speaker 5: Yes, which is you know, increasingly every major city.
Speaker 1: He was an issue.
Speaker 2: People got, people get arrested by the fence for like
Speaker 2: being on federal property in Portland. Great when like there
Speaker 2: was really nowhere else to go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah exactly, and like some some kindly local guy
Speaker 1: invited us into his building and asked that, you know,
Speaker 1: let us use the bathroom. But yeah, then we stepped
Speaker 1: out and suddenly we're like confronted by cops again. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, I could have been someone who was there
Speaker 1: just going to have to get a size of pizza.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The force was like sporadic and unpredictable throughout the evening.
Speaker 1: And then as were these convoys of vehicles that would
Speaker 1: just come hauling as through downtown right obviously not you know,
Speaker 1: stopping at red lights, et cetera.
Speaker 4: It was weird.
Speaker 1: Sometimes a green light would happen. So the cars would
Speaker 1: start going like and then this cop convoy would come
Speaker 1: and some of them would turn right, and some of
Speaker 1: them would assume the cars would stop and go straight on.
Speaker 1: And so you had the situation where the cops were
Speaker 1: nearly hitting each other and it just like it seemed
Speaker 1: utterly chaotic and I don't know what they were doing
Speaker 1: other than driving around a high speed for fun. Once
Speaker 1: they did manage to kettle some groups of people right
Speaker 1: like they uh again, folks maybe who haven't been at
Speaker 1: these events before will not be familiar with the way
Speaker 1: these things work. But like the police would move in
Speaker 1: from both sides and then suddenly you're like, oh shit,
Speaker 1: there's nowhere to go. And then I did didn't put
Speaker 1: up in a school bus to take presumably to detain
Speaker 1: those people and take them to process them. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the tactics were like, I mean, it's their cops. Is
Speaker 1: what you expect that you know, we've both been doing
Speaker 1: this for a while. You expect them to use those
Speaker 1: weapons in the way they could inflict the most damage
Speaker 1: and harm to people. And unfortunately, like that does seem
Speaker 1: to be happening in Yeah, well, in terms of where
Speaker 1: things are right now. You know, Gavin Newsom is trying
Speaker 1: to thread the needle.
Speaker 2: It looks like between letting the LAPD do whatever they
Speaker 2: and he to be fair, I don't think he has
Speaker 2: any issue with people getting fucked up with right nussions
Speaker 2: what to do, while also not seeding responsibility for security
Speaker 2: of his state to the federal government, which has been
Speaker 2: an interesting line for him to walk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean his stance seems to be like, the
Speaker 1: LAPD can fuck up these kids, just fine, we don't
Speaker 1: need your help.
Speaker 2: Yes, which I mean they literally can, Like I will say, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's not incorrect, right, I'm not talking at a moral level.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying, like, yes, the LAPED has sufficient force
Speaker 2: for the protests that have been that have existed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the LAPD then the first Nights who
Speaker 1: are caught off God, I think right.
Speaker 2: And so was Ice, And there was a lot of
Speaker 2: debate about because, like you know, LAPED not coming in
Speaker 2: initially to support ICE when they got surrounded, like and
Speaker 2: that's those are the kind of things you get when
Speaker 2: the authorities are taken off balance. But if the numbers
Speaker 2: don't keep increasing, you know, and they have to increase
Speaker 2: pretty exponentially as they move in, you know, federal agents
Speaker 2: in the National Guard and mobilize the whole police force
Speaker 2: in a.
Speaker 1: City like LA.
Speaker 2: Then this situation becomes basically impossible for protesters to regain
Speaker 2: the initiative. And I don't know if i'd say it's
Speaker 2: impossible right now, but unless there's some sort of like
Speaker 2: massive sea changes, what's happening that does seem kind of
Speaker 2: like where things are going to go. And to be clear,
Speaker 2: here we're talking about primarily Compton Paramount some protests, and
Speaker 2: then downtown Los Angeles some protests. There's a handful of
Speaker 2: city blocks and one of the largest metro areas in
Speaker 2: the entire country. This is not Los Angeles all collapsed.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not like the rights to could after after
Speaker 1: ruddy king right, right, right, not not even a little
Speaker 1: bit yeah yet right, like yeah, I mean people are
Speaker 1: pissed off obviously, like and maybe they're you know, will
Speaker 1: you'll get that sort of thing you had in Portland,
Speaker 1: right where more people came as the protest continued, and
Speaker 1: as more and more FEDS turned up, Like there were
Speaker 1: people who might not have showed up at first, just
Speaker 1: being like upset at the presence of Feds in their city.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but yeah, it seems like right now
Speaker 1: that their move is to flood the city. I mean,
Speaker 1: crazy volumes of cops shouting all the exits on the
Speaker 1: one ten today. Yeah, National Guard, Like the National Guard
Speaker 1: folks were mostly around the Federal building from what I saw,
Speaker 1: but like just a huge volume of cubs and no
Speaker 1: particular plan other than a vast number of police. And
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, massive detentions, massive use of riot munitions,
Speaker 1: massive use of violence to dissuade protest. But then I've
Speaker 1: seen like obviously it's interesting, right, like, and I'm sure
Speaker 1: you've experienced this, Robert, Like you can be like nose
Speaker 1: to the to the grindstone in a conflict zone or
Speaker 1: at a protest and other clue what's happening, and I
Speaker 1: have to go on a Twitter or a blue Sky
Speaker 1: to work out what the fuck's going on?
Speaker 2: Right, you can tell kind of what's happening in front
Speaker 2: of you, and even then that you sometimes see something
Speaker 2: or you're looking left and the thing happens on the right,
Speaker 2: and you get three different stories about what happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, and so like you know, you know, we
Speaker 1: found out David Twitter had been released when me I
Speaker 1: sent a message saying that, like, right, and then likewise,
Speaker 1: folks for finding out that they are protests in other
Speaker 1: areas of the country, which you know is always I think,
Speaker 1: gives a little morale boost. Yeah, so like there's a chance.
Speaker 1: I mean I'm seeing more and more I sort of
Speaker 1: big protest in New York tonight. They can't deploy the
Speaker 1: Marines everywhere. I mean, right there, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of marines, but not that many.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 1: It's in one sense, like and I know that this
Speaker 1: is maybe a strange opinion or stance or what have you,
Speaker 1: but like, in a sense, it gives me hope to
Speaker 1: see these things like at a protest or you know,
Speaker 1: like a big action like that. Like I always feel
Speaker 1: kind of very cared for and in a strange way
Speaker 1: because like the only thing that matters is taking care
Speaker 1: of each other, right, and trying trying not to get hurt,
Speaker 1: and then for folks who are in the street to
Speaker 1: try and remain there, right, And like it's quite a
Speaker 1: like you have this kind of disaster community, right, the
Speaker 1: same thing that you sometimes find in conflict zones or
Speaker 1: after natural disasters, and like, right, It's always beautiful to
Speaker 1: see that, right, Like, you know, I'm vegan and I
Speaker 1: could not find any fucking vegan food for a while,
Speaker 1: and like people were bringing me snacks and I thought
Speaker 1: that was really sweet, and like, you know, I saw
Speaker 1: people taking care of strangers when they got tear gass,
Speaker 1: or taking care of strangers when they get shot, or
Speaker 1: like just folks who have bought snacks and like wanted
Speaker 1: to give them to one house people who were there, right,
Speaker 1: So all that stuff is just a reminder that like
Speaker 1: you know, like actually, you know, if you were consuming
Speaker 1: this through the fucking New York Times, right, you'd think
Speaker 1: that people were looting and burning the city. And I
Speaker 1: idn't see anyone to steal shit. I did see people
Speaker 1: take care of one another. Yeah, and that's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1: And you know, maybe people need to be in the
Speaker 1: streets to find one another right now, because you know,
Speaker 1: every every year people it gets harder to go outside,
Speaker 1: easier to stay on the internet, right, people get more adomized. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like it was cool to see like young Mexican folks,
Speaker 1: young Salvadorean folks, ateml and you know, people have different
Speaker 1: extractions who are now Americans and in addition obviously to
Speaker 1: their I think identities and backgrounds showing up and then
Speaker 1: like young black folks showing up with them and being like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like fuck the police, and like it was
Speaker 1: cool to see maybe folks who are a little bit
Speaker 1: more liberal, like I definitely had folks who are like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're not here for the riot. We're just here for
Speaker 1: the peaceful protest in so much as you know, and
Speaker 1: no one wants to get shot in the face with
Speaker 1: a forty millimeter, right, no one. No one's there to no,
Speaker 1: absolutely not. And so it's cool to see those people
Speaker 1: making those connections. And we need to make those connections now, right,
Speaker 1: We need to talk to people and talk to each other.
Speaker 1: I didn't see people beefing with each other. I didn't
Speaker 1: really see the like optics police, right, if you were again,
Speaker 1: if you were consuming this on the fucking blue sky,
Speaker 1: which can be intolerably libs sometimes like seeing people being like,
Speaker 1: you know, because I personally disagree with the optics of
Speaker 1: this one person's decision, the whole protest is therefore flawed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the whole protest as fuck, And let's just let I
Speaker 1: steal their fucking children, Like, yeah, people letting people be
Speaker 1: and deal with the consequences their own actions instead of
Speaker 1: being condescending.
Speaker 2: Now, and I mean I'm looking at Twitter right now
Speaker 2: where half of the comments are about someone who drove
Speaker 2: through a crowd in LA and people either this is
Speaker 2: what happens when America gets fed up? Or what other
Speaker 2: option did he have? You know, you're getting a mix
Speaker 2: of that sort of thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, shit, are people okay? Like I'm not.
Speaker 1: Aware of any like serious injuries fatalities, certainly, but yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah that was the other weird thing, like vehicles throughout
Speaker 1: that means LA everyone's driving all the time, but there
Speaker 1: were vehicles like constantly just moving through yep. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: it's LA rights with people coming out to do their
Speaker 1: donuts and stuff. But like it is a risk, like
Speaker 1: if someone we've shared a car bomb, brother, but yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, we sure did. I've seen a few car bombs.
Speaker 1: It always freaks me out. We need a big crowd
Speaker 1: like that, and then you've got these cars around like
Speaker 1: the potential for vehicular violence. Yeah, it's not great. Yeah again, right,
Speaker 1: we have the quote unquote public safety forces deployed in
Speaker 1: massive numbers, and no one's no one's stopping that.
Speaker 2: No, And you know, also just a note to people,
Speaker 2: the only realistic way to stop cars in this situation
Speaker 2: is with a barrier made of other cars. Right is
Speaker 2: you block off the route of march with vehicles. There's
Speaker 2: no other realistic tool at your disposal as somebody who's
Speaker 2: part of a protest to stop a full ass vehicle.
Speaker 2: We're gonna talk a little bit more with a couple
Speaker 2: of updates from the ground and then close out.
Speaker 1: But first here's our last bit of ads.
Speaker 7: Oh go not for good. No, they're gonna be go
Speaker 7: not not.
Speaker 4: Not do the same.
Speaker 9: Your your baby's gonna be taken away.
Speaker 8: That's not how that's.
Speaker 7: Hide there.
Speaker 1: So we're back in James.
Speaker 2: While you were leaving, the Mayor of Los Angeles declared
Speaker 2: a curfew in place from eight pm to six a m.
Speaker 2: For the one ten to the west, I five to
Speaker 2: the east, out, one ten to south, I five and
Speaker 2: one ten to north. This is from the public safety
Speaker 2: alert texted out to people in Los Angeles. So people
Speaker 2: are allowed to travel to and from work, to seek
Speaker 2: or to give emergency care ems. People are exempt. No
Speaker 2: one else is exempt as far as I'm aware. But yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's the situation. So part of why Mayor Karen
Speaker 2: Bass is issue at curfew is that it gives the
Speaker 2: police extra kind of freedom to take people into custody,
Speaker 2: right yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, credential media are exempt. Yeah, that's what I was told.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people too, and from work. Credential media, emergency and
Speaker 2: medical personnel law enforcement are the limited exemptions. So that's
Speaker 2: what we've got going on right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you are at their working as a journalists,
Speaker 1: like it's important to carry your press pass right oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll stop you from getting shot with impact munitions because
Speaker 1: they've done that to a lot of people. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And like you know, I had a large blue press
Speaker 1: badge on my play carrier like I always do, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not doesn't make you bulletproof. Yeah, there's a curfew tonight, which,
Speaker 1: like you say, just gives them the means to use
Speaker 1: more coercive force and to charge people more harshly. They'll
Speaker 1: continue doing that. Helicopter shit, right, they had probably four
Speaker 1: or five helicopters.
Speaker 2: They really love putting them out in LA and especially
Speaker 2: now that they got the military. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Man, it had a real kind of blade run of
Speaker 1: vibe to be in this dark city at night with
Speaker 1: these helicopter circling spotlighting people from above, and like little
Speaker 1: fires happening across the city and then occasional clouds of
Speaker 1: like spicy air floating towards you. I have seen since
Speaker 1: speculation that they were using some kind of other chemical
Speaker 1: irritant instead of tear gas. I think that the most
Speaker 1: likely explanation is just they were using tear gas that
Speaker 1: was older.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it tastes different when it's older. The shit the
Speaker 2: FEDS US is often different from the shit state or
Speaker 2: local police use, like yeah, you know, you get different
Speaker 2: sort of mixes, but I'm not aware, like it's I'm
Speaker 2: certain it's just tear gas, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I think it's just a bit different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, different variants in ages of ta gas and sometimes
Speaker 1: they've take on different appearances too. And they weren't really
Speaker 1: fogging the tar gas, not that I saw. They were
Speaker 1: just tossing tossing out the grenades. You didn't get that
Speaker 1: like wall of tear gas that you guys.
Speaker 5: Are familiar with in Portland.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it took on like the
Speaker 1: protest athetic, Like I didn't see as many people with
Speaker 1: half masks or hard hats or goggles, any of that stuff.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, and in one sense, people it's great
Speaker 1: to see people coming out and like engaging their right
Speaker 1: to protest. Yeah, and coming from where they are as
Speaker 1: they are showing up to show out for something, leaving
Speaker 1: work or whatever.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it makes me worried for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like you know, I'm they're around the block a
Speaker 1: few times, and I'm worried that people are going to
Speaker 1: get fucked up.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, it's curfew tonight. It's curfew tonight. There's still
Speaker 2: marine numbers are still at around seven hundred. There's about
Speaker 2: four thousand National Guard troops, so the number of military
Speaker 2: deployed significantly outnumbers demonstrators at this point. Mayor care and
Speaker 2: Bass has stated that or or Sorry. The Pentagon has
Speaker 2: stated it's costing about one hundred and thirty four million
Speaker 2: dollars this deployment. So jesus man, Yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 2: like I'd say, it's it's not a pointless escalation. The
Speaker 2: point of the escalation is that they want to keep
Speaker 2: using the military, right, Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and to sort of establish a precedent that domestic
Speaker 1: unrest could be dealt with by the military, which, to
Speaker 1: be clear, like by my reading, is completely in contradiction
Speaker 1: of the Constitution. Yeah, but a lot of things that
Speaker 1: are in constitution of the Constitution happened, especially with policing
Speaker 1: all the fucking time, right, Like, yeah, like it is
Speaker 1: important not to normalize this again, Like you don't have
Speaker 1: to be like a blue head Antifa to be like
Speaker 1: this is fucked up. And I think I definitely spoke
Speaker 1: to a few people, like folks who have come out
Speaker 1: of church and stuff, just like, yeah, we had they
Speaker 1: had sent the marines here, so we just came on
Speaker 1: down because that's not okay, that's good to see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And those are conversations that people who are invested in
Speaker 1: not living in a country where your first memorizs don't
Speaker 1: matter anymore because you can get shot by an eighteen
Speaker 1: year old marine who hasn't had the time to really
Speaker 1: morally and ethically consider that decision. Yeah, Like it's important
Speaker 1: to have those talks with people now because like it
Speaker 1: is very concerning. Yeah, you know, you and I have
Speaker 1: have attended a few civil wars. I don't want to
Speaker 1: be like this country spinning towards civil wars that you know,
Speaker 1: don't think we have a long long way from that.
Speaker 2: I mean, when the President stands in front of a
Speaker 2: bunch of enlisted men at Fort Bragg and talks about
Speaker 2: how they're using the military to restore order to an
Speaker 2: American city that's been invaded, there's no longer an argument
Speaker 2: that those comparisons are an escalation or exaggeration, right, like hyperbolic,
Speaker 2: like yeah, like we're in the shit right now, folks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and like show me a thing that Asad wouldn't have
Speaker 2: said today, right, right, right. And what you don't have
Speaker 2: is an actual insurrection going on. What you don't have
Speaker 2: is anyone actually fighting the government. You have people who
Speaker 2: are like angry and yelling and some folks who throw
Speaker 2: through rocks. You do not have a militant uprising against
Speaker 2: federal power. They're just kind of acting like it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like if you have an insurrection in this country. This
Speaker 2: country has a shit ton of guns. You don't know
Speaker 2: if there's an insurrection because people will be using them.
Speaker 2: Like that's not happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's young people in the street waving flags and
Speaker 1: shouting and like saying fuck the police, is a constitutionally
Speaker 1: protected right in this country. Like, yes, it is. You
Speaker 1: should not get hurt for exercising your first amendment, right right, Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: Like I'm I'm proud of all those people who showed up.
Speaker 5: I'm proud of them for taking care of each other.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I hope that they stay there, and I
Speaker 1: hope that they you know, as they stay there, they
Speaker 1: become more astute.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they learn some stuff.
Speaker 1: I saw a lot of running two hundred yards away
Speaker 1: from the cops in a very straight line state, down
Speaker 1: a straight street. Yeah, Like, which is not the move
Speaker 1: right that you want to be.
Speaker 5: You want to be. I'm up, he tiese me, I'm down.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Serpentine, serpentine, you do the worm, That's that's how you
Speaker 1: get him.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There is some polling out early polling.
Speaker 2: This is from g Elliot Morris, formerly of five point
Speaker 2: thirty eight, but conducted June tenth by you gov. Of
Speaker 2: four thy three hundred and nine adults, do you approve
Speaker 2: a disapprove of deploying National Guard soldiers to the Los
Speaker 2: Angeles area to respond to protests over the federal government's
Speaker 2: immigration enforcement Thirty eight percent of food approve, forty five
Speaker 2: percent disapprove, and nineteen percent are not sure. Do you
Speaker 2: approve or disapprove of deploying marines to the Los Angeles area?
Speaker 2: Thirty four percent approve, forty seven percent disapprove, nineteen percent
Speaker 2: not sure. So you know these aren't popular measures, although
Speaker 2: they're also not as unpopular as you would hope.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's not great. I'd like to see you more.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, you've got Tom Cotton doing. Is I
Speaker 1: forgetting to woll stoot you on a wash Post?
Speaker 5: OpEd?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: Send in the troops for real?
Speaker 4: This time?
Speaker 5: Was that? I thought that was the Times?
Speaker 4: Was it the time?
Speaker 1: I think I forget exactly. Yeah, they're somewhat indistinguishable these days,
Speaker 1: quickly in the op ed pages. You're right, robbit, it
Speaker 1: was the Times. No, No, that's a twenty twenty op ed. Oh,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five op ed was in the Wall Street chair.
Speaker 1: He got a new one. Okay, yeah, he wrote twenty twenty, rubbit,
Speaker 1: he wrote send in the troops. In twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: he wrote, send in the troops comma for real for real? Okay?
Speaker 5: Well he got it, yep, yeah, I mean yeah, he
Speaker 5: got what he wanted.
Speaker 1: Well done, Ranger Tom guy who lied about being an
Speaker 1: Army ranger yes, not a ranger, Tom, Yeah, not a
Speaker 1: ranger Tom. Yeah. I mean you see this in the
Speaker 1: UK a lot. I'm very familiar with this kind of
Speaker 1: oh soo doing the pos. Yeah, maybe that's a good
Speaker 1: place for us to end. If you were in the
Speaker 1: US military or the National Guard, if you were someone
Speaker 1: you love is in the military of the National Guard.
Speaker 1: Now it's a good time to read up about bloody Sunday. Yeah,
Speaker 1: happened in Ireland, and now is a good time to
Speaker 1: look at what's currently happening, what has been happening to
Speaker 1: those soldiers, because it took a long time for those
Speaker 1: people to stand trial. And it's not officers who are
Speaker 1: standing trial, right, it's soldiers. It's paratory business case because
Speaker 1: those are always going to be the fingers on the trigger, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so you know, no one, no one knows which
Speaker 1: direction history is moving in. But like things don't feel
Speaker 1: morally right, you know, there were things that the GI
Speaker 1: Rights Hotline. But I think people should be aware what
Speaker 1: happens when countries use their militaries to oppress protest and
Speaker 1: what has happened to some of the soldiers who have
Speaker 1: been ordered to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, look up Bloody Sunday folks. Maybe we'll cover
Speaker 2: that in the not too distant future, because yeah, that's
Speaker 2: just going to get more relevant. Don't listen to you
Speaker 2: too if you can avoid it, but just look it up. Yeah,
Speaker 2: avoid you two. Not the song Sunday, our bloody Sunday.
Speaker 2: But yeah, all right, everybody, Well this has been it
Speaker 2: could happen here. We will be back tomorrow. We'll see
Speaker 2: if Gavin Newsom has been arrested yet. All right, thanks James, Yeah, thanks,
Speaker 2: that's an episode.
Speaker 5: Bye to Live in Die in l A. Hey, this
Speaker 5: is not a game.
Speaker 4: It is smoke bomb blast.
Speaker 9: That was the data Feds king. That was the data
Speaker 9: Feds king. That was the data bets.
Speaker 5: Live in din in l a.
Speaker 7: Why nothing will be the same. It's smoke bomb blast.
Speaker 1: That was the data Feds came.
Speaker 4: That was the data Feds came.
Speaker 10: That was the data fet A Little and Dying in
Speaker 10: la I ain't a song we sang. It's the gang
Speaker 10: banging Traders. We was ready when it came for us.
Speaker 10: Monkey Monkey Piggy, Piggy, immigration cowardpping off the back of
Speaker 10: black bands, out in Paramount, black bagging, family, kidnapping, broad
Speaker 10: daylight stare with us, staring us to fight back, right right.
Speaker 10: He trying to make a shoe sides Black Love, Brown
Speaker 10: Pride won't play when it's time to ride for West
Speaker 10: side East Sides. He trying to send Americans to Foremard prisons.
Speaker 10: You don't think he'll try.
Speaker 1: To put black bodies inside.
Speaker 10: Game time, Homie, gonna meet us on that Lameter. I
Speaker 10: ain't scared of nail Lamiga. We knew the trail we're
Speaker 10: being here. Gonna keep it peace, Bro. They gonna try
Speaker 10: to bait us. It insta gat us. But wait, bro,
Speaker 10: take it to their face, Brody masking in this paper.
Speaker 10: Then we work for the border. We just following with
Speaker 10: all this, but fear overtakes them matches a facade. We
Speaker 10: exercise our rights, they said, National Guard, and one thing's
Speaker 10: for certain. Burned down the regime when the president chooses
Speaker 10: to send the marine and die in la Hey, this
Speaker 10: is not a game.
Speaker 4: It is smoke bomb blast.
Speaker 9: That was the data FEDS king. That was the data
Speaker 9: FEDS king. That was the data FEDS ca live and
Speaker 9: die in la Why, nothing will be the same. It's
Speaker 9: smoke bomb blast. That was the data FEDS cane. That
Speaker 9: was the data FEDS cane. That was the data FEDS came.
Speaker 5: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 5: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 5: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today
Speaker 5: I'm joined by Mia Wong and James Stout. This episode,
Speaker 5: we are covering the week of June four to June eleventh.
Speaker 5: Let's start James with an update on the protests happening
Speaker 5: in LA in response to mass ice raids in the
Speaker 5: Los Angeles area and also around the country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I've been in La. I was up covering it.
Speaker 1: I'm back home now. It's on Wednesday. We did a
Speaker 1: whole episode about this people can listen to. In terms
Speaker 1: of update, I think things were a little bit smaller tonight.
Speaker 1: There were a large number of detentions made late tonight.
Speaker 1: You mean last night? Tuesday night?
Speaker 5: Tuesday night?
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: To summarize, right, the first two nights saw the city.
Speaker 5: Caught off guard.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The weekend was pretty spicy. Yeah, it got pretty well
Speaker 1: that there. A couple of cop cars got destroyed. To
Speaker 1: think some weimos made the ultimate sacrifice. Urrip Weymouth yep Oh.
Speaker 1: I saw them trucking the Weimos out and there was
Speaker 1: not much Weimo left, Like it was the cremaines of
Speaker 1: the Weimo passed me gone, but Notfregan. So by Monday
Speaker 1: morning they had flooded Los Angele.
Speaker 5: It's with police.
Speaker 1: I saw police from LAPD, LASD. I saw police from
Speaker 1: fps DHS, National Guard, California Highway Patrol.
Speaker 4: It's play.
Speaker 1: It's like Pokemon for cops up there, and that resulted
Speaker 1: in them splitting.
Speaker 5: Up protesters, kettling and detaining people.
Speaker 1: On Monday night. Yeah, and they made extremely liberal use
Speaker 1: of impact munitions, chemical lyeritans, et cetera. Fatday Sunday, Monday Tuesday.
Speaker 1: Thousands of impact munitions that you can find casings all
Speaker 1: the DTLA if you just go walk around. I saw
Speaker 1: a lot of like people are tagged up a lot
Speaker 1: of buildings in DTLA. But from what I've seen, I
Speaker 1: don't know. We'll see, right, It's also the week, so
Speaker 1: maybe maybe things will get bigger again over the weekend.
Speaker 5: Yeah, things can get less combative during the week because
Speaker 5: people are busy with work and keeping themselves like fed
Speaker 5: and yeah, handhouse, and then on the weekend things can
Speaker 5: sometimes open back up again.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And also it's worth it's worth noting how these how
Speaker 7: these specific protests are flaring up, which is that like
Speaker 7: these ones are flaring up when Ice like drags people
Speaker 7: out of a place.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is directly in response to ICE kidnapping their names, right.
Speaker 7: And so you know, the next time ICE does a
Speaker 7: bunch of kidnappings of people, there's a chance that it
Speaker 7: will pop off again because people are being like, holy shit,
Speaker 7: don't take my neighbor away.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And the LA protests are already happening in a sequence.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: We had stuff happening in San Diego. We then had
Speaker 5: stuff in Minneapolis. We then had stuff in Chicago. We
Speaker 5: then had the really big flare of which was LA.
Speaker 5: And I think what's interesting right now is that instead
Speaker 5: of having just like nationwide riots like there was in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty, this is more like a sequence that actually
Speaker 5: directly follows the actions of ICE. And in some ways,
Speaker 5: I think this can be harder to combat. If every
Speaker 5: city has the capacity to do what LA has done
Speaker 5: in response to the actions of ICE, that follow the
Speaker 5: actions of ICE, that could be harder to prepare for
Speaker 5: than just the federal government realizing that we have to
Speaker 5: do massive counterinsurgency everywhere, all at the same time, like
Speaker 5: what happened in twenty twenty. If instead this is a
Speaker 5: rolling sequence of protests that happened directly in response to
Speaker 5: ice actions, any city could be next. Instead of just
Speaker 5: trying to prepare for nationwide riots, they have to be
Speaker 5: this more like mobile fluid force. They have to respond
Speaker 5: to different outbursts that happen in different cities at different times.
Speaker 5: And I think the other advantage that this model has
Speaker 5: is that the actual protesters themselves can also iterate on tactics.
Speaker 5: Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every time, you
Speaker 5: can take what happened in a previous city, like a
Speaker 5: week ago, two weeks ago, and iterate on that, iterate
Speaker 5: on what was unsuccessfully, what captured attention, and what was
Speaker 5: able to catch the cops off guard, minimizing mass arrests.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in terms of the state response, just in case
Speaker 1: people have missed it right, two thousand National Guard troops,
Speaker 1: seven hundred United States Marines. The Marines whitly came from
Speaker 1: twenty nine Palms. I know the Corps has like an
Speaker 1: urban warfare school or at least had one there in
Speaker 1: twenty nine Palms. Obviously Camp Pendleton is a bigger base.
Speaker 1: I actually might not be geograph. They're both huge and
Speaker 1: closer to LA, but they sent them from twenty nine
Speaker 1: Palms instead. I didn't see any Marines. They're just supposed
Speaker 1: to be protecting federal assets and not supposed to be
Speaker 1: out there like straight up policing. Obviously, that's, you know, unconstitutional.
Speaker 1: One could make a case it's unconstitutional to be deploying
Speaker 1: them at all in this fashion.
Speaker 5: There are some on the streets now. National Guard is
Speaker 5: actually making arrests on the street. Marines have not as
Speaker 5: of Wednesday, but some of the Marines have been deployed.
Speaker 5: There's upwards of seven hundred who are like in the
Speaker 5: process of being deployed to LA streets right now, out
Speaker 5: of two thousand available troops, some of which are actually
Speaker 5: still receiving training on standard rules of force. So these
Speaker 5: people do not have necessarily like extensive training on police
Speaker 5: crowd control, but are currently brushing up on crowd control tactics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what I saw from National Guard was like it
Speaker 1: seemed to be by rank, although I'm not certain of that.
Speaker 1: Guys with with shields and sticks right, just straight up
Speaker 1: poles as opposed to like truncheons like a T shape
Speaker 1: or an L shape or whatever. And then probably one
Speaker 1: in every five or six had an M four with
Speaker 1: a magazine. That's a gun for people who aren't familiar,
Speaker 1: it's in AAR fifteen and that's obviously live ammunition. So
Speaker 1: like they didn't seem to have any access to like
Speaker 1: less lethals or they didn't bring them. A Y did,
Speaker 1: but I don't know about marines. And obviously we saw
Speaker 1: like police using less lethals. And then LASD also had
Speaker 1: some cops with m pas amongst their formations.
Speaker 5: And this is just about to like really expand outside
Speaker 5: of LA and California amidst anti ICE protests across Texas.
Speaker 5: Governor Greg Abbott just deployed the Texas National Guard. And
Speaker 5: on Tuesday night, I believe MSNBC broke the story that
Speaker 5: ICE is about to send Special Response Team quote unquote
Speaker 5: tactical units to five Democrat controlled areas, namely in New
Speaker 5: York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, and northern Virginia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, SRT is like a swat team if if you're
Speaker 1: not familiar, Like there was a DHSSRT that ended up
Speaker 1: responding in to that South Park protest in San Diego
Speaker 1: that we mentioned last week or the week before.
Speaker 5: As of Wednesday, there's already been protests this week and
Speaker 5: over half US states. This will certainly continue throughout the weekend,
Speaker 5: at least for LA. On Tuesday night, the mayor announced
Speaker 5: an eight pm curfew in downtown Los Angeles. There were
Speaker 5: mass arrests Tuesday night, hundreds of people. I think the
Speaker 5: other advantage that this kind of rolling sequence model that
Speaker 5: we've seen with like San Diego, Minneapolis, Chicago, LA is
Speaker 5: that not only does it give people time to like
Speaker 5: iterate on tactics, but it also gives people a break.
Speaker 5: If anyone who survived twenty twenty, like you know how
Speaker 5: how intense burnout can be from just doing that all
Speaker 5: the time. Yeah, and having the built in brakes where
Speaker 5: you can like recover physically and mentally while iterating on tactics,
Speaker 5: that could be interesting to see.
Speaker 7: I think also this one thing we should notice about this,
Speaker 7: which is that like there's a very clear actual thing
Speaker 7: you're trying to do here, which is stop them from
Speaker 7: taking these people. And even if you fail to immediately
Speaker 7: take someone, like stop them taking someone in the moment.
Speaker 7: Every single like second they're having to do dealing with
Speaker 7: this shit is means that they're not doing it. Yeah,
Speaker 7: so you're you're degrading their capacity. Yeah, exactly. The time
Speaker 7: is like the most valuable asset year. Yeah, and like
Speaker 7: obviously again like the larger goals you want to like expel,
Speaker 7: like you know, like one of the most common things
Speaker 7: I'm hearing from people is just like ice out of
Speaker 7: the city, right, Like, we don't want them to be
Speaker 7: fucking doing these raids, but every every time they're forced
Speaker 7: to like actually face resistance when they're doing a raid
Speaker 7: makes it much much harder for them to do what
Speaker 7: they have to start planning for there to be resistance
Speaker 7: to the rage, which slows them down. And yeah, everything
Speaker 7: you could do to put fucking wrenches into the gears
Speaker 7: until the machine breaks is good. And then there's a
Speaker 7: there's a very clear path from A to B two
Speaker 7: C in a way that they're kind of aren't. Like,
Speaker 7: it doesn't rely on politicians doing stuff. It just relies
Speaker 7: on us stopping them.
Speaker 4: So yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 1: Tak me politicians doing stuff. The city of Glendale did
Speaker 1: cancel its detention contract with Ice, right, so they won't
Speaker 1: be detaining people there. So like a little bit of
Speaker 1: progress there. And Gavin Newsom has said some shit about
Speaker 1: the deployment of the National Guard and California has far
Speaker 1: a court case like news has not done everything in
Speaker 1: his power to stop that. But it's Gavin Newsom. What
Speaker 1: do you expect I'll be back in the al a.
Speaker 1: Things continue there, but it's uh, certainly the biggest protest
Speaker 1: we've seen this time around in the Trump administration. All right,
Speaker 1: let's go and break and come back to discuss more news.
Speaker 1: We are back and unlike people from twelve countries who
Speaker 1: will not be coming back to the United States for
Speaker 1: the foreseeable future because the Trump administration has announced.
Speaker 5: A new travel ban.
Speaker 1: The form of the travel ban is basically, anyone who
Speaker 1: applies for a visa or is in the process of
Speaker 1: applying for a visa currently, if they are from one
Speaker 1: of these twelve countries is unable to obtain a visa
Speaker 1: to the United States. Right the twelve countries, seven have
Speaker 1: partial restrictions, and then the full ban is on Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad,
Speaker 1: the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, eritrere Haiti, Iran, Livia, Somalia,
Speaker 1: Sudan and Yemen, and then Borindi, kuber Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo,
Speaker 1: Turkmenistan and Venezuela have like a higher barrier, right and
Speaker 1: some visas are not available to them. Meanmar is an
Speaker 1: interesting inclusion there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: They looked at two criteria eteems right, because Trump made
Speaker 1: an executive order at the start of his presidency, like
Speaker 1: looking to identify countries for a travel man. The two
Speaker 1: criteria they had were visa overstay percentages and the quote
Speaker 1: unquote not having a competent central authority to cooperate with
Speaker 1: on vetting. Right, So like you can't do a background
Speaker 1: check on someone if their country doesn't have that facility.
Speaker 1: It's a claim, right. I think they got vanmar on
Speaker 1: visa overstay percentages. It's worth noting, right that they use
Speaker 1: percentages and not raw numbers for a reason, because, yeah,
Speaker 1: a certain percentage of Burmese people may overstay their visa.
Speaker 1: I think it's twenty seven point one percent. That amounts
Speaker 1: to five hundred and forty three individuals. If we look
Speaker 1: at for instance, France, these are twenty twenty three numbers,
Speaker 1: about zero point six percent of French people over stay
Speaker 1: their visa. That amounts to nine one hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: two individuals, right, So like a percentage is great, but
Speaker 1: a big percentage of a small thing is still a
Speaker 1: small thing. Yeah, this is how they're attempting to justify
Speaker 1: it though in terms of bulletproofing it through the courts. Obviously,
Speaker 1: they didn't have the best luck with their travel ban
Speaker 1: in the first administration, so using this tactic is one
Speaker 1: that they're hoping will justify it. Will it will stick
Speaker 1: the landing through the courts. I should add that they
Speaker 1: have some exemptions right, existing visa holders who are currently
Speaker 1: within the United States can remain in the United States.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: In practice, lots of these countries only get single entry visas,
Speaker 1: so it might be hard for them to leave and
Speaker 1: come back. But it's sometimes I've heard it reported that
Speaker 1: all these people, like people from these countries can no
Speaker 1: longer come to the United States or be in the
Speaker 1: United States, and that's not true. There are exemptions for
Speaker 1: people who are dual citizens. There are exemptions for adoptive children.
Speaker 1: There are exempts for ethnic and religious minorities in Iran.
Speaker 1: There are exemptions for sports teams because the United States. Well,
Speaker 1: the United States is holding the World Cup and the Olympics, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it would be something of a fascical spectacle if
Speaker 1: you know, nineteen countries were not represented. I mean, the
Speaker 1: Olympic Games is something of a fascical spectacle to begin with,
Speaker 1: one could argue, but yeah, they didn't want that, right,
Speaker 1: they didn't want that like international spectacle. So a professional
Speaker 1: athlete visa is hard to get at the best of times,
Speaker 1: so that is a high bar, but those ones still
Speaker 1: seem to be available. And then there's also exemptions for
Speaker 1: SIV wrote special immigrant visas. These are people who've worked
Speaker 1: closely with the United States. The vast bulk of them
Speaker 1: will be Afghan people, people who worked as interpreters or
Speaker 1: otherwise cooperated with the United States during the twenty years
Speaker 1: the United States was a war in Afghanistan. Again, I've
Speaker 1: seen that mis reported, including by people who really should
Speaker 1: know better. But you know, I'm never not disappointed in
Speaker 1: a lot of people's immigration coverage. This will be challenging court, right,
Speaker 1: but I think they have gone some way to trying
Speaker 1: to make this a bit more bulletproof than they did before.
Speaker 1: And it is concerning that they seem to have a
Speaker 1: better chance. Obviously pretty concerning, especially for us, you know,
Speaker 1: with our extensive reboarding on Burma or Mihanmar, that those
Speaker 1: people can't come here and be safe. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: travel ban in a nutshell, I guess.
Speaker 7: Also, I think it's worth noting so like this is
Speaker 7: just an expanded version. Well, I guess it's like a
Speaker 7: little bit of differences, but it's basically an expanded version
Speaker 7: of the Muslim band from his first term.
Speaker 1: Yeah, with some new countries and I think maybe the
Speaker 1: removal of some countries from previously.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and like it's worth noting that, like in Tromp
Speaker 7: one like that immediately caused the airport protests, which were
Speaker 7: like the first big protests of the administration that were
Speaker 7: extremely effective until people like went home. And this time
Speaker 7: it's basically been a news story because we're so far
Speaker 7: along that the protests have been about like ices dragging
Speaker 7: our neighbors away, and yeah, I just think that's fucking
Speaker 7: bad as shit. And also the airport protests, like we're
Speaker 7: really effective.
Speaker 1: Some of the more effective protests in those years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I am I did see a flyer for an airport protest,
Speaker 1: but I've seen no evidence of one's occurring.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I had heard that there was going to be
Speaker 7: one on Monday, but that it just like didn't happen.
Speaker 7: So I don't know what's going on with that. Yeah,
Speaker 7: but that was a thing that was pretty effective, and
Speaker 7: they also didn't eat the shirt of everyone for most
Speaker 7: of it, which was nice.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well Mia, talking of beats, how about we dropped
Speaker 1: some beats right now with this sick tariff song. Great work, James,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you, jazz rocking jazz bots.
Speaker 7: Sorry, jazz rocking jazz bock. The Donald Trump has apparently,
Speaker 7: according to him, resolved that the trade war with China.
Speaker 7: He's claiming the negotiation one is he's claiming, he's claiming victory,
Speaker 7: mission accomplished. Yeah, the claim that he's making out of
Speaker 7: the out of the London negotiations. And I want to
Speaker 7: point out that I have not heard anything from the
Speaker 7: Chinese side. It's possible there will be soft from the
Speaker 7: Chinese side by the time this episode comes out. It's
Speaker 7: possible this whole deal will have collass by.
Speaker 5: The time this comes out.
Speaker 7: It seems like the deal is that US maintains tariffs
Speaker 7: of fifty five percent, which is what they're at right now,
Speaker 7: China maintains ten percent tariffs, and then China ensures US
Speaker 7: access to rare earth metals, and then the US does.
Speaker 7: Trump was talking about the US not actually doing a
Speaker 7: crackdown on like Chinese international students. So who knows what
Speaker 7: the fuck is going to happen with any of that.
Speaker 7: That is the reporting that's coming out right now.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 7: Quite frankly, I am skeptical this is going to hold.
Speaker 7: I again, like I don't I don't know if like
Speaker 7: in two days when this episode comes out of any
Speaker 7: of this is gonna be true, because again we have
Speaker 7: heard nothing from the Chinese side. It has all been
Speaker 7: from Trump, So who the fuck knows. But yeah, that's
Speaker 7: that that is.
Speaker 5: That is the late of tariff news. This is the
Speaker 5: kind of short one. That's that's what we've got that's exciting.
Speaker 5: That's exciting that we won trade is back. I can
Speaker 5: go back to buying everything I own from Timu, no problem.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I give my usual disclaimer that fifty
Speaker 7: percent tariff on China is like fucking ruinous the global economy,
Speaker 7: et cetera, et cetera. I do genuinely hope that like
Speaker 7: the Chinese international students are getting cracked out on because
Speaker 7: Jesus fucking Christ, those poor kids. All of these policies
Speaker 7: are tied together in this sort of like unhinged like
Speaker 7: American Nationalists project, et cetera, et cetera. They're all connected.
Speaker 7: They hate it and AA really really fun time to
Speaker 7: be a Chinese trans woman in the US.
Speaker 5: WHOA, Okay, it's also fun to enjoy the COVID vaccine
Speaker 5: because we might not get it for much longer. I
Speaker 5: guess I'll do a brief update on an episode I
Speaker 5: did with Cave a few weeks ago. So RFK has
Speaker 5: now dismissed the entirety of the ACIP, the CDC's Vaccine
Speaker 5: Advisory Committee that has just been completely dissolved. This happened
Speaker 5: on Tuesday. That was the big theory that Cave had
Speaker 5: is that if that panel gets dissolved, that that was
Speaker 5: kind of the last line of defense with like reasonable
Speaker 5: people being in charge of COVID vaccine recommendations at the CDC.
Speaker 5: And that has gone. And just a few minutes ago,
Speaker 5: RFK Junior announced the replacements. And i'd have not had
Speaker 5: enough time to look into all these guys, because this
Speaker 5: was literally just thirty minutes ago. But at least half
Speaker 5: of them are at the very least what would be
Speaker 5: considered COVID vaccine skeptic, oh cool, right wing libertarian types,
Speaker 5: people who have been dismissed from their academic positions. Basically,
Speaker 5: it's who you would expect RFK two to submit to
Speaker 5: a vaccine advisory panel. The very least half are like cranks.
Speaker 5: I will try to look into the rest of these
Speaker 5: guys in the future. We should probably do a full
Speaker 5: follow up episode eventually on the new panel. So not
Speaker 5: looking good on the COVID vaccine front.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we also have very bad news from the FCC,
Speaker 7: which instead of like you know, I don't know, Like
Speaker 7: I know, crypto scams are supposed to be the SEC's thing,
Speaker 7: but I feel like the FCC also should have fucking
Speaker 7: things with crypto scams. But instead of instead of going
Speaker 7: after the fucking crypto scams, what they're doing is they're
Speaker 7: gonna hold like meetings basically with what is I'm assuming
Speaker 7: is going to be a bunch of the most unhingedy
Speaker 7: transgrifters and anti trans like hacks, frauds, and violent bigots.
Speaker 5: Notably not trans people. Yeah, yeah, they will be included.
Speaker 5: No for the statements no trans people, no trans people, no, no, No.
Speaker 5: They're looking into ways to do like FCC investigations for
Speaker 5: like deceptive marketing practices for any doctor and also parents
Speaker 5: for some reason, which how the fuck is you got
Speaker 5: heater a parent for defective marketing?
Speaker 7: What the fuck are we doing here? But anyone who
Speaker 7: like gives a child's any kind of trans healthcare?
Speaker 5: I mean, is it specifically trans healthcare or are they
Speaker 5: trying to like specify like surgical procedures, because I've seen
Speaker 5: some like mixed reporting on this.
Speaker 7: It's unclear right now. The wording that I saw was
Speaker 7: so ambiguous that I think it could be anything.
Speaker 5: But I don't know.
Speaker 7: And this is I think one of the things it's
Speaker 7: not clear that they know right now, right Like, it's
Speaker 7: all just really really up in the air. What the
Speaker 7: fuck this is going to turn into or if this
Speaker 7: is even going to turn into anything. We had that
Speaker 7: whole at the beginning of Pride. The FBI was like, hey,
Speaker 7: you can report like doctors doing like trans healthcare here
Speaker 7: to things. Yeah, and some of these have not really
Speaker 7: turned into anything yet. The anti Wolk FBI soliciting tips
Speaker 7: for people providing trends healthcare. Yeah, yeah, so, like I
Speaker 7: don't know, we'll put a pin in that one to
Speaker 7: see if some fucking horrible stuff happens out of the
Speaker 7: out of there. That's you know, one of the next
Speaker 7: gian anti trans things that they're doing, as all of
Speaker 7: the anti immregrant stuff happens, as they fucking make vaccines illegal.
Speaker 5: Like it's so much of the trends dust specifically is
Speaker 5: like just the chilling effect that it's trying to scare
Speaker 5: people away from providing people with the health care that
Speaker 5: they need to live fulfillian lives. And it's working.
Speaker 7: Like there are there are lots of clinics that have
Speaker 7: like fucking stopped and if you if you are one
Speaker 7: of the people at these clinics.
Speaker 5: Fuck you eat shit well. And I think that is
Speaker 5: where people can apply pressure.
Speaker 7: To Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So I was gonna say, yeah,
Speaker 7: it's like there have been protests.
Speaker 5: You're not going to change the mind of the Trump
Speaker 5: administration on this topic at this point, but you can
Speaker 5: apply pressure to people who are feeling like they're too
Speaker 5: they're too scared to actually provide healthcare, and they can
Speaker 5: be reminded that no it is their duty to provide
Speaker 5: people with healthcare.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And and people have successfully gotten clinics to start
Speaker 7: to restart like transalth go for kids by just going
Speaker 7: out and protesting. This is also just like if you're
Speaker 7: I don't know, you're in like a blue city and
Speaker 7: you don't know immigrants, and you're like, I want to
Speaker 7: do a protest, this is the thing you can do.
Speaker 7: You can find there's one in Chicago right now that
Speaker 7: I'm blanking on the name of where there's a bunch
Speaker 7: of protests. Yeah, but like you can find the clinics
Speaker 7: that are refusing to do this and you can go
Speaker 7: fucking protest them, and this can and will work.
Speaker 1: We've spoken on the show before to healthcare workers who
Speaker 1: are like very dedicated to keeping the provision of gender
Speaker 1: affirming care. So like you want to listen to more.
Speaker 4: You can hear that.
Speaker 5: Yah, you can hear how folks are organizing to retect that. Yeah.
Speaker 7: And all of those people are fucking heroes, even if
Speaker 7: they probably won't be remembered as such for a long time,
Speaker 7: but they are. And keep doing it and keep the
Speaker 7: fight up.
Speaker 5: Let's go and break and then return to finish up
Speaker 5: on an exciting piece of news. Hooray. Okay, we are back.
Speaker 5: So as usual, a massive, massive news dropped right after
Speaker 5: we finished recording last week's Executive Disobium, and that is
Speaker 5: the the Elon Musk Donald Trump breakup story got a
Speaker 5: lot more messy. So this is what we're gonna close on,
Speaker 5: possibly one of our last stinky Musk segments.
Speaker 1: But I fucking know it, Jesus Christ, We'll never forget you.
Speaker 7: Eat On.
Speaker 5: Oh uh miya, do you wanna do you wanna to
Speaker 5: start us off here?
Speaker 7: Yeah, let's let's start this off with. Okay, I have
Speaker 7: been seeing this has kind of stopped now that Elon
Speaker 7: has kind of like run crying back the Trump. But
Speaker 7: like we'll see, there was a there was a moment
Speaker 7: where a lot of the like like Matt and Glaciers,
Speaker 7: like a lot of the sort of like reasonable Democrats
Speaker 7: or whatever we're trying to be, like we should try
Speaker 7: to recruit Musk into the coulistion.
Speaker 5: That was a scary moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 7: Want reminds everyone this is the guy who did two
Speaker 7: Nazis saluted the inauguration two two of them. He did
Speaker 7: one and then he did a second one. People have
Speaker 7: forgotten that they also did the second NA, like Census
Speaker 7: administration came into office. He has spent this time destroying
Speaker 7: the federal government. He has spent this time terrorizing like
Speaker 7: government employees, just shutting down fucking important government institutions. Enormous
Speaker 7: numbers of people are going to die because of the
Speaker 7: things that he's done, like the shutting down to USAID
Speaker 7: and particularly like the vaccine programs, the ANTIHAV programs. You know,
Speaker 7: like he's just been doing all of the shift for
Speaker 7: this entire time, right, he has been just systematically looting
Speaker 7: and tearing apart anything in the US federal government that
Speaker 7: even can remotely do anything for a person from again,
Speaker 7: everything from like HIV prevention to like destroying a bunch
Speaker 7: of the apparatus that like figures out what the weather
Speaker 7: is going to be and tells you when storms are coming. Yeah,
Speaker 7: he has been fucking doing that.
Speaker 5: Well, like Mia, the weather is woke. You can't you
Speaker 5: can't forget the woke weather machines.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5: I just had a meeting with the Southeast Alliance where
Speaker 5: we're deciding the weather for the next few weeks.
Speaker 7: Fucking God, make it less hot here.
Speaker 5: It's too fucking hot weather too hot. I know, well,
Speaker 5: we have to raise the temperature. It's all it's all
Speaker 5: part of the plan, large scale political planned, that's right,
Speaker 5: you get it, James, Yeah, the plan more heat, more riots.
Speaker 7: I don't know, that's right, Okay, it's it's also remembering
Speaker 7: that these two were very very close sort of like
Speaker 7: during this election cycle. Right, Trump was just straight up
Speaker 7: going first. Buddy was just I mean, she's just just
Speaker 7: like straight up in Philadelphia, like paying people to vote.
Speaker 5: Through these like raffles. Elon a Celon. Yeah, Elon was
Speaker 5: just like yeah, straight up doing these right.
Speaker 7: Trump just like did a tesla ad.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like he just did a tesla ad.
Speaker 1: They first, buddy has gotta gotta have each other's backs,
Speaker 1: you know, never say that again.
Speaker 7: So there had started to be a little bit of
Speaker 7: tension between them, like as the tariffs are mounted, because
Speaker 7: the tariffs are you know, not good for Elon and
Speaker 7: think things kind of came to a head when Elon
Speaker 7: tried to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and just
Speaker 7: got his ass kicked harder than anyone I've ever seen
Speaker 7: get just absolutely thumped.
Speaker 5: And this is where the policy wonk sector of the
Speaker 5: right was starting to like side eye Elon and question
Speaker 5: his like yeah, yeah, invincibility, right, this this this this
Speaker 5: guy that can come in and like save the Republican Party,
Speaker 5: can secure every future election. That's where that I like
Speaker 5: view of Elon started to really get called into question.
Speaker 5: Maybe this guy is kind of just a one hit wonder.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and and and you can also look at a
Speaker 7: lot of the stuff that was sort of happening here
Speaker 7: in terms of like she is staggeringly unpopular, right, everyone
Speaker 7: fucking hates him, and like the Number Party did a
Speaker 7: really bad job of this. But like just like the
Speaker 7: party's base and the Tesla protests were very effective and
Speaker 7: like negative polarizing opinion of him.
Speaker 5: Negative, people really really dislike him, Like worldwide, everyone hates it.
Speaker 7: She cost right wing parties.
Speaker 8: Elections and countries that like, yeah, he's never been taggering
Speaker 8: staggering like she she may have accidentally saved Germany from
Speaker 8: fascism for like a decade.
Speaker 5: It's very funny, you know, critical support to the to
Speaker 5: the fascist carmaker who saves Germany from fascism.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, and then so okay, so we we've we've
Speaker 7: been coming up to like the end of his appointment
Speaker 7: as like a special What the fuck was the name
Speaker 7: of the term special government employee?
Speaker 5: H special government employe? Oh it was special. I was
Speaker 5: gonna say that.
Speaker 7: Then I was like, it can't be called special government employee.
Speaker 5: We call it age.
Speaker 4: Ski.
Speaker 5: Okay, well, James, you can't say that. No, no, you can't.
Speaker 1: I've been canceled.
Speaker 7: But there was always a question of like what exactly
Speaker 7: his role is going to be going forward once his
Speaker 7: time is a special government employee like ran out, but
Speaker 7: then he leaves with Stephen Miller's wife. So, as we
Speaker 7: reported a previous episode, but the final break came over
Speaker 7: the weekend over the budget, big beautiful budget, and Elon
Speaker 7: has been pissed off at this budget for like a while,
Speaker 7: and over the weekend he finally starts straight up doing
Speaker 7: like kill the budget posting and telling people to like
Speaker 7: call their senators to kill the budget instead of just
Speaker 7: saying it's bad. And this is I think actually an
Speaker 7: important thing to note here, like.
Speaker 5: Like actively campaigning against the budget bill and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: which is essentially Trump's like core policy at this point.
Speaker 5: It's like the to the way to push through a
Speaker 5: whole bunch of the stuff that he can't just do
Speaker 5: himself as president. Yep, is just trojan horse through this
Speaker 5: budget bill. Yeah, and and and this gets too.
Speaker 7: I think something that's like a kind of important split
Speaker 7: in the Republican Party right now about this budget, which
Speaker 7: is that like Musk is a is a budget deficit
Speaker 7: true believer, right, Like yes, he and his guls are
Speaker 7: trying to destroy the federal government because like ideologically they
Speaker 7: don't think it should really exist except for like as
Speaker 7: a tool to hand the money, as a tool to
Speaker 7: like shoot people who they don't like. But he is
Speaker 7: part of this cadra of tech people. And this is
Speaker 7: very very common in these tech circles, and you see
Speaker 7: that in some finance circles of these people who believe
Speaker 7: that the US is about to like enter like the
Speaker 7: super Great Depression because the the amount of the GDP
Speaker 7: being spent on debt payments is too high, and so
Speaker 7: they think if they don't like stop this right now.
Speaker 7: And this is partially why they are trying to like
Speaker 7: crash the economy, because they thought that if you crash
Speaker 7: the economy and you did all this terrift stuff or
Speaker 7: like whatever.
Speaker 5: It would it would decrease the cost of of US borrowing.
Speaker 7: Now that didn't happen, right, The interest rates of the
Speaker 7: bond shot up because everyone was like, holy fuck, these
Speaker 7: like absolute maniacs aren't gonna pay their debt, so you know,
Speaker 7: none of the shit is working. But they are like
Speaker 7: true believers on this yeah right, And this is again,
Speaker 7: this is very very very common in tech circles, like
Speaker 7: these people who like are are really like, oh God,
Speaker 7: the US is gonna die unless we like yeah, like
Speaker 7: unless we start just like destroying the national debt.
Speaker 5: And the whole DOGE idea is built around like terminal
Speaker 5: tech brain and it's it's it's trying to apply the
Speaker 5: logic of these like startups that are kind of scams,
Speaker 5: but trying to apply the logic of startups to an
Speaker 5: entire government. And there was an interview NPR this week
Speaker 5: where they talked to a DOGE employee. Oh yeah, he
Speaker 5: has an ex DOGE employee, and NPR asked about how
Speaker 5: much fraud and abuse they were actually able to find,
Speaker 5: and he said, quote, I did not find the federal
Speaker 5: government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I
Speaker 5: was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for
Speaker 5: opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse, and I do
Speaker 5: believe that there is a lot of waste, there's minimal
Speaker 5: amounts of fraud and abuse to me feels relatively nonexistent.
Speaker 5: And the reason is, I think we have a bias
Speaker 5: as people coming from the tech industry where we worked
Speaker 5: at companies you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies
Speaker 5: that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and
Speaker 5: have lots of people kind of sitting around and doing nothinguote.
Speaker 5: So his idea that the government must be full of
Speaker 5: like fraud and abuse is because that's just how tech
Speaker 5: companies work, and that the government works the same as
Speaker 5: a tech company. Yeah, and I think Elon have views
Speaker 5: this the exact same way. That's why he was doing
Speaker 5: his like Twitter takeover stuff to the government. Yeah, is
Speaker 5: he believed that's how it actually functions, and it doesn't.
Speaker 5: That's not really how the federal gureacracy functions. Like these
Speaker 5: people have just like eaten the fucking kool aid, right,
Speaker 5: Like none of the Republicans actually believed that like the
Speaker 5: US like economy functions like a pocketbook, Like none of
Speaker 5: them believe that you're because it's not true, right, Like
Speaker 5: you don't print your own money, so of course the
Speaker 5: US government doesn't find it like a pocketbook. But like,
Speaker 5: this is the generation of people where like the people
Speaker 5: who are just so absolutely pilled on the ideology have
Speaker 5: taken over. But on the other hand, there is Trump,
Speaker 5: and Trump doesn't give off fuck about any of this, right, Like,
Speaker 5: the faction that Trump here is representing is the faction
Speaker 5: of capitalists who just wants tax cuts. You don't give
Speaker 5: off fuck about like all of this weird tech brain stuff.
Speaker 7: Like they elected Trump with the mandate of handing them
Speaker 7: trillions of dollars in these formuli tax cuts, and that's
Speaker 7: all they can about. And we're getting a giant conflict
Speaker 7: between them because as much as Trump has just sort
Speaker 7: of been like lying about the budget numbers or whatever
Speaker 7: the fuck, if you're one of these actual budget off people,
Speaker 7: you can just look at the budget and go, this
Speaker 7: is going to increase the debt by like two trillion
Speaker 7: dollars or whatever the fuck, right, And it's revealed a
Speaker 7: sort of pre existing source of tension inside of the
Speaker 7: base between the sort of tech people and a lot
Speaker 7: of the rest of sectors are capital which aren't as
Speaker 7: ideologically pilled. So let's get into all of the actual
Speaker 7: shit because it's very funny. So Business Insider put together
Speaker 7: a really good minute by minute timeline if you want
Speaker 7: to do that. I'm not going through this shit minute
Speaker 7: by minute.
Speaker 5: I'm not gonna go through minute by minute.
Speaker 4: I am.
Speaker 5: I am going to go through tweet by tweet. Tweets.
Speaker 5: We have to talk about the tweets. The first time
Speaker 5: I've ever really wanted to say that they're so good. Yeah,
Speaker 5: the first big tweet, and this was, you know, amongst
Speaker 5: Elon crashing out about the budget bill and talking about
Speaker 5: how he's going to cancel certain SpaceX SpaceX projects. But
Speaker 5: the first big tweet from Elon was time to drop
Speaker 5: the really big bomb at real Donald Trump is in
Speaker 5: the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have
Speaker 5: not been made public. Have a nice day, Donald J. Trump.
Speaker 5: Mark this place. In the future, the truth will come out.
Speaker 5: So this is the really big one, as Elon says,
Speaker 5: the really big Bob.
Speaker 7: I actually think this, in the long run could be
Speaker 7: one of the most important aspects of this entire fight,
Speaker 7: because the right is incredibly conspiracy brained. They've all been
Speaker 7: like hyped up on this, like Epstein pill shit, and
Speaker 7: like specifically on like the Trump's gonna release Epstein files
Speaker 7: and show all the Democrats, right, but they've always had
Speaker 7: like the psychological block about talking about the fact that
Speaker 7: like Trump and Epstein are the most connected motherfuckers anyone's
Speaker 7: ever been.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna read this.
Speaker 7: There's a very famous quote from a New York magazine
Speaker 7: article that's like Trump talking to a bunch of people
Speaker 7: at like a meeting. Quote I've known jeff for fifteen years,
Speaker 7: terrific guide, Trump booms from a speakerphone. He's a lot
Speaker 7: of fun to be with. It is even said that
Speaker 7: he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and
Speaker 7: many of them are on the younger side, no doubt
Speaker 7: about it. Jeffrey enjoys his social life so like he
Speaker 7: knew right he was trans ages, Yeah, some two doesn't two,
Speaker 7: Like he's He's on Epstein's fucking.
Speaker 5: Plain like he is, like everyone know exists, right, Like
Speaker 5: everyone except everyone knows this, right, everyone except for like
Speaker 5: the weirdo QAnon right understands this, And some of the
Speaker 5: young on people try to justify this as being like no,
Speaker 5: Trump was like you know, a deep mold, a deep
Speaker 5: plant who got in close with with Epstein, so that
Speaker 5: we could eventually round up and arrest all the Democrat pedophiles. Right,
Speaker 5: that's what they try to justify it. But now that
Speaker 5: that sort of like specific Q and on logic doesn't
Speaker 5: really exist as much on the right anymore. Yeah, Now
Speaker 5: people just like memory hole, especially the right, they just
Speaker 5: memory hole that like Trump and Epstein were best buddies.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and like and and this is the thing, it's
Speaker 7: been impossible. We'll talk about on the right, you just
Speaker 7: can't do it right. Yeah, And suddenly on Musk, who
Speaker 7: is a guy who like is capable of shifting what
Speaker 7: right wing discourse is, It's suddenly like, yeah, this guy's
Speaker 7: a pedophile.
Speaker 5: I want to read this.
Speaker 7: This, this post that Trump made has response to this, right,
Speaker 7: I missed this when this happens. I've only seen this
Speaker 7: in the business inside of reporting, so on truth social
Speaker 7: Trump's response to this was to post it or to
Speaker 7: truth truth.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 7: Of David Shoon, who tweeted this quote. I was hired
Speaker 7: to lead Jeffrey f Stein's defense as his criminal lawyer
Speaker 7: nine days before he died. He sought my advice for
Speaker 7: months before that. I can authoritatively, unequivocally and definitively say
Speaker 7: he has no information to hurt President Trump. I specifically
Speaker 7: asked him.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that sounds legit.
Speaker 7: This is one of the most unhinged posts I have
Speaker 7: ever seen.
Speaker 5: This genuinely, this is this is not a joke.
Speaker 7: If you if you are a fucking poster and you
Speaker 7: you are like, what can my contribution to like the
Speaker 7: future of democracy be? You need to push this shit
Speaker 7: into the unhinged like fucking like the depths of like
Speaker 7: fucking eight chan right like into into like the fucking
Speaker 7: breeding layers of the most unhinged right wing spaces in
Speaker 7: the world. You need to be going in and just
Speaker 7: injecting this shit straight into their fucking brains. You you
Speaker 7: need to be like like just like just just hyping
Speaker 7: them up on the most unhinged conspiracies about Trump being
Speaker 7: like a fucking like being a fucking Epstein guy, because
Speaker 7: this is completely unhinged, Like what do you mean. His
Speaker 7: defense lawyer, who was hired nine days before he died,
Speaker 7: is supposed to have specifically asked him about Trump and
Speaker 7: the and Trump's response to being called a pedophile is
Speaker 7: to go to this guy fucking inject that shit into
Speaker 7: right wing discourse. We know four Chan does this the
Speaker 7: leftist discourse all the time and injects like the worst
Speaker 7: discourses of all time, fucking do it to them.
Speaker 5: It is odd how this was really the first thing
Speaker 5: that breaks through this block. On the right, you had
Speaker 5: Alex Jones like freaking out on Twitter being quote, God
Speaker 5: help us all ye oh yay, Kanye was freaking out.
Speaker 5: Cat Turn was crashing out on the timeline. It was
Speaker 5: really bizarre. Trump's immediate response was saying, quote, I don't
Speaker 5: mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done
Speaker 5: so months ago. This is one of the greatest bills
Speaker 5: ever presented to Congress, and then goes on to talk
Speaker 5: about how great the bill is.
Speaker 7: It's wild.
Speaker 5: You had Ian Miles Chong tweeting about Elon versus the
Speaker 5: president who will win my money is on Elon Trump
Speaker 5: should be impeached and Jadvan should replace him with Elon
Speaker 5: Musk boosting this claim saying yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's pretty good. It says pretty funny.
Speaker 5: Something that's extremely indicative of the current cultural moment that
Speaker 5: we are at is during this spat, when when things
Speaker 5: really broke out on on Twitter and truth social During
Speaker 5: during this spat, both the Vice President of the United
Speaker 5: States and the director of the FBI were on two
Speaker 5: separate podcasts and got to live react to this.
Speaker 1: That's very funny.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, I am going to play the clip. I will
Speaker 5: start with JD. Vance reacting live on a podcast by
Speaker 5: someone named THEO Vaughn.
Speaker 11: Here here's here's my basic reaction to like all this
Speaker 11: stuff is luck. First of all, like absolutely not. Donald
Speaker 11: Trump didn't do anything wrong with Jeffrey Epstein. Like there's
Speaker 11: the guy is whatever the Democrats in the media says
Speaker 11: about him, that's totally bs. Here here's my basic my
Speaker 11: basic read on it. First of all, I'm the vice
Speaker 11: president's President Trump. My loyalties are always going to.
Speaker 5: Be with the President.
Speaker 11: And I think that Elon, he's an incredible entrepreneur. He's
Speaker 11: actually done I think does was really good. This sort
Speaker 11: of effort to root out waste fraud abuse in our
Speaker 11: country is really good good And and look, man, I'm
Speaker 11: always going to be loyal to the President, and I
Speaker 11: hope that eventually Elon kind of comes back into the fold.
Speaker 11: Maybe that's not possible now because he's gone so nuclear.
Speaker 7: I hope it is, do you know why?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean so, look, I think number one.
Speaker 11: Elon's new to politics, right, So part of it is
Speaker 11: this guy got into politics and it has suffered a
Speaker 11: lot for it. But I mean, I and I get
Speaker 11: the frustration there, and I get the frustration that. I mean, look,
Speaker 11: Congress got the spending bill, but the main purpose of
Speaker 11: the bill is not actually spending or cutting spending, though
Speaker 11: it does cut a lot of spending. The main purpose
Speaker 11: of the bill is to prevent the biggest tax increase.
Speaker 11: But I understand, like it's a good bill, it's not
Speaker 11: a perfect bill. Like the process in DC. If you're
Speaker 11: a business leader, you probably get frustrated with that process
Speaker 11: because it's more you know, bureaucratic, it's more slow moving.
Speaker 11: So I think there's just some frustrations there. But I
Speaker 11: I really, man, I think it's a huge mistake for
Speaker 11: him to go after the president like that. And I
Speaker 11: think that if he and the president are in some
Speaker 11: blood feud, most importantly, it's going to be bad for
Speaker 11: the country. But I think it's gonna be I don't
Speaker 11: think it's gonna be good for eeln either.
Speaker 5: So that's jd Vance's reaction to this. He eventually got
Speaker 5: put onto like damage control. We'll talk about that in
Speaker 5: a sec What is more interesting to me is Cash
Speaker 5: Pattel's reaction, because Patel's been taking fire from the right
Speaker 5: for being a little bit soft on the promise of
Speaker 5: releasing the full Epstein files, trying to downplay the extent
Speaker 5: of the files and say there's really nothing in there
Speaker 5: that's super notable. And this has gotten him in trouble
Speaker 5: because him and people like Dan Bongino have for years
Speaker 5: made a living out of talking about how the Epstein
Speaker 5: files is going to ruin the Democratic Party. They have
Speaker 5: all of this evidence, all this footage, and now that
Speaker 5: these guys are in power, they're simply not talking about
Speaker 5: this issue. And this has got some of the Q
Speaker 5: and on right upset, and Cash Ptel's reaction to this
Speaker 5: is frankly baffling. I'm not participating in that conversation.
Speaker 4: Have a nice day, DD.
Speaker 5: So much takets fall away.
Speaker 4: There going back and forth about different things.
Speaker 7: And yeah, he said he was disappointing elon ye want
Speaker 7: to leave Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5: That's a crazy thing to say. How does he know?
Speaker 3: Does he know that Donald Trump is in the Epstein
Speaker 3: files or does he have access to them?
Speaker 5: I don't know how he would, but I'm just staying
Speaker 5: out of the trump elon thing.
Speaker 7: That's way outside of my life.
Speaker 1: Are they?
Speaker 5: I know my lane and that ain't What do you mean,
Speaker 5: isn't your lane? You're the director of the FBI, you
Speaker 5: are in charge of the Epstein files. This specifically is
Speaker 5: your lane. This, this one thing is actually your late
Speaker 5: it's unhinged. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: His big thing now is yes to wear a hunting
Speaker 1: camera all the time. I guess that says his new lane.
Speaker 5: So after the heat of this started to die down,
Speaker 5: you started to get more of the right to try to,
Speaker 5: I guess, soothe the tension. A lot of a lot
Speaker 5: of people trying to trying to talk about coming together.
Speaker 5: You had right wing commentators trying to frame this as
Speaker 5: two alpha males beefing, right, this is this is just
Speaker 5: how you just how alpha males be. We got We've
Speaker 5: got to quote some of these because Jack Pasovic famously said,
Speaker 5: some of y'all can't handle two high agency males going
Speaker 5: at it. And it really shows this is direct communication
Speaker 5: fallow centric versus indirect communication. Guy no centric, I understand
Speaker 5: you aren't used to it. Wonderful stuff from Pasovic. As usual.
Speaker 5: You also had our friends at the New Norm posting
Speaker 5: videos about trying to solve this dispute through a dancing competition.
Speaker 5: Roll the clip.
Speaker 4: Can't we all just get along?
Speaker 7: We've got to cook you to say, hey.
Speaker 5: I do find it odd that a lot of people's
Speaker 5: innate reaction after the heat died down was even if
Speaker 5: Elon Musk is semi credibly accusing the president of being
Speaker 5: a pedophile, can't we just all get along together? I
Speaker 5: don't know why we can't just get along? This is
Speaker 5: this is hurting the country. And Elon's like remark about
Speaker 5: Trump being in the files is in and of itself
Speaker 5: just kind of baffling from Elon's perspective, because he was
Speaker 5: bragging in tweets about how he is responsible for Trump
Speaker 5: being elected, and Trump was then having to respond to
Speaker 5: that by claiming that they would have won the election
Speaker 5: without Elon. But Elon was saying that without him, Trump
Speaker 5: would have lost the election right after he called him
Speaker 5: a pedophile, which is super interesting because it's essentially Musk
Speaker 5: saying I'm fine with making sure a pedophile gets elected president,
Speaker 5: but I draw the line at a bad spending bill. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's really what is too much for him. The implication
Speaker 5: is that if he didn't get essentially shafted from the
Speaker 5: White House, he just would have kept this a secret.
Speaker 5: And he's like okay with working with Trump otherwise except
Speaker 5: for the bad bill And maybe he's maybe he's butt
Speaker 5: heard about Trump threatening to terminate his governmental subsidies and contracts.
Speaker 5: But like, come on, elon, this is crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, not the most well considered. It is fantastic
Speaker 1: that the richest man in the world is addicted to
Speaker 1: posting because we get some real we get some real banging.
Speaker 5: Posters, posters madness. It never never fails.
Speaker 7: I gotta say, though, Trump's posting response terrible. This guy
Speaker 7: has washed There's nothing there. He's fucking gone mentally like
Speaker 7: he could have fucking get like even twenty twenty. Trump
Speaker 7: just destroys him in one tweet like none of this
Speaker 7: is He's there's nothing left there.
Speaker 5: He's a shell. Now. They have now been making attempts
Speaker 5: to fold the team back together. It was reported recently
Speaker 5: that actually on Friday night, which was the day after
Speaker 5: this spat on unfolded on Twitter, but a Friday night
Speaker 5: jd Vance and White House chap of staff Susie Willis
Speaker 5: had a call with Elon to de escalate the conflict. Eventually,
Speaker 5: Elon has started deleting some of his more inflammatory tweets
Speaker 5: about the president coward and has now posted quote, I
Speaker 5: regret some of my posts about President Trump last week.
Speaker 5: They went too far.
Speaker 1: I said the thing that I wasn't supposed to say.
Speaker 5: So he got us stern talking to by Jade Vance,
Speaker 5: who is kind of caught in between Trump and Musk
Speaker 5: here but has stated that his loyalties will will always
Speaker 5: lie with the President. So yeah, that is the current
Speaker 5: state of the Musk and Trump fallout. It will not
Speaker 5: be able to go back to how it was, but
Speaker 5: they might try to play nice again. Yep, I think
Speaker 5: that does it for us here at it could happen here.
Speaker 5: We reported the news.
Speaker 1: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
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