Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode, So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
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Speaker 3: Welcome to you can happen here a podcast where so
Speaker 3: many things are happening here that we frankly have borne
Speaker 3: out the bit about trying to use this as our introduction.
Speaker 3: I am your host, Bio Wong. One of the many, many, many,
Speaker 3: many many crises that are unfolding in this country right
Speaker 3: now is a rolling ethnic cleansing carried out by Ice
Speaker 3: and Border Patrol with the assistance of the cops. And
Speaker 3: we have talked about this from a lot of angles.
Speaker 3: But a thing I want to sort of draw attention
Speaker 3: back to in this moment where there's increased attention and
Speaker 3: scrutiny from truly a series of really hideous ice shootings
Speaker 3: is what it's like to be in detention right now
Speaker 3: and how possibly people can be gotten out of the
Speaker 3: tension and with me to talk about something that I
Speaker 3: feel like I can't even describe as the horrors because
Speaker 3: it's simply worse than that. Is Ellie Bell, who is
Speaker 3: a community organizer, does many things, wears many hats. Welcome
Speaker 3: to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Hello, I'm Ellie. And the reason I am
Speaker 1: here right now for this specific podcast conversation is that
Speaker 1: I am on a team that is trying to help
Speaker 1: many immigrants by one in tourchainicular that I will be
Speaker 1: talking about tonight Alberto, who is a father and a
Speaker 1: husband and is currently detained in an ICE attention center
Speaker 1: in Indiana after being transferred from his home in Chicago.
Speaker 1: And you know, we are trying to get him out
Speaker 1: and to get his family's story out there and his
Speaker 1: story out there, and you know, among many other things
Speaker 1: that ICE is doing in a way that it's into
Speaker 1: all of that. That's what I am here to talk
Speaker 1: about today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's begin. So I guess one thing that
Speaker 3: I want to sort of lead off with here is
Speaker 3: obviously the sort of the most intense ICE repression and
Speaker 3: raids have shifted to places like Minneapolis right now. I mean,
Speaker 3: who knows, as you're listening to this, maybe they've pivoted
Speaker 3: it to another place. I don't know. Everything is moving
Speaker 3: so unbelievably fast and horribly but also raised are still
Speaker 3: continuing in the places where ice has normally pulled out.
Speaker 3: Now the frequency of those raids has decreased because they
Speaker 3: simply don't have the personnel to run these kind of
Speaker 3: I don't know. They describe it as operational tempo. I
Speaker 3: describe it as they don't have the people to kidnap
Speaker 3: this many people at once.
Speaker 1: They can't kidnap or kill us all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which, you know, not enormously happy to see people
Speaker 3: chanting that here. I have a bunch of visceral memories
Speaker 3: of the last two times that I saw people chanting
Speaker 3: that and didn't go great. So let's not go on
Speaker 3: the likes to Dan twenty nineteen tangents. Yeah, actually no, no, sorry, sorry,
Speaker 3: I am wrong there. The su Dan one was we
Speaker 3: are not Afraid to Die, which is in some weeks
Speaker 3: bleaker there.
Speaker 1: There is so much, there's so much history packed in here.
Speaker 3: Moving to the presence of you know, our version of
Speaker 3: the ethnic cleansing. Can you go to sort of the
Speaker 3: start of this and talk about what the specific raid
Speaker 3: here looked like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, I mean, I think I want to zoom
Speaker 1: out for a moment before I get into the specifics
Speaker 1: of what happened with this man, this father, and hasban
Speaker 1: done his family and then get into it. But you know,
Speaker 1: as I'm sure you know we are all talking about,
Speaker 1: we are being Ice escalating their tactics in just an
Speaker 1: egregious way. They killed a woman in cold blood and
Speaker 1: just executed her in the street the other day, Rene
Speaker 1: and Good. Now, of course this is not the first
Speaker 1: or only person that they've killed recently. It's one of many.
Speaker 1: I think there are now eleven, it might be twelve.
Speaker 1: The number just keeps rising every day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we still don't having very good information about
Speaker 3: what happened. But literally the next day in Portland, someone
Speaker 3: either ICE work border patrol. At the time I'm recording this,
Speaker 3: it's Tuesday the thirteenth. We still don't know whether it
Speaker 3: was iberdoctil, but someone shot two people in Portland. So yeah,
Speaker 3: and I think they're being charged right now for terrorism
Speaker 3: because this is just what happens. Now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these are all connected, but you know we know
Speaker 1: that there are I believe there's been it was nine
Speaker 1: two days ago, then now it's like eleven or twelve.
Speaker 1: It just keeps rising. The number of people that we
Speaker 1: know of, I want to be really clear that we
Speaker 1: know of and as you said, we don't have good
Speaker 1: data on this. We do not have correct data on this,
Speaker 1: which is also an intentional tool of the state to
Speaker 1: obscure what is happening. But there are so many people
Speaker 1: who have been killed by ice, and those are the
Speaker 1: ones that we know of. You know, since let's say
Speaker 1: in the last two or three months, there are so
Speaker 1: many more. There are so many people missing from Alligator Alcatraz.
Speaker 1: What we saw happen in Minneapolis last week is horrendous.
Speaker 1: And you know, the same way that al Berrow, who
Speaker 1: I am part of this team trying to help get
Speaker 1: him out of detention. He did nothing wrong. He has
Speaker 1: had no criminal activity. There was nothing to warrant the
Speaker 1: excuse that he must be detained or treated violently. It's
Speaker 1: the same as how Renee did nothing wrong and nothing
Speaker 1: to deserve being murdered. He was witnessing, He was witnessing
Speaker 1: and being there for her neighbors, and she was sitting
Speaker 1: there in her car, and that is what we know,
Speaker 1: but her murder the same way that these raids and
Speaker 1: everything going on. It's an escalation tactic used by ICE.
Speaker 1: That's part of deep rooted old school fascist and authoritarian
Speaker 1: measures to test what they can get away with while
Speaker 1: people remain complacent in times of genocide and ethnic cleansing,
Speaker 1: and for societal people, you know, they just want to
Speaker 1: see what they can get away with and how much
Speaker 1: control they can exercise. So that being said, to get
Speaker 1: into what happened to Albero and his wife is they
Speaker 1: are in Chicago and they've been there for a little
Speaker 1: over a year since they came here to seek asylum,
Speaker 1: and they were first in a shelter and then they
Speaker 1: finally were able to get the work they needed to
Speaker 1: have a home with their three kids. You know, I
Speaker 1: want to be really explicit that this person is a father,
Speaker 1: a husband. He has other family members here who look
Speaker 1: up to him, who he is a father figure or
Speaker 1: an uncle too. He is a community figure and a leader.
Speaker 1: After he was taken, you know, I was told by
Speaker 1: a family friend who is part of the team that
Speaker 1: I'm working with. They told me that the women in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood the other like immigrant women in all like
Speaker 1: work together and know each other. Called him a pendados,
Speaker 1: like a loving term for someone who is just like
Speaker 1: a community member, like a shining beacon in a community,
Speaker 1: and that is that is who he is. And I
Speaker 1: also really want to emphasize that it wouldn't really matter
Speaker 1: if that wasn't who he was, and if he was
Speaker 1: somehow quote unquote lesser than that or not a saint,
Speaker 1: because there's no such thing as like a good or
Speaker 1: bad immigrant. Nobody deserves to be treated this inhumanely, unless,
Speaker 1: of course, you're a fascist, then I think you know
Speaker 1: fair game.
Speaker 3: Hey, look, I'm gonna put my foot down there and
Speaker 3: say we are more than capable of dealing with fascists internally.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah we can.
Speaker 3: We can simply hold the line on no deportations and
Speaker 3: simply right right us.
Speaker 1: But but so so, what happened was it was early
Speaker 1: early morning the morning of Monday, December twenty ninth. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's officially been two weeks since this happened. Monday, December
Speaker 1: twenty ninth. It's like somewhere between maybe five and six am,
Speaker 1: six thirty. It's still dark out. He and his wife,
Speaker 1: whose name I'm not going to use to protect her
Speaker 1: anonymity and her identity, but he and his wife got
Speaker 1: into their car and the windows were rolled down. The
Speaker 1: slightest bit they were getting in their car to drive
Speaker 1: to work, so that then she could go back home
Speaker 1: and be with her kids after taking him to work.
Speaker 1: And I want to be really explicit that we know
Speaker 1: that when ICE agents came to do this raid, they
Speaker 1: didn't have their names when they approached them. They didn't
Speaker 1: know anything about them until they took them in in
Speaker 1: the Chicago area. You know, you can talk about this
Speaker 1: a little if you want, but ICE has to have
Speaker 1: a warrant for the people they're picking up. They can't
Speaker 1: just pick up anyone. Based on the novel Cancaid decree,
Speaker 1: which was just extended by the appeals court, we know
Speaker 1: that in Chicago this is something that has been continuously happening.
Speaker 1: And as we look at this from a broader context,
Speaker 1: they go after non white people, kidnap them, and ask
Speaker 1: questions later just because they think no one is going
Speaker 1: to care. And part of the reason that I'm talking
Speaker 1: about all of this is because I want to be
Speaker 1: very clear that people are watching, people care, and more
Speaker 1: people need to be watching, and more people need to
Speaker 1: care when it happens to people who are not white,
Speaker 1: not just white women, because obviously Renee's murder is horrific,
Speaker 1: and I saw her be able to raise one point
Speaker 1: four million dollars in less than a day, and Albero's
Speaker 1: campaign has been at fourteen thousand dollars for more than
Speaker 1: a week, and we can't raise more money because people
Speaker 1: have so much more sympathy and empathy for white people.
Speaker 1: And that is actually so tied into why ICE does
Speaker 1: the things they do because of that same whiteness, that
Speaker 1: same white supremacy where they think we can do whatever
Speaker 1: we want to immigrants and brown people. Who's going to care?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's that is one of the major constituent
Speaker 3: elements of this entire rolling ethnic cleansing is that you know,
Speaker 3: and this is this has been a thing in Chicago
Speaker 3: and since the raids really kicked off, is that every
Speaker 3: fucking day someone just disappears and everyone just goes about
Speaker 3: their lives.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and they count on us to do that, and
Speaker 1: they count on us to not be paying enough attention
Speaker 1: that we can't keep track of how shitty their data
Speaker 1: is and how inconsistent their data is, and all of
Speaker 1: the numbers we don't have.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and the everything they're relying on is they're
Speaker 3: relying on their not being any tend to stop them, right.
Speaker 3: What they're relying on is you know, once once they
Speaker 3: grab someone, everyone just going okay, well, that's just you know,
Speaker 3: this is this is a statistic counting an encounter and
Speaker 3: not this is a life that needs to be fought
Speaker 3: for exactly.
Speaker 1: And that is why I find it so important and
Speaker 1: why I am doing the work that I am doing
Speaker 1: alongside everyone else who's doing this kind of work to
Speaker 1: uplift stories and tell them because they can't be told
Speaker 1: by the immigrants themselves right now, because they're being tortured
Speaker 1: inside detention. And it's so crucial for people to understand
Speaker 1: that these are not numbers, These are not just names
Speaker 1: on a page. These are real people's lives. This is
Speaker 1: a real man who's three children, whose three young children
Speaker 1: have now gone to bed without him every night for
Speaker 1: two weeks. They don't know where their dad is. They
Speaker 1: don't know why he's not there, they don't know why
Speaker 1: he's apparently being tortured. They just know that their dad
Speaker 1: isn't there. And I need people to under stand you
Speaker 1: know think about Can you imagine can you imagine being
Speaker 1: away from your family for two weeks and counting, not
Speaker 1: knowing when you're going to come back, if you're going
Speaker 1: to come back, if you're going to die in distension?
Speaker 1: Can you imagine being the child of someone? And a
Speaker 1: lot of people don't have to imagine. I'm saying this
Speaker 1: for like, you know, white people and privileged people who
Speaker 1: don't have to think about these things or can get
Speaker 1: away with just going about business as usual, because there
Speaker 1: are a lot of us who have immigrant family and
Speaker 1: have loved ones who this has been done to, and
Speaker 1: we don't get to go about our day's business as
Speaker 1: usual because it's just not possible. It's just not possible.
Speaker 1: It would be like asking me to go about my
Speaker 1: life business as usual when my family in Lebanon and
Speaker 1: Palestine are being bumped. Yeah, it's not possible. It is
Speaker 1: not possible. All of these things are connected, Our lives
Speaker 1: are connected, and we owe it to each other to
Speaker 1: pay attention and to witness, especially because we are seeing
Speaker 1: that they will kill you for paying attention and witnessing
Speaker 1: because they don't want you to be able to exercise
Speaker 1: that right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and you know. The secondary thing, and this
Speaker 3: is something that's been pretty well known for a very
Speaker 3: long time, is that the more of you that there
Speaker 3: are at a thing, the less likely they are to
Speaker 3: kill you. Yeah, and then this has been a thing
Speaker 3: with you know, US police killing the protest forever, which
Speaker 3: at the US doesn't like fire regular bullets into crowds
Speaker 3: because it's a terrible idea. It's how you get uprisings, right,
Speaker 3: Like you know, I mean I say this on the
Speaker 3: show all the time. This is how the Mexican government
Speaker 3: lost control of the city of Wahaka. Like they literally
Speaker 3: accidentally started like like a pseudo anarchistra in that city
Speaker 3: by doing that. Right, So normally what they do is
Speaker 3: they pick off people when they're on their own.
Speaker 1: I'm going to be totally honest, I kind of wish
Speaker 1: that the government would make a ridiculous mistake right now
Speaker 1: that lends itself to people being able to get justice.
Speaker 1: That's all I'll say. I'm not going to give specifical yes.
Speaker 3: But I mean, you know, but it's also the other
Speaker 3: thing gonna say about that that right is, like whether
Speaker 3: or not they get away with this is also up
Speaker 3: to us.
Speaker 1: It is, it absolutely is and that is that is
Speaker 1: why I say we owe each other everything, and we
Speaker 1: owe each other witnessing, because the thing is the job
Speaker 1: of telling these stories, of trying to help get people vulnerable,
Speaker 1: vulnerable people out of detention is also falling to a
Speaker 1: select few people who are the most vulnerable already, and
Speaker 1: who have things on the line and things We're risking
Speaker 1: to do this because we know it's the right thing.
Speaker 1: And there are so many people with so much privilege
Speaker 1: who could be doing something, whether it's really really small
Speaker 1: like donating five dollars or sharing someone's story, or calling
Speaker 1: Congress to have them pressure Ice to let immigrants out,
Speaker 1: whatever it is that you could be doing, there are
Speaker 1: so many people who are not doing that. And when
Speaker 1: there are so many people who are not doing any
Speaker 1: of the labor, all of that labor gets distributed so
Speaker 1: unevenly among a few people. You know. I always think
Speaker 1: about the what is it James Baldwin quote about how
Speaker 1: it is the job of you know, like a few people.
Speaker 1: It's only a few people on this earth who are
Speaker 1: like doing the job of like loving people. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: completely butchering it right now because it's late at night,
Speaker 1: and I you know, can't think of it, but it's
Speaker 1: it's something like that, and I think about that all
Speaker 1: the time and something that I'm thinking about right now
Speaker 1: a lot, and having a lot of conversations, mostly with
Speaker 1: white people, about Hey, you need to start doing something
Speaker 1: because you have a lot of privilege that you're not utilizing,
Speaker 1: and when you don't utilize it, you actually are doing
Speaker 1: a lot of harm. Not in necessarily the same way
Speaker 1: that the ice agents are, but you're still kind of
Speaker 1: capitulating to what they want you to do by putting
Speaker 1: all of this labor on vulnerable people who have so
Speaker 1: much to lose and so much to risk. And we
Speaker 1: can't afford to burn out constantly because we don't have
Speaker 1: the support and the more equitable division of labor that's needed.
Speaker 1: Like we need everyone. We need everyone who can possibly
Speaker 1: do anything, whether that's putting your bodies on the line
Speaker 1: in person, or or if you're a disabled person and
Speaker 1: you're in bed and you can post something online or
Speaker 1: you can tell someone like we need to activate our
Speaker 1: community networks for each other.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's also a lot of sort of logistical stuff,
Speaker 3: you know. I mean, there's like the old line about
Speaker 3: the army that like five or ten to one, like
Speaker 3: logistics people for every person who's out on the front.
Speaker 3: And that's also the way that if you're going to
Speaker 3: have an organizing thing that works, there's a massive sort
Speaker 3: of logistical tale behind everyone who's out doing stuff.
Speaker 1: Absolutely right, you need you need safety people too at home.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff to be done.
Speaker 1: I'll finish telling the story of what happens to Albero
Speaker 1: two because I want to you know, center that because again,
Speaker 1: you know, this is a this is a community issue,
Speaker 1: and this is a community member who is missing now
Speaker 1: who can't do his part as a part of a
Speaker 1: whole community because he has he's been taken. And like
Speaker 1: when he was taken, they had guns. They had one
Speaker 1: pointed right at his wife. He was saying, you know,
Speaker 1: they were saying, we're not resisting, but they kept danging
Speaker 1: on the car window, and they reached inside the car
Speaker 1: window and they like, you know, he and his wife
Speaker 1: emphasized that they were just going to work. They weren't
Speaker 1: doing anything, and I didn't care. They see a non
Speaker 1: white person and they grow hungry for violence. And after
Speaker 1: detaining her, you know, they asked her to sign a
Speaker 1: document so that she could go get for kids. She
Speaker 1: refused because she didn't trust them, and she told them
Speaker 1: that she wasn't going to sign anything. And then later
Speaker 1: they found out I think the lawyers found out that
Speaker 1: what it was is that they were giving her a
Speaker 1: voluntary deportation paper yep, for the whole family.
Speaker 3: And that level they do this all the time.
Speaker 1: They do this all the time. That level of deceit
Speaker 1: and trickery is just horrible. Because they did it. They
Speaker 1: gave it to her in English, and she doesn't speak English.
Speaker 1: They thought they could get her to sign it to
Speaker 1: get them out. This is being run by like the
Speaker 1: same people who are banging doors down and just going
Speaker 1: into houses in Minneapolis. It's all connected. They use the
Speaker 1: same pactics of violence and fearmongering, and it's terrible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean they've been moving personnel around so
Speaker 3: like there's like a non zero chance that was literally
Speaker 3: the same person, Like that person could be in Minneapolis
Speaker 3: now we don't know. And this has become the sort
Speaker 3: of background noise of American life. And he used to
Speaker 3: fucking not be the background noise because they're fucking grabbing
Speaker 3: people out of cars.
Speaker 1: It shouldn't be I mean, every day I see people
Speaker 1: posts some type of video on TikTok or Instagram reels
Speaker 1: or or Twitter or a blue sky, Like, I just
Speaker 1: see people everyday people post God. You know, it feels
Speaker 1: so horrific to watch all of this happen and have
Speaker 1: to go to a nine to five. And I have
Speaker 1: empathy for that, especially as someone who does community organizing.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I think there is a lot of sacrifice.
Speaker 1: I know there's a lot of sacrifice in the types
Speaker 1: of things that I do, and there's also a lot
Speaker 1: of privilege in the fact that I even have community
Speaker 1: and loved ones who help me to pay my rent
Speaker 1: so that I can do this kind of organizing without
Speaker 1: worrying about not having shelter. And it's like we were
Speaker 1: saying before we, you know, started the recording, like I
Speaker 1: take it very seriously that I need to rest and
Speaker 1: I need to feed myself, and I need to take
Speaker 1: care myself because rest is not resistance, but me getting
Speaker 1: the rest that I need and the care that I
Speaker 1: need allows me to resist in a way that helps
Speaker 1: someone else to get free. And that's like what we
Speaker 1: all need to be doing for each other.
Speaker 3: I'm just gonna say this because you know, there used
Speaker 3: to be a thing people would do whatever. There is
Speaker 3: a large social upheaval. It was called the occupation of
Speaker 3: the factories. Yeah, you could go read Mella Testa writing
Speaker 3: about it in like nineteen twenty one. Very old thing.
Speaker 3: See the Seattle general strike was like the most famous
Speaker 3: example people doing this in the US. But it was like, Okay,
Speaker 3: so there's some shit going on. We need to stop
Speaker 3: something from happening. So we are going to take over
Speaker 3: our workplaces and run the parts of it that need
Speaker 3: to be run so that people could get food, and
Speaker 3: then otherwise we're not and otherwise we're control.
Speaker 1: You don't actually just have to go to your line to.
Speaker 3: Buy the people in Seattle. Those people didn't know what
Speaker 3: a television was. Wow, and they were able to do this.
Speaker 3: You showed one of the people in like in like
Speaker 3: the Seattle, like nineteen nineteen general strikes, people who who
Speaker 3: did this, Like if you showed them a computer, they
Speaker 3: would have a heart attack. And they did this. So
Speaker 3: I believe that all of you you have seen things
Speaker 3: that would have obliterated these people's minds.
Speaker 1: Oh it's I have like a slightly different take. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it is like a hot take or
Speaker 1: a cold take or a lukewarm take. But my perspective
Speaker 1: is one who said that you just have to go
Speaker 1: to your nine to five while you watch all of
Speaker 1: this happen. Who said that you are saying, oh, I
Speaker 1: have to do that. No one is actually making you
Speaker 1: do that. The consequences of that are that if you
Speaker 1: don't go to your nine to five, or you take
Speaker 1: a sick day or something, you might get fired, and
Speaker 1: you might be in a similarly vulnerable position to someone
Speaker 1: whose life is already on the line. But if we
Speaker 1: all stood in solidarity with each other, that would be
Speaker 1: less dangerous, Like if we chose each other over capitalism,
Speaker 1: that would be so radical. But that's my take.
Speaker 3: There are not enough cops to evict us all. There
Speaker 3: simply aren't.
Speaker 1: There, really just aren't. I think that people forget or
Speaker 1: conveniently compartmentalize the truth that we as a collective, when
Speaker 1: we band together, when we refuse to participate in individualism
Speaker 1: the ways that they want us to, we are so powerful.
Speaker 1: And I think that that scares people because that's a
Speaker 1: lot of responsibility. But again, that's really only so much responsibility.
Speaker 1: If you see yourself as an individual as opposed to
Speaker 1: part of a collective. If you see yourself as bearing
Speaker 1: a piece of responsibility as part of a collective, the
Speaker 1: same way that ants all move in a colony and
Speaker 1: carry like a piece of bread together, maybe you wouldn't
Speaker 1: feel so much overwhelmed because you would understand that we
Speaker 1: are in this together. And I think that we really
Speaker 1: owe that to each other to reframe that in our
Speaker 1: minds and in our nervous systems as well, so that
Speaker 1: we can just like maybe shut up and show up.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, speaking of showing up, Okay, yeah, we're locking back
Speaker 3: on shoes, We're locking in, We're locking the fucking we
Speaker 3: can do this, I believe in us. So going back,
Speaker 3: I guess from the sort of macro perspective to the
Speaker 3: micro individual perspective of yeah, the exact specific ways that
Speaker 3: one individual person gets treated.
Speaker 1: Totally, so sure, locking back into what is happening on
Speaker 1: a more micro level. Giving an example of how Ice
Speaker 1: is dehumanizing immigrants in attention whether they are here quote
Speaker 1: unquote illegally or not. Alberto is not here illegally, Okay,
Speaker 1: he's going through the asylum process. When the immigration attorneys
Speaker 1: on our organizing teams spoke with Alberto and specifically asked
Speaker 1: about his conditions at Fay County. He said that and
Speaker 1: granted this, I believe with some him in the last week.
Speaker 1: I think they haven't spoken to him in maybe a week.
Speaker 1: It's been hard too, But when they asked about his conditions,
Speaker 1: he said that he had all the basics, is now
Speaker 1: being given three meals a day, and was at least
Speaker 1: at that point being administered medication. We don't have very
Speaker 1: good context and accurate data on how often that's actually
Speaker 1: been happening. He has a severe seizure disorder and he
Speaker 1: requires medication to be administered at least I think twice
Speaker 1: a day, and even one missed dose can be fatal.
Speaker 1: It's been a while since they've been able to talk.
Speaker 1: I do know that he checks in with his family
Speaker 1: and a family friend every morning, only briefly. I spoke
Speaker 1: to them just before this call to get any updated information.
Speaker 1: There was a day this week where he didn't xt
Speaker 1: first thing in the morning, and we were all really worried,
Speaker 1: and we had no idea what that meant. It turns
Speaker 1: out that the WiFi just was down, but oh my god,
Speaker 1: how horrifying. Every day I wake up and I just
Speaker 1: I don't know if he's still alive.
Speaker 4: And he is.
Speaker 1: Only one of many many immigrants that I have worked
Speaker 1: on cases for and that I am trying to bring
Speaker 1: attention to. And it's terrifying to never know if he's
Speaker 1: going to be one of the many, many people who
Speaker 1: have died in there, because it's been weeks or months
Speaker 1: or a year, and so, you know, as far as
Speaker 1: as conditions go, we don't have a lot of information
Speaker 1: about his specific condition. We know that he has been struggling.
Speaker 1: We know that it's been very hard on his health.
Speaker 1: It would be hard on anyone's health, whether they were
Speaker 1: disabled or sick or not, because the conditions are inhumane.
Speaker 1: We do know as reported by other clients of the
Speaker 1: immigration attorneys on our team. We know that at different
Speaker 1: attention centers, many have told her that it's very cold.
Speaker 1: One who is with the gen pop and could only
Speaker 1: speak with her from a tablet in the room while
Speaker 1: other detainees were around. Several have told her that they
Speaker 1: were denied access to nurses and medical care when they
Speaker 1: had headaches or a sore throat. I also want to
Speaker 1: tie this back to, you know, the global pandemic. We've
Speaker 1: seen a lot of people die of COVID or other
Speaker 1: illnesses well in detention. This is a public health issue.
Speaker 1: This is a public health and safety issue. Just the
Speaker 1: same way that people who are in prisons are treated
Speaker 1: poorly and not given the medical care they need, and
Speaker 1: that faulty is part of the point. Immigrants and detention
Speaker 1: are also completely deprived of medical care that they need,
Speaker 1: and again that would be really dangerous for anyone, but
Speaker 1: for Albero, he has a severe seizure disorder, Like one
Speaker 1: thing could go wrong and he would be done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like his life hangs in the balance. There's another client
Speaker 1: she has with castro intestinal problems told her that they
Speaker 1: basically can't eat anything because the food quality is so
Speaker 1: poor and coupled with their condition, they just vomit and
Speaker 1: have diarrhea constant meat. This is what is happening in
Speaker 1: IC attention facilities. They are just completely overrun with these
Speaker 1: public health and safety disasters and they don't have the
Speaker 1: care or attention because those conditions happening are orchestrated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like they don't give a shit or they're orchestrated.
Speaker 1: They're a part of the cool feed. They don't care. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's worse is they do care, but they care about
Speaker 1: creating the suffering.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's like like for them, it's like these
Speaker 3: people's ultimate goal is to not have non white people
Speaker 3: in the US, right you could. You can look at like,
Speaker 3: you know, Stephen Miller's wife, like, yeah, last week was
Speaker 3: like posting shit about what will happen when they deport
Speaker 3: one hundred million Americans. It's like, yeah, right.
Speaker 1: They want enough no estate, absolutely.
Speaker 3: No, like they and they don't it doesn't really matter
Speaker 3: to them, Like you know, it's it's kind of bad
Speaker 3: PR if people die in their in their fucking camps,
Speaker 3: but they don't give it gives. These people don't give
Speaker 3: a shit whether if people die or like are sent away,
Speaker 3: Like they don't fucking care, Like they care about hurting people.
Speaker 3: They don't care where they live or die.
Speaker 1: They don't care about bad PR either to an extent,
Speaker 1: because I mean, you know, this is what the show
Speaker 1: is about. Authoritarian regimes and fascism is about control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean sure, I guess maybe if there's enough bad
Speaker 1: PR and they can't literally control people on the streets
Speaker 1: who are overtaking the situation and fighting back because they've
Speaker 1: gotten bad PR. That's a problem, But in and of itself,
Speaker 1: I don't really know if they care about the bad PR.
Speaker 1: They should care about the results of the bad PR,
Speaker 1: which is why we should all keep giving them bad PR.
Speaker 1: We've seen a lot of that. There are so many
Speaker 1: things that have happened since the escalation in Minneapolis last
Speaker 1: week where Renee and Good was shot and killed. Okay,
Speaker 1: I was collecting notes before this call, and I'd already
Speaker 1: had many, and then when I was collecting notes just
Speaker 1: from today alone, I was like, oh my god, twenty
Speaker 1: things have happened. We found out in the last day alone.
Speaker 1: There was a huge piece published in Slate today that
Speaker 1: ICE is doing zero background checks on their applicants. A
Speaker 1: journalist got officially hired despite being a prominent person who
Speaker 1: speaks about leftism online. They failed a drug test, They
Speaker 1: didn't even complete all the proper paperwork. ICE has literally
Speaker 1: no idea who they're hiring, and they don't care because
Speaker 1: they'll take anyone who is willing to terrorize people like
Speaker 1: that's going to cause it's already causing a lot of
Speaker 1: community ruptors. It's going to ruin communities. And the reality
Speaker 1: is they don't care if it does, because it's actually
Speaker 1: the point. If this were about accuracy or a real
Speaker 1: quote unquote justice or Americans who are you know, quote
Speaker 1: unquote being wronged by immigrants or whatever their narrative is,
Speaker 1: they would have a vetting process. They would want the
Speaker 1: best of the best. But they don't because it's just
Speaker 1: about annihilation and control.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and the other part of that too, if you
Speaker 3: want to look at the sort of more positive angle
Speaker 3: of it, is like part of what's going on here
Speaker 3: is that they can't find enough people who want to
Speaker 3: commit an ethnic cleansing.
Speaker 1: Here's my thing. I'm a little concerned that's not true.
Speaker 1: They are incentivizing people to betray their values. And part
Speaker 1: of what's going on in this country is that people
Speaker 1: are out of work. People need to stay bet in house.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but here's the thing, Like, if they were able
Speaker 3: to really easily like recruit those people into doing this,
Speaker 3: then they wouldn't be continuously upping the bonus rates, and
Speaker 3: they wouldn't be trying to like store cops from other agencies,
Speaker 3: Like I think they seem to be having legitimate problems
Speaker 3: even in a shitty job market, and.
Speaker 1: We should we should give them more. I think we
Speaker 1: should give them more. I think that we should incentivize
Speaker 1: I personally would love to figure out how to incentivize
Speaker 1: ice agents to quit their jobs. Like, I don't know
Speaker 1: what I have to do. Maybe I'll gather my like
Speaker 1: sex worker friends to organize them kind of campaign. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Well, you can you just just make their lives miserable
Speaker 3: until they quit, Like that's the that's the easy, sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I And by the way, I say sex worker
Speaker 1: friends specifically because doms are tough and they would bully
Speaker 1: ice agents to no end. And I say this as
Speaker 1: a former DOBS.
Speaker 3: I believe in US. I believe in US. We can.
Speaker 3: We can. We can make these people's lives hell. We
Speaker 3: could do this.
Speaker 1: I really think that if we take collective action and
Speaker 1: we all take stock of what are my skills and
Speaker 1: I and use that to put the pressure on the
Speaker 1: people who are making this terror possible, I think that
Speaker 1: we can. I think we can take them all down.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that we truly could convince people to quit
Speaker 1: if we make their lives a living hell. Do not
Speaker 1: let them stay at hotels, do not let them buy groceries.
Speaker 1: Don't let them show their faces anywhere in public. Okay.
Speaker 1: This is also another thing that happened today. I think
Speaker 1: it was there was the largest data breach ever. There
Speaker 1: was a data breach today or yesterday that was forty
Speaker 1: five hundred names got leaked YEP, with info in them,
Speaker 1: so they can't be anonymous. We have to take that
Speaker 1: and run with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now, legal disclaimer, we are not advocating legal actions here.
Speaker 3: We are simply not doing this.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying anything is possible if you believe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, however, coma what other people do with this data
Speaker 3: is or something we can really control it exists now, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I actually think it would be a shame if we
Speaker 1: did something with that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, now, speaking of doing things with our data,
Speaker 3: I don't know. I was probably supposed to have taken
Speaker 3: like two outbreaks right now, but fuck it, we're gonna
Speaker 3: We're doing one here. I believe in us, and we
Speaker 3: are back now. One of the bleak things something that
Speaker 3: you want to talk about, Alie, is that the conditions
Speaker 3: that we're seeing here are things that have already killed people,
Speaker 3: and that the danger here compounds. The more risk you're at,
Speaker 3: the more you know, for a few again, but to
Speaker 3: take to take it. To take a completely non abstract example,
Speaker 3: if you need seizure meds twice a day when you
Speaker 3: might die, the odds of terrible stuff happening to you increases.
Speaker 3: But yeah, can we talk a bit about the other
Speaker 3: people who if this has already fucking happened to.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, there's so many, and we can't name
Speaker 1: them all because we don't know all of their names
Speaker 1: because again we don't have all the proper data. We
Speaker 1: only know some things. But that's why we're part of
Speaker 1: a big part of this campaign has been asking people
Speaker 1: to put pressure on congress people to release Albero, to
Speaker 1: show that we're not going to give up on him
Speaker 1: the way that other people have just been given up
Speaker 1: on and died in detention, and that we're going to
Speaker 1: work relentlessly to get him out because he matters. But
Speaker 1: you know, as ICE escalates its attainments across the country
Speaker 1: and in the Midwest, specifically in Ohio and Minnesota and
Speaker 1: all these places Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus, what happens to him,
Speaker 1: so that's a precedent for others, the same way that
Speaker 1: what's been happening to other immigrants. Has set the precedent
Speaker 1: that this is going to keep happening, you know, showing
Speaker 1: that Ice can't just take someone and disappear and get
Speaker 1: away with it really matters for everyone else. People are
Speaker 1: watching for every immigrant detained recently and everything that ICE
Speaker 1: is rolling out and this is God the I don't
Speaker 1: even know I've lost pack because the numbers keep changing
Speaker 1: and growing. I wanted to say that the second person
Speaker 1: that we know of that that Renee was the second
Speaker 1: person that we knew of that Ice had murdered since
Speaker 1: New Year's Eve. But it wouldn't be surprising if there are,
Speaker 1: you know, so many. There's just so many immigrants who
Speaker 1: have died in Pestidina are currently dying in fusity, which
Speaker 1: is what we're trying to prevent. For Alberto and like
Speaker 1: in La I still keep Porter in his own home. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: you know, in Chicago or now I guess Indiana, because
Speaker 1: that's where they're keeping him. They're violating and detaining families
Speaker 1: like Albero's who have done nothing to deserve this treatment.
Speaker 1: We saw a forty four year old woman, Marie and
Speaker 1: Blaze from Haiti who died in a US ice facility
Speaker 1: two or three weeks ago, after being detained since February
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty five, I believe who was captured and
Speaker 1: taken into custody at an airport outside of US territories
Speaker 1: and you know, once again showing ices lack of regard
Speaker 1: for the law, just total lawlessness. She was transferred to
Speaker 1: Louisiana and then somewhere else where she died after vocalizing
Speaker 1: trust pain. And as far as I know, she didn't
Speaker 1: go in with the disability, she didn't go in with
Speaker 1: health condition. But the conditions are so horrifying there that
Speaker 1: that is just to be expected, which is terrible, and
Speaker 1: this dangerous pattern can't continue to unfold. We don't want
Speaker 1: this to be Albero and his family's reality, nor any
Speaker 1: immigrants living nightmare. You know, like this is such a
Speaker 1: community issue across the world, Like every one of the
Speaker 1: people connected to anyone who has died in ice attention
Speaker 1: is impacted for the rest of their life by this,
Speaker 1: you know, Like it's what I was saying when I said,
Speaker 1: people who have immigrant family, we can't just go about
Speaker 1: business as usual. Every day I wake up and I
Speaker 1: don't know if something is going to happen to one
Speaker 1: or all of my loved ones who might be targeted
Speaker 1: by virtue of having dark skin, which is not a crime,
Speaker 1: but in America we're trying to make it one. And
Speaker 1: like again, we don't want this to happen to Albero.
Speaker 1: He's a community member. Everyone in the community is saddened.
Speaker 1: He's a father, he is an uncle, he is a husband.
Speaker 1: His wife is so upset and so worried and doesn't
Speaker 1: understand why this is happening, because to her, he is
Speaker 1: a man who goes to work day and night to
Speaker 1: help his family, to provide for his family, and there
Speaker 1: just is absolutely no reason for him to be in there.
Speaker 1: And she was originally in detention too, they were both detained,
Speaker 1: but they let her out, and that also feels like
Speaker 1: part of the cruelty, you know, part of the cruelty,
Speaker 1: and the conditions of dyeing in ice custody are also
Speaker 1: rooted in being separated from hair.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and love.
Speaker 1: They let her out, you know. Probably we don't know,
Speaker 1: We have no idea why. We can't begin to imagine
Speaker 1: our guests, but it probably has something to do with
Speaker 1: separating them because it makes the experience more expruciating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, as as bleak as the situation is,
Speaker 3: and it's really really fucking bad, we do in terms
Speaker 3: of being able to turn this a try to save
Speaker 3: one person's life and be use this as a precedent
Speaker 3: we can use to fucking try to get other people out.
Speaker 3: There is a legal advantage we have here that we
Speaker 3: don't in most places, which is, Yeah, as you were
Speaker 3: talking about earlier, this stop was so illegal. They literally
Speaker 3: did a whole bunch of things that they were specifically
Speaker 3: ordered by a judge not to do. Yes, and that
Speaker 3: gives us, That gives us a little bit of hope
Speaker 3: in a situation where it allows us to put pressure
Speaker 3: in ways that normally, like would be very very difficulty.
Speaker 3: So can you talk a bit more about.
Speaker 1: That the NAVA consent decree.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or like or how it can be deployed here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean so right, there was nothing remotely legal
Speaker 1: about what they did. The NAVA Consent decree that exists
Speaker 1: in Chicago specifically, you know, limits ICE's ability to carry
Speaker 1: out warrantless arrests and vehicle stops. They require predetermined fallible cause,
Speaker 1: with the most recent rulings enforcing that despite constant violations
Speaker 1: by ice, but you know, groups like the National Immigrant
Speaker 1: Justice Center used that to successfully challenge those violations, leading
Speaker 1: to potential releases and actual releases for people who have
Speaker 1: been detained and orders for officers being retrained.
Speaker 3: Which I mean, they're just gonna be doing it, right,
Speaker 3: but like they're just gonna keep doing it.
Speaker 1: But you know, wait, what happened in Minneapolis for example
Speaker 1: with Renee and good they got in trouble. Actually the
Speaker 1: officers had something sent to them to remind them, like, hey,
Speaker 1: so you actually like can't do things the way that
Speaker 1: you did, and things like the NAVI consent decree. Right,
Speaker 1: they cause problems because you can wave around a paper
Speaker 1: and say hey, like you can't do this, and like
Speaker 1: is it kind of as fake as the constitution in
Speaker 1: some ways? Yeah, like they kind of don't care about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But it is the tool that can be used by
Speaker 1: lawyers like the wonderful immigration lawyers that we have on
Speaker 1: our team, and we have Pala and and who are
Speaker 1: or the immigration attorneys helping Alberto and his wife, and
Speaker 1: they can use that like they've filed a habeas and
Speaker 1: they can use all of this evidence of how they
Speaker 1: were illegally detained and violated without any grounds to push
Speaker 1: back and say you need to release him immediately.
Speaker 3: The piece of paper for the judge does give us
Speaker 3: a little bit of openings here. And could you explain
Speaker 3: to people, like what you know what people listening to
Speaker 3: the show right now can do to help here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I would say two folds. If we
Speaker 1: are looking at Alberto's case and his family's case, they're
Speaker 1: is a crowd fund that they can donate to. I
Speaker 1: can send you the link that you can share.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we will link in the description.
Speaker 1: We really need people to donate to that. Again, Renee
Speaker 1: and Good was able to her wife was able to
Speaker 1: raise one point four million dollars in a day, and well,
Speaker 1: I am hoping and have faith that they will redistribute
Speaker 1: that to other people in need who are impacted by
Speaker 1: situations like this. It doesn't really feel great to see
Speaker 1: white people get all that money when we can't even
Speaker 1: push past fourteen thousand dollars for Albero. So we really
Speaker 1: need people to donate. There is also a change dot
Speaker 1: org petition for people to sign. We have a few
Speaker 1: thousand people who have signed it, but we need more.
Speaker 1: Asking for Congress to pressure Ice to release him. This
Speaker 1: would also be monumental for other immigrants and attention. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if we can use this as a case study, we
Speaker 1: know what we can get done through people power, through
Speaker 1: sheer will, and through not allowing things to just fall
Speaker 1: through the cracks of social media because you're too busy
Speaker 1: doom scrolling. That being said, what people can also do
Speaker 1: is they can post. I mean, I think that people
Speaker 1: should doom scroll less if it means that their nervous
Speaker 1: systems will be more regulated so that they can go
Speaker 1: up to defend community members and protect community members. But
Speaker 1: if what you have is your phone in bed and
Speaker 1: you're scrolling post fair, let people know what is happening.
Speaker 1: Refuse to be silent, refuse to just go about your
Speaker 1: day business as usual. Talk about things. Let them know
Speaker 1: that people see what's happening and they're paying attention. And
Speaker 1: we are not going to just let people be disappeared
Speaker 1: or killed and die in detention. We are not going
Speaker 1: to abandon vulnerable people. I every single one of us
Speaker 1: as the opportunity to use our voice. You don't have
Speaker 1: to be me, you don't have to be a well
Speaker 1: known person who has large platforms. Every single one of
Speaker 1: us has a community that we can activate at any time.
Speaker 1: You text five people and tell them about something that
Speaker 1: is being done to someone, and they text five people,
Speaker 1: and they text five people. That's the entire world. Baby, Like,
Speaker 1: we got this shit.
Speaker 3: I believe we can appropriate pubids, keep tactics to help people.
Speaker 3: I believe in us.
Speaker 1: Pete Seeger said, solidarity forever. Okay, I believe that we
Speaker 1: will win. If what you do is make memes, make
Speaker 1: a meme, make a copy pasta, make a copy pasta
Speaker 1: and send it to people. Like if your method is
Speaker 1: shit posting, sure, take whatever you got and find a
Speaker 1: way to spread the news. And you know, do it
Speaker 1: for other immigrants too, you know, do it for do
Speaker 1: it for whoever. But the more you speak out, the
Speaker 1: more you make it possible for other people to speak out, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they realize they're not going to be the only
Speaker 1: ones even if they're afraid to say something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's hard, it's harder to crack down on everyone. Sure.
Speaker 1: And also the more you show people like I actually
Speaker 1: have no idea. If he knows how much support he has,
Speaker 1: I would love for him to know that so that
Speaker 1: it helps him to get through. I know he knows
Speaker 1: that he has his family's support, and that's a lot.
Speaker 1: That's more than enough. But I would also, you know,
Speaker 1: love for people to just really like hair for immigrants
Speaker 1: and non white people in general right now who are
Speaker 1: on this soil that we call, you know, the land
Speaker 1: of the United States, because basically, anyone who is not
Speaker 1: white right now is terrified of what might happen to
Speaker 1: them if they're on the wrong street at the wrong time,
Speaker 1: and they're rolling out these terror campaigns in Oregon and
Speaker 1: Columbus and Minneapolis and Chicago and New York. I knew
Speaker 1: they were going to escalate things in New York after
Speaker 1: Zoron took office, because it's a great excuse. Everyone is
Speaker 1: terrified right now. And the best thing that you can
Speaker 1: do is show up every day and be human to
Speaker 1: each other. Buy someone a coffee, like offer to just
Speaker 1: listen to a non white person in your life, take
Speaker 1: an anti racism course up as a human being who
Speaker 1: cares about other human beings, because that is the thing
Speaker 1: that matters most. When I think about stories that we
Speaker 1: have from way back in history, like all just flag
Speaker 1: you know, Anne Frank, because that's the one that everyone knows.
Speaker 1: The thing that mattered for her. The thing that kept
Speaker 1: her alive for longer than she could have maybe been
Speaker 1: alive is people being human to each other. Like, I
Speaker 1: think that's such an underrated way to show up, and
Speaker 1: we take it for granted every day because we don't
Speaker 1: consider always how our smallest actions impact each other. And
Speaker 1: the truth is that your smallest actions could be the
Speaker 1: difference between someone losing their life or not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. I'm to close this by doing
Speaker 3: as this tradition about what in every twelve episodes I
Speaker 3: do answer something from the fucking and Darnamic manifesto. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is the he has this lie, hecauys. Remember that
Speaker 3: the frontiers of the rebellion is everywhere, and even the
Speaker 3: smallest act if insurrection pushes our lines forward, and it does, right,
Speaker 3: It's impossible to know until it happens what the single
Speaker 3: push that makes the damn break is going to be.
Speaker 3: But it will be something, yeah, And it is literally
Speaker 3: impossible to tell what it's going to be until you
Speaker 3: know the The The only way you can find out
Speaker 3: if the action that you are taking is going to
Speaker 3: be the one that knocks everything over is by doing it.
Speaker 3: So go do.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Yeah, we owe each other everything, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do something kind of silly because I am
Speaker 1: who I am. But this is one of my favorite
Speaker 1: songs in the world. And this is a Shrek reference.
Speaker 3: Oh my God, all.
Speaker 1: Star by smash Mouth, Like you know all Flickwitters's gold
Speaker 1: only shooting Stars, break the mold. You'll never know if
Speaker 1: you don't go, You'll never shine if you don't go.
Speaker 1: Like that, it's a directive. That's a directive. I think
Speaker 1: we should listen to smash Mouth and we should try.
Speaker 1: We should just try for each other. I take that
Speaker 1: song very serious.
Speaker 3: You know, I really, really truly. When I was planning
Speaker 3: this episode like a week ago, it did not think
Speaker 3: it was going to end with and Or and Shrek.
Speaker 3: But you know, this is why you could never look.
Speaker 3: You never know how things are going to go, and
Speaker 3: sometimes they end well. Yeah, Allie, do you have anything
Speaker 3: else that you want to make sure people know? And
Speaker 3: where can people find you?
Speaker 1: I don't have anything else that I think people should know.
Speaker 1: People can find me on Instagram at literally l I
Speaker 1: T E R E l l Y like literally but
Speaker 1: with my name E.
Speaker 3: L L Y incredible. Well, we'll have this in the
Speaker 3: description too great.
Speaker 1: That's been my username everywhere on social media since I
Speaker 1: was fifteen, so it's been sixteen years. People are always like,
Speaker 1: how did you get that user name gil gil baby?
Speaker 1: You had to you had to be on on Twitter
Speaker 1: as a as a kid. But yeah, that's that's It's
Speaker 1: my same username everywhere. I have a newsletter that you
Speaker 1: could find on my social media where I write about
Speaker 1: community care and what we owe to each other. I'm
Speaker 1: way less concerned about people being able to find me
Speaker 1: except to just, you know, go go share the campaigns
Speaker 1: that I've shared on my page for Alberto and other immigrants,
Speaker 1: because I am constantly sharing things. If you know, this
Speaker 1: helps me to get more of a plot so that
Speaker 1: people share more of the crucial campaigns that I share.
Speaker 1: That is great. My main concern is I don't need
Speaker 1: to be seen or heard or listened to any more
Speaker 1: than is necessary to get people to take action to
Speaker 1: help more vulnerable people than me. But if people also
Speaker 1: want to listen to things I have to say, or
Speaker 1: go for it. I quote Mashmouth a lot, and I'm
Speaker 1: very gay.
Speaker 3: We love to see it. Okay, this has been it
Speaker 3: could happen here a podcast done by the girl who
Speaker 3: posted iost be destroyed after every single post for eight
Speaker 3: goddamn years. And now we're here, so let's go fight.
Speaker 1: And now we're here, and for its ebooks, everything happens
Speaker 1: so much.
Speaker 4: Yes, welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 4: Last September, President Trump announced a federal crackdown on left
Speaker 4: wing radical terrorism by signing an executive order dubbing quote
Speaker 4: unquote Antifa a domestic terrorist organization and directing federal law
Speaker 4: enforcement to investigate potential federal crimes related to political violence,
Speaker 4: especially stemming from quote anti Americanism, anti capitalism, anti Christianity,
Speaker 4: and hostility towards traditional American values. Last month, the FBI
Speaker 4: claimed one of their first big victories against so called
Speaker 4: Antifa terrorism since Trump's National security directive. On December twelfth,
Speaker 4: the FBI arrested four people in southern California, who the
Speaker 4: government claims are members of a far left group called
Speaker 4: the Turtle Island Liberation Front. The criminal complaint, signed on
Speaker 4: December thirteenth by an FBI agent working at the Joint
Speaker 4: Terrorism Task Force office in Los Angeles, alleges that these
Speaker 4: four individuals conspired to construct and detonate a series of
Speaker 4: bombs in southern California on New Year's Eve twenty twenty five.
Speaker 4: The four defendants were first charged with conspiracy and possession
Speaker 4: of an unregistered destructive device. Then on December twenty third,
Speaker 4: a federal grand jury indicted them on additional terrorism related felonies.
Speaker 4: Here's a brief clip from the FBI press conference announcing
Speaker 4: the arrests where First Assistant US Attorney Bill Assley compared
Speaker 4: the Turtle Island Liberation Front group to Antifa.
Speaker 3: This case is another reminder about the dangers that radicalized
Speaker 3: Antifa like groups posed to public safety and the rule
Speaker 3: of law.
Speaker 4: In court documents, the defendants are not just referred to
Speaker 4: by their eagle names, but also by their direct action
Speaker 4: or signal code names. Audrey Eileen Carrol aka Asanach or
Speaker 4: Black Moon, Zachary Aaron Paige aka ak Ash Carrington or
Speaker 4: Cuthulhu's Daughter, Dante Garfield aka Nomad, and Tina Laie aka
Speaker 4: kickwere The criminal complaint states that after forming the initial
Speaker 4: bombing plan, Carol and Page recruited additional co conspirators who
Speaker 4: participated in further planning meetings and helped procure bomb making materials.
Speaker 4: On December twelfth, the four defendants traveled to a remote
Speaker 4: location in the Mohave Desert with the alleged intent to
Speaker 4: build and test explosive devices. An undercover FBI agent was
Speaker 4: present at the testing site and a surveillance plane observed
Speaker 4: from overhead. Before the defendants completed assembling a functional explosive device,
Speaker 4: the FBI arrested Carol, Paige Garfield, and Lie. From the
Speaker 4: court documents that are currently available, the earliest allusion to
Speaker 4: this New Year's Eve bombing plot is in a signal
Speaker 4: message dated November twenty fourth, twenty twenty five, allegedly from
Speaker 4: one of the defendants, Audrey Eileen Carroll, to whom they
Speaker 4: believed was a genuine co conspirator but was actually a
Speaker 4: confidential human source working with law enforcement. According to the indictment,
Speaker 4: this alleged signal message from Carol stated that she and
Speaker 4: quote unquote four comrades were planning to go to the
Speaker 4: desert from December eleventh to December thirteenth, twenty twenty five,
Speaker 4: to quote test the items we are going to use
Speaker 4: for those party plans unquote. This message references pre existing
Speaker 4: quote unquote party plans, which any prior origin of has
Speaker 4: not yet been elaborated on. This confidential Human Source appears
Speaker 4: to be an individual embedded in the Los Angeles activist scene.
Speaker 4: The criminal complaint describes them like this quote. The confidential
Speaker 4: Human Source is cooperating with law enforcement and is a
Speaker 4: validated and vetted source. The Confidential Human Source has been
Speaker 4: a reliable source information since in or around August twenty
Speaker 4: twenty one. The confidential Human Source is cooperating for financial compensation.
Speaker 4: The confidential Human Source does not have any criminal history.
Speaker 4: The Confidential Human Source provided past reliable reporting on other
Speaker 4: cases and has provided reliable reporting in this case.
Speaker 2: Unquote.
Speaker 4: The quote unquote. Turtle Island Liberation Front appears to be
Speaker 4: a relatively new group with a social media footprint that
Speaker 4: only goes back to July twenty twenty five. The Instagram
Speaker 4: bio for their LA chapter reads quote liberation through decolonization
Speaker 4: and tribal sovereignty.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: Their most recent post, from December twelfth, the day of
Speaker 4: the arrests, is promoting a quote unquote Palestine pop up
Speaker 4: market in Culver City. A post from November twenty eighth
Speaker 4: reads quote if they hurt you, they hurt me too.
Speaker 4: Our destinies are intertwined. Liberation for one must mean liberation
Speaker 4: for all. The empire must fall, and from within the
Speaker 4: belly of the beast, we must be the ones to
Speaker 4: dismantle it. Revolution is the only way stop quote unquote
Speaker 4: peaceful protesting, rise up, fight back. We are not outnumbered.
Speaker 4: They are organize and be ready unquote. As news of
Speaker 4: this group and the bombing plot spread around the Internet
Speaker 4: last month among the left, there was a lot of
Speaker 4: skepticism pointed at the authenticity of the story and the
Speaker 4: Turtle Island Liberation Front grid group itself, with questions pointed
Speaker 4: at its name and some language used in their social
Speaker 4: media posts. The name derives from a term that some
Speaker 4: Indigenous tribes used to describe the North American continent and
Speaker 4: is common language among a certain sect of quote unquote
Speaker 4: land back activists. The Liberation Front moniker has been used
Speaker 4: by a collection of direct action based groups, most notably
Speaker 4: the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front in
Speaker 4: the two thousands. Though the Turtle Island Liberation Front group
Speaker 4: doesn't seem to have been a formalized activist group for
Speaker 4: very long, there were genuine people involved with this group,
Speaker 4: as evidenced by there being for defendants in this criminal case.
Speaker 4: The Turtle Island Liberation Front Instagram account was run by
Speaker 4: one of these defendants, and the language used in their
Speaker 4: posts is not uncommon among the quote unquote anti imperialists
Speaker 4: whose ideology is grown in influence among the American left
Speaker 4: during Israel's genocide in Palestine. And though both an FBI
Speaker 4: informant and an undercover employee played a part in this investigation,
Speaker 4: the group seems to have contained a collection of genuine
Speaker 4: individuals who have participated in the wider Los Angeles activist
Speaker 4: scene and especially anti Israel protests. The indictment and criminal
Speaker 4: complaint outlined the material steps that defendants allegedly took to
Speaker 4: detail the plans of this bombing plot and procure materials
Speaker 4: to construct explosive devices without material support from FBI sources
Speaker 4: or undercover employees. All the information in the indictment and
Speaker 4: criminal complaint is alleged, and all the defendants should be
Speaker 4: considered innocent until proven guilty. The indictment claims that Carol
Speaker 4: set up an in person meeting for November twenty sixth
Speaker 4: to discuss the bombing plot with another allegedly Island Liberation
Speaker 4: Front member Zachary Aaron Page, and the Confidential Human Source,
Speaker 4: who were instructed to quote where casual block no devices.
Speaker 4: If you can't leave it at home, have it turned
Speaker 4: off and wrapped in tinfoil makeshift Faraday bag.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 4: During this in person meeting, Carol allegedly distributed an eight
Speaker 4: page handwritten document titled Operation Midnight Sun, outlining the plan
Speaker 4: for the bombing to both the Confidential Human Source and
Speaker 4: co defendant Zachary Page. Carol allegedly retained two to four
Speaker 4: additional copies of the handwritten plan. The indictment says that
Speaker 4: Carol explained that the document was handwritten because she quote
Speaker 4: did not want any traces of the attack plan on
Speaker 4: a computer. After this meeting, Carol allegedly sent an encrypted
Speaker 4: message to the Confidential Human Source about the bomb testing
Speaker 4: camp out in the desert. Quote this trip is very spicy, LOL.
Speaker 4: Will be testing the things were going to make for December,
Speaker 4: like the things in the instructions on that document I
Speaker 4: gave you. Testing first is important so we know how
Speaker 4: well they work, lol unquote. The plan was for teams
Speaker 4: of four on the ground participants to plant backpacks containing
Speaker 4: quote unquote complex pipe bombs or IED's improvised closive devices
Speaker 4: outside of buildings at five locations targeting two US companies,
Speaker 4: and then simultaneously detonate the bombs at midnight on New
Speaker 4: Year's Eve twenty twenty five. There would be one off
Speaker 4: the ground member assisting the teams remotely by listening to
Speaker 4: police scanners or stationed in a vehicle in case quote
Speaker 4: an emergency getaway is needed unquote, and one member of
Speaker 4: each on the ground team would create graffiti of quote
Speaker 4: a red triangle and one message of the teams, choosing
Speaker 4: on the sidewalk closest to the building while the other
Speaker 4: three are placing the devices.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: The indictment claims that the handwritten plan also instructed co
Speaker 4: conspirators quote, once you plant your IEDs, if there is
Speaker 4: any time to safely do so, dump an accelerant around
Speaker 4: the premises, such as gasoline for added effect. We want
Speaker 4: to do as much damage as possible unquote. The plan
Speaker 4: identified five target locations as quote unquote marks with five
Speaker 4: more blank slots captioned add more if enough comrades. The
Speaker 4: criminal complaint states that these targets were quote property and
Speaker 4: facilities operated by two separate companies that are used or
Speaker 4: engaged in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce.
Speaker 2: Unquote.
Speaker 4: I'm going to quote from three sections of the criminal
Speaker 4: complaint that outline some of the opsec or operational security
Speaker 4: precautions that are allegedly included in this handwritten plan. Quote.
Speaker 4: The plan described multiple operational security measures the co conspirators
Speaker 4: should take to conceal their identities, such as the use
Speaker 4: of a burner phone that would be disposed of after
Speaker 4: the bombings by quote submerging it in a concrete brick
Speaker 4: after destroying the sim and then disposing of the brick
Speaker 4: in a body of water unquote. The target date of
Speaker 4: the operation, New Year's Eve, was identified as an opportune
Speaker 4: time because quote fireworks will be going off at this time,
Speaker 4: so explosions will be less likely to be noticed as
Speaker 4: immediately as any normal day unquote. The plan emphasized that
Speaker 4: quote absolutely no mistakes can be made.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: The plans outline the use of quote unquote black block
Speaker 4: over top of a layer of quote gray slash casual
Speaker 4: block on top of normal street clothes, and noted to
Speaker 4: keep hair very tightly concealed, and to wear gloves for
Speaker 4: the purpose of avoidance of leaving behind DNA. The plan
Speaker 4: further instructed that participants should leave their personal devices at
Speaker 4: home and to make sure the devices were set up
Speaker 4: to stream a long movie during the time of the attacks,
Speaker 4: as so to craft an alibi or quote unquote, plausible
Speaker 4: deniability by having it appear as though the actor was
Speaker 4: actively using their devices. The plan discussed pre operational surveillance
Speaker 4: of targets, identification of D block or D clothing locations,
Speaker 4: and not leaving quote anything other than the IED's behind unquote,
Speaker 4: as they could not quote risk any evidence tracing back
Speaker 4: to us unquote. The plan also noted the benefit of
Speaker 4: placing a small pebble in a shoe to alter natural
Speaker 4: gait to obfuscate their identification. Instructions on how to purchase
Speaker 4: materials to construct a pipe bomb suggested using cash only,
Speaker 4: purchasing in small quantities to avoid suspicion, and splitting purchases
Speaker 4: amongst a team rather than individually. In addition into the
Speaker 4: plan of action and operational security tactics, detailed instructions were
Speaker 4: provided on the components required to build a pipe bomb,
Speaker 4: as well as how to create homemade gunpowder. On December second,
Speaker 4: there was another in person meeting between the law enforcement
Speaker 4: source Carol and Page, as well as two other co conspirators,
Speaker 4: to go over the plan. They met again on December
Speaker 4: seventh to review the bombing plot an allegedly discussed intent
Speaker 4: to conduct future attacks against federal offices. This meeting was
Speaker 4: also attended by an undercover FBI employee who was being
Speaker 4: recruited to join the operation. The undercover asked Carol about
Speaker 4: the black powder instructions in the handwritten plan, and Carol
Speaker 4: responded that she conducted the recent search herself and discussed
Speaker 4: wanting to test several different types of bomb to determine
Speaker 4: which could quote unquote completely pulverize their assigned building on
Speaker 4: New Year's Eve. To quote the criminal complaint quote, Carol
Speaker 4: stated that she had acquired some components thirteen PVC pipes
Speaker 4: and that she had bought potassium nitrate on Amazon using
Speaker 4: a burner account that was scheduled to be delivered on
Speaker 4: December eleventh, twenty twenty five. During this in person meeting,
Speaker 4: Carol confirmed that she operated the Turnal Island Liberation Front
Speaker 4: Instagram account and that she had met a co conspirator
Speaker 4: through said Instagram account. The indictment claims that Carol told
Speaker 4: co conspirators in this meeting quote what we are about
Speaker 4: to do that's gonna be like a Luigi level situation unquote,
Speaker 4: and that it was time for America to fall, and
Speaker 4: that America falling will make Israel fall. According to the indictment,
Speaker 4: during this December seventh meeting, Page told attendees again, including
Speaker 4: an undercover FBI employee, that they were doing everything quote
Speaker 4: to be as clean as possible because one hundred thousand
Speaker 4: percent the FBI is gonna be like on that shit. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so we all know what we're getting into unquote. In person,
Speaker 4: Page outlined some of the operational security precautions to avoid
Speaker 4: law enforcement detection, like covering shoes with socks to cover
Speaker 4: shoe prints, and burning shoes after the bombing. Page also
Speaker 4: allegedly asked attendees if they would like to receive firearms
Speaker 4: training from a group that held a training about a
Speaker 4: month prior, and Carol said that she had a contact
Speaker 4: who could obtain unregistered ars. This wasn't the first time
Speaker 4: Turtle Island Liberation Front members allegedly brought up firearms. The
Speaker 4: indictment claims that on quote December third, twenty twenty five,
Speaker 4: defended an page using an encrypted messaging application, asked the
Speaker 4: confidential human source if the human source was interested in
Speaker 4: receiving firearms training. Explaining his plan to shoot ICE officials
Speaker 4: in a voice message to the Confidential Human source, defendant
Speaker 4: Page stated quote, I just had this day dream. I
Speaker 4: was like, we're just patrolling or whatever, and we're strapped
Speaker 4: right and we see ICE trying to pull up on
Speaker 4: someone or a group of people, and we just like
Speaker 4: roll up on them, like strapped up, and we're like, nah,
Speaker 4: get the fuck out of here. They're gonna get shot
Speaker 4: if they try to do anything like, we shoot first,
Speaker 4: we ask questions later. That's the policy. I told that
Speaker 4: too in Brackets Defendant Carol. Defendant Carol knows all about this,
Speaker 4: and Brackets Defending Carol was like, yeah, let's fucking do it.
Speaker 4: But I'm like, seriously, that is what's needed. Maybe if
Speaker 4: ICE agents they're like, wait, I don't want to get
Speaker 4: fucking shot right now, they ain't gonna do it. And
Speaker 4: if they still try to do it, well, well guess what.
Speaker 4: Welcome to the dirt, motherfucker.
Speaker 2: Unquote.
Speaker 4: After sending this voice message, Page told the Confidential Human source, quote,
Speaker 4: let me know when you listen. So I can delete
Speaker 4: it unquote. Small lines like that are part of what
Speaker 4: I find really interesting in this Turtle Island Liberation front case,
Speaker 4: because the indictment and criminal complaint are just full of
Speaker 4: the defendants recommending these security folklore practices like setting up
Speaker 4: your phone to stream a long movie to create an alibi,
Speaker 4: and placing a small pebble in your shoe to alter
Speaker 4: your gait, deleting these messages after you send them, which
Speaker 4: they're trying to do, all while working with not just
Speaker 4: an FBI informant but also an undercover agent. During the
Speaker 4: December seventh in person meeting, Page and Carol discussed plans
Speaker 4: for future attacks after this New Year's Eve bombing plot,
Speaker 4: specifically a plan to target ICE agents and vehicles with
Speaker 4: hype bombs starting around January or February twenty twenty six,
Speaker 4: with Carol noting in the meeting quote that would definitely
Speaker 4: take some of them out and would probably scare the
Speaker 4: rest of them unquote. Now, following this meeting, more co conspirators,
Speaker 4: including an undercover FBI employee, were added to the signal
Speaker 4: group chat called the Order of the Black Lotus, which
Speaker 4: Carol described as the radical faction of the Turtle Island
Speaker 4: Liberation Front and which Page described as quote unquote super underground.
Speaker 4: The indictment contains some alleged messages sent to an encrypted
Speaker 4: group chat. It's unclear this is specifically the Order of
Speaker 4: the Black Lotus chat or another Turtle Island Liberation Front
Speaker 4: related chat, but I will read through some of these messages.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: Page messaged co conspirators, including defendants Carol and Garfield quote
Speaker 4: death to Israel, death to the USA, death to colonizers,
Speaker 4: death to settler colonialism. In response to defendant Pages message,
Speaker 4: defendant Carol stated, quote death to them all, burn it
Speaker 4: all down, three burning heart emojis unquote. Defendant Carol messaged
Speaker 4: co conspirators, including Page and Garfield, quote I identify as
Speaker 4: a terrorist and I am a Hamas fangirl.
Speaker 2: Unquote.
Speaker 4: Garfield messaged co conspirators, including Carol and Paige, quote I
Speaker 4: am here to destroy Zionism by any means necessary. Real
Speaker 4: activism equals destroying Zionism by any means necessary, even if
Speaker 4: it's risky. If you aren't willing to die for or
Speaker 4: lose your freedom, then you're just another toy in the machine.
Speaker 2: Unquote.
Speaker 4: Carol messaged. Quote glory to the martyr's death to Israel
Speaker 4: three salute emojis, and on December third, defendant Carol told
Speaker 4: the confidential human source quote, these fucking SJA you peaceful
Speaker 4: protest libs are insane, Like it's wild to me that
Speaker 4: I've seen state violence enacted on some people like that
Speaker 4: and they still think they can keep going with peaceful
Speaker 4: protest bs and indirect roots unquote. Defendants used the BLACKLOADUS
Speaker 4: group chat what Carol described as quote our group for
Speaker 4: everything radical unquote, to discuss sourcing bomb making parts including
Speaker 4: cotton string and PVC pipes, as well as coordinates for
Speaker 4: the explosives testing site in the desert quote where we
Speaker 4: will set up camp and where we will test unquote.
Speaker 4: On the afternoon of December tenth, Page messaged the group
Speaker 4: about just having acquired two parts for the bomb recipe
Speaker 4: and that starter would be picked up later that day.
Speaker 4: Page was under FBI surveillance around the time this message
Speaker 4: was sent, and fifteen minutes prior to sending this message,
Speaker 4: Page was seen grabbing a package from an Amazon pickup location.
Speaker 4: Hours later, FBI agent's watched Page by pistol primers from
Speaker 4: a store in Irving, California. Quote dressed in a manner
Speaker 4: to obscure pages identity, namely wearing a medical mask, gloves,
Speaker 4: ball cap, and longsleeve shirt. To quote the criminal complaint,
Speaker 4: Carol replied to Page's messages about obtaining more items from
Speaker 4: the ingredient's list, writing that another package was quote already delivered,
Speaker 4: got to pick it up tomorrow, but yay with four
Speaker 4: whys unquote. The criminal complaint says that quote. According to
Speaker 4: Amazon records, on December seventh, twenty twenty five, Carol purchased
Speaker 4: two five pound bags of potassium nitrate ninety nine percent
Speaker 4: pure prilled Kno three five pounds for industrial and technical
Speaker 4: applications to be delivered to the Amazon counter at the
Speaker 4: Whole Foods located at three three seven seven South La
Speaker 4: Sienna Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. The potassium nitrate was delivered
Speaker 4: on December eleventh, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Unquote.
Speaker 4: In early December, Carol messaged the confidential human source on
Speaker 4: signal a list of components chemicals and tools, along with
Speaker 4: prices of the required items. Several of these components were
Speaker 4: either listed as already purchased or designated to be acquired
Speaker 4: by another quote unquote Comrade Carol advised the confidential human
Speaker 4: source quote with the list, write it and down when
Speaker 4: you have some time, then I'll delete that message, so
Speaker 4: it's no in the chat, a'll well.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: Carol also told the confidential Human source that they should
Speaker 4: get some burner phones quote unquote bought with cash only
Speaker 4: for the bomb testing camp out in the desert. Page
Speaker 4: instructed the group to only bring two burner phones to
Speaker 4: use in case of emergencies and for directions on the
Speaker 4: way out to quote the complaint quote. Once everyone arrived,
Speaker 4: their phones would be put in a small cardboard box
Speaker 4: completely sealed with aluminum. The phones would not be returned
Speaker 4: until the caravan was out of the campsite and back
Speaker 4: on the main road. Quote forgetting to the desert, Page
Speaker 4: wrote that each navigator should have a burner phone, quoting
Speaker 4: page in the complaint quote no phones besides burners, and
Speaker 4: all phones except navigators to be wrapped in foil or
Speaker 4: a Faraday bag for the entirety of the trip and
Speaker 4: install OSM. And it is an open source maps, so
Speaker 4: no corporate tracking unquote. Garfield wrote, quote, I have a
Speaker 4: few burners, but I'm saving for the big event, the
Speaker 4: big party, celebrate emoji quote. On December tenth, Carol sent
Speaker 4: the Confidential Human Source a message on signal, reading quote,
Speaker 4: I kind of hand this notebook where I wrote down
Speaker 4: multiple plans that never happened or got delayed, so it's
Speaker 4: like my terrorist diary. Lmaoooo. I have to get rid
Speaker 4: of that unquote. On the morning of December twelfth, twenty
Speaker 4: twenty five, Carol, Page, Garfield, and Lye traveled to the
Speaker 4: desert in two vehicles, the Confidential Human Source in one
Speaker 4: car and the undercover in the other. To quote from
Speaker 4: the complaint quote. In the undercover vehicle, Page discussed using
Speaker 4: cigarettes as a delayed fusing device for the explosives. Once
Speaker 4: they arrived in the desert, in the other vehicle, Carol
Speaker 4: explained to Lie that the day's events were meant as
Speaker 4: a test run for the New Year's Eve bombing plot,
Speaker 4: which Carol described in detail, stating, quote, what we're doing
Speaker 4: will be considered a terrorist act unquote. In response to
Speaker 4: Carroll's detailing of the New Year's Eve plot, Lie asked
Speaker 4: if there would be any people at the bombing target locations.
Speaker 4: Carol responded in the negative, but noted that if they
Speaker 4: saw any people such as a security guard at any
Speaker 4: of the locations they would warn them. At approximately ten
Speaker 4: one am, the co conspirators arrived at the desert and
Speaker 4: began setting up a campsite including tents and tables based
Speaker 4: on information from the undercover and confidential human source. Carol
Speaker 4: Page and lie All brought bomb making components to the campsite,
Speaker 4: including various sizes of PVC pipes, suspected potassium nitrate, charcoal,
Speaker 4: charcoal powder, sulfur powder, and material to be used as fuses,
Speaker 4: among others. After the undercover alerted law enforcement with a
Speaker 4: predetermined signal indicating that bomb testing was imminent, FBI personnel
Speaker 4: intervened and placed Carol Paige, Garfield, and Lye into custody.
Speaker 4: This is a clip from the law enforcement press conference
Speaker 4: announcing the arrests with a Keel Davis, Assistant Director in
Speaker 4: charge of the FBI Los Angeles Field Office.
Speaker 7: On December twelfth, a group of individuals, again members of
Speaker 7: this antigovernment group, traveled out to the desert to test
Speaker 7: their explosive devices. They had precursor can mmicals there and
Speaker 7: they were going to make They were going to create
Speaker 7: these these bombs in the desert. What they are starting
Speaker 7: to do is put their chemicals and wares and the
Speaker 7: components out on the on the table on the table there.
Speaker 7: This footage that you're watching is from our surveillance plane.
Speaker 7: And then what happened after this is the Los Angeles
Speaker 7: FBI SWAT team, along with the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team
Speaker 7: moved in and arrested all four subjects without without incident.
Speaker 4: The criminal complaint notes at the end that quote based
Speaker 4: on conversations with the bomb technician. While no quote unquote
Speaker 4: end caps were found at the campsite, the co conspirators
Speaker 4: could have improvised using other material to plug the end
Speaker 4: of the PBC pipe, though such method would have been
Speaker 4: less effective than using a proper end cap. As noted above,
Speaker 4: there were also sufficient parts to create several molotov cocktail
Speaker 4: devices quote. After the arrests, law enforcement also raided the
Speaker 4: homes of the Turtle Island Liberation Front members. In Page's residence,
Speaker 4: police found a copy of the handwritten attack plan Operation
Speaker 4: Midnight Sun. That same day, December twelfth, another Turtle Island
Speaker 4: Liberation Front related arrest was made all the way in Louisiana.
Speaker 4: A former marine who was member of the Order of
Speaker 4: the Black Lotus Signal group under the name Darkwitch. She
Speaker 4: her who was also planning to instruct the group on
Speaker 4: quote urban tactics, accuracy, and combat shooting. She was arrested
Speaker 4: while driving from New Iberia to New Orleans with a rifle, handgun,
Speaker 4: gas canister, and body armour. The FBI believes that she
Speaker 4: was going to carry out an attack based on a
Speaker 4: Facebook post commenting on a border patrol rest in New
Speaker 4: Orleans captioned quote shit time to recreate Waco, Texas with
Speaker 4: these fuckers thuck Ice unquote. Three of the defendants in
Speaker 4: the Los Angeles case, Paige, Carol and Lai, have pled
Speaker 4: not guilty. Garfield is set to be arraigned the day
Speaker 4: that I'm recording this, and the Turtle Island Liberation Front
Speaker 4: trial is currently scheduled for the end of February.
Speaker 3: Welcome to It Could Happen? Here a podcast about which
Speaker 3: calamity this country and many others are going through. This week,
Speaker 3: I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are
Speaker 3: going to be talking about the Federal Reserve. Now, those
Speaker 3: of you who have listened to Executive Disorder are aware
Speaker 3: that a bit over a week ago, as this episode
Speaker 3: is being released. Federal Reserve Chairman Jiromage Powell released what
Speaker 3: again I can really only describe as someone escaping from
Speaker 3: a kidnapping and releasing a video about it in which
Speaker 3: he discussed a Justice Department grand jury subpoena and a
Speaker 3: threat to indict him over cost overruns on a new
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve building. Now, Jerome Powell has claimed that these
Speaker 3: charges are really about removing him and about eliminating the
Speaker 3: independence of the Federal Reserve. He also claims that he
Speaker 3: was directly threatened with these charges unless he was willing
Speaker 3: to adjust the Federal Reserve policy to fall in line
Speaker 3: with the Trump administration. And this is an astonishing video
Speaker 3: for a number of reasons. One is that it's, in
Speaker 3: a lot of ways one of the most direct points
Speaker 3: of defiance that a government official has taken directly to
Speaker 3: the presidents. It's also astonishing because it is actually technically
Speaker 3: the second time that Trump has tried to do something
Speaker 3: like this to a member of the Federal Reserve Board.
Speaker 3: Because as you're listening to this, the Supreme Court has
Speaker 3: been hearing arguments about Trump's attempt to fire one of
Speaker 3: the other members of the Federal Reserve Board, a woman
Speaker 3: named Lisa Cook. Now, obviously I don't know yet what
Speaker 3: the outcome of that deliberation is going to be. It
Speaker 3: seems right now that the Supreme Court is uncompelled with
Speaker 3: Trump's ability to fire a Federal Reserve board member over
Speaker 3: really truly very trumped up charges about mortgage fraud. I'm
Speaker 3: going to quote here from the Supreme Court in what
Speaker 3: has become a very important statement. Quote, the Federal Reserve
Speaker 3: is a uniquely structured, quasi private entity that follows in
Speaker 3: the distinct tradition of the First and Second Banks of
Speaker 3: the United States. The importance of this statement is that
Speaker 3: the Supreme Court has been willing to allow Trump to
Speaker 3: fire the heads of other you know, what are supposed
Speaker 3: to be independent entities, right, or fire members of what
Speaker 3: are supposed to be independent federal agencies. He's been able
Speaker 3: to just completely illegally, by the way, but with the
Speaker 3: approval the Supreme Court, been able to fire a lot
Speaker 3: of people who were appointed under the Biden administration to
Speaker 3: posts in independent regulatory agencies. However, so far, the Supreme
Speaker 3: Court has balked at doing this for the Federal Reserve. Now,
Speaker 3: why is that and why is this entire thing so
Speaker 3: important to understand that question and to understand why I've
Speaker 3: spent so much time talking about what in the grand
Speaker 3: scheme of things seems like a kind of minor, you know,
Speaker 3: just like another example of Trump attempting to use the
Speaker 3: judiciary and investigations to go after as political enemies. We
Speaker 3: need to talk about what the Federal Reserve is and
Speaker 3: what it does, because this is our guably the central
Speaker 3: institution of global capitalism, and its importance in maintaining the
Speaker 3: global capitalist economy is to a large extent, the reason
Speaker 3: why this is the point at which US senators, who
Speaker 3: are aligned with Trump on every other issue have actively
Speaker 3: taken a stand against this sort of prosecut of Jerome Powell.
Speaker 3: It's why the Supreme Court seems to not be interested
Speaker 3: in allowing Trump to wield the executive power. And this
Speaker 3: is because fucking with the Federal Reserve is fucking with
Speaker 3: the money. So what is the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve,
Speaker 3: to put it mildly, is an extremely confusing entity. So
Speaker 3: if you remember back to a few minutes ago when
Speaker 3: I said that the Supreme Court said that the Federal
Speaker 3: Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi private entity, we can
Speaker 3: ask the question. Okay, so it's a quasi private entity.
Speaker 3: Is it a public entity or is it a private entity?
Speaker 3: This is a relatively simple question. Here is the answer
Speaker 3: provided by the Saint Louis Federal Reserve's website quote. The
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve Banks are not a part of the federal government,
Speaker 3: but they exist because of an Act of Congress. Their
Speaker 3: purpose is to serve the public. So is the Fed
Speaker 3: private or public? The answer is both. While the Board
Speaker 3: of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve
Speaker 3: Banks are set up like private corporations. Member banks hold
Speaker 3: stock in the Federal Reserve and earn dividends. Holding this
Speaker 3: stock does not carry with it the control and financial
Speaker 3: interests given to holders of common stock and for profit organizations.
Speaker 3: The stock may not be sold or pleasures collateral for loans. Okay,
Speaker 3: so here's the Federal Reserve's answer to is it a
Speaker 3: public or private entity? Is both? The Board of Governors
Speaker 3: is an independent agency. The Federal Reserve Banks are set
Speaker 3: up like private corporations. So it's sort of both. Okay,
Speaker 3: question settled, it's both. We can move on. Wait, hold on,
Speaker 3: I am receiving word that the Federal Reserve has comments
Speaker 3: on this idea. Hold on, hold on, let me, let me.
Speaker 3: Let me turn to the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve's website,
Speaker 3: which has a comment on the idea that the Federal
Speaker 3: Reserve banks or private entities. Okay, here we go, here
Speaker 3: we go quoting them. Now, some observers mistakenly consider the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve
Speaker 3: banks are organized similar to private corporations. For instance, each
Speaker 3: of the twelve Reserve banks operates within its own particular
Speaker 3: geographic area or district of the United States, and each
Speaker 3: is incorporated, is separately incorporated and has its own board
Speaker 3: of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the Federal
Speaker 3: Reserve system hold stock in their district's reserve bank. Now, okay,
Speaker 3: let's look at what we have here. These are two
Speaker 3: different websites run by two different parts of the Federal Reserve,
Speaker 3: one of which says that the Federal Reserve Banks are
Speaker 3: not part of the of the federal government, but they
Speaker 3: exist because of an Act of Congress. So is the
Speaker 3: Fed public or private? The answer is both, because the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations. That's
Speaker 3: the Saint Louis at are Reserve. Now the National Federal Reserve,
Speaker 3: says quote, some observers mistakenly considered the Federal Reserve to
Speaker 3: be a private entity because the reserve banks are organized
Speaker 3: similarly to private corporations. So you can see that we
Speaker 3: are dealing here with an absolute goddamn mess because if
Speaker 3: you read the two websites of different federal versions of
Speaker 3: the Federal Reserve, National and sort of branches of the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve, they say different things about what it is,
Speaker 3: and they sound like they're arguing each other. Now, Okay,
Speaker 3: I am doing this because it's funny. Technically both of
Speaker 3: these agree with each other. But this is a shit
Speaker 3: show because part of the purpose of the Federal Reserve
Speaker 3: is to be an entity that does research and distribute
Speaker 3: information to the public, and its websites can't agree on
Speaker 3: what it is. Now again, I'm being slightly pedantic here.
Speaker 3: Technically both versions of this story do you say that
Speaker 3: this is both a public and a private entity? Sort of?
Speaker 3: Now again, And this is a basic question about the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve. Is it a public or private entity? And
Speaker 3: they can't agree on it. And this is, to use
Speaker 3: a technical term, a fucking nightmare, because again, the actual
Speaker 3: answer is that it is sort of both. The banks
Speaker 3: themselves are like technically private, but they're run by the
Speaker 3: Board of Governors, which is technically a government agency, and
Speaker 3: they were established by the government. So tending to sort
Speaker 3: out this colossal mess has inside of academia, this has
Speaker 3: caused a change in the conception of what the state
Speaker 3: is because what is this crap? So okay, let's actually
Speaker 3: run through the structure of the Federal Reserve. So importantly,
Speaker 3: the Federal Reserve is kind of three entities in a way.
Speaker 3: You can think about this like the Holy Trinity. Right.
Speaker 3: You have the twelve Federal Reserve banks, and those banks
Speaker 3: are collectively managed by what are called governors, who serve
Speaker 3: on what is called the Board of Governors, which is
Speaker 3: the second entity. And then there's also the Federal Open
Speaker 3: Market Committee, which for our purposes we don't care about
Speaker 3: that much, but is composed of the seven members of
Speaker 3: the Board of Governors, and this is the quote defend itself.
Speaker 3: Is composed of the seven members of the Bord of Governors,
Speaker 3: the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,
Speaker 3: and four of the remaining eleven Reserve Bank presidents. You
Speaker 3: serve one year terms on a rotating basis. So, okay,
Speaker 3: we have three entities, right. We have the centralized Federal
Speaker 3: Reserve banks, which there's twelve of them. They cover different
Speaker 3: geographic regions of the country. We have the Board of Governors,
Speaker 3: which oversees them. And the Board of Governors is the
Speaker 3: part that is technically a government agency. And these governors
Speaker 3: are importantly, for our purposes, nominated by the President and
Speaker 3: confirmed by Congress. And this Board of Governors. The purpose
Speaker 3: of this Board of Governors is to sort of run
Speaker 3: all of it. Now they're running all of this at
Speaker 3: a macro level. Each of those twelve federal reserve banks
Speaker 3: also have their own border directors and their own structures
Speaker 3: that each run all of the different banks. So this
Speaker 3: is complicated. And again why talking about the Federal Reserve
Speaker 3: is so complicated. If you just like start looking at
Speaker 3: political stuff people have written about the Federal Reserve, it's
Speaker 3: a nightmare. Like if you try to like do your
Speaker 3: own research, your options are, I'll less you know where
Speaker 3: to look, right, your options are at the Federal Reserve itself,
Speaker 3: which is actually not a terrible resource for the most part,
Speaker 3: because again, conducting economic research is one of the points
Speaker 3: of the Federal Reserve, but it's not ideal. And then
Speaker 3: also immediately you get a bunch of very weird, anti
Speaker 3: Semitic conspiracy theories about sound money and the sort of
Speaker 3: Rand Paull people who want to eliminate the Federal Reserve
Speaker 3: because they're mad at the US dollar not being based
Speaker 3: on gold. Nightmare, terrible, zero out of ten. We absolutely
Speaker 3: hate it. Now, speaking of things that we absolutely hate,
Speaker 3: it is not buying these products and services. We are back.
Speaker 3: So all right, we've gone over the structure of the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve. So what does the Federal Reserve actually do?
Speaker 3: And why are we talking about this at such length.
Speaker 3: If you know one thing about the FED, it's that
Speaker 3: the FED can print money. You may or may not
Speaker 3: remember the FED printing money memes from twenty twenty in
Speaker 3: that sort of era, and this is one of the
Speaker 3: conceptions of the FED that is true. The Federal Reserve
Speaker 3: is the entity given power by the US government to
Speaker 3: print money. So when dollar bills are created, the Treasury
Speaker 3: commissions the FED to print the bills. Technically speaking, coins
Speaker 3: are still minted by the Treasury, which is a whole
Speaker 3: side showed tangent that I had to cut out of
Speaker 3: the story because it's like twenty minutes long. But you know,
Speaker 3: if you are holding a US dollar, basically the odds
Speaker 3: are very very very very very very very very good.
Speaker 3: The way you were holding is technically a Federal Reserve note.
Speaker 3: Now what does that mean? Be a what is happening here?
Speaker 3: Why is it the government doesn't print money? Why is
Speaker 3: it this quas I private public entity that's printing the money. Now,
Speaker 3: what's happening here is slightly more complex than FED money printer.
Speaker 3: An American dollar is US debt. Right, what you are
Speaker 3: holding in your hands is a promise from the US
Speaker 3: government to pay one dollar to the Federal Reserve. The
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve is having this money distributed and is having
Speaker 3: this debt distributed. And this is what US currency is.
Speaker 3: It is based on debt held by in this case,
Speaker 3: the Federal Reserve banks, which have been given a monopoly
Speaker 3: to print this debt as Federal Reserve notes, and the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve can just sort of create this. It's also
Speaker 3: worth noting that, you know, when we talk about the
Speaker 3: FED creating money, I mean obviously like it prints money
Speaker 3: for stuff commissioned by the treasury, so you can have
Speaker 3: more bills in circulation, But most of the actual money
Speaker 3: that's being created or not created is you know, this
Speaker 3: is all happening digitally. It is funds appearing in the
Speaker 3: bank accounts of the banks that use the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 3: So the other thing you may have heard about the
Speaker 3: FED is the FED funds rate or what's called the
Speaker 3: FED interest rate, or you'll hear a bunch of talk
Speaker 3: about the FED setting interest rates. So to understand what
Speaker 3: this is, we need to kind of take a step
Speaker 3: back and look at what these banks actually are. The
Speaker 3: way this is commonly described is that the FED is
Speaker 3: the bank of banks, right, which is when a bank
Speaker 3: needs alone, they go to the Federal Reserve, and banks
Speaker 3: put their money in the Federal Reserve and they use
Speaker 3: it to move their money around. That's true enough for
Speaker 3: our purposes. I should also state here that a lot
Speaker 3: of what I'm going to be saying this episode, particularly
Speaker 3: from here forward, is technically probably a simplification of what's
Speaker 3: actually happening, because the mechanisms here are very very compt located.
Speaker 3: But okay, so the FED interest rate, right, this is
Speaker 3: the thing that is the source of all of the
Speaker 3: tension here, right. What Trump is pissed about to a
Speaker 3: large extent is that he thinks that FED interest rates
Speaker 3: are too high and he wants them to be lower
Speaker 3: because he thinks this will cause the economy to grow more. So, okay,
Speaker 3: what does that mean is what is the FED interest rate?
Speaker 3: The way this is explained to the public is that
Speaker 3: the FED sets the cost of borrowing. That's like true,
Speaker 3: kind of. Basically, there is a rate that is decided
Speaker 3: on by the Federal Reserve Board. On a more technical level, though,
Speaker 3: it's slightly more complicated than that. So when you hear
Speaker 3: someone talk about the Fed's interest rate, what they are
Speaker 3: talking about is the Federal funds rate, And technically what
Speaker 3: they're talking about is the target Federal funds rate. So
Speaker 3: I'm going to quote from the Federal Reserve self quote.
Speaker 3: The effective Federal funds rate is the interest rate at
Speaker 3: which depository institutions, banks, savings institutions, thrifts, and credit unions,
Speaker 3: and government sponsored enterprises borrow from and lend to each
Speaker 3: other overnight to meet short term business needs. The target
Speaker 3: for the Federal funds rate, which is set by the
Speaker 3: Federal Open Market Committee, has varied widely. Over the years
Speaker 3: in response to prevailing economic conditions. So yeah, Also, by
Speaker 3: the way, it is technically the Federal Open Market Committee
Speaker 3: that sets the fund rate. But okay, when we're talking
Speaker 3: about the FED setting the interest rates, right, there's kind
Speaker 3: of two things going on. So the effective Federal funds rate,
Speaker 3: which is the thing that they're trying to control, is
Speaker 3: the interest rate at which all of these different banks
Speaker 3: that have their money in here are all using it
Speaker 3: to lend to each other overnight. Through the money they
Speaker 3: have the Federal reserve, they're all lending it to each other.
Speaker 3: The average of the rate of interest that whist are
Speaker 3: lending to each other overnight, the average of that rate
Speaker 3: is the federal funds rate. When people talk about like
Speaker 3: the interest rates like three point two percent or whatever.
Speaker 3: What the FED is trying to do is make sure
Speaker 3: that at the end of the night, this effective federal
Speaker 3: funds rate, which is the rate that all these banks
Speaker 3: are lending each other money at, is at that rate.
Speaker 3: But they don't actually technically directly have control of this,
Speaker 3: because it is to be clear, the average rate of
Speaker 3: which all of these banks are lending to each other
Speaker 3: what the FED is manipulating directly usually is the interest
Speaker 3: on reserve balances or IRB. So this is the thing
Speaker 3: the FED does control. The interest on reserve balances is
Speaker 3: how much interest they pay out for just putting your
Speaker 3: money in the FED and leaving it there. I'm going
Speaker 3: to quote the FED again. The Fed's primary tool for
Speaker 3: influencing the Federal funds rate is the interest the FED
Speaker 3: pays on funds that banks whole as reserve balances at
Speaker 3: their Federal Reserve bank, which is the interest on reserve
Speaker 3: balances rate. Because banks are unlikely to lend funds in
Speaker 3: the federal funds market for less than they get paid
Speaker 3: on their reserve balances at the Federal Reserve, the interest
Speaker 3: rate on reserve balances is an effective tool for guiding
Speaker 3: the federal funds rate. Okay, Mia, you've been spouting gibberish
Speaker 3: for many minutes. Now what the fuck does that mean?
Speaker 3: So what the FED is normally doing is all right,
Speaker 3: so you put your money in a bank, right, and
Speaker 3: that bank has an interest rate, and it pays you
Speaker 3: out that amount of interest at the end of the year, right,
Speaker 3: And that's the money that you are making for putting
Speaker 3: your money in this corporation. The FED also has their
Speaker 3: own interest on reserve balances, so that they have their
Speaker 3: own interest rate for how much money you can get
Speaker 3: from just leaving your money in the Federal Reserve. And
Speaker 3: the theory, and this is like you know, true, is
Speaker 3: that banks aren't going to lend each other money at
Speaker 3: interest rates that are lower than what you can get
Speaker 3: from the FED because otherwise you just leave your money
Speaker 3: in the FED and you get them out amount of money.
Speaker 3: So if you're going to you know, loan someone something, right,
Speaker 3: the interest that's being charged here is going to be
Speaker 3: higher than the FED rate. And that's when we talk
Speaker 3: about FED setting interest rates. That that's what's happening on
Speaker 3: a technical level, and this is actually very important in
Speaker 3: the global economy because what this does, and this is
Speaker 3: where everything gets extremely murky, and I'm going to go
Speaker 3: to a very very high level of abstraction down from
Speaker 3: sort of the very low technical details. Now in theory,
Speaker 3: what this means is, this is how easy it is
Speaker 3: to obtain money to invest in stuff. Right, This sets
Speaker 3: the rate at which you can borrow money. And in theory,
Speaker 3: if you have a very very low interest rate right
Speaker 3: the FED, if the FED funds rate is really low,
Speaker 3: then it's very read cheap and easy to get a
Speaker 3: bunch of money, and that money flows to the economy,
Speaker 3: and theoretically that money will you know, be used to
Speaker 3: invest in stuff and that will increase economic growth. Okay,
Speaker 3: so why wouldn't the FED rate just always be zero?
Speaker 3: And the answer to that is that the FED is
Speaker 3: an institution and this this is part of its legal
Speaker 3: framework that established it is also trying to control inflation.
Speaker 3: And the theory, effectively is that if you leave these
Speaker 3: things for too low for too long, it will cause inflation,
Speaker 3: and it will cause economic bubbles that are not actually
Speaker 3: supported by the return on investment. Because if you can
Speaker 3: just always continuously borrow money for zero dollars, then you
Speaker 3: can just invest in anything as long as the return
Speaker 3: is like slightly more than like nothing. However, comma raising
Speaker 3: interest rates used as a way to try to slow
Speaker 3: economic growth in order to not have inflation results, right
Speaker 3: and also to not have there be sort of speculative bubbles.
Speaker 3: And right now we've entered period in which interest rates
Speaker 3: have been rising. After a pretty prolonged period of interest
Speaker 3: rates being effectively zero, like following the two thousand and
Speaker 3: eight financial collapse, they've been really low for like a while,
Speaker 3: for some stuff in the nineties that we're going to
Speaker 3: get to you later. But this is basically the primary dispute,
Speaker 3: which is that Okay, now, obviously the FED is to
Speaker 3: some extent a political actor. But the question here is
Speaker 3: who is going to get to set these sort of
Speaker 3: interest rates? Right? Is it going to be the President
Speaker 3: of the United States? Right, is it going to be
Speaker 3: that Donald Trump can just be like, oh, economy look bad,
Speaker 3: turned down the interest rate? Or is it going to
Speaker 3: be the Federal Reserve itself, which is how it presently
Speaker 3: functions running this And that's what FED independence means. So
Speaker 3: what is that stake here is one of the defining
Speaker 3: the defining mechanisms of sort of economic control, of control
Speaker 3: over the function of the economy. You know that this
Speaker 3: is called like a macroeconomic policy lever Right. This is
Speaker 3: one of the largest, most important and most powerful tools
Speaker 3: that exists in the entire world economy for managing and
Speaker 3: regulating the American economy. And the question is is this
Speaker 3: going to remain with this sort of quasi technocratic independent
Speaker 3: staff or is it going to be directly set by
Speaker 3: the president. And that is a huge fucking deal because
Speaker 3: as you mentioned last time I talked about this, there
Speaker 3: have been times where presidents have gotten control over central banks.
Speaker 3: For example, the sort of scare story that everyone is
Speaker 3: talking about is Turkey where Airdwan, they're effectively dictatorial leader,
Speaker 3: managed to break the independence of his own central bank
Speaker 3: and inflation rates are now merely forty percent. So this
Speaker 3: is what's at stake. It's who gets to control this thing?
Speaker 3: Is it Donald Trump or is it the Federal Reserve?
Speaker 3: Now we are going to go to ads and we
Speaker 3: are going to come back and talk a bit more
Speaker 3: about some of the nightmares that can happen here. Now. Okay,
Speaker 3: so we've been talking mostly about the FED interest rate
Speaker 3: because that is most of what it does, or that's
Speaker 3: not most of what it does. That's the most important
Speaker 3: thing that it does on a political level in terms
Speaker 3: of you know, this is why Donald Trump wants it. However, coma,
Speaker 3: the FED does a bunch of other shit, like, for example,
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of the world's gold supply owned by
Speaker 3: a bunch of countries across the world sits in a
Speaker 3: vault under the Federal Reserve building. The FED has a
Speaker 3: balance sheet right of like the assets that it owns
Speaker 3: and that balance sheet is right now about six and
Speaker 3: a half trillion dollars. The payment system that the FED
Speaker 3: maintains has two trillion dollars a day moving through it. Right,
Speaker 3: This payment infrastructure, the infrastructure of the Federal Reserve is
Speaker 3: the core of the functioning of the entire American banking system.
Speaker 3: Like I kind of emphasize this enough, and this is
Speaker 3: also you know, important on a macro international level, right,
Speaker 3: Like this institution functioning sort of normally is the difference
Speaker 3: between capitalism working kind of normally, which is not good
Speaker 3: but is working, and it's not working, and Trump is
Speaker 3: trying to take control of it. And again, this is
Speaker 3: a guy who wants to invade Greenland, and she is
Speaker 3: trying to take control over one of the most powerful
Speaker 3: economic institutions that has ever existed in human history. So
Speaker 3: these are the sort of the stakes of the fight
Speaker 3: that's happening here, because again, the FED is supposed to
Speaker 3: be an independent entity, right The President is not supposed
Speaker 3: to be able to order the FED to just do
Speaker 3: whatever it wants. And this is what's at stake with
Speaker 3: Trump trying to fire one of these Reserve board presidents,
Speaker 3: with Trump trying to prosecute the current head of the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve and use that threat to bring the Fed
Speaker 3: into line with doing what he wants to do. Now,
Speaker 3: Trump is also again attempting to install his own guy
Speaker 3: when Jerome Powell's term as the Chairman of the Federal
Speaker 3: Reserve Board ends. And Okay, in terms of could the
Speaker 3: Trump administration actually run this, right, I'm gonna read this
Speaker 3: quote from actually a very good Yahoo story about the
Speaker 3: search for Trump's knew who he wants to run the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve. This is starting with a quote from Trump's
Speaker 3: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett, Who's been the guy who is
Speaker 3: running the candidate search. Quote, who can bring the board
Speaker 3: along with them? Who has the gravitas, Bessett said, who
Speaker 3: is going to have an open, green span like mind
Speaker 3: that we could be going through a productivity boom like
Speaker 3: we did in the nineties and not just throw the
Speaker 3: brakes because we're alarmed at a high GDP number. Okay,
Speaker 3: if you have spent your life closely following American macroeconomic policy,
Speaker 3: that is nuts. That is a terrifying statement, utterly horrifying. Now, Mia,
Speaker 3: why is it scary to say that he wants a
Speaker 3: green span like mindset that doesn't throw the brakes on
Speaker 3: the economy because they're alarmed by a GDP number. Why
Speaker 3: is that scary? And this is also you know, why
Speaker 3: is it scary for the Trump administration to have direct
Speaker 3: control of the Federal Reserve. Part of the reason we
Speaker 3: haven't had a full scale economic collapse in two thousand
Speaker 3: and eight has been that there has been a bunch
Speaker 3: of very very careful management of the economy by the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve. Right, they have done a lot of technical stuff.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm saying they've done a lot of technical stuff.
Speaker 3: Well when I say well, I mean for the functioning
Speaker 3: of capital, like you and me and everyone listening to this.
Speaker 3: Is it working for us? No, not really, but it's
Speaker 3: working for capital, right, And they've been able to prevent
Speaker 3: an economic collapse through a lot of sort of technical means.
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty, and you see this now, they did
Speaker 3: these things called overnight repo injections where they would pump
Speaker 3: like one hundred billion dollars in liquidity into the bank
Speaker 3: markets overnight in order to make sure there was liquidity
Speaker 3: to because that was one of the things that cost
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight collapse so they've been doing a
Speaker 3: bunch of very careful management, some of it in these
Speaker 3: large swings that have very little public attention, some of
Speaker 3: it in just the way they've been doing policy. What
Speaker 3: these guys want to do is the Greenspan stuff from
Speaker 3: the nineties. So okay, meyah, what the fuck is that?
Speaker 3: So what he's talking about is the green Span put now,
Speaker 3: what happened to the nineties To simplify the story a
Speaker 3: little bit, but I'm not evenly simplifying it much. Every
Speaker 3: time the market went down, Greenspan would just lower the
Speaker 3: interest rate to make the market go back up. Right,
Speaker 3: So every single time it even sort of looks like
Speaker 3: the market might be going down, he makes the cost
Speaker 3: of borrowing from the Fed cheaper, so you can just
Speaker 3: take more money out of the Federal Reserve and plunge
Speaker 3: that money back into the stock market. Right, that's the
Speaker 3: theory here. The economist Robert Brenner called it asset Kanesianism.
Speaker 3: This is something we have talked about on the show many, many,
Speaker 3: many times, and it is to a large extent, the
Speaker 3: thing responsible for the two thousand and eight economic collapse,
Speaker 3: and also the dot com bo will before that, and
Speaker 3: arguably also the Asian market collapses in the nineties. Okay,
Speaker 3: you know you're you're dealing with a problem, which is
Speaker 3: that you don't have a manufacturing economy that can support
Speaker 3: economic growth. So what are you gonna do instead? Okay,
Speaker 3: we're gonna give everyone a bunch of money so they
Speaker 3: can do speculative investing in stocks. And we're gonna give
Speaker 3: him one a bunch of money so that they can
Speaker 3: go invest in housing market because housing prices will only
Speaker 3: ever go up, and that's the thing that these people
Speaker 3: want to do. Right And in terms of why, okay,
Speaker 3: why should you be scared about this?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 3: This is like saying that, Okay, we need to bring
Speaker 3: back the guys who did all of the mortgage backed
Speaker 3: securities in two thousand and eight that went up and
Speaker 3: put them in charge of like the world's most powerful
Speaker 3: economic institution. So the candidates that Trump is talking about
Speaker 3: putting in place, I don't know if any of them
Speaker 3: are going to make it right now, because I think
Speaker 3: the kind of person Trump is looking for is not
Speaker 3: the kind of person who like runs this kind of
Speaker 3: thing normally. In terms of like what Trump would do
Speaker 3: with the guy that he sort of installed there, we
Speaker 3: can look at who they've already installed, right, And the
Speaker 3: one Federal Reserve Board member that Trump has successfully gotten
Speaker 3: in place is Stephan Miren who, and I kind of
Speaker 3: emphasizes enough, I talk about how nuts this guy is
Speaker 3: all the time. This is this's the guy who wants
Speaker 3: other countries to pay taxes on holding US bonds. And
Speaker 3: this is the guy that, again, is now one of
Speaker 3: the governors of the Federal Reserve, war because Trump put
Speaker 3: him there. I could spend another forty minutes ranting about
Speaker 3: how bad of an idea his Mara Lago Accords, which
Speaker 3: is his version of the Plaza Chords, would be. It's gibberish,
Speaker 3: it's atrocious. And these people are simply not good enough
Speaker 3: at technical economic management to be put in charge of
Speaker 3: the Federal Reserve, the most powerful economic agency in the
Speaker 3: entire world. And again, as I've been saying, right, this
Speaker 3: economic management has been good for capital. Has it been
Speaker 3: good for us? Like? No, not really. However, putting that
Speaker 3: power directly into the hands of Donald Trump is an
Speaker 3: even worse idea. But it's also very important that this
Speaker 3: has been good for capital, because FED independence is the
Speaker 3: red line for a lot of very very powerful sectors
Speaker 3: of capital who would be fine with things like like
Speaker 3: you could, like Trump could do public executions in the streets,
Speaker 3: and like GP Morgan eventually would be okay with it. Right,
Speaker 3: JP Morgan is like panicking over this Federal Reserve stuff.
Speaker 3: So this is actually a line at which segments of
Speaker 3: capital are willing to break with Trump because this is
Speaker 3: an existential threat to them. Now, before I sort of
Speaker 3: close this out, you know, I've been giving what is
Speaker 3: essentially a very conventional analysis of what the Federal Reserve is,
Speaker 3: because to some extent you need a conventional analysis of
Speaker 3: what the Federal Reserve is to understand what the fuck
Speaker 3: is going on with these board things. But I want
Speaker 3: to give the final word to the anthropologist David Graper.
Speaker 3: This is from his book Debt the First five thousand Years. Quote.
Speaker 3: One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even
Speaker 3: the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let
Speaker 3: alone in official accounts. That is the role of war
Speaker 3: and military power. There's a reason why the Wizard has
Speaker 3: such a strange capacity to make money out of nothing.
Speaker 3: Behind him, there is a man with a gun. True,
Speaker 3: in one sense, he's been there from the start, I
Speaker 3: have already pointed out that modern money is based on
Speaker 3: government debt, and that governments borrow money in order to
Speaker 3: finance wars. This is just as true today as it
Speaker 3: was in the age of King Philip the Second. The
Speaker 3: creation of central banks represented a permanent institutionalization of that
Speaker 3: marriage between the interests of warriors and financiers that had
Speaker 3: already begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy, and that eventually
Speaker 3: became the foundation of financial capitalism. And this is something
Speaker 3: that's very very important. Right. We've been talking about how
Speaker 3: important the FED is as an economic institution, and obviously
Speaker 3: the importance of the Federal Reserve is tied in with
Speaker 3: the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency,
Speaker 3: which makes it the most important currency on Earth. It
Speaker 3: means that every other country is doing a bunch of
Speaker 3: transactions denominated in American dollars, and it turns out when
Speaker 3: you can make American dollars that is an enormous advantage
Speaker 3: for you. But this is all based on American military power. Right.
Speaker 3: The reason that the dollar is the world reserve currency
Speaker 3: is because all of the countries that had competing currencies
Speaker 3: that could have been the international standard were sort of
Speaker 3: annihilated during World War Two, and at the end of
Speaker 3: World War Two it was the United States left standing
Speaker 3: with the richest and most powerful economy on Earth. Yes,
Speaker 3: but also like it was the country with nukes and
Speaker 3: the largest army that wasn't the Soviets. Right. The element
Speaker 3: here that Graber is pointing out right is that the
Speaker 3: debt that you and me and everyone is like carrying
Speaker 3: out our day to day stuff with is war debt.
Speaker 3: Literally the thing that we used to like buy groceries
Speaker 3: is to a large extent, it's a tiny bit more
Speaker 3: complicated than this, but like loads that were taken out
Speaker 3: to like go bomb Vietnam. And part of what's happening
Speaker 3: under the Trump administration is that all of the things
Speaker 3: that used to be under the table, right, the US,
Speaker 3: you know, always had the kind of military power that
Speaker 3: Trump is sort of throwing around to try to you know,
Speaker 3: invade Greenland or just kidnap the president of Venezuela and
Speaker 3: like run the country by gunboat. The US has always
Speaker 3: had the ability to do this. It's just that it
Speaker 3: was largely agreed upon by everyone involved running the system
Speaker 3: that using this power under the table was more effective
Speaker 3: than using it openly. The Trump administration thinks that, you know,
Speaker 3: using soft power or not explicitly, just like saying we're
Speaker 3: going to invade you is like womanly pussy coock shit,
Speaker 3: Like that's effectively what's happening here, is it? And these
Speaker 3: people think that these relationships need to be drawn out
Speaker 3: into the open, right, And so what we're left with
Speaker 3: here is a war between two sectors of capital, one
Speaker 3: of which wants to immolate the world to satisfy the
Speaker 3: ego of a tyrant, and the other of which wants
Speaker 3: to let climate change immolate the world slightly slower, because
Speaker 3: doing anything about climate change would hurt their bottom line,
Speaker 3: but allowing the god king to immolate the world by
Speaker 3: himself would hurt their bottom line too. And this is
Speaker 3: effectively the problem with the moment that they're in, which
Speaker 3: is that neither of these institutions, right, Donald Trump is
Speaker 3: not on your side. The Federal Reserve is also not
Speaker 3: on your side. What is necessary here, though, is not
Speaker 3: for sort of comrade Federal Reserve to join us. What
Speaker 3: is necessary here for our purposes is that enough sectors
Speaker 3: of capital when the time comes right, when Trump finally
Speaker 3: does something and when there's a popular reaction enough that
Speaker 3: forces a confrontration between Trump and the American people. When
Speaker 3: that time comes, what is necessary is that these massive
Speaker 3: and powerful economic institutions stand aside and not defend the regime.
Speaker 3: As I've talked about to a significant extent on this
Speaker 3: podcast already, this is how the Bolsheviks won their revolution.
Speaker 3: It's also how the February Revolution won, which was that
Speaker 3: large portions of the populace, large portions of the ruling class,
Speaker 3: and to some extent, large portions of the state simply
Speaker 3: sat the conflict out because they didn't particularly like the revolutionaries,
Speaker 3: but they also weren't going to go die for some
Speaker 3: random tyrant. And that, in the end, is what's important
Speaker 3: about this conflict. Right there is, on the one hand,
Speaker 3: the possibility of Donald Trump just immolating the entire economy,
Speaker 3: and on the other there is the possibility of these
Speaker 3: people standing aside when we attempt to build a world
Speaker 3: when we are not being lit on fire for profit. Husband,
Speaker 3: it could happen here.
Speaker 2: What's getting assaulted by federal agents?
Speaker 4: No, don't I love when we start episodes both sleepy and.
Speaker 2: I'm Wired, I'm awake, I'm wide awake, baby, I'm a
Speaker 2: white awake.
Speaker 1: Will you will you start? Will you do you are?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 2: We already started, We already started.
Speaker 1: We have it.
Speaker 2: This is Executive Disorder.
Speaker 4: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 4: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 4: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today
Speaker 4: I'm joined by James Stout, Mio Wong, Robert Evans, and
Speaker 4: Margaret Kiljoy. This episode, we are covering the week of
Speaker 4: January fourteenth to January twenty.
Speaker 2: First, you know a lot of news organizations don't go
Speaker 2: woot woot geither cowards fucked up.
Speaker 5: That's because they don't drink fago.
Speaker 2: I know that's right.
Speaker 8: The official beverage of this journalist. This episode's printed by
Speaker 8: four Loco at tea mugget. You're a in allowed test.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Speaking of drinking, Actually, we will start this episode with
Speaker 4: a big glass of whole milk. Everyone has one, right,
Speaker 4: let's all go up at the same time.
Speaker 2: We finish it as we leave for the toilet.
Speaker 4: There we go, delicious, delicious whole milk.
Speaker 2: We drink a gallon every hour.
Speaker 4: We are not sponsored by the dairy lobby. There's nothing
Speaker 4: fishy going on whatsoever. We're not a drinking whole milk now.
Speaker 2: Not at all, not at all, Garrison Heifer, Davis.
Speaker 9: Heffer, even even Margaret Yeah, who's been a vegan for
Speaker 9: how many decades?
Speaker 2: Look, you can be a vegan and still have a
Speaker 2: lot of money in the dairy industry, Sophie.
Speaker 5: Well, all I'm saying is that if I increase my
Speaker 5: meat diet by twenty five percent, it will stay the same.
Speaker 2: Look, that's that's accurate.
Speaker 4: We love we love that math Huber.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And also, thanks to some of the new changes in
Speaker 2: the way the Food and Drug Administration works, I can
Speaker 2: guarantee you that American whole milk has almost no dairy
Speaker 2: in it. It's mostly chalk and baby laxative, just like
Speaker 2: our heroine.
Speaker 8: I have a theory about this. Can I sham my
Speaker 8: bog theory? I think the grand unifying principle about which
Speaker 8: we could bring American people together is that there are
Speaker 8: too many milks. Everyone agreed, that's right.
Speaker 4: Principle, that's right, what should take over from class? Yeah, yeah, milks,
Speaker 4: the great unifying milk principles.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the milk productionist.
Speaker 2: You know what place loves milk? Minnesota.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's turn to Minneapolis. The continuing ICE raids. In
Speaker 4: the fallout from ICE killing Renee Goody. On Wednesday, January fourteenth,
Speaker 4: ICE agents attempted to pull over a vehicle whose tag
Speaker 4: was registered to someone illegally in the country. The driver
Speaker 4: was not the owner of the vehicle and tried to
Speaker 4: evade arrest. After a fifteen to twenty minute car chase,
Speaker 4: the driver crashed into a light pole, but continued to
Speaker 4: run on foot. The man ran towards a nearby apartment building,
Speaker 4: with agents now chasing on foot, catching up with him
Speaker 4: after the man tripped and fell. A fedral Affidavid claims
Speaker 4: that another man watching from a porch named Julio Caesar
Speaker 4: Sosa Seles used a broom to assault the agents, while
Speaker 4: an unnamed individual hit the agents with a snow shovel.
Speaker 4: After the man they were chasing freed himself, one of
Speaker 4: the ICE agents fired his pistol, hitting Soceles, who was
Speaker 4: then hospitalized with a non life threatening injury. This information
Speaker 4: is from an FBI report, which contradicts initial statements made
Speaker 4: by DHS, which claimed that ICE was conducting a targeted
Speaker 4: traffic stop for Julio Caesar Sosacelees, a Venezuelan national cool.
Speaker 2: I think it's worth noting that this is essentially ice
Speaker 2: shooting the guy who saves the day at the end
Speaker 2: of home alone. Just as a quick note, that's all
Speaker 2: I've got to say.
Speaker 3: So, we haven't gotten very much good information about the
Speaker 3: shooting that's not from the government. What we do have
Speaker 3: is there is a livestream Facebook video of some of
Speaker 3: the nine to one one call that the family member's
Speaker 3: maids and I'm just going to quote from CNN here
Speaker 3: in the video, the family tells a nine to eleven
Speaker 3: dispatcher that agent shot so to sell Us as he
Speaker 3: tried to enter his home. They were following my husband
Speaker 3: for about thirty minutes. They were trying to crash into him.
Speaker 3: He arrived at home, and because we closed the door
Speaker 3: to them, they shot him. A woman can be heard
Speaker 3: telling the dispatcher it's not clear who is speaking or
Speaker 3: whether so sell Us is the person referred to as
Speaker 3: being followed. So that's the only kind of independent thing
Speaker 3: that we have on this right now, which also significantly
Speaker 3: contradicts the story that they got attacked by a guy
Speaker 3: with a snowshovel or brim.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't think it necessarily contradicts that there
Speaker 4: was a shovel getting moved in the direction of an
Speaker 4: ICE agent at some point.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, attacked. It may have just been a guy
Speaker 2: trying to create distance in space between itself and an
Speaker 2: armed man.
Speaker 8: Yeah, knocked it over as he ran past it, right,
Speaker 8: and then they tripped over it.
Speaker 2: Like, there's a wide variety of things that police officers
Speaker 2: have framed as I was assaulted with this, and then
Speaker 2: if you look at the video, it does not look
Speaker 2: like someone assaulting a police officer.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It might have just literally been a snowshovel on the porch. Honestly,
Speaker 5: they might have assaulted a police officer. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 5: care either way. I'm just saying we don't know what happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The main report, which is in federal court documents that
Speaker 4: were unsealed on Tuesday, have this FBI agent giving his
Speaker 4: report based on his knowledge of the incident, which had
Speaker 4: ICE chasing someone that bystanders used a broom and a
Speaker 4: shovel trying to get the agents off a man who
Speaker 4: was tackled on the ground. One ICE agent deflected a
Speaker 4: shovel blow and it created a small gash in his hand.
Speaker 4: The men that they were chasing was able to free
Speaker 4: himself from being held, and as that man was running away,
Speaker 4: an agent fired a pistol. That is the the most
Speaker 4: detailed report that we have at the moment.
Speaker 8: Yeah, sure, and like we can't categorically say what happened, right,
Speaker 8: You can't report a law enforcement testimony as you only saw,
Speaker 8: so what you shouldn't Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sure, shouldn't.
Speaker 8: I guess I can say that, like I'm in Minneapolis
Speaker 8: right now, right, and so Margaret, you're comfortable with.
Speaker 2: Me saying you're also in Minneapolis.
Speaker 5: It's true, I am in Minneapolis right now.
Speaker 2: They are co located.
Speaker 8: As they say, It's very hard to report on these
Speaker 8: things because essentially they happen extremely quickly, right and like
Speaker 8: on almost every corner in most of the like dense
Speaker 8: urban parts of town, there are people hanging out just
Speaker 8: trying to keep their neighbors safe. And these things happen
Speaker 8: so fast that big crowds aren't even able to gather
Speaker 8: for the most part. If you combine that with the
Speaker 8: fact that these iceage de germanly aren't wearing body worn cameras.
Speaker 8: You're only going to get a couple of accounts, and
Speaker 8: it's going to end up in he said, she said, right, right,
Speaker 8: and then they're going to go with the law enforcement testimony.
Speaker 2: Which is what they want, which is exactly yep.
Speaker 3: And I think it is also worth noting that the
Speaker 3: last three shootings that we've gotten, like the federal agents
Speaker 3: lied about what happened. Yeah, and we got the videos
Speaker 3: later on it showed that they were lying about it.
Speaker 2: So at this point, my default assumption is that, absent
Speaker 2: other information, they are not telling the truth.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Also they're framing the Asians, framing his decision to fire
Speaker 4: as related to being afraid of his life, and yeah,
Speaker 4: in the document, the fear would be based on the
Speaker 4: presence of a broom handle and trumps.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 4: It is a broom based assault that he cites as
Speaker 4: the reason that you fired.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's someone running away, right.
Speaker 3: And the woman who says that her son was the
Speaker 3: one being pursued by ice, I'm just gonna read the
Speaker 3: quote here because this is something that does directly contradict
Speaker 3: the testimony. But in an interview with CNN, Mabel Lajorna,
Speaker 3: the mother of Alfredo Alejandro Aljerno disputed both of those
Speaker 3: claims on the basis of her connection with her son.
Speaker 3: Immediately after the shooting, Aljorna said her son told her
Speaker 3: he was the one being pursued on foot by Ice
Speaker 3: and that the other guy was already inside the building
Speaker 3: when the agent shot him, not outside where Ice said
Speaker 3: the agent fired the shot.
Speaker 2: Geez. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's the testimony that we have that's not
Speaker 3: from the ICE people, and I think we'll figure out
Speaker 3: in the coming weeks, like what happened.
Speaker 4: Yeah, maybe maybe three people were arrested after this incident.
Speaker 4: The person that they were chasing, who they have claimed
Speaker 4: two different people at some point, the man that Mea
Speaker 4: just referenced, as well as the person who was shot.
Speaker 4: And there's also this third individual who is allegedly the
Speaker 4: shovel wielder, which is not named in the BIAFFA David, Yeah,
Speaker 4: but all of these three people have been arrested.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: During a protest that same night, dozens of people broke
Speaker 4: into two parked FBI vehicles, finding challenge coins and US
Speaker 4: Marshall documents. One person has been arrested for stealing a
Speaker 4: rifle from one of the vehicles.
Speaker 2: Bad challenge coins much safer, also safer.
Speaker 4: Today on Saturday, Governor Walls mobilize the Minnesota National Guard
Speaker 4: and place them on standby to assist local law enforcement.
Speaker 4: If deployed, the Guard will be wearing yellow reflective vests
Speaker 4: to distinguish themselves from federal forces.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's this is an interesting moment in and of itself,
Speaker 2: just the acknowledgment from the both the military command and
Speaker 2: the governor that like, yeah, you can't tell the difference
Speaker 2: between a soldier and a cop anymore. Like we have
Speaker 2: to do this so that people don't think the army
Speaker 2: is the police. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: And it's a very like oraboris moment too, because you
Speaker 5: have just like the cops are dressing up like the soldiers,
Speaker 5: so the soldiers are like, oh, well, I guess we
Speaker 5: got to change how we dress now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this could actually fuck up our ability to carry
Speaker 2: out our mission. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Further complicating matters, fifteen hundred soldiers from the eleventh Airborne
Speaker 4: Division at Fort Waynworth and Alaska have been placed on standby,
Speaker 4: with Pentagon officials telling CBS News that they are preparing
Speaker 4: to deploy to Minneapolis due to the Eleventh Airborne Division's
Speaker 4: Arctic Forte. There has also been public speculation that this
Speaker 4: activation may be related to rising tensions over Greenland, but
Speaker 4: that has no basis based on what officials are saying
Speaker 4: at the moment. Yeah A Sunday protest in Saint Paul
Speaker 4: disrupted a church service because protesters believe that one of
Speaker 4: the pastors is also the head of the Saint Paul
Speaker 4: ice Field Office, David Easterwood. Easterwood's profile on the church's
Speaker 4: website does appear to match the identity of the head
Speaker 4: of the local ice Field office. Later that day, Attorney
Speaker 4: General Pambondi released a statement quote attacks against law enforcement
Speaker 4: and the intimidation of Christians are being met with the
Speaker 4: full force of federal law.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: The Department of Justice announced that it was launching an
Speaker 4: investigation into the protesters, including TV journalist Don Lemon, who
Speaker 4: was streaming inside the church, for possible violations of the
Speaker 4: Face Act, which makes it a federal crime to interfere
Speaker 4: with people trying to access reproductive clinic services or exercise
Speaker 4: their Firstmendment right of religious freedom at a place of worship.
Speaker 4: Harmet Dylan, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, has also
Speaker 4: invoked the Clan Act as a justification to bring conspiracy
Speaker 4: charges against protest attendees, darkly ironic since this very protest
Speaker 4: was partially put on by Black Lives Matter Minnesota.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's also particularly well given like we've been driving
Speaker 8: around today and seen multiple churches with like ice go
Speaker 8: home kind of messaging. Obviously those people are not going
Speaker 8: to be protected in the same way, right if they
Speaker 8: choose to take care of migrants, Like I don't think
Speaker 8: I've seen any churches with like anything other than that messaging.
Speaker 2: And in time cruising around today, I.
Speaker 5: Haven't seen any pro ice messaging anywhere, any pro Trump
Speaker 5: messaging period. I have never seen a more united this
Speaker 5: city in my life.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's genuinely remarkable, like to see people who's I
Speaker 8: don't think they would like identify as having radical politics,
Speaker 8: but they are like out standing on street corners in
Speaker 8: the freezing cold just to try and keep their neighborhoods safe.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is the this is the warmer day of
Speaker 5: the week. And I went and got all this like
Speaker 5: extra snow gear, and I live in the mountains, right
Speaker 5: that is like where I live, and I'm standing there
Speaker 5: in most of my extra snow gear and everyone's like,
Speaker 5: today's the warm day. Everything's fine, and I'm like I
Speaker 5: need to get inside soon.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I will die. Welcome to walk to Minnesota.
Speaker 3: Winters die.
Speaker 5: We're talking to a seventy six year old with no
Speaker 5: hat on.
Speaker 8: Yeah, degree is incredible, warmed by pure anger. I mean,
Speaker 8: that is warm, but she was ready to take on
Speaker 8: the world. It was really Yeah, it's genuinely really wonderful
Speaker 8: to see Like we went out, we talked to these
Speaker 8: people for a while, some folks stop by and it's
Speaker 8: just feeding everyone. It's really nice to see a community
Speaker 8: like entirely in lockstep taking care of one another.
Speaker 5: And I feel like, to me so far, like the
Speaker 5: actual headline around Minneapolis is that, like, obviously there's like
Speaker 5: these instances of really horrific violence coming from the state
Speaker 5: or coming from the federal government, right, But the actual
Speaker 5: story that so far, the people we've talked to want
Speaker 5: to get across is this. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: journalists come here and just want to cover all the
Speaker 5: bad stuff that's happened here. But this horizontal organizing and
Speaker 5: this like feeling of togetherness and also more than anything else,
Speaker 5: like I think even when you talk about the bad
Speaker 5: thing that's happening, it's federal occupation, right, and like people
Speaker 5: are very very aware of the fact that this is
Speaker 5: an outside force occupying the city and it and so
Speaker 5: even like anything that's happening, like individual bad actions taken
Speaker 5: by the federal police, I think it needs to be
Speaker 5: understood that, like, no one here is buying any other
Speaker 5: line besides, no, this outside force is here to steal
Speaker 5: our neighbors, right and us.
Speaker 8: You'll go past like fancy coffee shops and random like
Speaker 8: like businesses, like I've seen businesses before having signs that
Speaker 8: say like refugees welcome and we cherishow migrant neighbors. But
Speaker 8: the ones here will also say like Ice get out
Speaker 8: of town, Ice, go home. We don't want you here,
Speaker 8: Like people like yeah, yeah, yeah, Like people are not
Speaker 8: having it to a degree, which like I don't think
Speaker 8: I've seen that. You know, I wasn't in Chicago during
Speaker 8: the time that Ice was there, was in Los Angeles.
Speaker 8: But like every neighborhood here feels like the neighborhoods sort
Speaker 8: of most in lockstep in those cities, right, every neighborhood
Speaker 8: we've been to, right, like in heavily Latino neighborhoods where
Speaker 8: I live. Yeah, everyone's watching out for each other. Meant
Speaker 8: in San Diego that is, but like here and every
Speaker 8: single neighborhood, everyone is watching out for each other from
Speaker 8: what we've seen, And like it is folks of every
Speaker 8: age and demographic standing on street corners in the freezing cold,
Speaker 8: just pulling a shift to keep an eye out.
Speaker 2: It's remarkable.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I was like, there's no way. People are like, oh,
Speaker 5: every neighborhood has like a neighborhood watch, and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 5: I don't know. There's like two people per neighborhood wandering
Speaker 5: at any given time. Like I was like, how can
Speaker 5: you watch a whole city? And like, oh, the answer
Speaker 5: is everyone in the city does it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: That's the story that I want people to take from this,
Speaker 8: is that like nobody here wants this, and they're not
Speaker 8: just like angry and going on the internet. They're angry
Speaker 8: and getting to know their neighbors, going and organizing each other,
Speaker 8: taking care of one another, and doing the things that
Speaker 8: they can do to keep each other safe.
Speaker 4: During Trump's three hundred and sixty five days in office
Speaker 4: press conference this past Tuesday, he discussed the killing of
Speaker 4: Renee Good and expressed hope that Good's parents would continue
Speaker 4: to support President Trump.
Speaker 2: Let's watch amazing.
Speaker 8: Yeah, come damn, I haven't seen it.
Speaker 4: Well you are unlucky enough to see it now.
Speaker 2: No, we'll do it live.
Speaker 4: It's gross, it's weird.
Speaker 8: Garson'spootingaupex dot com the everything website.
Speaker 6: And you know they're going to make mistakes.
Speaker 10: Sometimes Ice is going to be too rough with somebody,
Speaker 10: or you know they're dealing with rough people.
Speaker 6: Are they going to make a mistake? Sometimes it can happen.
Speaker 6: We feel terribly. I felt horribly.
Speaker 10: When I was told that the young woman who was
Speaker 10: I had the tragedy. It's a tragedy. It's a horrible thing.
Speaker 10: Everybody would say. Ice would say the same thing. But
Speaker 10: when I learned her parents, and her father in particular,
Speaker 10: is like, I hope he still is, but I don't know.
Speaker 10: It was a tremendous Trump fan. He was all for Trump.
Speaker 10: I loved Trump, and uh, you know, it's terrible. I
Speaker 10: was told that by a lot of people. They said, oh,
Speaker 10: he loves you, he he was.
Speaker 6: I hoped.
Speaker 10: I hope he still feels that way or that's hard,
Speaker 10: hard situation. But her father was a tremendous and parents
Speaker 10: were tremendous Trump fans.
Speaker 6: That's so sad it just happens. It's terrible.
Speaker 2: What is there even to say? You know, what do you?
Speaker 2: How do you the fuck? Yeah, it's it's interesting that
Speaker 2: he's he seems to be capable of, like legitimately being
Speaker 2: upset at the thought of one of his fans not
Speaker 2: liking him anymore. Yeah, Like that's weird the fact that
Speaker 2: he like he brings it up in a way that
Speaker 2: suggests like there's no artifice there, right, Yeah, like that
Speaker 2: that's the genuineness of like, oh, he actually seems to
Speaker 2: be slightly disturbed at the thought of one of his
Speaker 2: fans no longer liking him, even though his secret police
Speaker 2: murdered that guy's daughter. That's fascinating. It doesn't change anything, Like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, there's nothing to do with that information,
Speaker 2: but it's a fascinating understanding Donald Trump's mind data point. Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, it is one of the weird things where you
Speaker 4: kind of see him be sincere and genuine briefly, but
Speaker 4: it's for such a fucking weird thing.
Speaker 3: Weird.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like he understands that You're like, well,
Speaker 5: you know, maybe maybe he doesn't like me anymore, but
Speaker 5: I hope he does.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this would be a reason to change his opinion
Speaker 2: of me. But yeah, I.
Speaker 5: Murdered his child.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I don't know what else to say about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah I didn't either.
Speaker 4: So part of the whole reason why ICE is doing
Speaker 4: this operation in Minnesota, Operation Metro Surge. This was started
Speaker 4: in part due to allegations of COVID relief of fraud
Speaker 4: among the Somali community in Minnesota. ICE Dirrector Todd LLINs
Speaker 4: went on Fox News earlier this month in the lead
Speaker 4: up to ICE's mass deployment to address this.
Speaker 11: You know, one thing we're really focused on is the
Speaker 11: fact that unfortunately, with Minnesota's sanctuary laws and jurisdictions, it
Speaker 11: attracts these type of frousts.
Speaker 3: It attracts people that do take.
Speaker 11: Money away from the hard working Americans in the people
Speaker 11: of Minnesota. We want to help root out these people
Speaker 11: that are committing fraud. And you look at the billions
Speaker 11: of dollars that potentially could have been stolen, that could
Speaker 11: have gone to foreign terrorist organizations that we're really focused on.
Speaker 11: So we're hoping to get to the bottom of that.
Speaker 4: So as ICE is currently hoping to get to the
Speaker 4: bottom of this fraud problem in Minnesota. Just this past week,
Speaker 4: Trump has pardoned at least eleven white collar fraudsters.
Speaker 5: I think we can all agree the biggest problem with
Speaker 5: that clip was the type oe in ice at the
Speaker 5: bottom where they Fox News didn't put the period after
Speaker 5: the E in ice, but they put the period after
Speaker 5: the I in the sea. I think we can all agree.
Speaker 4: Yeah, get on it, Todd. Actually, uh, Fox News is
Speaker 4: hiring is hiring a graphic design position in New York
Speaker 4: right now. So if you want to apply to fix
Speaker 4: the graphics, see you later, losers.
Speaker 8: Yeah, can you use Chad Gpt They probably did.
Speaker 2: Here's a job for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Let's go on break and then talk about as Trump
Speaker 4: calls it, Iceland.
Speaker 2: Jesus and we're back. First off, if you need to
Speaker 2: tell the difference between Greenland and Iceland, just remember the
Speaker 2: words of wisdom from either the first or the second
Speaker 2: Mighty Ducks movie. Right, quack quack Greenland is and Iceland
Speaker 2: is nice? Is the is the way to remember the two?
Speaker 4: Well, he can't spell nice without ice, Robert.
Speaker 2: That's rights in Iceland. Yeah, Yeah, that's that's how you
Speaker 2: tell the difference. That's a little that's a little tip
Speaker 2: for the president and everyone else, I guess trying to remember.
Speaker 5: That's probably that's how I've known the difference my entire life,
Speaker 5: and it's almost certainly because of watching The Mighty Ducks and.
Speaker 2: The Mighty Ducks. Yeah, exactly, exactly the Mighty Ducks films. Sorry, yeah,
Speaker 2: shout out to my Iceland friends. I enjoyed Iceland very much.
Speaker 2: Shout out to whoever made the Mighty Ducks. Yeah, I know,
Speaker 2: the knowledge of the creation has been lost in time.
Speaker 5: It was actually the whole thing was actually a propaganda
Speaker 5: film by the Iceland tourist industry, a little known in fact.
Speaker 2: That's right, big Iceland. We are reporting this on the
Speaker 2: day that it looks like Donald Trump may have just blinked.
Speaker 2: He put up a truth announcing that he had reached
Speaker 2: an arrangement with NATO and that tariffs would not be
Speaker 2: necessary against all of Western Europe. Basically, it's kind of
Speaker 2: unclear the details of the deal. He's saying that it's
Speaker 2: a big, permanent thing. The US has sorted out its
Speaker 2: security needs. Doesn't seem like we're going to be invading Greenland.
Speaker 2: But you know, it's also Donald Trump, So we could
Speaker 2: be in a very different position tomorrow. But that's kind
Speaker 2: of the big update right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's talk about kind of the lead up to
Speaker 4: this ye moment. I suppose sure, multiple EU nations and
Speaker 4: Denmark have sent troops to Greenland the past two weeks
Speaker 4: for the Arctic Endurance military exercise aimed at countering Russian
Speaker 4: security threats and to demonstrate that European NATO countries have
Speaker 4: the capacity to defend Arctic territory without the US needing
Speaker 4: control over Greenland. Now, Trump took this military deployment as
Speaker 4: a personal slight and levied tariffs in retaliation, posting on
Speaker 4: true social quote. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom,
Speaker 4: the Netherlands and Finland have journeyed to Greenland for purposes unknown.
Speaker 4: This is a very dangerous situation for the safety, security
Speaker 4: and survival of our planet. Those countries who are playing
Speaker 4: this very dangerous game have put a level of risk
Speaker 4: in play that is not tenable or sustainable. Therefore, it
Speaker 4: is imperative that, in order to protect global peace and security,
Speaker 4: strong measures be taken so that this potentially perilous situation
Speaker 4: and quickly and without question unquote. He then announced ten
Speaker 4: percent tariffs against all of these nations, which would increase
Speaker 4: to twenty five percent next month.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess my gut feeling is, you know, to reef,
Speaker 2: you know, like it. But beyond that, this is kind
Speaker 2: of just what Trump does now, right, is he threatens
Speaker 2: everyone with like whatever the nuclear option is, short of
Speaker 2: the literal nuclear option, which in this case is nuking
Speaker 2: global trade. And then it kind of blows up in
Speaker 2: his face because the EU actually has the ability to
Speaker 2: collapse the dollar status as a reserve currency, and the
Speaker 2: money awardens of the world are aware of that, which
Speaker 2: is why the draft Dow plunged eight hundred points yesterday
Speaker 2: and probably why Trump felt pressured to come to an
Speaker 2: accommodation with NATO. I don't know that he ever literally
Speaker 2: planned on invading, although at this point I think you
Speaker 2: can't take that out of the equation. But like, this
Speaker 2: is just what he does now, right, Like none of
Speaker 2: this is like it's wild because he might have literally
Speaker 2: bombed a fucking NATO member. But I don't know what
Speaker 2: to say other than.
Speaker 8: That, Yeah, I can I can explain a little bit
Speaker 8: more about the unhidden series of messages that Donald Trump
Speaker 8: has been sending to various world leaders. God, we know
Speaker 8: about these because they have all been released.
Speaker 4: Right, fantastic from Planetary Security.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thing is Fred's text?
Speaker 8: Well not just that, right, the Norwegians released the text
Speaker 8: that was sent by him to Norwegian Prime minister. Right,
Speaker 8: like the Norwegians, they're not normally like an impulsive nation.
Speaker 2: That's not what people know the Norwegians for now.
Speaker 8: No, they don't make big swings on the international scale
Speaker 8: very much, but they have done this time. So I'm
Speaker 8: just going to quote write from his message to Norwegian
Speaker 8: Prime minister quote, considering your country decided not to give
Speaker 8: me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars
Speaker 8: plus pluses all in caps, I no longer feel an
Speaker 8: obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always
Speaker 8: be predominant, but can now think about what is good
Speaker 8: and proper for the United States of America. Then Trump
Speaker 8: released text from Mark Rutter, the NATO Secretary General, that
Speaker 8: read quote, mister President, dear Donald, what you accomplished in
Speaker 8: Syria today is incredible. We will get onto that. Return
Speaker 8: to the quote, I will use my media engagement to
Speaker 8: Davos to highlight your work there in Gaza and in Ukraine.
Speaker 8: I am committed to finding a way forward on Greenland.
Speaker 8: Can't wait to see you. Do you have the French
Speaker 8: text as well? It's a French text.
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 8: I don't have it in here, but yes, the Macran
Speaker 8: text message I'm more than happy to read because that
Speaker 8: one was pretty funny. Actually, so we are totally in
Speaker 8: line on Syria. We can do great things in Iran. Interestingly,
Speaker 8: none of these sentences end with any punctuation. No punctuation,
Speaker 8: no punctuation Macran rejoicing.
Speaker 2: It not helpful, so I'll just read them in one
Speaker 2: continuous breath.
Speaker 8: I do not understand what you're doing on Greenland. Let
Speaker 8: us try to build great things one lowercase. I can
Speaker 8: set up a G seven lowercase G meeting after Davos
Speaker 8: in Paris on Thursday afternoon. I can invite the Ukrainians
Speaker 8: to Danish Assyrians and the Russians in the margins.
Speaker 2: Two.
Speaker 8: Let us have a dinner together in Paris together on
Speaker 8: Thursday before you go back to the US. I manuel
Speaker 8: lots of flowercase in there. Actually, none of the countries
Speaker 8: getting up a case.
Speaker 4: Imagine setting your situationship this text and then he just
Speaker 4: posts it on true social Yeah, it's so violated.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what's so weird to me is that this
Speaker 2: is almost word for word the text. I say, James,
Speaker 2: it's true.
Speaker 8: I've posted it on a new website.
Speaker 4: I do not understand what you were doing on Greenlands.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: I love that sentence, just floating on its own, like
Speaker 8: it's it's magnificent.
Speaker 2: It's magnificent. And it's also like, yeah, that is basically
Speaker 2: everyone feels like, man, I don't know what you're doing
Speaker 2: on Greenlands, Like what is actually happening here?
Speaker 5: I mean, what do you do when like there's a
Speaker 5: petulant child who also has a handgun or a nuke,
Speaker 5: you know, and you're just like shut up kid, Oh
Speaker 5: wait no, you could shoot me. Uh no, it's time
Speaker 5: for nap.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This is why I have, like you know how
Speaker 2: hotels have those like little sprinklers in the roof. I've
Speaker 2: got one of those just for cs gas. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: just to keep just to clear out the house in case,
Speaker 2: you know, you gotta calm everybody down. That's what we
Speaker 2: need for the country. Yeah, we only need little holiday.
Speaker 8: Let's talk about Greenland, right, Greenland's a semi autonomous territory
Speaker 8: of denmarkt as a colony, and then over the twentieth
Speaker 8: century Greenlanders became Danish citizens and now they have like
Speaker 8: the semi autonomous situation where that they have a lot
Speaker 8: of home rule, but they are still part of Denmark. Denmark,
Speaker 8: of course, is part of the EU and of NATO,
Speaker 8: so therefore they are part of the EU and part
Speaker 8: of NATO.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: As we said earlier, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, finn and
Speaker 8: the Netherlands and the UK have also very small numbers
Speaker 8: of troops to the territory in the past couple of weeks.
Speaker 8: But the US is the one that has the most
Speaker 8: troops on Denmark, right, because the United States has a base,
Speaker 8: so they've kept this base that since World War Two.
Speaker 8: It was there in World War two because the Nazis
Speaker 8: occupied Denmark, right, and then the United States garrison Greenland
Speaker 8: because it does have like they're not wrong in saying
Speaker 8: it has an important strategic position right where it is now, it's.
Speaker 2: Really well located. And the reality of again this is
Speaker 2: another mark in the column of like conservatives pretending climate
Speaker 2: change isn't real and acting based on the realities of
Speaker 2: climate change. Because of the warming oceans in that part
Speaker 2: of the world, it's going to become much more navigable.
Speaker 2: It used to not be as strategic because there was
Speaker 2: just less possibility of moving naval assets through the area.
Speaker 2: And now that that's not going to be a problem
Speaker 2: because the world's warming and there's going to be less
Speaker 2: ice there, Greenland has much more much higher like strategic
Speaker 2: value just in terms of like as a place to
Speaker 2: have as a potential naval joke point.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, are you saying that the people who named
Speaker 5: it were actually being prescient ahead of the curve.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, they were ahead of the curve. They weren't
Speaker 2: just trying to stop people from coming to Iceland. They
Speaker 2: foresaw it in the ruins.
Speaker 8: So the US you speak, called Tula Air Force Base,
Speaker 8: and essentially the US has the right according to Defense
Speaker 8: Treaty creates Greenland to use Greenland to defend itself and
Speaker 8: to defend the Arctic.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: So what they previously had that during they kept the
Speaker 8: base during the Cold War because it was where they
Speaker 8: would be able to identify missile launches coming from the
Speaker 8: former Soviet Union?
Speaker 2: Was it time the Soviet Union?
Speaker 12: Right?
Speaker 8: And then they could intercept from from there with their
Speaker 8: air Force base. They now it is now a space
Speaker 8: Force space. Yeah, it's now the Petrifix Spaceport Space.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: And the US can expand or garrison this base as
Speaker 8: it needs to write, like the majority of Greenland, it's
Speaker 8: all occupied, right, but it is not like I guess,
Speaker 8: urbanized or built upon.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 8: The US could expand this base, it could add more
Speaker 8: assets to this base, but the United States has decided
Speaker 8: that it's not enough and that it needs total sovereignty
Speaker 8: over Greenland. So there are a few ways it could
Speaker 8: achieve that, and we should just be explicit about those, right.
Speaker 8: The first is obviously by direct military action. That still
Speaker 8: seems relatively unlikely, but who knows these days.
Speaker 3: Hopefully.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there is an influence campaign that they're trying, right,
Speaker 8: that they're attempting to influence Greenlanders into wanting to become American.
Speaker 8: The polling data I have shown so that Greenlanders do
Speaker 8: favor in the hindants. But yeah, they do not favor
Speaker 8: joining the United States. They wouldn't mind leaving Denmark, and.
Speaker 2: Also overwhelmingly when presented with a choice between the United
Speaker 2: States or Denmark, would prefer to remain part of death.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, that situation right now, it's one that like
Speaker 8: they don't want to go out the frying pan into
Speaker 8: the fire, so to speak.
Speaker 2: I guess yeah, for reasons that make no sense to
Speaker 2: me as I text my friend about the doctor visit
Speaker 2: they can't afford.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Like it's interesting seeming as interviews where they're like,
Speaker 8: why would we want that? We've seen what you people
Speaker 8: have for healthcare?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what sucks? What is the appeal of being America?
Speaker 8: If Denmark has any spaces, California you know will join you.
Speaker 8: So yeah, the other option will be to purchase it, right,
Speaker 8: which is not on the card. It's like Greenland is
Speaker 8: not for sale. So yeah, me, do you want to
Speaker 8: talk about this this tariff campaign they've been suggesting that
Speaker 8: they're going to leverage.
Speaker 2: Wait a second, what's that, James? Did you say?
Speaker 4: Jazz rocky jazz, bot.
Speaker 3: Rock, jazz rocky jazz.
Speaker 9: Bob.
Speaker 3: By God, it's Mia Wong's music.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I bet you would have picked that.
Speaker 8: We asked me what she wanted. She wrote it so made.
Speaker 8: She went into a room, she wrote down music notes
Speaker 8: on a piece of paper, and she came out with
Speaker 8: something that.
Speaker 2: Turned out somebody else had done it before.
Speaker 3: Well we couldn't. We couldn't licensed Barracuda. So this is
Speaker 3: this is this is what we got.
Speaker 2: That we actually were not trying to make a parody.
Speaker 2: This is one of those things like the evolution of
Speaker 2: the bow and arrow. We just kind of independently recreated
Speaker 2: rock the kasba, but based around tariffs from fresh principles.
Speaker 5: That's the carsonization of songs.
Speaker 2: That's right, carsonalization of songs. All music becomes rock the
Speaker 2: kasvo if you if you had given it up, give.
Speaker 8: It long enough on the Galapagos Islands. That's what we
Speaker 8: sent me here to write a song on. She was
Speaker 8: on the Glapica Islands for a long time.
Speaker 3: That's right, very nice there, so so speaker speaking of
Speaker 3: things changing very very quickly. So two days ago, as
Speaker 3: we are recording this, Trump was interviewed about these terrorists
Speaker 3: he was going to impose by I think it was NBC,
Speaker 3: and he said, quote, I will one hundred percent. It
Speaker 3: is now Wednesday, and he has backed off of the tariffs.
Speaker 2: Tomorrow truly another day, who knows.
Speaker 3: Who knows. I think it's kind of worth noting as
Speaker 3: of right now when we're recording this. Everyone is kind
Speaker 3: of treating this as if this is over. But except
Speaker 3: for the German finance minister who said, quote, it's good
Speaker 3: they are engaged in dialogue. We have to wait a
Speaker 3: bit and not get our hopes up so soon. Yeah,
Speaker 3: which is significant. That's that's the smart play too. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And this is significant because Germany, as we'll get you
Speaker 3: in a second, Germany has been one of the major
Speaker 3: EU countries that does not want to deploy what is
Speaker 3: being called and I can't believe I'm saying this, the
Speaker 3: trade bazuka. So it's called the every single to go
Speaker 3: today it is called what is the trade bazuka?
Speaker 2: It's okay, we're all asking ourselves that, aren't.
Speaker 3: We I okay. So before we get to the trade
Speaker 3: of bazuka, it's worth noting that in terms of the
Speaker 3: retaliation that has been being planned by the EU against
Speaker 3: the US for trying to do this, there's actually two
Speaker 3: different things on the table. One is a package of
Speaker 3: tariffs that we've actually talked about before on this show.
Speaker 3: That was the package of tariffs that EU developed as
Speaker 3: part of the trade negotiations. Well, basically it was developed
Speaker 3: in response to Liberation Day tariffs last year. They'd been
Speaker 3: suspended as part of trade negotiations with the US, and
Speaker 3: the US and the EU had finally reached an agreement,
Speaker 3: and then Trump said this and the EU backed out.
Speaker 3: So who knows what the tariff's status is going to
Speaker 3: be and if the EU and the US are going
Speaker 3: to continue to have come to this agreement that was
Speaker 3: supposed to stave these things. So these retaliatory terrorists were
Speaker 3: supposed to go into effect on February seventh. We had
Speaker 3: just negotiated it not coming in. These are there are
Speaker 3: a bunch of targeted tariffs on a bunch of US
Speaker 3: goods that are specifically designed to hit red States. The
Speaker 3: most famous of these is, for example, there's there's specific
Speaker 3: tariffs on like Kentucky bourbon and whiskey and stuff, but
Speaker 3: it also hits Boeing, a bunch of Rydom consumer goods.
Speaker 3: It's just like chewing gum. It's on roughly one hundred
Speaker 3: billion dollars of US goods. I think the biggest pressure
Speaker 3: points here are Boeing in general dynamics. There's tariffs on
Speaker 3: car companies. There's also very importantly there was a twenty
Speaker 3: five percent tariff in here on soybeans, which I think
Speaker 3: is a major leverage point because the US continues to
Speaker 3: need a market to sell all the soybeans that China's
Speaker 3: not buying.
Speaker 2: And yeah, China ain't buying them right now. We just
Speaker 2: had another month where they bought none of our soybeans.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So these are the tariffs that the EU was going
Speaker 4: to put into effect on February seventh in response to
Speaker 4: the Greenland tariffs.
Speaker 3: No, okay, sorry, back this up. This is a tariff
Speaker 3: measure that was originally designed back in May of last
Speaker 3: year in response to Trump's original ride of tariffs a
Speaker 3: Liberation Day tariffs. Yeah, they've been suspended until now, and
Speaker 3: they were about to just not go into effect at all. However,
Speaker 3: the EU immediately has been like, okay, maybe we are
Speaker 3: going to impose these ones.
Speaker 4: Ah, got it because of Trump's new because greenlands leverage tariffs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I see. So this is this is one of
Speaker 3: the two options that EU has. The other option and
Speaker 3: this is okay, getting those tariffs would be a little
Speaker 3: bit difficult, but that's significantly the more likely option. The
Speaker 3: other option, the thing you've been hearing about, which is
Speaker 3: the trade Bazuka, which.
Speaker 4: Was also my grinder screen name at the RNC.
Speaker 3: Trade bzuk you either get it?
Speaker 5: Are you deaf?
Speaker 3: You can? This is great? This is great. Okay, So
Speaker 3: all right, what is the trade bazuka? We're just going
Speaker 3: to move past that.
Speaker 2: So it's what a lot of Republicans were asking themselves
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 8: Oh god, gogo trending term in Minneapolis, ORGA.
Speaker 3: Okay, So the trade Bazuka is an anti coercion instrument
Speaker 3: that was originally designed by the EU in the early
Speaker 3: twenty twenties as a response to some bullshit that China
Speaker 3: pulled with Lithuania over embassy stuff in Taiwan. It's a
Speaker 3: whole thing. I'm not going to explain it here, but
Speaker 3: these measures are I think maybe the most extraordinary measures
Speaker 3: that I've seen. These measures, if they went into effect,
Speaker 3: would be more serious than the Liberation Day tariffs. They
Speaker 3: are very, very difficult to enact. They require fifteen of
Speaker 3: the twenty seven EU members, there has to be an
Speaker 3: investigation process, there's a whole thing, and the negotiations have
Speaker 3: to actually break down. And this is where it's really difficult,
Speaker 3: because Germany in particular does not really seem to want
Speaker 3: to do this. However, Trump has played this very badly
Speaker 3: in the sense that two of his natural allies in
Speaker 3: the EU are the UK and Norway, who he just
Speaker 3: was threatening to leverage tariffs on.
Speaker 2: So you can't part of the EU anymore.
Speaker 3: But yeah, well for yeah, but those are those are
Speaker 3: his two European allies, and the UK still has significant
Speaker 3: leverage inside of their Now what is interesting is that
Speaker 3: Macron has called first deployment if Trump presses to move
Speaker 3: on Greenland. So the question sort of is what does
Speaker 3: this thing do? And the short answer is everything. The
Speaker 3: long answer is incredibly long, and the medium answer is
Speaker 3: if you go read the document. I read it, I'm
Speaker 3: going to roughly based by description of what it can
Speaker 3: do on Willer Hail, which is a law firms version
Speaker 3: of it. So there's ten things they can do. They
Speaker 3: can put on tariffs. They can do important export restrictions
Speaker 3: on goods. They can impose trade restrictions in general. They
Speaker 3: can impose restrictions on government procurement and contracts and what
Speaker 3: goods are bought by governments. They can do services restrictions.
Speaker 3: They can do foreign direct investment restrictions. They can do
Speaker 3: restrictions on intellectual property. Right protections. They can do capital
Speaker 3: controls of financial services restrictions. They can do chemicals and
Speaker 3: like sanitary goods restrictions, so they can stop the US
Speaker 3: from importing goods to the EU. They can prevent EU
Speaker 3: governments from giving contracts to the US companies or buying
Speaker 3: anything from the US. They can restrict American intellectual property rights,
Speaker 3: which I don't even know what that would do.
Speaker 5: I think that means that they can all pirate whatever
Speaker 5: they want.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, right, that rules.
Speaker 2: Spain did this for a long time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like we're firing the trade Bizuka and now
Speaker 3: you can use every Disney character like Disney would rise up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just flood the market with with Mickey Mouse pornography.
Speaker 2: That that is that is part of the EU's response package.
Speaker 4: I mean that, No, that that already falls under fair
Speaker 4: you Strabert.
Speaker 2: Not the way I do it, Garrison, not the way
Speaker 2: I do it.
Speaker 3: These are technically two different Mickey Mouses.
Speaker 2: Technically, no, no, no, I've been very clear about which
Speaker 2: Mickey Mouse is in my pornography.
Speaker 3: So so the reason this is being called like the
Speaker 3: trade bizuk or the nuclear option is that the actual
Speaker 3: once this is enacted, which is very difficult. The actual
Speaker 3: limits and what they can do are almost on existence.
Speaker 3: They can once they've targeted it, it can kind of
Speaker 3: do whatever you wanted to do to the extent that
Speaker 3: they could in theory basically shut down all trade with
Speaker 3: the US.
Speaker 5: Why didn't they call it the trade death Star? I honest,
Speaker 5: Zook is not thinking big enough, like that takes out
Speaker 5: a tank, Jenny Widely.
Speaker 3: I think it's being called the Bazuko because the people
Speaker 3: reporting on this haven't actually read it and have not
Speaker 3: thought through the implications of what this thing does, which
Speaker 3: is that, like Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5: The trade mutually assured destruction device.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's isn't.
Speaker 5: Mutually assured destruction? Is that what this whole thing is
Speaker 5: built around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because the EU's economy will also plunge.
Speaker 3: But yeah, so this was originally designed around China specifically,
Speaker 3: but it's designed effectively as a nuke. Right, You're not
Speaker 3: supposed to have to ever get to the point where
Speaker 3: you're invoking it. It's designed to be a set of
Speaker 3: trade things that is so damaging that no one in
Speaker 3: their right mind would possibly risk it happening. Unfortunately, our
Speaker 3: president is Donald Trump. Heah, we are Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 3: that's the sort of nuclear option here. I want to
Speaker 3: mention one other thing which Robert Bluefly touched on earlier,
Speaker 3: which is there's been a lot of discussion of a
Speaker 3: quote from a report by the guy who is Deutsche
Speaker 3: Banks head of Foreign Exchange Research, and he's talking about
Speaker 3: how much treasury bond is owned.
Speaker 2: But you, I mean a lot. There are primary treasury
Speaker 2: bond holders, right, like the four In terms of foreign
Speaker 2: treasury bond holders.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, between that and stocks, it's like eight trillion dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and treasury bonds. By the way, the fact that
Speaker 2: the EU is like our primary foreign treasury bond holder,
Speaker 2: like treasury bonds and foreign countries holding them is why
Speaker 2: the dollar is the reserve currency. It's why if you
Speaker 2: are wanting to like ransom someone or buy illegal guns
Speaker 2: and drugs anywhere in the world, they're more likely to
Speaker 2: use dollars than euro. That is changing, you know, in
Speaker 2: the in the international crime game, but the dollar is
Speaker 2: still the default foreign currency. People around the world needed
Speaker 2: a currency that's universally valued, the dollar is is the
Speaker 2: best bet, and it's because of how treasury bonds work, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's I'm oversimplifying but that's.
Speaker 3: A big part of it. Yeah, so okay, I'm going
Speaker 3: to read the actual quote here. In an environment where
Speaker 3: the geoeconomic stability of the Western Alliance is being disrupted existentially,
Speaker 3: it is not clear why Europeans would be willing to
Speaker 3: play this part. To translate this from like banking into
Speaker 3: what is he actually saying. What he is arguing here
Speaker 3: is that there is the potential for these countries to
Speaker 3: stop buying US treasury bonds and effectively pull out of
Speaker 3: American assets. It's not quite that easy, but this, this
Speaker 3: would be the what we're talking about is like, is
Speaker 3: the is the end of the US al res reserve currency.
Speaker 3: And he's also very specific. This is about the fact
Speaker 3: that the dollar status is reserve currency is a thing
Speaker 3: that is allowing the US military to carry out these
Speaker 3: kind of operations. Up until yesterday when he said this,
Speaker 3: the only people I have ever seen actually say this
Speaker 3: are you know, I mean economist who I like as
Speaker 3: people like David Hudson, David Graber talks about this, but like,
Speaker 3: this is a thing that you could only say if
Speaker 3: you were like a Marxist or an anarchist. And now
Speaker 3: you have Deutsche Bank analysts saying it. And this is
Speaker 3: something that was impossible like two days ago, that there
Speaker 3: would actually be serious discussion of, you know, using as
Speaker 3: a geopolitical tool like getting out of US Treasury bonds,
Speaker 3: which means ending the US dollar as a reserve currency.
Speaker 3: And this was a big enough deal that the U
Speaker 3: s Secretary of the Treasury is claiming that Deutsche Bank
Speaker 3: called him to disavow the analysis. Wow, it's unclear if
Speaker 3: that's true or not. But this, I think is one
Speaker 3: of the things that really panicked them in terms of
Speaker 3: why Trump backed off. Was there are multiple nuclear options
Speaker 3: that are being put on the table for the first
Speaker 3: time ever. And I think that that and the down
Speaker 3: route was enough to just panic them for at least
Speaker 3: one day. And we'll see what tomorrow holds. But yeah,
Speaker 3: this is a really significant shift in what is able
Speaker 3: to be discussed in terms of reactions to what the
Speaker 3: US is doing.
Speaker 2: Well, you know what else is the United States?
Speaker 4: These ads another flawless Robert Evans molment everybody.
Speaker 2: And we're back, all right? What else we got to
Speaker 2: talk to? Anything else happened in the entire world?
Speaker 5: I don't think so.
Speaker 4: Yes, there actually there is two more Davos thinks very
Speaker 4: briefly that I think we should get to before we
Speaker 4: kind of end with some other updates on ongoing stories
Speaker 4: and situations that we've been covering on the pod for
Speaker 4: a while. But when Mia was talking about how this
Speaker 4: this sort of analysis was only used by you know,
Speaker 4: like Marxists or certain tymes of anarchists before that is
Speaker 4: now getting kind of paid lip service on the national stage,
Speaker 4: that reminded me a little bit of Canadian Prime Minister
Speaker 4: Mark Carney's Davos speech yesterday who which addressed some similar
Speaker 4: things on the fiction of the quote rules based international order.
Speaker 2: Christ, holy shit, I mean I agree with that description
Speaker 2: of the rules based international order. Mark conn has been
Speaker 2: reading my book.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's let's take a lesson.
Speaker 12: We knew the story of the international rules based order
Speaker 12: was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,
Speaker 12: that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that
Speaker 12: international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity
Speaker 12: of the accused or the victim.
Speaker 2: This fiction was useful.
Speaker 12: An American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open
Speaker 12: sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support
Speaker 12: for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign
Speaker 12: in the window, We participated in the rituals, and we
Speaker 12: largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
Speaker 6: This bargain no longer works.
Speaker 2: Let me be direct.
Speaker 12: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Speaker 12: Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy,
Speaker 12: and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.
Speaker 12: But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration
Speaker 12: as weapons. Tariffs's leverage, financial infrastructures, coercions, apply chains as vulnerabilities.
Speaker 2: To be exploited.
Speaker 12: You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through
Speaker 12: integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really remarkable to hear the political leader of
Speaker 2: Canada being like it was always very clearly a lie,
Speaker 2: the rules based international order where the United States exempted
Speaker 2: itself because it had power, but we pretended that this
Speaker 2: wasn't happening. We like acknowledging that, Like, we ignored them
Speaker 2: breaking the rules because it was convenient for Canada.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it totally worked out well for us, until now
Speaker 5: it doesn't work out well for us anymore.
Speaker 3: Like I should invading a rock. It was fine, but
Speaker 3: now like that fucking it might invade us one day.
Speaker 4: So oh yeah, it's really interesting, just totally pulling back
Speaker 4: the curtain on this type of neoliberalism here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love too.
Speaker 2: Every time you get someone who would never ever give,
Speaker 2: like anarchists or anarchist political theory the light of day,
Speaker 2: like independently come to a conclusion very late. That is
Speaker 2: like that anarchists has been yelling after you, like, yes,
Speaker 2: it's a fiction. The rules based international order is a
Speaker 2: fiction all the like. Everyone's playing lip service to these ideas,
Speaker 2: knowing the US has exempted itself because hiding behind the
Speaker 2: big guy is convenient. But that's a bad idea. The
Speaker 2: thing that people who knew anything were saying when we
Speaker 2: invaded Iraq, which was if you let them get away
Speaker 2: with this, no one will ever be safe, that's the way.
Speaker 2: And all those people got pushed aside is like, no,
Speaker 2: you're just being hysteric, Like you're just being like that
Speaker 2: you don't have like a real understanding of politics and
Speaker 2: how it works, and there will never be any kind
Speaker 2: of reckoning of people being like, oh yeah, all of
Speaker 2: like the all of the people who were like inconveniently
Speaker 2: critical were right twenty something years ago. They'll never say that,
Speaker 2: but it's fun to see them admit it, like, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of obliquely.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it sounds like he's been reading Charles Tilly. It's
Speaker 8: kind of kind of remarkable.
Speaker 4: Carney did write this speech himself. That's something that he
Speaker 4: has come out and said that this was not like
Speaker 4: some speech writer who's pulling from like whatever, like you know,
Speaker 4: Neil Liberal bookshelf is popular right now, Like he specifically
Speaker 4: wrote this himself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean he just crimmed from that book I
Speaker 5: read as a kid. The Emperor has no clothes.
Speaker 3: Like clothes.
Speaker 4: So before the announcement of this ambiguous Greenland deal, which
Speaker 4: neither the European authorities nor Trump has really given any
Speaker 4: details of yet. But but before this, Trump did speak
Speaker 4: Outdavos on Wednesday, where he confused to Greenland for Iceland
Speaker 4: and said that they called him quote unquote, daddy, God
Speaker 4: damn it. Play the clip.
Speaker 13: I'm helping Europe, I'm helping NATO, and I've until the
Speaker 13: last few days when I told him about Iceland they
Speaker 13: loved me. They called me daddy right last time. Oh god,
Speaker 13: very smart man said he's our daddy. He's running it.
Speaker 13: I was like running it.
Speaker 10: I went from running it to being a terrible human
Speaker 10: being very cool.
Speaker 4: Mister President, based on the reporting, acknowledging that he multiple times,
Speaker 4: not just in this clip, said Iceland when he meant Greenland.
Speaker 4: Carolyn Levitt, pres Secretary, responded by saying no, his written
Speaker 4: remarks referred to Greenland as a quote unquote piece of ice,
Speaker 4: because that's what it is unquote, so saying that he
Speaker 4: was literally calling Greenland like an ice land. Anyway, the
Speaker 4: emperor is totally wearing clothes. I don't know what you're
Speaker 4: talking about.
Speaker 3: What's that mon moth? But quote about they don't even
Speaker 3: bother to lie badly anymore.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's the worst excuse I've ever heard.
Speaker 4: It's incredible ice Land.
Speaker 8: I mean, it's going to be a remarkable thing to
Speaker 8: be in her position right and just be like, what
Speaker 8: the fuck am I going to come up with?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 2: How do I what? What are we going to spin here?
Speaker 3: Ice? Pause?
Speaker 4: Spacelaneah Land one word? It's incredible? Wait what you go?
Speaker 3: Girl?
Speaker 2: Go off?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: Later at the CEO reception dinner, Trump said this, Oh god, we.
Speaker 6: Had good reviews in that speech.
Speaker 10: Usually they say he's a horrible dictator type person.
Speaker 6: I'm anna dictator, but sometimes you need a dictator. But
Speaker 6: they didn't say that in this case.
Speaker 3: Sure, my guy.
Speaker 4: Share oh man, of.
Speaker 2: Course they didn't. I wonder why. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Multiple times during this speech he was like, if it
Speaker 4: weren't for the United States and you'd all be speaking
Speaker 4: German and maybe a little Japanese, it's like incredible.
Speaker 2: How did he think? Like, yeah, how did he think that,
Speaker 2: like control was going to break down between those two countries.
Speaker 8: Slowly giving Japan right on Sundays it's Japan and the
Speaker 8: rest of the time it's German.
Speaker 2: Incredible, Yeah, pan pulling up like your deadbeat dad to
Speaker 2: be like, look this weekend your mind.
Speaker 1: If it wasn't a horrific monster, be really funny.
Speaker 2: We're eating sushi.
Speaker 1: He's so funny.
Speaker 2: He is really he's our funniest president by a wide margin.
Speaker 3: Evil, but he's so funny. Yeah.
Speaker 9: The way he pronounced dictator where there was like a
Speaker 9: slight pause, like.
Speaker 2: He legitimately has good timing as a presenter. It's actually
Speaker 2: two words Sophie.
Speaker 8: He was saying dick and then tata like the contraction
Speaker 8: of potato like.
Speaker 1: It sounded like he was giving a recipe.
Speaker 2: I was like, what are we doing here?
Speaker 9: Oh my gosh, here, do we have anything else from Davos?
Speaker 4: No, I think that's all for DeVos. One of the
Speaker 4: funnier DeVos isn't in recent memory. I agree, Yeah, Now
Speaker 4: we just have some sad news that James is probably
Speaker 4: gonna say.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so, I guess if we start with a run
Speaker 8: right protesta continuing. The BBC had a piece today where
Speaker 8: they were leaked to photos of hundreds of the people
Speaker 8: who have been killed. Jesus, there's three hundred and twenty
Speaker 8: six items, including eighteen women. The reason that they were
Speaker 8: able to get these images is it seems that people
Speaker 8: went to the mortuary and had to look through a
Speaker 8: slide show of the faces of people who have been killed,
Speaker 8: many of whom are so disfigured that they're unrecognizable, and
Speaker 8: they have to flick through hundreds of images of these
Speaker 8: brutalized human remains in order to try and identify their
Speaker 8: loved ones. Right, it is unimaginable the scale of state violence.
Speaker 8: Godoyen had an interview on his Twitter or his ex
Speaker 8: dot com right that with people with someone inside Iran,
Speaker 8: which I'd encourage people to read and which we will
Speaker 8: link in the show notes. But like people continue to
Speaker 8: be in the streets there and the state continues to
Speaker 8: meet them with absolutely horrific violence. And talking of horrific violence,
Speaker 8: I want to move now to Syria, right, specifically to
Speaker 8: Syrian Kurdistan and the I guess majority Arab parts of
Speaker 8: Syria that had previously been part of the Autonomous Administration
Speaker 8: of North and East Syria.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 8: Last week we talked about fighting in Aleppo and then
Speaker 8: we spoke about like fighting moving towards Euphrates. Right, fighting
Speaker 8: has now moved past where it was last week, and
Speaker 8: it's moving dangerously closed to Comeichlo and Hesseka, which are
Speaker 8: the two biggest Kurdish cities. Hesseica is not just a
Speaker 8: city where Curdish people live.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 8: Arab people, I mean not neither of these are right,
Speaker 8: Arab people, are Syrian people, are Meinian people, right yuzds.
Speaker 8: The ANES was a multi ethnic project like that. That's
Speaker 8: what distinguished the SDF from the from the YPG and
Speaker 8: the YPG right that they were multi ethnic, they weren't
Speaker 8: just Kurdish.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: The the way that this has occurred is that the
Speaker 8: Syrian Transitional Government has been able to flip multiple tribal
Speaker 8: groups who are mostly Arab who had previously fought alongside
Speaker 8: the SDF as part of the SDF right, but have
Speaker 8: now flipped to the side of the Syrian Transitional Government.
Speaker 8: So it's leaves the SDF with previously units that have
Speaker 8: been there suddenly flipping, and they have lost huge amounts
Speaker 8: of territory to include Raka, famously.
Speaker 2: Formber capital of the Islamic State.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the former capital where thousands died both as a result
Speaker 8: of is violence and in the fighting for the city
Speaker 8: and a result as a result of civilians died as
Speaker 8: a result of coalition bombing during the fighting for the city.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 8: There have been absolutely horrific images of the brutalization of
Speaker 8: the remains of captured YPG and YPGA fighters.
Speaker 2: Right, men and women.
Speaker 8: We have seen executions. This is not just executions are happening.
Speaker 8: It is that people who are fighting not necessarily in
Speaker 8: the Syrian Arab Army, but in at least alliance with
Speaker 8: the Syrian Transitional Government, have been so comfortable carrying out
Speaker 8: summary executions that they have decided to film and share them.
Speaker 8: So on Monday, muslium Abdi, right, the general of the
Speaker 8: Syrian Democratic Forces, traveled to Damascus to attempt to negotiate
Speaker 8: a peace and was not able to do that. It
Speaker 8: seems that he was offered some kind of position, but
Speaker 8: he didn't want the position. There was not also some
Speaker 8: kind of autonomy backstops for the remaining areas of the
Speaker 8: AA and E S right, and so as a result,
Speaker 8: there was a general mobilization in the AAN E S.
Speaker 8: People from Bakur so, people from northern Kurdistan have crossed
Speaker 8: the border. There's a border wall, fence wall, depending on
Speaker 8: where you're at, in between Turkish Kurdistan and Syrian Kurdistan, right,
Speaker 8: And at one point people have broken that down and
Speaker 8: young people have entered into Syrin Kurdistan to fight to
Speaker 8: defend the cities that are still part of the A
Speaker 8: and E S. The counter terrorism group of the p
Speaker 8: UK has entered Syrien Kurdistan. That's quite surprising, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Which is the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Yeah, which is
Speaker 2: an Iraqi Kurdish political party effectively, Yeah.
Speaker 3: It is not aligned.
Speaker 5: Oh, Yeah, they're not lefty, right, or they're not democratic
Speaker 5: and federalist.
Speaker 8: No, they I mean were at some point like.
Speaker 2: They are now today basically like an arm of the
Speaker 2: Kurdish quote unquote state in northern Iraq. Right, they were
Speaker 2: originally more of an actual political party and did have
Speaker 2: some socialist elements. That's not really super relevant to what's
Speaker 2: going on.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the ideology is not the same as the ideology
Speaker 8: that you have seen in Imbrishava, right. Yeah, but like
Speaker 8: I have not since Kabani have you seen more unity
Speaker 8: of Kurdish people, regardless politics, right, Like a sort of
Speaker 8: statement from the gacy stuff from Bazani, from Talibani. So
Speaker 8: these are the two major political figures in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Speaker 8: I've seen Kurdish religious leaders making statements right because people
Speaker 8: are afraid of an ethnic cleansing, because they have seen
Speaker 8: the ethnic cleansings of the Drus and the Ala Whites
Speaker 8: that have already happened under the STG. Right, it's worth noting.
Speaker 8: I guess at this point, like for whatever reason, they
Speaker 8: have not chosen to remove the name Arab from the
Speaker 8: country's name, like the Syrian Arab Republic, And I think
Speaker 8: like that Syria is a multi ethnic and very diverse country,
Speaker 8: and if it is to succeed under any form of administration,
Speaker 8: it needs to acknowledge that, right. And it's it's really
Speaker 8: worrying to see this horrific inter ethnic violence, and it
Speaker 8: is being massively accelerated by people in the media right
Speaker 8: to include a lot of like people who who might
Speaker 8: be referred to as experts. I don't think that's a
Speaker 8: reasonable appalach like they're their expertise. It was pretty limited,
Speaker 8: but nonetheless, people who like to include journalists, telegram influencers
Speaker 8: and then think tankers in the West. People are sharing
Speaker 8: things that are either not true or that have not
Speaker 8: happened in this time, like telegram videos are actually not
Speaker 8: taken in Syria this week, right, that have taken different
Speaker 8: places and times, And we are careening towards this not
Speaker 8: becoming a fight between two different administrative projects, but becoming
Speaker 8: an inter ethnic conflict, right, And I think we're pretty
Speaker 8: much there at this point, and nobody seemed to be
Speaker 8: looking for an off ramp, which is tragic. Like I
Speaker 8: was in Hesseca two years ago and I was conducting
Speaker 8: interviews there and a member of this little kid whose
Speaker 8: father had died fighting Isis and like it was dark outside.
Speaker 8: You know, this was during a time when when Turkey
Speaker 8: was bombing the region quite heavily, and the little kid,
Speaker 8: I think had been struggling to sleep because he's.
Speaker 2: Sleeping in the middle of the day.
Speaker 8: And then when he woke up, we were just hanging
Speaker 8: out with his mother and I gave a little kids
Speaker 8: some toys to play with that I brought with me,
Speaker 8: and like, I can't help but thinking how scared that
Speaker 8: poor little guy is now, you know, and his dad's
Speaker 8: not there, right, yeah, because like twelve thousand members of
Speaker 8: the SDF. He died fighting the Islamic state, right and
Speaker 8: now another state is coming to put his family, his
Speaker 8: kid in danger. Like that's horrific. What people have gone
Speaker 8: through in Syria already is too much. And like to
Speaker 8: see more killing and dying there is heartbreaking for me. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: it's very briefly. On the immigration update, it appears that
Speaker 8: immigration and Customs enforcement are now under the impression or
Speaker 8: there they believe that they can enter homes without the
Speaker 8: consent of the homeowner, so they can use force to
Speaker 8: enter in order to remove someone with a final removal order,
Speaker 8: so long as they have an administrative warrant that is
Speaker 8: a different thing from a judicial warrant.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 8: This is often what people talk about when they talk
Speaker 8: about does ICE have a warrant? They're looking for a
Speaker 8: judicial warrant as opposed to warrant that they have issued
Speaker 8: themselves at administrative warrant, and so this will obviously broaden
Speaker 8: the amount of places that they can enter and times
Speaker 8: when they end up entering people's homes by force. Right,
Speaker 8: So we will likely be seeing more violence here as well. Yay,
Speaker 8: I'm going to put a link to a have ASAW
Speaker 8: fundraiser at the bottom of this if you'd like to
Speaker 8: help people in Kurdistan.
Speaker 2: There are people who have been displaced.
Speaker 8: Four times now in the last few years versince twenty eighteen,
Speaker 8: so if you'd like to help, you can do that.
Speaker 8: Will also include a fundraising link for Minneapolis if you'd
Speaker 8: like to spend some money closer to home. If you'd
Speaker 8: like to email us, you can do so by emailing
Speaker 8: cool Zone Tips at proton dot me. If you want
Speaker 8: the email to be encrypted, you should send it from
Speaker 8: a proton address.
Speaker 2: Well, we look forward to hearing more from Margaret and
Speaker 2: James in Minneapolis, and I don't know. I guess that's it.
Speaker 5: We reported the news, did we We reported the news, Yeah,
Speaker 5: all of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's kind of how it feel.
Speaker 6: Awesome.
Speaker 5: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 9: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 4: You listen to podcasts.
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