Speaker 1: Alsome Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode, So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Hello, welcome to it could happen here. It's me today, James,
Speaker 3: and I'm very lucky to be joined by Cooper Quentin,
Speaker 3: who is a senior staff technologist at the EFF and
Speaker 3: Colonel Panic who is a hacker. And we are going
Speaker 3: to be talking today about the privacy apocalypse that is
Speaker 3: coming our way, I guess, the end of privacy and
Speaker 3: what you can do to stop it being the end
Speaker 3: of privacy. So thanks for joining me, Bithee.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, Hey James, happy to be on the show again.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for making the time. So I guess, like
Speaker 3: in the case is somebody lives under a rock, we
Speaker 3: should start breaking down some of the different surveillance mechanisms
Speaker 3: that the state is building and maybe kettle panic. You
Speaker 3: can kick us off with flock because that is the
Speaker 3: one that has probably got the most attention recently, and
Speaker 3: then Cooper, we can pick up on some of the
Speaker 3: many other privacy violation tools.
Speaker 5: Certainly, you may notice all these cameras popping up around
Speaker 5: your town. They're on a black pole. It's a black
Speaker 5: camera with a solar panel, and these are what we
Speaker 5: call flock cameras. They're really easy to spot, but they're
Speaker 5: essentially ALPRs. They're automatic license plate readers. So this is
Speaker 5: like a form of drag net surveillance where anytime you
Speaker 5: drive by these things, they're just logging your license plate.
Speaker 5: And they've expanded this to do other things like facial
Speaker 5: recognition and gunshot detection and so on. Distressed person detection
Speaker 5: is another one which is really dodgy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fascinating, but it just looks for people who are
Speaker 3: acting distressed.
Speaker 5: Or I think it's a sound thing too, right.
Speaker 4: Oh, okay, yeah, I think it's it's pretty similar to
Speaker 4: gunshot detection in the books for people shouting, people in
Speaker 4: the heightened state of emotion, right, I mean, this could
Speaker 4: really easily be a protest detector.
Speaker 3: Right yeah, Or I meantine if that was a fucking peacock,
Speaker 3: like you have peacocks get angry, they really sounds like
Speaker 3: someone's dying or folks.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I mean false false positives are already a
Speaker 4: huge issue for gunshot detections in general. Right, they can
Speaker 4: go off for a balloon popping, they can go off
Speaker 4: for fireworks.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then just because you're in the area, you know,
Speaker 5: you're now part of an investigation.
Speaker 3: So press, we should talk a little bit about some
Speaker 3: of the other ones to keep it. Maybe we start
Speaker 3: with facial recognition.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, facial recognition is all the rays these days.
Speaker 4: A lot of law enforcement is unfortunately investing in this.
Speaker 4: We've seen of course ICE with their mobile fortified tool
Speaker 4: that's gotten a lot of press lately. And then this
Speaker 4: is so this is an app that runs on Android
Speaker 4: phones that they can scan people with and you know, apparently,
Speaker 4: according to them, get a fully one hundred percent accurate
Speaker 4: identity for that person within seconds. Anybody who understands facial
Speaker 4: recognition will tell you that that is not true, and
Speaker 4: that can't possibly be true. Facial recognition is never one
Speaker 4: hundred percent accurate, and in fact, there have been dozens
Speaker 4: of cases where people have been falsely arrested, wrongfully imprisoned
Speaker 4: in charge because of incorrect facial recognition results. This has
Speaker 4: also already happened in the case of Mobile Fortify. There
Speaker 4: was a woman in Oregon who ICE scanned her face,
Speaker 4: and they scanned her twice. Both times it came up
Speaker 4: with a different identity for this woman, and it turns
Speaker 4: out that both of those identities, neither of them were
Speaker 4: the correct identity for this woman.
Speaker 6: Jesus, but it's been using this as as a you know,
Speaker 6: sort of judge jury and execution to determine whether to arrest, detain,
Speaker 6: and possibly even deport somebody.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's pretty bleak. Something that happens if when
Speaker 3: you come to the United States you're a migrant rate
Speaker 3: is that they will collect a large amount of your
Speaker 3: biometric data. But it seems to even with all of that,
Speaker 3: the resolution that they have on the scan is actually
Speaker 3: very poor.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, that's I mean, that's that is correct. Right.
Speaker 4: So the way that this works, the databases that they have,
Speaker 4: it's checking against various immigration databases. We think that it's
Speaker 4: most likely checking against the like tsa database of biometric
Speaker 4: scans that you do every time you take a flight,
Speaker 4: of course, all of the at the border biometric scans,
Speaker 4: the ingress and egress scans. Yeah, any sort of viset
Speaker 4: information or anything like that. There's also the Clearview AI,
Speaker 4: So even if you've never done any of these, there's
Speaker 4: another app called clear View which is used by law
Speaker 4: enforcement and by ICE, which does a similar thing. But
Speaker 4: it's back end data is all of the photos that
Speaker 4: have been posted online, so they're using data from social
Speaker 4: media Facebook, Instagram, everything else to make a face match
Speaker 4: and determine who you are based on that sort of
Speaker 4: publicly available data as well.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what a reassuring thing to hear.
Speaker 5: The high cost of the free service.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about a couple of other things. I think
Speaker 3: those are things that people have a very reasonable fear
Speaker 3: of concern, with anger about however you want to put it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there is some stuff which I think perhaps we just
Speaker 3: need to understand what it means, I guess, and maybe
Speaker 3: we could start there and it coup. You've done a
Speaker 3: lot with stingrays or cell phone sight simulators, with lots
Speaker 3: of names for them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely. So I've been for the last couple of
Speaker 4: years working on a project called ray Hunter, which is
Speaker 4: a open so project to detect cell sized smitters or
Speaker 4: stingrays or MC catchers, whatever you want to call them.
Speaker 4: I will probably use these terms interchangeably. And in short,
Speaker 4: the way it works is it's a little piece of
Speaker 4: software that sits on a mobile hotspot, one of those
Speaker 4: little things that you buy to get like Wi Fi
Speaker 4: in various places from a cellular connection, and it looks
Speaker 4: at the traffic between the hotspot and the towers that
Speaker 4: it's connected to, specifically the control traffic, not what you're doing,
Speaker 4: but what the control traffic is, how it's connecting into
Speaker 4: the towers. It looks for a number of suspicious things,
Speaker 4: signatures that we've written of what we think are indicative
Speaker 4: of MC catcher activity. So we've been running this for
Speaker 4: a year. There's several hundred of these around the US,
Speaker 4: if not a couple of thousand, but we don't have
Speaker 4: exact numbers. There's a bunch of these all over the US.
Speaker 4: We had a bunch of Minneapolis, people have been running
Speaker 4: them in Chicago, in LA when that was going on.
Speaker 4: People have been running them all over the country. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and we have found some evidence of MC catchers, but
Speaker 4: a lot less than we expected, or a lot less
Speaker 4: than many people expected. I actually didn't expect to find many.
Speaker 4: And specifically, we have not found any evidence of mccatchers
Speaker 4: being used at protests. And I just stop for your
Speaker 4: first second to explain what a sting ray or mccatcher is. Yeah,
Speaker 4: this is a fake cell tower essentially that tricks your
Speaker 4: phone into connecting to it so that your phone will
Speaker 4: identify itself to the mccatcher. These are used for the
Speaker 4: primary reason these are used for is to track down
Speaker 4: a specific person. So like what we see in court
Speaker 4: documents is that these are used to verify that somebody
Speaker 4: is home before a police rate happens. Right. This is
Speaker 4: what the vast majority of use for these is. That
Speaker 4: is one use. The other potential use, and the one
Speaker 4: we're actually more concerned about, is that these could be
Speaker 4: used to identify who is in a specific area. You
Speaker 4: can set one of these up outside, let's say, outside
Speaker 4: of a mosque or outside of a protest an anarchist
Speaker 4: meeting or a anti fascist meeting is regularly happening, right,
Speaker 4: and identify the people who were in that meeting by
Speaker 4: getting those unique IDs and then going to the phone
Speaker 4: company and saying give us the subscriber information for these people,
Speaker 4: and that is a far more concerning use, and we
Speaker 4: are not seeing it so far with ray Hunter being
Speaker 4: used for that. What we're seeing is uses that seem
Speaker 4: to be more in line with the sort of manhunt
Speaker 4: or like verifying that somebody is home style of operation,
Speaker 4: which is also what we're seeing in cored documents.
Speaker 5: Interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't mean that they government cannot find out
Speaker 3: that you were at a place or at a protest, right,
Speaker 3: It just means that they're not using this mechanism of
Speaker 3: doing that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's exactly right. So people have asked us,
Speaker 4: are what our theories are for about why we're not
Speaker 4: seeing these a protest because for a lot for a
Speaker 4: long time, there were a lot of activists that were
Speaker 4: pretty convinced that these were showing up at every protest, right,
Speaker 4: or that maybe like you know, to use the old
Speaker 4: there was the old co Intel pro language was like
Speaker 4: the architects of co Intel pro wanted activists to feel
Speaker 4: like there was a cop behind every bush and inside
Speaker 4: every mailbox, right, And that was really the impression that
Speaker 4: a lot of activists had about mccatchers, right, that they
Speaker 4: were in every cop car, that they were everywhere, that
Speaker 4: they were just constantly being used, And it seems like
Speaker 4: that's not the case. And I think there's a couple
Speaker 4: reasons why. One is that they're expensive. It costs about
Speaker 4: a million dollars for an mccatcher contract, So these are
Speaker 4: actually like fairly rare, and they're hard to operate. They
Speaker 4: require a lot of technical knowledge, they require a lot
Speaker 4: of understanding. Cops are idiots. They don't want to actually
Speaker 4: go do all this work if it's not necessary, right,
Speaker 4: And it's a lot more expensive then using one of
Speaker 4: the many other surveillance technologies they have flock facial recognition,
Speaker 4: things like pen Link, which we can talk about in
Speaker 4: a little bit, but other databases of location because our
Speaker 4: phone advertisements on our phones are constantly giving up our location, right,
Speaker 4: and there's a whole surveillance industry around that selling that
Speaker 4: data to police. Also, the other big issue is that
Speaker 4: there was a legal decision in twenty twenty, twenty nineteen.
Speaker 4: I'm going to mess this up. Fact checkers will need
Speaker 4: to get on this in twenty nineteen called Carboner versus USA,
Speaker 4: and the Supreme Court in that decision decided that to
Speaker 4: access historical cell site location information, so this is where
Speaker 4: people were located based on what cell towers they're connected to.
Speaker 4: That police would need a warrant for that information. And
Speaker 4: it seems like at that time a lot of law
Speaker 4: enforcement agencies decided that that also extended to stingrays. Whereas
Speaker 4: previously they had not been needing to get a warrant
Speaker 4: to use their sting rays, it seems like a lot
Speaker 4: of them thought, oh, okay, this seems like it probably
Speaker 4: also applies to stingrays. Therefore, any case using sting rays
Speaker 4: without a warrant, we'll get thrown out, and therefore we're
Speaker 4: going to need to get a warrant to use this thing.
Speaker 7: It turns out having to get a warrant was too
Speaker 7: high of a bar for most police agencies and made
Speaker 7: them not want to use this technology unless they absolutely had.
Speaker 4: To and thought they could get a warrant for it.
Speaker 4: But there's a lot of other things they don't have
Speaker 4: to get a warrant for, so we think my theory
Speaker 4: is that they are using these other technologies that are
Speaker 4: easier to use, cheaper to use, don't have to get
Speaker 4: a warrant, and saving the stingrays only for when they
Speaker 4: are sure they can get a warrant and when they
Speaker 4: cost and complexity is justified.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense to the twenty eighteen June twenty second,
Speaker 3: twenty eighteen, that supreme cool case.
Speaker 4: Thank you real time fact checking here on ICHH.
Speaker 3: Yep, that's what we do. Let's talk about PenLink and
Speaker 3: like other data. I did hear recently that it's possible
Speaker 3: that Iran had used commercially available location data to target
Speaker 3: some of its strikes on US troops in the Middle East,
Speaker 3: which is wild to consider.
Speaker 4: I had not heard that, but it's not surprising and
Speaker 4: it is absolutely wild. Right. So yeah, So PenLink is
Speaker 4: a company that actually previously had sold a lot of
Speaker 4: software to help out with mccatchers. So interestingly they have
Speaker 4: now pivoted to different types of surfails. So they a
Speaker 4: few years ago acquired this company is Rael, a company
Speaker 4: called Cobwebs. Cobwebs makes a lot of different software. There's
Speaker 4: actually just recently a fantastic report about all of the
Speaker 4: software in that was acquired by PenLink. In this sale,
Speaker 4: there were links to a couple of spyware manufacturers. Anyway,
Speaker 4: there was a report on citizen Lab that's excellent. I
Speaker 4: highly recommend it. But the short of it is that
Speaker 4: PenLink has acquired two of their main products, one of
Speaker 4: which is called Tangles and the other one is called Weblock.
Speaker 4: Tangles is a social media surveillance tool that allows investigators
Speaker 4: to scrape social media for specific keywords and make links
Speaker 4: between different people different organizations. Say like anybody who has
Speaker 4: interacted with the Jean Brown gun Club, or anybody who
Speaker 4: has interacted with the Socialist ra or anybody who has
Speaker 4: mentioned the words Antifa. Right, you can go build a
Speaker 4: dossier on that person, build the dossier on who their
Speaker 4: friends are, what they're talking about. Scrape specific groups, any
Speaker 4: sort of left leaning group, right, they can build a
Speaker 4: dossier on that and who all the people are, who
Speaker 4: their friends are. And then they have this tool called Weblock.
Speaker 4: And what Weblock does is it is a near real
Speaker 4: time database of the locations of millions of phones worldwide.
Speaker 4: And so how it works is police can circle a
Speaker 4: specific area on a map and it will show information
Speaker 4: about all of the phones that they know, you know
Speaker 4: that we're in that area in some sort of time frame.
Speaker 4: And I think that the data gets updated every twenty
Speaker 4: four hours. So you're going to have about a twenty
Speaker 4: four hour delay in that data piece. So you circle
Speaker 4: an area just like with your finger, and you're going
Speaker 4: to see who was there, you know, as of twenty
Speaker 4: four hours ago and back to so you know, whatever
Speaker 4: timebrame you said. You can then select any one of
Speaker 4: those phones that were in that area and see information
Speaker 4: about that person, which is mostly advertising demographic information like
Speaker 4: what what sort of age bracket that person's in, what
Speaker 4: their interests and hobbies are, whether they have kids, whether
Speaker 4: they're a parent, what their nationality is, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 4: But you can also see a historical map of where
Speaker 4: that person or where that device we should say, yeah,
Speaker 4: has been right, and so you can see where they're,
Speaker 4: where they spend their days, which is probably their work
Speaker 4: or something like that, where they spend their nights, which
Speaker 4: is probably their house, you know, where they spend sort
Speaker 4: of their afternoons or evenings, maybe a third space, maybe
Speaker 4: a lover's house, something like that. Right, But you can
Speaker 4: see everywhere they've gone. You can see if they were
Speaker 4: at a specific protest, you could see everybody who was
Speaker 4: at a specific protest. You could do a lot of
Speaker 4: different things with that, and we think that they get
Speaker 4: that data from advertising networks. We know they get it
Speaker 4: from apps on your phone, and basically those apps are
Speaker 4: sending information to advertising networks which is then sold or
Speaker 4: scraped by penleink to add to their database for this app,
Speaker 4: and all of this is then sold to law enforcement,
Speaker 4: so law enforcement can get this information and none of
Speaker 4: it requires a warrant. Currently, a law enforcement does not
Speaker 4: think they need a warrant to acquire this data, and
Speaker 4: judges have upheld that so far.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so you're saying when you download an app and
Speaker 5: you give it location permissions, that this is aggregated and
Speaker 5: then sold to third party.
Speaker 4: Not every app, but yeah, a lot of apps, like
Speaker 4: most didn't. We've been really strongly encouraging people to not
Speaker 4: give apps location permissions unless there's a very good reason
Speaker 4: why that app should have location permissions. Right Like, on
Speaker 4: my phone, the only app that has location permissions is
Speaker 4: my maps app and my weather app, and that's because
Speaker 4: I know those apps don't have advertising SDKs in them. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but if you wanted to, if you were extra paranoid,
Speaker 4: like if I was heading through too something, I mean,
Speaker 4: if I was heading to something that I didn't want
Speaker 4: people to know I was there, I would turn my
Speaker 4: phone off or at least put it on airplane mode, right. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, short of that, you could turn off location
Speaker 4: services entirely for your phone, right and give no app
Speaker 4: your location. But yeah, it's our phones are snitches, man,
Speaker 4: Our phones are snitches.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is the big take home is the big
Speaker 3: snake you carry around in your pocket take everywhere with
Speaker 3: you talking of its nitches. I can't think of a
Speaker 3: way to fucking pivot this into adverts down some cerruss.
Speaker 4: Here's some things you can buy the snitch on you.
Speaker 8: Yeah, hey, buy these things.
Speaker 3: They'll give away information data, sell it to an is
Speaker 3: Raeli company, will sell it back to the cops. All right,
Speaker 3: we are back. I hope you bought something nice. I
Speaker 3: want to talk about community counter surveillance because it is interesting.
Speaker 3: It gives people something they can understand a little more
Speaker 3: about the web of surveillance around them. Right then they
Speaker 3: could feel a little bit more informed. So let's talk
Speaker 3: about it. Maybe, Colonel Panic, if you want to kick off,
Speaker 3: you've been involved in some of these devices. I don't
Speaker 3: know how you want to put it. You're behind some
Speaker 3: of them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, certainly I came up with the idea for what
Speaker 5: people are now calling we spy. It actually was are
Speaker 5: initially called OUI spy. Its organizational unique identifier, which is
Speaker 5: the first six characters of a Mac address. But it's art.
Speaker 5: You know, it's going to be pronounced however people want it.
Speaker 5: It has dual meanings we spy. But this actually kind
Speaker 5: of was born from the war driving community, which is
Speaker 5: old school driving around trying to find devices, just seeing
Speaker 5: what's out there. And so essentially you have all these
Speaker 5: devices that are transmitting around you, and it's totally fine
Speaker 5: and totally legal to just receive passively, and so things
Speaker 5: like Wiggle or Kismet you can use on Linux to
Speaker 5: just drive around and just kind of see what devices
Speaker 5: are in your area. And through this I came up
Speaker 5: with a device that was based on remote ID stuff
Speaker 5: prior to we spy that just detects drones and then
Speaker 5: transmits it over meshtastic, or it detects a device and
Speaker 5: transmits it over meshtastic. And then I was like, it'd
Speaker 5: be really cool to have a device that if you
Speaker 5: have a device that you want to know when comes
Speaker 5: around you, it'll just BEP. And so I just took
Speaker 5: a micro controller and drew out the design for this
Speaker 5: thing to connect to a beeper and essentially made the
Speaker 5: firmwares that do a few different things. For instance, if
Speaker 5: you if you wanted to know when a Tesla drove
Speaker 5: by or something, you could put in the OUI for
Speaker 5: that or the MAC address for a specific device, and
Speaker 5: you can just tell you get alerts when devices are
Speaker 5: around you, essentially, so that's where all that began.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to explain how like this might help someone. Let's say,
Speaker 3: like you just wanted to get an idea right of
Speaker 3: the surveillance infrastructure that that you encountered in your daily life.
Speaker 3: You haven't been going to city council meetings, you don't
Speaker 3: know what that shit is. Your local newspaper is dead
Speaker 3: now because everyone's local newspaper is dead now, right, so
Speaker 3: there's no reporting on it. Like if they wanted to
Speaker 3: get one of these devices, cruise around town and work
Speaker 3: out like when they were being spied on, Look, what
Speaker 3: kind of abilities would it give them?
Speaker 5: Certainly, so there's drone detection on this device, so you
Speaker 5: can have it alert when drones are near, or have
Speaker 5: it map via remote ID. But the biggest one I
Speaker 5: think that has been the most important one is the
Speaker 5: flock camera detection. There's a ton of other cameras then flock,
Speaker 5: but this is the important one lately. So a lot
Speaker 5: of people are out on you know, out doing war
Speaker 5: driving and doing real time research and contributing to, you know,
Speaker 5: adding to this database of flockcams signatures essentially, and it's
Speaker 5: either Wi Fi or Bluetooth, and some of them are
Speaker 5: over cellular too, but essentially this. I made a firmware
Speaker 5: called flock you when you drive around, it just war
Speaker 5: drives flockcams. And a good friend of mine did some
Speaker 5: recent research and found out that if you put the
Speaker 5: micro controller into Wi Fi promiscuous mode, it'll detect more flockcams.
Speaker 5: So that firmware just came out a couple of days ago.
Speaker 5: So constantly being added to. So if anyone has you know,
Speaker 5: mac addresses OUIs, please contribute. It takes a village to
Speaker 5: raise us surveillance detection shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it allows people to then yet lit the crowdsce
Speaker 3: or do do community based mapping of this stuff, right
Speaker 3: to give people and like I know, I have friends
Speaker 3: have reported on gunshot detection software like it won't surprise
Speaker 3: people to find out which communities are the most surveiled
Speaker 3: and which communities are the least surveiled. Right, But it
Speaker 3: nonetheless it is important, Like that's an important function in
Speaker 3: making that obvious to people. Likewise, drones, people might be thinking,
Speaker 3: why why would I want to look for drones? Drones
Speaker 3: are super cool. I just fly them around to see
Speaker 3: the birds. Like, you can explain that drones might also
Speaker 3: play a role in surveillance.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely. I'm an avid drone flyer, so I developed
Speaker 5: just for funzis, you know, and made a drawn detector,
Speaker 5: and I quickly realized that the most frequent flyers are
Speaker 5: the PD unfortunately, you know, surveilling the area. So it's
Speaker 5: really interesting to see and to see that they're flying,
Speaker 5: you know, more regularly than any hobbyist.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, this has become a big part of late cups.
Speaker 3: Used to have to send up a helicopter to look
Speaker 3: at something from above, right, and they still do all
Speaker 3: the time. Hear that shit over my house every day.
Speaker 3: But they can also do it with it right now
Speaker 3: for much less money. But you want to explain ray
Speaker 3: hunter a little bit for people who are like suddenly
Speaker 3: shocked by all of this and they want to turn
Speaker 3: the car into a beeping machine.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure I will do that. I
Speaker 4: want to. I want to extol the virtues of we
Speaker 4: spuy for for a little bit before that, though, Yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean this is this is how I linked up
Speaker 4: with Colonel Panics because I thought this was such a
Speaker 4: really amazing project. And I think that it's it serves
Speaker 4: a couple of purposes, right, I think that there's there
Speaker 4: is one very practical purpose of like this can help
Speaker 4: you map out the surveillance in your town, right, you can.
Speaker 4: You can export the data from this and upload it
Speaker 4: directly to block mapper, right, or there's some other site
Speaker 4: that'll help you, like plot a route from point A
Speaker 4: to point B avoiding flock cameras, which I think is
Speaker 4: really cool. It also just helps sensitize you to how
Speaker 4: many flock cameras are in your town. Like people like
Speaker 4: they they they are unobtrusive to a degree, right, Like
Speaker 4: they are easy, easy visual noise to just ignore. Yeah, right,
Speaker 4: but when you're like I was surprised by how much
Speaker 4: it went off in my town, and then I look
Speaker 4: up and I'm like, oh yeah, flog cameras, flock camera okay, right,
Speaker 4: And It got me used to like spotting those cameras around, right,
Speaker 4: And I think that it's a really it's a really
Speaker 4: useful piece of propaganda work essentially in that in that
Speaker 4: way to get people used to spotting these, to get
Speaker 4: people thinking about, well, where are these? How many of
Speaker 4: these are there in my town?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 4: Like people are like, well, you could just go look
Speaker 4: for them, Yeah, but people don't.
Speaker 3: Right, You've got this ship to do. Yeah, Like, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: But if I hear that from the from their you know,
Speaker 4: really loud buzzer, right, I know that something is going on. Right,
Speaker 4: it's more of a it's a little more jarring. It's
Speaker 4: it's good in that way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I see it. It's like a like a little
Speaker 3: note Meandineville parrots at your shoulder. And when you're being
Speaker 3: spied on, you're being spied on. You're being spied on
Speaker 3: just constantly. Yeah, yeah, you realize the extent to which
Speaker 3: that is happening.
Speaker 5: Surveillance coal mine canary essentially, And yeah.
Speaker 3: It canary is better better enalogy.
Speaker 4: Kind of like lying cat, but surveillance cat.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: Instead of every time you're lying and says that, it
Speaker 4: just says surveillance every time somebody's spying on you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The other thing that I think is is cool. I
Speaker 4: know you I spy and and raigment. And why I
Speaker 4: think these are good projects is it gives a lot
Speaker 4: of people something to do right. Fascism can really make
Speaker 4: people feel helpless, and it's overarching surveillance can really make
Speaker 4: people feel helpless. And it's really easy for people to
Speaker 4: fall into privacy nihilism and security nihilism right and just
Speaker 4: be like, well, I'm gonna be watched constantly. There's nothing
Speaker 4: I can do, so, you know, sprit, why do anything right?
Speaker 4: And this gives people something to do, right. There's a
Speaker 4: thing you can and Americans love buying a thing, right,
Speaker 4: We love a gadget. And so there's a thing you
Speaker 4: can go buy or build or set up or whatever. Right,
Speaker 4: and go start pushing back, even just a little by little,
Speaker 4: on the surveillance around you.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 4: And then once you start doing one thing, it lowers
Speaker 4: the energy of activation. It becomes easy to do other
Speaker 4: things right. It becomes easier to go to your city
Speaker 4: council and demand that they rip these cameras out. It
Speaker 4: becomes easier to find and organize with other people in
Speaker 4: your community, right, it becomes easier to start to you know,
Speaker 4: think about direct action, you know, in that sense, it
Speaker 4: becomes a bit of like propaganda indeed, right, Like we're
Speaker 4: giving people the tool to get off their couch and
Speaker 4: start to push back and start to fight back and
Speaker 4: start to become a part of a community. Right. So
Speaker 4: I think it's really important for that with ray Hunters.
Speaker 4: So I already kind of described how it works, but
Speaker 4: we had we had a few goals with ray hunter.
Speaker 4: One was to figure out, you know, how often the
Speaker 4: cell size simulators were being used in the US and
Speaker 4: around the world. But but you know, I live I
Speaker 4: live here, so this is my main focus, but specifically
Speaker 4: how often they're being used to spy on protesters, right,
Speaker 4: because we were getting this idea that a lot of
Speaker 4: activists thought that they were everywhere, right, and I thought
Speaker 4: that other things were a much bigger threat, right, Like,
Speaker 4: I'm there are there are things that I'm more concerned about.
Speaker 4: But also cel size simulators, stingrays are pretty mysterious, right, Like,
Speaker 4: we don't we know the broad strokes of how they work,
Speaker 4: but we don't know the technical details of what exploits
Speaker 4: they are using to you know, essentially trick people's phones
Speaker 4: into connecting to them. Right, So this was a this
Speaker 4: was a chance to try to get some ground truth
Speaker 4: information about that as well. Yeah, and we have succeeded
Speaker 4: in that we have a bunch of recordings from around
Speaker 4: the US of things that we think are quite likely
Speaker 4: to be cell size similiators actively in use by law enforcement,
Speaker 4: and move out some ideas about how they're working and
Speaker 4: what they're doing, and the other goals that we wanted
Speaker 4: to try to like calm down some of the fear
Speaker 4: and uncertainty and doubt among activists about whether this was
Speaker 4: a threat model that they need to worry about and
Speaker 4: give people more accurate threat models.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like also give people, you know, a modicum
Speaker 4: of comfort.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 4: This is not a self defense device, right, This is
Speaker 4: actually like at the end of the day, this is
Speaker 4: a data collect like not data collection. We're not collecting
Speaker 4: your data, but this is this is a research project. Yeah,
Speaker 4: we're collecting the data about like how often do we
Speaker 4: think that we're actually seeing these Right. But it gives
Speaker 4: people a modicum of comfort too, Right, because you have this,
Speaker 4: you have Rayhunter with you, right, and if it doesn't
Speaker 4: go off, you're like, every time it doesn't go off,
Speaker 4: you're like, Okay, you know, maybe this is not actually
Speaker 4: a threat model that I need to worry so much about, right,
Speaker 4: And then I hope you'll think, well, what do I
Speaker 4: need to worry about? Oh? Probably things like PenLink. Probably
Speaker 4: things like Celebrate and the cops arresting me and making
Speaker 4: a copy of all the data on my phone. Yeah, right,
Speaker 4: probably other you know, facial recognition and other things like that,
Speaker 4: which I think are the things that you should be
Speaker 4: thinking about and worrying about. Yeah, that's been the point
Speaker 4: of Rayhunter, and I think it's been successful in that sense.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 4: But yeah, we really, I mean, we want we want
Speaker 4: more people to install this, right, especially the next time
Speaker 4: Ice lays siege to a city, right, we want to
Speaker 4: have we want to have some there. You know, late
Speaker 4: in the game to Minneapolis, a ground game got set
Speaker 4: up where we then had like a couple hundred of
Speaker 4: these on the ground of Minneapolis, and we didn't find
Speaker 4: we did not find anything in Minneapolis that we follow
Speaker 4: was conclusive evidence of an mccatcher. Well, Ice was there
Speaker 4: laying siege to the city. Hopefully there is no next
Speaker 4: time they lay siege to a city.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen again.
Speaker 4: But if that does happen again, hopefully we can get,
Speaker 4: you know, sort of a grand game set. I'm very
Speaker 4: quickly to try to determine if they're using this form
Speaker 4: of surveillance or not.
Speaker 3: So talking of surveillance, here are a couple of products
Speaker 3: and services. If you buy them, that will probably result
Speaker 3: in your data being collected, which will in turn be
Speaker 3: sole perhaps to an Israeli company who'll say to the cops.
Speaker 4: Shamba would never sell my data.
Speaker 3: All right, we are back. I think that's really good
Speaker 3: explanation of the value of these devices. The more you know,
Speaker 3: the more you know. And this is a struggle that
Speaker 3: I have on a daily basis at the moment. There
Speaker 3: are so many things to be angry and scared about
Speaker 3: right now. We don't need to invent shit that we
Speaker 3: shouldn't be angry and scared about. We need to focus
Speaker 3: on the things that are a real threat. And there
Speaker 3: are things in this landscape which are a real threat.
Speaker 3: And so I think it helps people to have that,
Speaker 3: Like it's one thing to go on flog map or
Speaker 3: whatever and be like, Okay, well they're there and there
Speaker 3: and there it's another one to be like, well, shit,
Speaker 3: in my going out to get a pizza with my friends,
Speaker 3: I was spied upon five times, and I think that
Speaker 3: that is very valuable. At the same time, nobody tried
Speaker 3: to sell sites spoof and get my information that way.
Speaker 3: I think that's very important. Let's talk a little bit
Speaker 3: about like how people can organize. San Diego has done
Speaker 3: a spectacular job of signing a contract that it can't
Speaker 3: stop paying for surveillance cameras. So even if we stop
Speaker 3: using them tomorrow, we would keep sending our taxpayer money
Speaker 3: to a spying company, which is great. Because our city
Speaker 3: is and run by the sea, it will continue to
Speaker 3: be a shit show forever apparently. But like, let's assume
Speaker 3: that other people have slightly more competent local government.
Speaker 4: What an amazing contract. I can't believe that they said that.
Speaker 3: It's California politics is a shit show, But San Diego
Speaker 3: is a fucking joke. Many examples of this.
Speaker 4: Listen, my city council member just got indicted by the
Speaker 4: FBI on corruption charges. So in the year of our
Speaker 4: Lord twenty twenty five, he got indicted by the FBI. So, like,
Speaker 4: how stupid do you have to go out so I
Speaker 4: have no legs to stand on. But also in California,
Speaker 4: so it all tracks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the great great times on the left coast.
Speaker 8: Yeah, let's talk about how people have.
Speaker 3: Organized their communities against surveil. It's like just to like
Speaker 3: paint a picture for folks here, right, Like, the flock
Speaker 3: camera does not know if you're doing a crime. The
Speaker 3: flock camera doesn't know if you came from another state
Speaker 3: to obtain reproductive healthcare. The flock camera doesn't know if
Speaker 3: you're a migrant parent popping out to get formula for
Speaker 3: your little baby. It captures all of that shit, right, Like,
Speaker 3: there's a broad range of people in this country who
Speaker 3: are fucking disgusted at that, people who we might not
Speaker 3: be used to organizing with. But perhaps you guys could
Speaker 3: like explain the how or if you're aware of instances
Speaker 3: where people have organized against state survailan too, would be
Speaker 3: cool to hear about that.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I recently did a talk here in Asheville, North Carolina,
Speaker 5: at an event called nerd Nite, and nerd Night is
Speaker 5: essentially it's a way to go to a bar without
Speaker 5: just a bunch of drivel. You know, you go and
Speaker 5: then somebody does three talks fifteen minutes each, and so
Speaker 5: the host was kind enough to give me a twenty
Speaker 5: five minute slot at the end to talk about flock
Speaker 5: cameras in our city here, And it just so happened
Speaker 5: to be happening before they tried to vote on a
Speaker 5: real time intelligence center that centralized flock ax on and
Speaker 5: all of our drawn data into one just like wall
Speaker 5: of surveillance for the city. And so I did this
Speaker 5: talk and a city council member showed up our toolest
Speaker 5: city council member, Kim Roni. She showed up and dearing
Speaker 5: the questions at the end, I was unsure because on
Speaker 5: our portal here it said the APD says, you know,
Speaker 5: we don't share our data with outside agencies. And Kim
Speaker 5: Roni came up and confirmed that something like four thousand
Speaker 5: agencies have access to our data. Yeah, we don't share them,
Speaker 5: but they can request and we just hand it over.
Speaker 5: So yeah, that's that's one thing that we learned at
Speaker 5: that time. So this this prompted a big push that
Speaker 5: was kind of happening for city council. So a lot
Speaker 5: of folks that came to that talk came to city Council,
Speaker 5: and I'm telling you, like, it's folks all over the board.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is Appalachia here, nobody, nobody wants to
Speaker 5: be surveilled in these hollers.
Speaker 3: You know. Yeah, this is one of those areas where
Speaker 3: we can build really broad coalitions, like of people who
Speaker 3: we might not agree on with on everything. Like this
Speaker 3: is a wret to anyone who wants to do almost
Speaker 3: anything apart from I guess just go show uping.
Speaker 5: One interesting point is that over one hundred people showed
Speaker 5: up to city council. I'm you know, this is new
Speaker 5: to me. I'm working on getting out there a little bit,
Speaker 5: and I seeded my time to another speaker, but over
Speaker 5: one hundred people showed up, and then they pulled it
Speaker 5: from the vote. They pulled it from the agenda, so
Speaker 5: lots of folks left, but then some folks stucked around
Speaker 5: for general comment and still got it out there. But
Speaker 5: you know, we'll see what happens down the line. They
Speaker 5: love to do that tactic.
Speaker 4: They did the same thing in Oakland when it was
Speaker 4: up for When it was up on the agenda, they
Speaker 4: said a ton of people showed up to discuss it,
Speaker 4: and then they were like Oops, no, never mind, we're
Speaker 4: gonna pull that from the agenda today. Yeah, it's such
Speaker 4: a shady tactic, but no, I mean, at eff we've
Speaker 4: seen we've seen similar things all over the country. You know,
Speaker 4: a ton of different cities have dropped their flock contracts
Speaker 4: recently because of community pressure. Right, this doesn't happen in
Speaker 4: a vacuum. Your city council doesn't care, right They they
Speaker 4: want to score easy political wins. Right block sells them
Speaker 4: this as an easy political win. Right this they can
Speaker 4: stop carjackings, right they can. They can find car thefts,
Speaker 4: they can, they can do all these things that are popular.
Speaker 4: Nobody likes being carjacked, nobody likes having their car stolen.
Speaker 4: Right But when people show up to city council and
Speaker 4: push back and fight against this, it makes it not
Speaker 4: an easy political win, right, it makes it It makes
Speaker 4: it actually politically a bit poisonous to push these technologies.
Speaker 8: And it should be.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we shouldn't be surveilled constantly just because we happen
Speaker 4: to be outside, and like, look, I would love to
Speaker 4: not have a car, right, but this is America. Like
Speaker 4: everybody drives all the time. That is that is the
Speaker 4: society we live in unfortunately. Yeah, and you shouldn't be
Speaker 4: You shouldn't be subject to surveillance just for participating in society.
Speaker 4: And like you said, I think we can build very
Speaker 4: broad coalitions around this, right, and we can start to like, hey,
Speaker 4: you know, remember how you know how mad you were
Speaker 4: about flock, Like, yeah, wait till you find out about
Speaker 4: these other surveillance technologies, right, Like, now, let's talk about
Speaker 4: campaign finance and how how all these companies you don't
Speaker 4: like are financing politicians? Right, Like you can you can
Speaker 4: pull people to the left, and this is a good
Speaker 4: way to start interacting with those people. Yeah, right, even
Speaker 4: people on the right, even sort of our more you know,
Speaker 4: the more libertarian folks.
Speaker 5: They hate them too.
Speaker 4: A lot of them have gone full Nazi, But the
Speaker 4: ones that haven't gone full Nazi, right, like, should really
Speaker 4: care about this stuff, right, and you can you know,
Speaker 4: this can be away in with them as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like everyone we can bring with us, we need
Speaker 3: to in it when else fuck them? Yeah, absolutely, But
Speaker 3: I think this is a really good area to organize
Speaker 3: because all of us stand to lose something. It's so
Speaker 3: fucking creepy when you realize the extent to which like
Speaker 3: someone is watching or could be watching. A million reasons
Speaker 3: why people could be.
Speaker 9: Mad at that.
Speaker 5: There's plenty of room for abuse, you know there too,
Speaker 5: And it's been documented, you know, a recent video with
Speaker 5: Ben Jordans. I mean, you know, oh yeah, if you
Speaker 5: give people this kind of surveillance access, it's impossible to
Speaker 5: vet people on this level, you know. And if you
Speaker 5: give people who got you know, God likes surveillance power,
Speaker 5: what are they going to end up doing? And there's
Speaker 5: been cases where they've shown that police officers have surveiled
Speaker 5: their ex partners and then consequently pulled that person over,
Speaker 5: which is just insane.
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, they've used this to stop people, to surveill
Speaker 4: current partners, ex partners. Like the idea that police would
Speaker 4: never abuse their power is completely absurd and anybody who
Speaker 4: is arguing that is not arguing in good faith, I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And yet like like it is another the Dems
Speaker 3: are like necessarily I mean, they're not on the side
Speaker 3: of goods, especially in this area. But like it is
Speaker 3: a big blue state thing, Like don't think that because
Speaker 3: you live in California, this isn't happening. It is very
Speaker 3: much happening.
Speaker 4: Right right, Yeah, I mean to talk about that real quick,
Speaker 4: right like, we have I am blanking on the bill number,
Speaker 4: but we have a law in California that prevents California
Speaker 4: police agencies from sharing data from flock with from lices,
Speaker 4: play regions in general, with outside agencies and with ICE.
Speaker 4: And it still happens all the time. Police just willfully
Speaker 4: ignore this law, you know, I mean, like we see
Speaker 4: immigration or ICE support as the reason they put down
Speaker 4: for searches, even though that's illegal. And when they don't
Speaker 4: do that, we know that ICE. You know, people in
Speaker 4: ICE have buddies in California law enforcement. They text them,
Speaker 4: they say, hey, run this plate for me. Law enforcement texts,
Speaker 4: runs the plate, puts the reason down as investigation or
Speaker 4: crime or you know some other such nonsense. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: then and then you know, sends the information back to ICE.
Speaker 5: Right It's we call that the good old boys system
Speaker 5: down here.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And they've made a concerted effort to recruit people
Speaker 3: from local law enforcement all across the country. And this
Speaker 3: is part of why right like, it gives a workaround
Speaker 3: SB fifty four is the California Values Act, which thank you,
Speaker 3: thank you, you are welcome. That is my shit. There
Speaker 3: has never been a prosecution under SP fifty four. As
Speaker 3: far as I'm aware, this law exists, like largely to
Speaker 3: make the politicians who passed it feel good. There are
Speaker 3: some parts about transferring people who are in detention already,
Speaker 3: But like these these systems give so many workarounds, right,
Speaker 3: or like if the data belongs to the company and
Speaker 3: not to the city, or if it's stored on a
Speaker 3: service somewhere else, like, all of these things provide potential
Speaker 3: work around. So I don't think I guess that because
Speaker 3: your local city council member has tweeted about ice being bad,
Speaker 3: that that means that your flock cameras are not being
Speaker 3: used for that. It's very hard to ring fences.
Speaker 10: Shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, If people want to learn more about this,
Speaker 3: if they want to maybe get a ray hunter, if
Speaker 3: they want to get a wee spy or mesh detect,
Speaker 3: don't explain mesh de tech for people really quickly. We
Speaker 3: didn't touch on that one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, mesh detect is essentially it's the first advice that
Speaker 5: I made, and its primary function was to detect dron
Speaker 5: remote ID. The FAA requires remote ID, which is any
Speaker 5: drone over I believe it's five hundred grams has to
Speaker 5: transmit pilot location and drone location in real time either
Speaker 5: via ble or Wi Fi, which is pretty whack for like,
Speaker 5: you know, yeah, amateur flyers that just want to fly around.
Speaker 5: But that being said, it's a great ocent tool. So
Speaker 5: I started with that, and essentially what this does is
Speaker 5: mesh detect. It takes that detection and sends it over
Speaker 5: mesh Tastic Laura networks. So you can set up a
Speaker 5: for instance, set up a node way out somewhere and
Speaker 5: then you can have it sends you a message down
Speaker 5: the line when a dron comes by over mesh tastic,
Speaker 5: or you can set it up somewhere and have it
Speaker 5: say okay, there's a body cam down here or whatever device,
Speaker 5: a tesla, an anything.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 5: A lot of devices randomize their OUI these days, mostly phones,
Speaker 5: but there's plenty that don't easily detectable. So send it
Speaker 5: over mesh. It just gives you a network of detection.
Speaker 4: Essentially.
Speaker 3: So people wanted to get a wee spy to get
Speaker 3: a mesh detect, how would they do? How they go
Speaker 3: about it? What are the ways they could get on?
Speaker 4: Make one?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I have a website called kernel Panic dot tech
Speaker 5: and it's co l O N e L. It's a
Speaker 5: little bit of a play on words. But these devices,
Speaker 5: like if you really need one of these things, hit
Speaker 5: me up, we'll talk. But also it's just two wires,
Speaker 5: you know, like you can take my design and just
Speaker 5: reverse engineer it and copy it, and I put the
Speaker 5: wiring on my GitHub. Every bit of this is open source,
Speaker 5: so if you look up Colonel Panic GitHub, you can
Speaker 5: take this and make it on your own. I've made
Speaker 5: Home Assistant integration, so like if a UI pops up
Speaker 5: around your house, you can just get an alert via
Speaker 5: your smart home. You could just go on there, you know,
Speaker 5: dev it out. If you see something that's that I
Speaker 5: screwed up, just let me know and I'll fix it
Speaker 5: or we'll collab. So it's all open source.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: How about ray Hunter.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so folks can go to Rayhunter dot e ff
Speaker 4: dot org and that is our ray Hunter documentation, that's
Speaker 4: our the ray Hunter book essentially, and there you can
Speaker 4: find links on where to buy the hardware. We do
Speaker 4: not sell the hardware, but you can buy the hardware
Speaker 4: on eBay or Amazon. Sometimes. The Orbit is what people
Speaker 4: use in the US primarily and like South America in
Speaker 4: Europe and parts of Africa. There's a tp link device
Speaker 4: that fits the bill better for those areas, and once
Speaker 4: you buy the hardware, you can install the software on
Speaker 4: it there. The hardware, unfortunately, is not open source because,
Speaker 4: like I said, we didn't bull the hardware. We're just
Speaker 4: purposing old hardware right when this when the project started,
Speaker 4: you could buy the hardware for like ten or twenty bucks.
Speaker 4: Now it's harder to find because of people have bought
Speaker 4: out a lot of the supply and other other scalpers
Speaker 4: have wised up to the fact that people are trying
Speaker 4: to buy these. So unfortunately we've created a whole like
Speaker 4: mini market. Uh, i'm a I'm a I'm a market maker.
Speaker 4: Goddamn it. We've a hyper capitalist right here. But no,
Speaker 4: there's like there's a whole you know, mini market of
Speaker 4: people selling like already installed ray Hunters on eBay and stuff.
Speaker 4: I don't recommend paying more than like forty or sixty
Speaker 4: bucks for the hardware, but then, yeah, the software is free.
Speaker 4: It's free, it's open source, right, it's on getthub. You
Speaker 4: can go edit it right now. And you know, I
Speaker 4: know there's a lot of tech folks that listen to
Speaker 4: the show, And I just want to say, like, there's
Speaker 4: so many cool opportunities for counter surveillance, right, Like we
Speaker 4: keep kind of kind of mentioning that, like a lot
Speaker 4: of police hardware is made by this company Axon, and
Speaker 4: it has a very unique blue chooth signature that can
Speaker 4: be easily detected.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of really interesting stuff that you can
Speaker 4: do with coutsual balance. And the chip that the OUI
Speaker 4: spy runs on, the ESP thirty two is this really
Speaker 4: powerful little chip that only costs like six bucks if
Speaker 4: you buy them wholesale, and it's got Wi Fi blue
Speaker 4: shoes and a bunch of really cool capabilities you know
Speaker 4: that you could use to make some really cool counter
Speaker 4: surveillance stuff. And so I really want to encourage the
Speaker 4: tech minded folks to like think about this, Come look
Speaker 4: at these projects, you know, Come, you know, write your
Speaker 4: own code or make your own projects.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 4: But like the quote from Hackers, and as your beautifully
Speaker 4: designed PC board says, colonel, we can snoop onto them
Speaker 4: as they snoop onto us, right exactly, we need to
Speaker 4: spy back, right, and we need to raise the cost
Speaker 4: of them spying on us, right, And that's like, sorry,
Speaker 4: let mean that that makes me to another thing go off.
Speaker 4: What's really cool about these products is like you can
Speaker 4: build right hunters for about twenty bucks, right you could.
Speaker 4: You could buy beautiful PC board and the already assembled
Speaker 4: thing from Colonel for you know, a few dollars. I
Speaker 4: don't know these priced off the time, it's I don't
Speaker 4: want to say. Or you could build one for you know,
Speaker 4: under twenty bucks, right yep, And you are then, for
Speaker 4: you know, twenty or forty bucks, you are making useless
Speaker 4: a surveillance tool and surveillance network which costs hundreds of
Speaker 4: thousands to millions of dollars. Right The economics here are
Speaker 4: on our side, yeah, right, Like this is just like
Speaker 4: any sort of asymmetrical warfare, right Like, it costs millions
Speaker 4: and billions and really billions of dollars for the governments
Speaker 4: of the US to set up this surveillance economy, and
Speaker 4: we can defeat it for you know, twenty or forty
Speaker 4: bucks each, right, Like, we can do this a lot
Speaker 4: longer than they can. They will go broke before we do.
Speaker 4: And I think that that's really important, right, Like, like
Speaker 4: the asymmetry here and the economics here are actually on
Speaker 4: our side. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's also like it's cool to understand and make stuff.
Speaker 3: I am very good at fixing things that work on
Speaker 3: you know, like explosion happens and piston lifts right like that,
Speaker 3: that's my wheelhouse. I can fix my truck. I can
Speaker 3: fix my bicycle. I can fix Are you saying you
Speaker 3: like ice in combustion?
Speaker 10: Yea.
Speaker 3: In many ways, both ices will be the yeah, the
Speaker 3: end of all of us. But I enjoy to fix one.
Speaker 3: I like to look at it and go like uh
Speaker 3: huh okay, this goes bang and then this goes up.
Speaker 3: And it's cool to learn this stuff. It's cool to
Speaker 3: learn a new skill, especially like once you get into
Speaker 3: your thirties, like it's good to learn shit. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: this is approachable, especially like the guides for these are
Speaker 3: very approachable even if you're not like a tech punk.
Speaker 3: If this is your first time going on GitHub and
Speaker 3: that there are people you can reach out to, like
Speaker 3: real nice people. You won't get an AI tech support.
Speaker 3: Someone will help you understand this shit, and that is cool.
Speaker 5: There's a platform called the M five stack that makes
Speaker 5: it really easy. So like you get as a jaw
Speaker 5: ESP thirty two, but M five stack makes it so
Speaker 5: that like you don't even have to do soldering, and
Speaker 5: they have dragon drop coating, so you can just plug
Speaker 5: in sensors and things like you can make a drawing
Speaker 5: detector out of one of those and already has like
Speaker 5: a screen onboard, and so like it's super cheap and
Speaker 5: you could just deb it out really hard and just
Speaker 5: go for it.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 5: It's it's easy for makers nowadays, Like like in the fifties, right,
Speaker 5: you have to have an it's our military and industry
Speaker 5: complex behind you to do this kind of stuff, right,
Speaker 5: or a corporation, And now you can just just make
Speaker 5: yourself a little thing in your house. It's really cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like you know, I was in Minnesota there
Speaker 3: at the time when lots of ice and CBP agents
Speaker 3: were two when they took a lot of people and
Speaker 3: killed two people, And like one of the things that
Speaker 3: was beautiful about that really horrible time was that everyone
Speaker 3: was so locked in, like to include grandmothers, to include
Speaker 3: a dude with a signed said, what would Ronald Reagan do? Like,
Speaker 3: no one wanted those people in their town, right, And
Speaker 3: that requires everyone to do what they do best. Not
Speaker 3: everyone can be out on a street corner whistling a
Speaker 3: whistle or driving around right. Some people that have HA
Speaker 3: like a really powerful skill set, And if you are
Speaker 3: someone who can't be out, you can still help create
Speaker 3: these You can help code this stuff like it's beautiful
Speaker 3: when our resistance takes the best from all of us
Speaker 3: and then we are all better because of.
Speaker 4: That, absolutely beautifully said.
Speaker 3: Anything you guys would like to plug before we go, websites,
Speaker 3: util aid projects, favorite snacks, whatever you want.
Speaker 5: Take a peek at d flock dot emmy if you
Speaker 5: want to. I have nothing to do with that project yet,
Speaker 5: but you know they map in the flock cams. You
Speaker 5: can use these detectors as supplementary devices to confirm or
Speaker 5: to find things you haven't seen. But other than that,
Speaker 5: just Colonel paniccdot tech can definitely check out EFF. They
Speaker 5: get a lot of good stuff going on and they've
Speaker 5: been doing it since the early days.
Speaker 4: At I guess I'll plug EFF's surveillance self defense guys. Specifically,
Speaker 4: that's at SSD dot ef dot org.
Speaker 3: We got it.
Speaker 4: We're the only continuously updated and long longest maintained security guys.
Speaker 4: There's also the Activist Checklist, which is really great. Another
Speaker 4: really great resource, the surveillance self defense guides are almost
Speaker 4: like a textbook, like there's a lot of info there,
Speaker 4: but if you just need the like quick and dirty
Speaker 4: cliffs that it's version. Activist Checklist is really great for that, right,
Speaker 4: and they're doing a good job keeping that up. A
Speaker 4: lot of respect to them, and then yeah, I check
Speaker 4: out you know Rayhunter dot eff dot org for Ray
Speaker 4: Hunter stuff, Colonel Panic dot tech for his stuff. Since
Speaker 4: he plugged my stuff, I guess the other thing that
Speaker 4: I will plug is open Archive, which is a nonprofit
Speaker 4: that I'm on the board of. They're making an app
Speaker 4: called save which allows you to securely record, archive, and
Speaker 4: verify videos of whatever you want, say, such as human
Speaker 4: rights abuses or you know, police atrocities or things of
Speaker 4: that nature. And so I recommend that project. Go check
Speaker 4: them out. They're really good folks. If you're doing a
Speaker 4: lot of cop watch type stuff, that's a good place
Speaker 4: to go.
Speaker 3: Fantastic nice. We thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 5: That was great, Thank you for having us.
Speaker 10: Thank you. Counter terrorism, No, I prefer table terrorism.
Speaker 2: Counter I hardly know word terrorism.
Speaker 10: Hi, this is it could happen here. Yeah, I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 10: That's Robert Evans and.
Speaker 4: Not a lot to be proud of with that introduction.
Speaker 10: No, not much to be proud of. But there's also
Speaker 10: not much to be proud of considering the twenty twenty
Speaker 10: six White House counter Terrorism Strategy.
Speaker 8: That's right.
Speaker 10: So I think we put equal amount of work into
Speaker 10: this as Sebastian Gorga.
Speaker 8: Did every year.
Speaker 2: The new counter terrorism list is It's My Dune, you know,
Speaker 2: or whatever big movie's coming out this year.
Speaker 10: Hi.
Speaker 2: I was excited.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean I was excited until I actually read it.
Speaker 10: And that's what we're gonna be talking about today. And
Speaker 10: it's a short one. This is very short. Actually, this
Speaker 10: is just fourteen pages of actual text, about half the
Speaker 10: length of previous comparable documents. Now, there's been a lot
Speaker 10: of headlines about the political weaponization after this strategy was released,
Speaker 10: and we'll talk about that in a sec. But let's
Speaker 10: first start by talking about how the document starts with
Speaker 10: a presidential forward by none other than Donald Trump, dated
Speaker 10: May twenty twenty sixth. Trump lists counter terrorism accomplishments from
Speaker 10: the first year of a second term, like mobilizing DHS
Speaker 10: to remove illegal alien criminals in ghiest sympathizers to arresting
Speaker 10: the isis K operative who planned the Abbey Gates suicide
Speaker 10: bombing in Afghanistan, and rescuing over one hundred American hostages.
Speaker 10: Speaking of Trump also says he secured the release of
Speaker 10: the remaining October seventh hostages end quote began the process
Speaker 10: of ensuring Gaza can no longer serve as a haven
Speaker 10: for terrorism and extremism unquote, and that's through establishing Trump's
Speaker 10: own Board of Peace. The president writes that Operation Midnight
Speaker 10: Hammer and Epic Fury have dealt quote unquote devastating blows
Speaker 10: to Iran, which Trump calls the world's number one state
Speaker 10: sponsor of terror. Other actions Trump admin has taken include
Speaker 10: designating Muslim Brotherhood chapters and quote unquote deadly cartels as
Speaker 10: terrorist organizations, with Trump boasting that he quote began using
Speaker 10: the strength and power of the US military to stop
Speaker 10: and destroy cartel operations. The example that he includes here
Speaker 10: is when the US armed forces captured the quote unquote
Speaker 10: narco terrorist outlaw Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro. So Trump's opening
Speaker 10: forward covers the majority of what this sixteen page total
Speaker 10: strategy is focused on. As Trump writes, quote cartel's jihadists
Speaker 10: or the governments who support them. Now, what Trump doesn't
Speaker 10: actually write about in this forward is what most reporting
Speaker 10: on the new counter terrorist strategy has focused on. The
Speaker 10: later inclusion of left wing terrorism as one of the
Speaker 10: nation's leading terror threats, and that's what we'll be mostly
Speaker 10: talking about today. Good though we will cover the other
Speaker 10: two types of terrorism that this guide focuses on now.
Speaker 10: This strategy is the brainchild of White House counter Terrorisms
Speaker 10: are Sebastian Gorka, a far right Hungarian commentator who briefly
Speaker 10: served in Trump's first term. This new document states, quote,
Speaker 10: a new type of domestic terrorism has emerged, driven by
Speaker 10: violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and
Speaker 10: the American way of life. The terrorist threat has changed.
Speaker 10: We face new categories and combinations of violent actors that
Speaker 10: make established ways of doing counter terrorism insufficient or obsolete.
Speaker 10: This strategy lists three main types of terror groups the
Speaker 10: US is currently facing narco terrorists and transnational gangs, legacy
Speaker 10: Islamic terrorists, and violent left wing extremists, including anarchists and
Speaker 10: anti fascists. Now we'll get to the narco terrorist stuff later,
Speaker 10: but let's start with that last line, which is clearly
Speaker 10: clearly pulling from Trump's Antifa terrorism Executive Order as well
Speaker 10: as the National Security Presdential and Mirandum Number seven, which
Speaker 10: directed federal law enforcement to investigate potential crimes relating to
Speaker 10: political violence and terrorism quote under the umbrella of self
Speaker 10: described anti fascism. This is a pretty clear political weaponization
Speaker 10: of the intelligence community apparatus, and the new counter terrorist
Speaker 10: strategy doubles down on what ms M seven established writing quote.
Speaker 10: In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national
Speaker 10: counter terrorism activities will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization
Speaker 10: of violent, secular political groups whose ideology is anti American,
Speaker 10: radically pro transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the
Speaker 10: tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home,
Speaker 10: identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa,
Speaker 10: and use law enforcement to cripple them operationally before they
Speaker 10: can name or kill the innocent. We will do the
Speaker 10: same with state sponsors of such groups and those governments
Speaker 10: undertaking lethal plots on US soil or against Americans anywhere quote.
Speaker 2: Are there any cases of that happening? Are there any
Speaker 2: Antifa groups killing Americans.
Speaker 8: They have one case. They have one case, not ANTIFA groups,
Speaker 8: but yes.
Speaker 10: Oh they don't have cases of state sponsors backing ANTIVA,
Speaker 10: but they do have one instance included a violent left
Speaker 10: wing extremism, which we'll get to in a sec one
Speaker 10: example across this like fourteen to sixteen page document. Now,
Speaker 10: the violent secular ideologies that I just listed are very
Speaker 10: similar to or overlapping with the common indicators and motivations
Speaker 10: animating violent conduct. Included NSPM seven, anti Americanism, anti capitalism
Speaker 10: to Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government,
Speaker 10: extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility to those
Speaker 10: who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
Speaker 10: After this new strategy was published, Sebastian Gorka told reporters, quote,
Speaker 10: we are taking ideology and counter ideology very seriously now,
Speaker 10: despite that clear political focus, literally calling it left wing extremism,
Speaker 10: something that Biden never really did with right wing extremism
Speaker 10: at least some documents.
Speaker 2: Like this, no shocking.
Speaker 10: Despite that clear focus, this counter terrorism strategy claims that
Speaker 10: counter terrorism operations will be executed quote unquote a politically
Speaker 10: and actually spends a significant portion complaining about how the
Speaker 10: Biden admin previously weaponized counter terrorism operations against innocent Americans
Speaker 10: great stuff quote, as real threats were ignored or underplayed.
Speaker 10: Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and
Speaker 10: Conservatives committed by violent left wing extremists, including the assassination
Speaker 10: of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.
Speaker 8: Unquote.
Speaker 10: This is the only example of quote unquote left wing
Speaker 10: violence included in this entire document. Just this, just this
Speaker 10: one killing now on executive disorder. We have reported on
Speaker 10: a few instances where the Trump administration has tried to
Speaker 10: weaponize the killing of Christians or attacks against churches as
Speaker 10: being motivated by like anti Christian bias, even when the
Speaker 10: people committing those attacks were themselves Christian, and for all
Speaker 10: that we can tell, we're not religiously motivated against Christians.
Speaker 10: But they tried to glom onto a few of these incidents.
Speaker 2: Certainly not the Charlie Kirk assassination exactly.
Speaker 10: Right, Yeah, but they've tried tried to try to glom
Speaker 10: onto these examples to build this narrative of like anti
Speaker 10: Christian violence which is rising in the United States. And
Speaker 10: as for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we still don't
Speaker 10: have a clear picture of the motivations behind that attack.
Speaker 10: More on that later. After this new counter terrorism strategy dropped,
Speaker 10: I did the thing that I assume anyone would do
Speaker 10: and read through the past like three or four counter
Speaker 10: terrorism strategies.
Speaker 2: Really, yeah, great stuff from the past ten years. Good work.
Speaker 10: Trump released one in twenty eighteen, and Biden's came out
Speaker 10: in twenty twenty one. Now, the first mention of any
Speaker 10: non Islamic terrorist group in Trump's twenty eighteen counter terrorism
Speaker 10: strategy is the Nordic Resistance Movement quote, a prominent transnational
Speaker 10: self described national socialist organization with anti Western views that
Speaker 10: has conducted violent Attacksicans, Muslims, left wing groups, and others unquote.
Speaker 10: This document from Trump's first term focuses almost exclusively on
Speaker 10: Islamic terrorism, specifically ISIS and al Qaeda, but also briefly
Speaker 10: mentions the Neo Nazi National Action Group in one paragraph
Speaker 10: and in another reads quote, the United States has long
Speaker 10: faced persistent security threat from domestic terrorists who are not
Speaker 10: motivated by a radical Islamist ideology, but are instead motivated
Speaker 10: by other forms of violent extremism such as racially motivated extremism,
Speaker 10: animal rights extremism, environmental stremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia
Speaker 10: extremism quot but that's really all has on non Islamic
Speaker 10: extremism in what is a thirty four page document.
Speaker 8: By the time Biden.
Speaker 10: Got into office, White's premacist violence had risen dramatically and
Speaker 10: the Biden had been released a domestic terrorism specific counter
Speaker 10: terrorism strategy. This document, released in June twenty twenty one,
Speaker 10: starts by describing racially or ethnically motivated violence from the
Speaker 10: KKK during reconstruction to attacks on Black churches and synagogues
Speaker 10: and the Al Paso shooting at the walmart. Then the
Speaker 10: document covers what it calls anti government or anti authority
Speaker 10: violent extremism, including the Oklahoma City bombing, the Congressional baseball
Speaker 10: game shooting, and the recent January sixth attack. I'm going
Speaker 10: to read a paragraph from Biden's domestic terrorism strategy here
Speaker 10: to compare quote. Today's domestic terrorists espouse a range of
Speaker 10: violent ideological motivations. They also take on a variety of forms,
Speaker 10: from loan actors to small groups of in formally aligned
Speaker 10: individuals to networks exhorting and targeting violence towards the specific communities,
Speaker 10: to violent self proclaimed militias. Among that wide range of
Speaker 10: animating ideologies, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, particularly those
Speaker 10: who promote the superiority of the white race, and militia
Speaker 10: vilencxtremists are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.
Speaker 10: These actors have different motivations, but many focus their violence
Speaker 10: towards the same segment or segments of the American community,
Speaker 10: whether persons of color, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, or other religious minorities,
Speaker 10: women and girls, LGBTQI plus individuals, or others. Their insistence
Speaker 10: on violence can at times be explicit. It also can
Speaker 10: at times be less explicit, lurking in the ideologies rooted
Speaker 10: in a perception of the superiority of the white race
Speaker 10: that call for violence in furtherance of preservation and abhorrent
Speaker 10: notions of racial purity or cleansing. Now, Biden's strategy does
Speaker 10: later specifically mention quote unquote, anarchist violence, though within the
Speaker 10: broader context of anti government or anti authority extremism quote.
Speaker 10: A significant component of today's threat includes self proclaimed militias
Speaker 10: and militia violent extremists who take steps to violently resist
Speaker 10: government authority or facilitate the overthrow of the US government
Speaker 10: based on perceived overreach. Anarchist violent extremists who violently oppose
Speaker 10: all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions which
Speaker 10: they perceive as harmful to society. The document goes on
Speaker 10: to mention sovereign citizen violent extremists and other groups that
Speaker 10: resist or oppose legislative, regulatory, or other actions taken by
Speaker 10: the government. And this strategy also names a few single
Speaker 10: issue ideologies which may motivate violence, like abortion, animal rights,
Speaker 10: environmental issues, or involuntarily seliment violent extremism. But that little
Speaker 10: section there is the closest that the Biden's strategy gets
Speaker 10: to quote unquote left wing violence as Trump would call it.
Speaker 10: But rather than referring to violence as somewhere on like
Speaker 10: left right politics, Biden's strategy tries to specifically name the
Speaker 10: exact motivating factor driving the violence. His document reads, quote,
Speaker 10: the definition of domestic terrorism in our law makes no
Speaker 10: distinction based on political views right, left or center, and
Speaker 10: neither should we unquote. Biden's ag Merk Garland would often
Speaker 10: say that combating domestic terrorism is about stopping violence, not
Speaker 10: policing ideology, and quote unquote, violence not ideology was an
Speaker 10: often repeated refrain during the Biden administration, and this is
Speaker 10: something that the Biden administration definitely acted on. The FBI
Speaker 10: investigated Stop Cop City under Biden, and a significant portion
Speaker 10: of the domestic terror related charges while Biden was in office.
Speaker 10: We're levied against Stop Coop City protesters by the State
Speaker 10: of Georgia with investigative assistance from multiple federal agencies, and
Speaker 10: almost all of whom we're charged with terrorism. We're not
Speaker 10: actually charged with any specific violent crime.
Speaker 8: We'll talk more.
Speaker 10: About the partisan weaponization of terrorism or counter terrorism after
Speaker 10: some ads.
Speaker 1: Excellent and we're back.
Speaker 10: It's such a blast from the past. Like read through
Speaker 10: all of these Biden counter terrorism manuals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, boy, back in those days. Yeah, it makes makes
Speaker 2: me nostalgic.
Speaker 10: It's just a totally different world.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 10: Like it's unfathomable to like think of the federal government
Speaker 10: now using this kind of language talk about like ethnic
Speaker 10: cleansing being done by the white supremacist motivated terrorists. It's
Speaker 10: it's like it's just a totally different, totally different ballgame now.
Speaker 10: In Trump's A New Strategy, it states that under the
Speaker 10: Biden admin, US officials quote used their significant powers to
Speaker 10: politically target individuals in the interests of those they favored,
Speaker 10: wanted to keep in power, or to help win elections unquote.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 10: Under Biden, there was an increase of domestic terrorism related
Speaker 10: prosecutions following January sixth, plus unrelated felony cases against Trump
Speaker 10: himself and prosecutions of Trump allies related to the Stop
Speaker 10: This Steal efforts. In twenty twenty two, the DOJ opened
Speaker 10: a new unit focused on domestic terrorism investigations, and just
Speaker 10: that year, one hundred million dollars of additional resources were
Speaker 10: allocated to the DOJFBI, and DHS for countering domestic terrorism.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 10: This increase in focus was correlated to an increase in attacks.
Speaker 10: The Government Accountability Office reported that between twenty and ten
Speaker 10: and twenty twenty one, domestic terrorism related investigations had grown
Speaker 10: by three hundred and fifty six percent, with two hundred
Speaker 10: and thirty one confirmed incidents. According to the DHS, in
Speaker 10: just Biden's first year of office, the number of FBI
Speaker 10: domestic terrorists investigations more than doubled during this time period.
Speaker 10: The intelligence community classified racially or ethnically motivated violence as
Speaker 10: the most common type of attack. It's thirty five percent
Speaker 10: of domestic terrorism, and this category also contributed to the
Speaker 10: most debts. The second most common type of attack was
Speaker 10: anti government or anti authority motivated violent extremism, with thirty
Speaker 10: two percent of attacks, and that category covered a lot
Speaker 10: of different things, including the malicious stuff as well as
Speaker 10: the anarchist stuff. It depends on who's doing the exact categorization, though, yeah. Now,
Speaker 10: the racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists were most likely
Speaker 10: to conduct civilian mass casualty attacks, while militia types were
Speaker 10: more likely to target law enforcement or government apparatus. In comparison,
Speaker 10: Trump's new counter terrorism strategy does not contain a single
Speaker 10: mention of racially or ethnically motivated by extremism, not one
Speaker 10: which is like a which is astounding, right, even like
Speaker 10: beyond beyond the clear partisan what weaponization like just from
Speaker 10: a counter terrorism standpoint like this is this is bizarre,
Speaker 10: This is this is quite quite a choice. The last
Speaker 10: pillar of Biden's counter terrorist strategy was quote confronting long
Speaker 10: term contributions to domestic terrorism, like racism, bigotry, religious or
Speaker 10: ethnic hatred unquote. Meanwhile, Trump's new strategy says that the
Speaker 10: fearsome powers of the US government must never be abused quote,
Speaker 10: whether under the guise of de radicalization, protecting our democracy,
Speaker 10: or any other pretext unquote. Great, which is I don't
Speaker 10: even know how to respond to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what always yeah, Like what are you supposed
Speaker 2: to say?
Speaker 10: I mean it. It demonstrates they're not actually interested in
Speaker 10: combating what is the most lethal form of domestics no terrorism, No.
Speaker 2: And they never have been.
Speaker 8: Even in Trump's first term.
Speaker 10: At least they moved towards that as the threat was increasing,
Speaker 10: But now they just have no interest whatsoever. And actually
Speaker 10: like target deradicalization as an example of the fearsome powers
Speaker 10: of the US government.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like the thing that never worked and like never
Speaker 2: actually did anything. Is the big boogeyman for you guys.
Speaker 8: Okay, it's wild.
Speaker 10: The new strategy includes a few examples of US government overreach. Quote.
Speaker 10: Our nation has not been well served by its intelligence community,
Speaker 10: which has been mirrored in old ways of looking at threats,
Speaker 10: or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a
Speaker 10: political tool, whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional Mass
Speaker 10: in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at school
Speaker 10: board meetings, members of Congress, or President Trumpet's associates. This
Speaker 10: administration will continue to prohibit the intelligence community from being
Speaker 10: used politically against innocent Americans unquote. So that's the main
Speaker 10: example of partisan weaponization of the intelligence community. Let's start
Speaker 10: with this first one, targeting Catholics attending traditional Mass. This
Speaker 10: refers to a twenty twenty three FBI memo from the
Speaker 10: Richmond Field Office on how racially or ethnically motivated violent
Speaker 10: extremists were displaying a growing interest in traditionalist Catholicism up
Speaker 10: great and how trad Catholic extremist violence could be mitigated
Speaker 10: by building connections within the church. Sure now, random Latin
Speaker 10: Mass churchgoers in Virginia were not being investigated. Rather, this
Speaker 10: memo was discussing the quote unquote growing overlap between the
Speaker 10: white nationalist movement and quote unquote radical traditionalist Catholics, and
Speaker 10: how white supremacists may use trad cafe social media to
Speaker 10: promote violence and recruit. This memo also made a distinction
Speaker 10: from ordinary traditional Catholics who prefer or Latin mass and
Speaker 10: the extremist beliefs and violent rhetoric from what they call
Speaker 10: radical traditional Catholics what we would just call tradcats like colloquially.
Speaker 10: After backlash to this memo, the FBI claims to have
Speaker 10: scrapped it for not meeting the standards of the FBI.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, we've seen how high those standards are in
Speaker 2: Cash Betell's era.
Speaker 10: I'm gonna go out a little bit of like a
Speaker 10: tangent here because I wanted to get more information about
Speaker 10: this Richmond Field Office memo and investigation. So it turns
Speaker 10: out the FBI did monitor a traditionalist priest at a church,
Speaker 10: and this church was not considered by the Vatican to
Speaker 10: be in full communion with the Catholic Church, but it's
Speaker 10: still Catholic affiliated. This priest refused to speak with the
Speaker 10: FBI about communications he had with a parisher who was
Speaker 10: a self described radical traditional Catholic clerical fascist, self described
Speaker 10: who was posting about conducting a mass shooting at a
Speaker 10: special needs school. Are resistance against the government, learning how
Speaker 10: to manufacture pipe bombs and using untraceable means to purchase
Speaker 10: supplies to manufacture three D printed weapons. Posting about that
Speaker 10: on this Catholic account.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nothing sketchy.
Speaker 10: So this Nazi was actually previously arrested in twenty nineteen
Speaker 10: after being overheard making comments about political violence while purchasing
Speaker 10: a several AR fifteen style rifles, multiple high capacity magazines,
Speaker 10: and large quantities of two two three ammunition, as well
Speaker 10: as making online statements advocating civil war and the murder
Speaker 10: of politicians. Now, after getting out of prison, this guy
Speaker 10: started attending this traditionalist church and planning an attack. The
Speaker 10: FBI claims he tried to recruit others with similar belief
Speaker 10: systems and made comments to churchgoers about his intent to
Speaker 10: commit violence. He was arrested again and pleaded guilty to
Speaker 10: possessing a destructive device. So the FBI was looking into
Speaker 10: this priest because this priest was not talking to them
Speaker 10: about what the communications were with this Nazi, communications that
Speaker 10: they know existed, and so they briefly looked into him.
Speaker 10: This caused a massive backlash among the right. This is
Speaker 10: where Marjorie Taylor Green was posting about defunding the FBI.
Speaker 10: A lot of the dismantled FBI stuff coming from the
Speaker 10: right was based on this incident of the FBI, you know,
Speaker 10: targeting conservative churchgoers. Little side tangent there. The other main
Speaker 10: example from the Trump counter terrorism strategy refers to parents
Speaker 10: and school boards. This is in reference to a letter
Speaker 10: from the National school Boards Association requesting federal intervention into
Speaker 10: the harassment, threats and attacks against school boards in twenty
Speaker 10: twenty one. And this letter read, in part quote, these
Speaker 10: heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of
Speaker 10: domestic terror and hate crimes unquote. After this letter was sent,
Speaker 10: the ag Mayork Garland announced that the government was going
Speaker 10: to look into these threats. This too, sparked a huge
Speaker 10: backlash from the right, claiming that the FBI was investigating
Speaker 10: parents for terrorism. There was congressional hearings, and a month later,
Speaker 10: the National school Board Association apologized for some of the
Speaker 10: language they included in this letter. So those are the
Speaker 10: two man examples of this of this horrendous government overreach
Speaker 10: and weaponization of the intelligence community against innocent Americans.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course, I mean, it's just it's frustrating how
Speaker 2: like reality doesn't matter at all here, But like what
Speaker 2: is the point of even like going in and line
Speaker 2: by line here's everything that's wrong with that. I don't
Speaker 2: even know anymore.
Speaker 10: No, it's not a matter of convincing. It's often a
Speaker 10: matter of just holding my sanity together, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, No, No, it's important to like look at
Speaker 2: it and to some extent document how bullshit it is.
Speaker 2: But it's also just like it's incredibly frustrating to like
Speaker 2: see this fucking tradcat priest get away with shit that
Speaker 2: like people would go to prison for if the ideologies
Speaker 2: were reversed.
Speaker 10: You know, yeah, sure you if you switch this stuff around,
Speaker 10: you can imagine how the Trump administration would be handling it. Yeah,
Speaker 10: a unitarian pastor righting planning some kind of attack with
Speaker 10: like an Antifa supercilgier well.
Speaker 2: Or just if you've got like a unitarian pastor or whatever,
Speaker 2: like someone who is tangentially attached to someone left wing
Speaker 2: who was like posting about carrying out an attack, like,
Speaker 2: the level of backlash would be higher and would hurt
Speaker 2: more people.
Speaker 10: No, horrendous, We've seen stuff like that happen. The sections
Speaker 10: on left wing terrorism in this new strategy actually only
Speaker 10: make up a few paragraphs of this sixteen page document.
Speaker 10: So what is the rest of this counter terrorism strategy
Speaker 10: really about? Then? The first priority is the quote neutralization
Speaker 10: of hemispheric terror threats by incapacitating cartel operations un quote.
Speaker 10: The primary threat is the so called narco terrorists previously mentioned,
Speaker 10: And this term narco terrorists was invented in the eighties
Speaker 10: by the President of Peru to describe attacks on the
Speaker 10: police by drug traffickers, but since then the term has
Speaker 10: come to mean a variety of things. In this new strategy,
Speaker 10: Trump doesn't just consider drug trafficking as a means to
Speaker 10: fund terrorist groups, but also implies that drug overdoses themselves
Speaker 10: constitute a form of terrorism.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 10: Quote. The borderless America created by the Biden administration was
Speaker 10: so badly exploited by threat actors that during one twelve
Speaker 10: month period, more Americans died as a result of illicit
Speaker 10: drugs flooded into the country by the cartels than all
Speaker 10: the US servicemen killed in combat since nineteen forty five. Unquote.
Speaker 2: I just look at those numbers for cigarettes. Let's just
Speaker 2: stand tobacco in. Let's just throw tobacco into the mix
Speaker 2: sea that. Oh, does it dwarf every other drug related
Speaker 2: death till combined? Yeah, it does.
Speaker 10: Obviously an absurd statement. Yeah, but I think It is
Speaker 10: crucial to understanding how the administration is operating by understanding
Speaker 10: that they consider drug overdoses to be terrorism. And that's
Speaker 10: a big part of how they're able to do what
Speaker 10: they're currently doing is by weaponizing terrorism as a category.
Speaker 10: The strategy later considers illicit fentanyl and its core precursor
Speaker 10: chemicals to be weapons of mass destruction. Sure right, this
Speaker 10: is the same category of weapons as nuclear bombs. That
Speaker 10: is how they categorize it. Technically, when the US government
Speaker 10: uses the term terrorism, it's supposed to mean activities that
Speaker 10: involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation
Speaker 10: of the criminal laws of the United States or any state,
Speaker 10: that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a
Speaker 10: civilian population, to influence the policy of a government by
Speaker 10: intimidation or coersion, or to affect the conduct of the
Speaker 10: government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. It's really that
Speaker 10: that last half that constitutes the terrorism part that separates
Speaker 10: terrorism from just any crime. It's the intent to intimidate
Speaker 10: or coerce civilian populations or influence the government. But the
Speaker 10: FBI defines international terrorism as quote violent criminal acts committed
Speaker 10: by individuals and or groups who are inspired by or
Speaker 10: associated with designated foreign terrorist organizations unquote. So if you
Speaker 10: designate a group of foreign terrorist organization, that means that
Speaker 10: what they are doing is terrorism. And that last bit
Speaker 10: leads us to Trump's kind of core strategy to combat
Speaker 10: drug trafficking, designating cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations,
Speaker 10: which will quote make available additional intelligence authorities and denying
Speaker 10: disrupt their financial streams and access to the United States unquote.
Speaker 10: After the designation, Trump authorized quote dozens of strikes by
Speaker 10: the Department of War against cartel drug boats, resulting in
Speaker 10: a more than ninety percent decrease in maritime drug smuggling
Speaker 10: into the United States unquote. Citation needed. Yeah, we will
Speaker 10: get into the second priority of the counter terrorist strategy
Speaker 10: after these ad breaks. All right, we are back for
Speaker 10: our last section here. Let's start by talking about the
Speaker 10: second priority of the counter terrorism strategy released last week.
Speaker 10: The second is the targeting and destruction of Islamist terror groups,
Speaker 10: especially Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and isis k.
Speaker 10: Trump's new strategy blames continuing jie hottist plots against Americans
Speaker 10: quote in part because of the failed forever war policies,
Speaker 10: the empowerment of terror supporting regimes like Iran, and a
Speaker 10: past unwillingness to challenge Islamist ideologies head on unquote. So
Speaker 10: how's that going? How's that going? I haven't I haven't
Speaker 10: checked the news in about three months, Robert, can you
Speaker 10: briefly fill me in?
Speaker 4: Good?
Speaker 2: No, no, no problems.
Speaker 10: It's flied.
Speaker 2: Everything's fine.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we solve all the failed forever war policies.
Speaker 2: We did no more forever wars. We've got a short war,
Speaker 2: but it's one of our shortest garrison.
Speaker 10: Iran is in no way empowered.
Speaker 2: I can't. I can't tell you how short this war
Speaker 2: is at the moment, you know, incredibly short war.
Speaker 10: Iran is an exercising economic influence over the whole world
Speaker 10: right now.
Speaker 2: I know you think that this has albin a disaster,
Speaker 2: but I'm going to put on a graph how long
Speaker 2: World War II lasted next to how long this little
Speaker 2: adventure in Iran has lasted, and you tell me if
Speaker 2: it's a problem. Mmmmmm, Wow, one of those numbers is
Speaker 2: bigger than the other.
Speaker 8: Yes, we're fine.
Speaker 10: It's wild. It's absolutely that shit that they have this
Speaker 10: in here yeah, like, yeah, it's so funny, it's insane.
Speaker 10: So the document talks about Islamist terrorism in Asia, Africa,
Speaker 10: the Middle East, and Europe for over four pages. It
Speaker 10: takes up a significant chunk of the strategy. These sections
Speaker 10: of the document largely mirror Trump's National security strategy from
Speaker 10: last year and talks about how quote unfed mass migration
Speaker 10: in Europe has been the transmission belt for terrorists, and
Speaker 10: discusses the need for quote honest conversations about Islamism and
Speaker 10: how hostile groups exploit open borders and related globalist ideals.
Speaker 10: The more these alien cultures grow and the longer current
Speaker 10: European policies persist, the more terrorism is guaranteed. As the
Speaker 10: birthplace of Western culture and values. Europe must act now
Speaker 10: to halt its willful decline unquote.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 10: One of the more explicitly fascist sections of this strategy,
Speaker 10: Trump's new CT strategy does discuss the integration of counter
Speaker 10: cartel and counter terrorism efforts, saying it allows the US
Speaker 10: to quote disrupt the shared networks, financing and logistical routes
Speaker 10: used by both designated drug traffickers and Islamist terrorists unquote.
Speaker 10: The main success story of this strategy is the capture
Speaker 10: of Maduro quote, the illegitimate leader of Venezuela, a cartel
Speaker 10: boss in league with terror sponsor Oroan and its terror
Speaker 10: proxy Hezbolah un quote. We've talked about this strategy for
Speaker 10: like thirty five minutes, and you may have noticed that
Speaker 10: so far we've really just talked about identifying targets with
Speaker 10: very little discussion actually on actual strategy on how to
Speaker 10: counter these threats. That's because the document has very little
Speaker 10: on actual strategy to counter these threats. It lays out
Speaker 10: three steps for countering terrorism, identifying terror actors and plots
Speaker 10: before they happen, cutting off their arms, funding and recruiting streams,
Speaker 10: and ultimately destroy the established threat group. Methods for going
Speaker 10: about this are quote a series of similar, high intensity
Speaker 10: but short campaigns against jihadist groups love to see that happen,
Speaker 10: as well as sanctions, shadow fleet, oil tanker interdiction, and
Speaker 10: covert operations to disrupt funding and state sponsorship of terrorism.
Speaker 10: That's it. That is really the bulk of like the
Speaker 10: actual strategy of how to do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the important thing to remember for all
Speaker 2: that's scary about this, and for all, like the people
Speaker 2: freaking out, and not to say if there's nothing to
Speaker 2: be concerned about. This is the government saying this. They
Speaker 2: have a lot of ability to fuck with. People certainly
Speaker 2: should be concerned about this, but at the same time,
Speaker 2: don't forget they don't know what they're doing or have
Speaker 2: a real plan for most of what they're doing.
Speaker 8: No like this is.
Speaker 2: Hacked together, cobbled together, and executed by people who don't
Speaker 2: know what they're doing and at least in one major case,
Speaker 2: are drunk all the time.
Speaker 10: Now, it's pretty stunning to compare this to the twenty
Speaker 10: twenty one BIND one, which is very, very complicated in
Speaker 10: laying out actual strategy to dismantle domestic terrorist operations, and
Speaker 10: this just this lacks a lot of a lot of
Speaker 10: the same strategic outlook. Lastly, the strategy outlines current functional
Speaker 10: aspects of the threat environment. That's the term at use
Speaker 10: this functional aspects. These are like complicating factors. I'll go
Speaker 10: through these line by line. New and evolving collaboration between
Speaker 10: nation states and threat groups such as cartels, alliances between
Speaker 10: established terror groups, exploitation of new weapons like drones by
Speaker 10: cartels and jihttists, the remaining threat of terrorists acquiring and
Speaker 10: using nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, which President Trump has
Speaker 10: rightly labeled the single greatest threat to this world unquote.
Speaker 10: All of this stuff is like Bush era terrorism stuff,
Speaker 10: Like this is all very outdated, not necessarily outdated, but
Speaker 10: like it's not cutting edge. I guessed what is what
Speaker 10: would be the more correct way of putting this, Like
Speaker 10: you're just talking about drones now in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: But another one of these quote unquote functional aspects is
Speaker 10: quote new and deepening alliances between the far left and Islamists,
Speaker 10: i e. The Red Green Alliance unquote. This really just
Speaker 10: takes up a single line. They don't expound on this.
Speaker 10: I'm pretty sure this would relate to like pro Palestine protests.
Speaker 10: Do is this relates people on the far left either
Speaker 10: supporting Hamas or just generally being pro Palestine or anti Israel.
Speaker 10: That's what they're calling a Red Green Alliance.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, it's just like a throwaway alive. But I
Speaker 10: thought it's worth including just because of how odd it is,
Speaker 10: Like it really stands out. It's at like the middle
Speaker 10: to end of the document, way after they actually do
Speaker 10: their like three paragraphs on left wing extremism. They just
Speaker 10: kind of throw that in there as a new complicating factor. Yeah,
Speaker 10: of course, So what does this all mean for the left?
Speaker 10: Almost nothing in here that pertains to left isn't already
Speaker 10: in National Security Potential Memorandum number seven. This new strategy
Speaker 10: does not designate trans people as a class as terrorists,
Speaker 10: nor does it categorize trans people as nihilistic violent extremists,
Speaker 10: like some have previously reported, in essentially states like NSPM
Speaker 10: seven that being extremely pro transgender can be a motivating
Speaker 10: factor in carrying out terroristic violence, and the only example
Speaker 10: provided is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which we still
Speaker 10: don't have an illuminated motive for besides the suspect allegedly
Speaker 10: expressing frustration at Kirk for spreading vaguely defined hate. The
Speaker 10: strategy claims, quote, our counter terrorism powers will not be
Speaker 10: used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us.
Speaker 10: We will not permit the weaponization of America's unparalleled counter
Speaker 10: terrorism capabilities for partisan purposes quote, despite clear political weaponization
Speaker 10: and Gorka specifically specifically mentioning that we're going to be
Speaker 10: countering ideology now. A way to kind of explain what's
Speaker 10: going on here, Like think about racially motivated or ethnically
Speaker 10: motivated violent extremism. Being racist isn't illegal, but if someone
Speaker 10: threatens to shoot up a black church because they are racist,
Speaker 10: then that qualifies as racially motivated bilent extremism. The Trump
Speaker 10: administration is basically using the same mo against people with
Speaker 10: left wing, anarchist or anti fascist views to either stop
Speaker 10: crimes before they occur, or crack down harder on people
Speaker 10: or groups who have committed crimes motivated by those ideologies.
Speaker 10: The Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already directed to investigate
Speaker 10: Antifa aligned groups and individuals quote engaged in acts of
Speaker 10: political violence and intimidation, and that's been happening since at
Speaker 10: least October of twenty twenty five. What's in this documents
Speaker 10: already been in effect for a while, and we've already
Speaker 10: seen some of the results of this in the federal
Speaker 10: Prairie Land trial last February, following the shooting of a
Speaker 10: cop outside an immigration detention facility in Texas last summer.
Speaker 10: The government in that case used the specter of Antifa
Speaker 10: to link a group of defendants together and argue for
Speaker 10: ideological motive, and a federal jury convicted eight people of riot, conspiracy,
Speaker 10: and material support to terrorists, even if each individual defendant
Speaker 10: did not commit an act of violence. Yeah, So there's
Speaker 10: cases like that, and then there's also cases against the SPLC, which,
Speaker 10: while the government hasn't specifically said are part of their
Speaker 10: anti antifa investigations, you can see some similar through lines there.
Speaker 8: Yeah, right, in a broad.
Speaker 10: Sense, that's how it relates to like current left wing activism. Right,
Speaker 10: the sort of threats and risk that has existed really
Speaker 10: ever since Trump took office, but especially after the Antifa
Speaker 10: Terrorism Executive Order and National Security Postential memorid AM number
Speaker 10: seven are still in effect. That is still the same
Speaker 10: level of risk. This document doesn't introduce anything new.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 10: Overall, what this strategy tries to do is connect all
Speaker 10: of the ideological targets of this administration, right, put them
Speaker 10: onto a map, intersecting each other. That's what it's doing
Speaker 10: with this Red Green alliance. So it's trying to connect
Speaker 10: all of these ideological targets while expounding on Trump's justification
Speaker 10: for mass deportations of suspected cartel members, military strikes on
Speaker 10: boats in the Western Hemisphere, regime change in Venezuela, and
Speaker 10: the ongoing war in the Middle East. That is really
Speaker 10: most of what the document's trying to do is actually
Speaker 10: build up the counter terrorism justification for all of Trump's
Speaker 10: military actions. And that's one thing that has I guess
Speaker 10: slightly frustrated me in people's discussion of this new strategy
Speaker 10: that a lot of it's based on threats to left
Speaker 10: wing activists in the United States, while not really focusing
Speaker 10: on the bulk of the document, which is building the
Speaker 10: justification for Trump's murderous military actions around the world. Right,
Speaker 10: actions that are blowing up people in boats, bombing schools
Speaker 10: in Iran, things that have like a sizable death count,
Speaker 10: and the sort of logistical and theoretical framework that Trump
Speaker 10: is building through this document does have really really devastating
Speaker 10: lethal consequences, And I guess that's what I wanted to
Speaker 10: focus on a little bit, a little bit more, rather
Speaker 10: than just the targeting of left wing extremists.
Speaker 2: Yep, all right, well fun, I guess we'll see what
Speaker 2: happens next.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, we're gonna see them continue to carry
Speaker 10: this out. Yeah, both domestically against left wing activists and overseas,
Speaker 10: including like right now, right, this is what they're doing
Speaker 10: in Iran, they're talking about Cuba. This strategy does not
Speaker 10: grant them any new powers, but it does give us
Speaker 10: a look into how they are thinking about regime change
Speaker 10: and the Donro doctrid.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, Jesus. It's also dumb.
Speaker 10: This US domination of the Western hemisphere. And I think
Speaker 10: that's really the core of what's driving this document, is
Speaker 10: the US domination of the Western hemisphere, rather than explicit
Speaker 10: political persecution of ideological left wing enemies, which is of
Speaker 10: course still a factor. It's still a thing to be
Speaker 10: concerned about and monitoring and fighting back against.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 2: Absolutely well, all right, guys, and that does it for
Speaker 2: us today? Huh yeah, let's nobody elsewhere, all right, see
Speaker 2: you around.
Speaker 9: Humanity is not a parasite, but the systems we collectively
Speaker 9: uphold today are certainly parasitic. They maintain their hold on
Speaker 9: us due to our interdependence as we rely on each
Speaker 9: other to survive. And these systems, as destructive as they are, are,
Speaker 9: how we know how to cooperate. And they also maintain
Speaker 9: their whole of course, through ideology, the sets of ideas
Speaker 9: about the world carried through religion, philosophy, politics, education, culture,
Speaker 9: et cetera. And to some extent they maintain their hold
Speaker 9: through violence, and I believe we must break free from
Speaker 9: this parasitism. I believe there are other ways of relating
Speaker 9: with each other with nature, and I'll talk about those
Speaker 9: ways at the end. By the way, hello and welcome.
Speaker 9: It could happen here. I'm andrews Age Andrewism on YouTube,
Speaker 9: and I'm joined today by.
Speaker 8: Mia Wong also here. Yeah, we're doing great interest, yepee.
Speaker 9: So I want to talk about parsism, the development of
Speaker 9: paristism over time, as discussed in Samuel Milla McDonald's book Progress,
Speaker 9: which I highly recommend quite an enjoyable read. So I
Speaker 9: actually really first heard about that book years ago before
Speaker 9: it was even out, and I had reached out and
Speaker 9: I was like, oh, I would love to, you know,
Speaker 9: get a copy as soon as it's available and talk
Speaker 9: about it and stuff. And you know, I was at
Speaker 9: that point in my life, I was really voraciously consuming
Speaker 9: these kind of grand narratives of history. And of course
Speaker 9: we know the flowers with these grand narratives. They have
Speaker 9: limited explanatory power. But I still found use in these
Speaker 9: narratives and understanding aspects and angles of our history. At
Speaker 9: least when you take a critical approach to them, because
Speaker 9: I mean history is, as the name implies, a story.
Speaker 9: You know, there are many interpretations and frameworks that can
Speaker 9: be used to explain or better understand different aspects of history,
Speaker 9: and so progress offers one framework through its three eras
Speaker 9: of focus. Of course, history isn't actually so linear. Different
Speaker 9: forms can co exist, forms can come and go. It
Speaker 9: is in this sequential development as is sometimes posed. But
Speaker 9: there are trends that we can observe. And so these
Speaker 9: three phases that McDonald discusses identifies particular ideas of progress,
Speaker 9: forms of parisitism, and agents of history. And I think
Speaker 9: it's a very compelling connection between the theology, politics, economics
Speaker 9: and ecology that intertwined to make up history. Obviously not
Speaker 9: perfectly accurate, but I think it helps us to see
Speaker 9: certain tendencies more clearly. So we can look at a
Speaker 9: lot of the anarchist approaches or anarchist adjacent approaches to
Speaker 9: tracing the development of the state in history. You know, Pt.
Speaker 9: Gal Loose had worship and power. JAMEC. Scott has against
Speaker 9: the Green and in progress, although I don't think he
Speaker 9: is anarchist anarchist a jacent in progress McDonald's starts with
Speaker 9: the beginning of recorded civilization in three thousand BCE and
Speaker 9: looks at the way that many early states developed from
Speaker 9: a blend of religion, politics, and daily life. So, I
Speaker 9: mean humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years
Speaker 9: before recorded history, right, they spread across the globe. They
Speaker 9: experimented with all kinds of different social, political, and economic
Speaker 9: organizations that are now lost. The Time and the Dawn
Speaker 9: of Everything by David Krieber and David wen Grew kind
Speaker 9: of wrestles with some of this. In the early years
Speaker 9: of recorded history, there were many manners of approach to
Speaker 9: state development. From roughly three thousand BCE to fourteen hundred CE.
Speaker 9: This is the first phase of McDonald's timeline. Human societies
Speaker 9: such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, meso America, and medieval Europe
Speaker 9: saw a combination of hierarchy with cosmology. McDonald calls this
Speaker 9: phase Heaven in the book, not to co sign it
Speaker 9: as an ideal, but to illustrate the prominence of religious
Speaker 9: power in this time period. And me I know, even
Speaker 9: hosting recently about the impact of religion and the seeming
Speaker 9: has its uns people have nowadays about actually engaging with
Speaker 9: what it means materially for the experience of domination in
Speaker 9: our day to day lives.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, and this some thing you can you can
Speaker 8: look at sort of in that period is the emergence
Speaker 8: of states alongside sort of the emergence of temple complexes
Speaker 8: as the thing that creates a bunch of the administrative systems.
Speaker 8: Greer talks about this, I think debt actually, where a
Speaker 8: bunch of sort of the administrative systems that would become
Speaker 8: like credit, are these things that are developed in order
Speaker 8: to sort of track resources moving into these giant temple complexes,
Speaker 8: and so you have the situation where, you know, the
Speaker 8: things that are going to become the building blocks of
Speaker 8: economics and exploitation for every single subsequent period in history
Speaker 8: are developed in order to in order to fuel these
Speaker 8: sort of hierarchical massive complexes where just staggering amounts of
Speaker 8: resources are like fueled into into these sort of temple complexes.
Speaker 8: And that's a you know, that's a thing that continues
Speaker 8: to current present day.
Speaker 9: Indeed, you know, indeed we have we have temple complex
Speaker 9: like what is temple complexes in the sense of megachurches nowadays.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's like what is what is the megachurch, but
Speaker 8: like the temple complex is force.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. That's the thing, right, Like we
Speaker 9: are seeing an echo of this historical time period even
Speaker 9: in the present, because the idea of progress in this
Speaker 9: time and in these places was about progressing toward a
Speaker 9: higher alignment with the divine order, the will of the gods,
Speaker 9: you know, ensuring that different groups of people were in
Speaker 9: their proper place in that order. And so you had
Speaker 9: the development of religious laws and theologies and monumental architecture
Speaker 9: which established this particular kind of order. And when disasters struck,
Speaker 9: whether it be floods or drought, certain vasions, this was
Speaker 9: a sign, a sign of the times perhaps.
Speaker 4: That the order was breaking down.
Speaker 9: And so it's really funny to me that, you know,
Speaker 9: in this progressive account of the idea of progress that
Speaker 9: McDonald's talking about, you know, even the earlier ideas of
Speaker 9: progress have not entirely gone away. You know, they haven't
Speaker 9: been replaced by the next era. They have just taken
Speaker 9: on subtler forms, and sometimes not as subtler forms.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there's there's a concept that the journal Chwang uses
Speaker 8: where I mean they're specifically talking about like the ways
Speaker 8: that elements of like the Chinese, I guess you call
Speaker 8: it the socialist regime are sort of taken and then
Speaker 8: used in the capitalist regime. They go to this thing
Speaker 8: from biology called exceptati where something like evolutionarily that was
Speaker 8: used for a different purpose is like repurposed for a
Speaker 8: new thing. So it's like, you know, you've like finn
Speaker 8: becomes hand like that. I'm a lot of great biologists,
Speaker 8: but this is this kind of thing where like you
Speaker 8: have this situation where like, yeah, elements of like the
Speaker 8: old notion of what progress was of like the sort
Speaker 8: of centralized hierarchical complexes of religion are like excapated by
Speaker 8: the next thing that's going to happen, and that's taken
Speaker 8: by the next thing, which is taken by the next thing,
Speaker 8: and we still have our sort of like versions of
Speaker 8: it that have been taken through like countless numbers of
Speaker 8: world systems.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I definitely see that. Of course, there were
Speaker 9: differences and how they would have i think approached religion
Speaker 9: and thoughts of religion compared to how we do yep
Speaker 9: psychologically in a time like that that they didn't really
Speaker 9: have this more prominent psychocoulturally accepted secular line set that
Speaker 9: we have today, where religion it could even be seen
Speaker 9: as something separate from everything else. You know, for them,
Speaker 9: religion was whole reality, worked the seasons, the hardest illness,
Speaker 9: Victorian War. All of this was interpreted through a sacred lens.
Speaker 9: People knew what place they had in the cosmos, or
Speaker 9: at least thought about it in that lens, and they
Speaker 9: understood what role they had in the divine hierarchy. On
Speaker 9: a material basis, though, because I mean we do have
Speaker 9: to think materially and not solely ideologically, these societies engage
Speaker 9: in what McDonald called continuous and regional parasitism to extract
Speaker 9: resources like food, labor, and land. And the agents of
Speaker 9: this paris are city states, kingdoms, and empires. On the
Speaker 9: city state level, you had them dominating their immediate hinterlends,
Speaker 9: and on an empire level, their conquerringe neighbors, done for
Speaker 9: either integration and taxation or tribute or slavery. But due
Speaker 9: to the limits of the technology of the time, you know,
Speaker 9: they didn't have the instant communication and fast transportation that
Speaker 9: we do today, there were limits to how far an
Speaker 9: empire could spread. Even the largest empires had their limits
Speaker 9: and would often devolve power or fracture. Tensions would begin
Speaker 9: to build as growing empires struggled to uphold central authority.
Speaker 9: Belief systems came into conflict, and contact and intellectual traditions developed.
Speaker 9: Over time, governance would get more bureaucratic, religions would face
Speaker 9: reform due to challenges from within, and by the time
Speaker 9: that we approached the late medieval period around the thirteen
Speaker 9: hundreds and fourteen hundreds, at least from a europe focused
Speaker 9: account or Old World focused account, the world is indeed
Speaker 9: change it. Transition has begun from this heaven phase to
Speaker 9: the next phase in McDonald's framework, as in the nation
Speaker 9: phase from fourteen hundred to nineteen hundred, where we move
Speaker 9: away from a world of cosmic order to a world
Speaker 9: more distinctly human, a world of human order religion phasis,
Speaker 9: of course, but authority has begun to move from the
Speaker 9: heavens down to Earth, an earth that could be observed,
Speaker 9: could be measured, navigated and controlled by human beings. And
Speaker 9: so we see this in this time with the emergence
Speaker 9: of the sciences and the emergence of newly minted political
Speaker 9: theories and the idea of progress. In this time was
Speaker 9: redefined as expanding knowledge, increase in efficiency, mastering the environment,
Speaker 9: hence the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, advances and navigation and
Speaker 9: so on, and consequently parasitism as a process becomes more disposed.
Speaker 9: Extraction would stretch across continents and would be carried by
Speaker 9: maritime tree routes taken resources from different parts of the world,
Speaker 9: including sugar, cotton, spices, metal, and labor, all flowing through
Speaker 9: increasingly complex global systems and increasingly industrial supply chains. As
Speaker 9: wealth starts accumulating in certain regions thanks the extraction of others,
Speaker 9: you know, the rich is being built up in one
Speaker 9: place because of the poverty being developed in another place.
Speaker 9: As the agents of this time of the kingdoms and empires,
Speaker 9: but also newly minted corporate charters and nation states. And
Speaker 9: to be clear, I'm not trying to say that these
Speaker 9: are the sole agents history in any of these particular periods,
Speaker 9: which is that they were significant. I don't want to
Speaker 9: deny the role of you know, the politics from below
Speaker 9: the rabble, as Graba sometimes refers to them, would have
Speaker 9: also shaped the development of history.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think it's also worth noting too. And there's
Speaker 8: something you were talking about from the top. But as
Speaker 8: with all of these sort of like really really broad
Speaker 8: sweet books at history, this is capturing trends in a
Speaker 8: few places in the worlds as they moved. There are
Speaker 8: obviously many, many, many other things that are also coexisting
Speaker 8: with all of these systems at the same time. The
Speaker 8: entire world in like two thousand BC is not just
Speaker 8: like mirror images of like the Shang dynasty everywhere right Like,
Speaker 8: there's a whole plethora of different systems that are interacting
Speaker 8: with each other from I mean, I can't even there's
Speaker 8: just an unbelievable sort of diversity of like cultural forms,
Speaker 8: some of which are states, some of which are not.
Speaker 8: But yeah, when you're doing a macrohistory like this, you
Speaker 8: are looking at certain sets of thems and matching patterns
Speaker 8: with them. But that also is not We're also not
Speaker 8: saying here but that's literally everything that is happening on earth,
Speaker 8: because it's not. Yeah, but yeah, just just want to
Speaker 8: get that in for the people who are gonna get
Speaker 8: very mad about this, which you are aware of the
Speaker 8: presence of other narratives. We have we have we have
Speaker 8: we have done our postmodernism training, we have done our
Speaker 8: historical archaeological stuff. I just.
Speaker 9: Of course, of course, and like I was saying, they
Speaker 9: had these other agents, but for this particular narrative of
Speaker 9: focusing on the kingdoms, the empires, the corporate charters, and
Speaker 9: the nation states. And in the nation states, we take
Speaker 9: them for granted now, but they really were not always
Speaker 9: a thing. You know, the idea of a group of
Speaker 9: people with a shared identity, language, culture, and history being
Speaker 9: artificially i would say, unified under a state. It has
Speaker 9: to be constructed and enforced through violence and assimilation. You know,
Speaker 9: you didn't have this concept of France until France was built,
Speaker 9: and the whole world has suffered as a result. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 9: we didn't have this concept of Italy. You didn't have
Speaker 9: this concept of of of Nigeria, you didn't have this concept.
Speaker 9: These nation states had to be constructed.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Even China, which is seen as like the sort of
Speaker 8: archetypical example of this, Like we have a bunch of
Speaker 8: records of people in the fifteen hundreds, and I think
Speaker 8: even through the sixteen hundreds, like going and talking to
Speaker 8: people in China and being like, yeah, you're in China
Speaker 8: and the people are talking to are like, what the
Speaker 8: fuck is China. What are you talking about? Like, we're
Speaker 8: like under this ruler, who's under this ruler, who's under
Speaker 8: this ruler? Who's like yeah, exactly, you know. So yeah,
Speaker 8: these things have to be constructed, and they were constructed
Speaker 8: a lot more recently than people.
Speaker 9: Think, and then to actually get people to identify with
Speaker 9: them also has to be constructed over generations in some cases.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and usually by you know, a process in which
Speaker 8: I mean the only way to cause people to have
Speaker 8: a positive identification with like a specific new bounded national
Speaker 8: territorial identity is to have it be posed against an other.
Speaker 8: So yeah, what of these? What of these? Also, like
Speaker 8: the question of the national like the twentieth century national
Speaker 8: liberation movements, this when you get like, for example, like
Speaker 8: pan Arabism, it's like, okay, like whose national liberation is this?
Speaker 8: Because sure as fuck is not like the Kurds or Yazidis.
Speaker 8: It's you know, yeah. This is all of which is
Speaker 8: to say what you were saying, which is this is
Speaker 8: a violent and bloody process that is a lot more
Speaker 8: recent that people understand.
Speaker 9: Absolutely, this time also saw a lot of revolutions bloody indeed,
Speaker 9: you know, the rise and fall of old powers and
Speaker 9: new powers. And this is also a phase. I think
Speaker 9: they could be marked by its contradictions. You know, you
Speaker 9: had this rise in side of ideas like liberty and rights,
Speaker 9: and you know, liberalism was developed in this period, as
Speaker 9: was socialism. But you also had obviously this vast industrial
Speaker 9: exploitation of people's and ecologies. We saw the dire event
Speaker 9: of the sciences and scientific classifications, but you also saw
Speaker 9: how that gave way to pseudo scientific justifications for inequality.
Speaker 9: You know, the create chain of being, the idea of
Speaker 9: the whit's being on top of everyone else. Yeah, you
Speaker 9: saw a self determination for some and self determination not
Speaker 9: so much for others. As by the time we reached
Speaker 9: the eighteen hundreds, the piece of change was exceedingly traumatic
Speaker 9: and volatile. Industrialization, urbanization, communication and transportation converged to compress
Speaker 9: time and space. We see the booth of new ideas
Speaker 9: and reformed relations, and by the time we reached the
Speaker 9: early twentieth century a new phase is taken shape. We
Speaker 9: are now in what McDonald's calls the system phase, spanning
Speaker 9: from nineteen hundred to the present day. The system, the machine,
Speaker 9: whatever you want to call it, is this fast, interconnected
Speaker 9: set of systems that organize we live, produce, consume, and
Speaker 9: even think. The system does not have you know, a
Speaker 9: single king or figurehead that you can point to as
Speaker 9: the big bad, despite I think people's efforts to try
Speaker 9: and find a big bad. It's really a web of
Speaker 9: processes and incentives and networks and complex bureaucracies and global
Speaker 9: markets and industrial and post industrial economies and mass communication
Speaker 9: and the underground economy and all these different things chugging
Speaker 9: along almost like it's beastly bloodthirst is something benign. Forgive
Speaker 9: the alliteration and like to throw in out of poetry
Speaker 9: every once in a while. So the idea of progress
Speaker 9: becomes very economistic in this period. It's focused on growth, output, productivity, efficiency.
Speaker 9: Our entire economy is basically organized around these metrics. That's
Speaker 9: the thing that people are worrying about when they're on
Speaker 9: Fox Business or whatever, the Financial Times, whatever spaces of
Speaker 9: dialogue about the economy. The focus is not on actually
Speaker 9: all of people's needs being met. It's what's what's growth?
Speaker 9: Looking like this quarta? How efficient how we exploit in
Speaker 9: the planet.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm still going to be haunted forever by that.
Speaker 8: The clip on CNBC that we played in the ED
Speaker 8: a few weeks ago whenever this is coming out, where
Speaker 8: the CNBC anchor goes, Trump has threatened to wipe out
Speaker 8: a civilization. What does this mean for investors?
Speaker 9: Yeah, I saw that. I saw that.
Speaker 8: That's horrifying, haunting, haunting shit.
Speaker 9: The way that our economy has been built around these
Speaker 9: metrics is truly horrifying. And you also see the idea
Speaker 9: of progress in this time tends toward the economistic, you know,
Speaker 9: the inevitability of globalization, the ideological victory of capitalism, and
Speaker 9: so on, and pastism in this system phase is as
Speaker 9: the name implies, systemic quote directly from the book, contiguous
Speaker 9: parstism had captured energy from additionous societies and native, wild
Speaker 9: and domestic species. This is the parstism of the first phase.
Speaker 9: Disparate parasitism, meanwhile, had captured energy from additionous societies, imperial subjects,
Speaker 9: and both exotic wild and intensively domesticated species abroad. And
Speaker 9: that's the second phase. And so the new form, networked
Speaker 9: parstism captured energy from all of these as well, but
Speaker 9: with the addition of ancient species of plant to animal
Speaker 9: in the form of fossils, this enabled concrete energy capture
Speaker 9: through increase in electrification, and then the digitization and extraction
Speaker 9: and production and abstract energy capture from extremely large, dense
Speaker 9: populations of urban subjects. Though the foundations of this system
Speaker 9: were built in the nineteenth century, it was only the
Speaker 9: twentieth century that it came to dominate end quote. So
Speaker 9: this parst is is networked on another level. You know,
Speaker 9: it flows through global supply chains. It extracts fossil fuels,
Speaker 9: you know, cool oil, gas power, maintains the entire cont
Speaker 9: It maintains transportation, industry, agriculture, digital infrastructure, all of it.
Speaker 9: A whole world, as we've seen, has been built around
Speaker 9: these fossil fuels, and something as simple as blocking a
Speaker 9: pay smalls straight can have a dire impact on the
Speaker 9: entire world, much of which is yet to be felt.
Speaker 9: Even as the strait has now been reopened, it has
Speaker 9: not been reopened about to be seemingly. I mean, Israel
Speaker 9: did viod. This is fire though, right, so it probably
Speaker 9: will not be opened again.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean even before that it hadn't been reopened.
Speaker 8: I don't know. I have no idea when this episode
Speaker 8: is going to come out, So I am stating for
Speaker 8: the record.
Speaker 9: Here Yeah, it's very hard to.
Speaker 8: Can't have it's impossible. It's like not impossible. It's extremely
Speaker 8: difficult to figure out whether the strait is open on
Speaker 8: an hour two hour basis.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like that's fair.
Speaker 8: I don't know what the fuck it's gonna be, Like,
Speaker 8: I don't know, Like maybe so maybe someone will have
Speaker 8: like filled the straight in by the time this episode
Speaker 8: comes out, Like who knows. Sorry, I just I've been
Speaker 8: so straight pilled.
Speaker 9: That's a fair point. That's fair point. I guess the
Speaker 9: point I'm trying to make is even in any hypothetical
Speaker 9: scenario where this strait is fully open, you're still going
Speaker 9: to feel the impact of that brief period of closure.
Speaker 8: Yeah, for years.
Speaker 12: Yeah, this is dumb phased by the way.
Speaker 9: It's not just on the whole extraction of resources of
Speaker 9: land of Libor. You also notice that it extracts our
Speaker 9: attention as well, through the collection of data, through the
Speaker 9: increasingly efficient ways that it seeks to draw out eyeballs
Speaker 9: for the sake of advertising, for the sake of profit.
Speaker 9: And this unprecedented scale of extraction obviously cannot last. It's
Speaker 9: merely borrowing from the future and from million year old ecosystems.
Speaker 9: Eventually that debt is going to catch up on us.
Speaker 9: In fact that it already has begun to catch up
Speaker 9: on us. We're not in the when climate change happens
Speaker 9: in the future. It is happening right now, and the
Speaker 9: Nation States are carrying on business as usual and business
Speaker 9: is booming. The agents of this parasitic phase do not care.
Speaker 9: This period saw the rise of corporations, you know, these
Speaker 9: massive transnational entities, and what you'll notice about this period
Speaker 9: is that they are the agents of this time, even
Speaker 9: sometimes more than countries some of them, some of these
Speaker 9: corporations have more power than entire countries, and to the
Speaker 9: advantage of mass communication and coblization. We also saw ideological coalitions,
Speaker 9: which could be seen as another agent in this phase.
Speaker 9: You know that the government's institutions, media, tech giants, and
Speaker 9: movements that share a particular worldview and shape the narratives
Speaker 9: that determine what people be it workers, consumers, users, or
Speaker 9: citizens believe it's normal, necessary, and it never tell. As
Speaker 9: a person living in this time, it is very difficult
Speaker 9: to see it. You know, you get used to a
Speaker 9: certain system. It's you know, it's like water to fish.
Speaker 9: If you abstract and tangible like, what are you talking
Speaker 9: about this? There's nothing besides this can be the reaction
Speaker 9: you get sometimes, and it is not on anyone individual
Speaker 9: to understand the detailed machinations of the entire system, the
Speaker 9: biggest picture. Nobody I think sees all the machinations of
Speaker 9: the entire system. But nevertheless, the system sees you. You know,
Speaker 9: it sees you as part of its functioning. And to
Speaker 9: kind of bring it to a close, what I want
Speaker 9: people to take away from this is that you know
Speaker 9: you can be and you are an agent in history. Now,
Speaker 9: whether you are an agent of history that serves as
Speaker 9: a cog in the machine or you are an agent
Speaker 9: of history that serves as a wedge in the machine,
Speaker 9: that's really up to you. We're obviously facing down enormous wealth,
Speaker 9: deep inequality, technological advancement, military might, environmental stray, and atomization.
Speaker 9: The twenty twenties have been a world bind of a
Speaker 9: decade already and it's not even over yet.
Speaker 8: Oh God, so fore worry. Yeah, this decade sucks.
Speaker 4: It really does.
Speaker 9: But the system is not unassailable. Yes it can and
Speaker 9: it does adapt to our eruptures, but it is a
Speaker 9: lot more fragile than it puts forward, you know, to
Speaker 9: borrow from I can't remember who said it, the concept
Speaker 9: of paper tiger. It comes from Chinese mythology, a Chinese
Speaker 9: military philosophy.
Speaker 8: Right, yeah, Like I know, Mao talks about it a lot.
Speaker 8: I don't actually know where it's from.
Speaker 9: But yeah, yeah, but I say that to say that
Speaker 9: it's a paper tiger, you know, a particularly study paper tiger,
Speaker 9: but a paper tiger nonetheless.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And never have the people who are attempting to
Speaker 8: write the paper tiger have like, never in the entire
Speaker 8: like history of modern capitalism has it been written by
Speaker 8: people who have less idea what the fuck they're doing. Nick,
Speaker 8: Never have people who understand the system so poorly been
Speaker 8: in charge of it, and they are, you know, they
Speaker 8: are already kind of tearing it apart because they don't
Speaker 8: understand it at all.
Speaker 9: Yeah. I think one of the one of these signs
Speaker 9: of that was just the idea that you can kneecap
Speaker 9: your country's soft power mechanisms entirely and bully every other
Speaker 9: country in the world and expect nothing bad to happen.
Speaker 9: I mean, honestly, the US has not faced the consequences
Speaker 9: that it should for the things that it has done
Speaker 9: in this year alone, that's alone in a decade of history.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: But I mean when you saw the deconstruction of us AID, right,
Speaker 9: which was one of the US's primary mechanisms of having
Speaker 9: swaying other countries, building up goodwill in other countries, and
Speaker 9: also you know, intervening in the into the domestic politics
Speaker 9: of other countries, to break that down like a bull
Speaker 9: in a China shop, when that was really like one
Speaker 9: of the main pillars that was keeping your whole liberal
Speaker 9: world order float. It really, I think as an indication
Speaker 9: of the incompetence with even mes Yeah.
Speaker 8: And then even on top of that, I think think
Speaker 8: even on an even larger scale, Right, the entire premise
Speaker 8: for I mean, like the entire premise of the packs Americana, Right,
Speaker 8: the entire premise of the post Wold War two American
Speaker 8: order was that the US Navy would keep the world's
Speaker 8: oceans open for supply chains. Yeah, that was the whole thing,
Speaker 8: and it worked exactly as long as the US never
Speaker 8: actually had to fight a war over like the sea
Speaker 8: lanes that it couldn't militarily control. And then we fought
Speaker 8: the one war which would prove that we cannot in
Speaker 8: fact secure the sea lanes. Global capital. Ipacal transformations are
Speaker 8: happening in like the very structure of global capital because
Speaker 8: these people think that like the idea of not using
Speaker 8: your military power and then reaping the reaping the world
Speaker 8: spanning like trillion trillion dollar rewards of this, like they
Speaker 8: thought that shit was like girl, shit, Yeah.
Speaker 9: I mean the whole the whole point of what I've
Speaker 9: been thinking. Part of the point of investing in all
Speaker 9: of this military might is so that you don't have
Speaker 9: to use it. Yeah, it's just just try and scale
Speaker 9: people into just bowing down the station your troops outside
Speaker 9: the territory, and you're like, yeah, are you gonna really try.
Speaker 4: And challenge us?
Speaker 9: Yeah, And then you went and stomped all over with somebody,
Speaker 9: and obvious they had to stand up and defend themselves.
Speaker 9: And now everybody is seeing what it is, you know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and it's a situation too where like yeah, like
Speaker 8: Iran has always technically had the military power to like
Speaker 8: control the strader of Moos, but they never did because
Speaker 8: the consequence of that would be the US bombing their cities.
Speaker 8: So the only way you could possibly lose control of
Speaker 8: the straight of from moos is if you bombed the
Speaker 8: cities first, So all you had to do was not
Speaker 8: do that and it would be fine.
Speaker 9: Yeah. But I mean the little girls in the school
Speaker 9: were Hamasna, so oh god, yeah, it's just just a tragedy.
Speaker 8: God, it's really hideous. They've decided to repeatedly shoot themselves
Speaker 8: in the balls because they just like wanted to go
Speaker 8: kill a bunch of brown kids. You know, this is
Speaker 8: an unfathomable horror. And also they so clearly have no
Speaker 8: idea what the fuck they're doing that it makes a
Speaker 8: lot of things possible.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep. So the question is, you
Speaker 9: know what comes next. We're seeing, like, as you said,
Speaker 9: epocal transformations just in this year alone. This phase will
Speaker 9: be incurrently as defined by McDonald. It's not going to
Speaker 9: last forever, you know, Unlike previous phases. However, this phase
Speaker 9: has been imposed truly globally. There's no longer a hint
Speaker 9: land that one can escape too. Yeah, and so what
Speaker 9: comes next can be fragmentation, it can be some kind
Speaker 9: of evolution or calcification, or it can be a social revolution.
Speaker 9: And the more ones and the cogs and wedges in
Speaker 9: this moment to actively decide in that. But I think
Speaker 9: we can do without this parasitism. As MacDonald knowes, there
Speaker 9: are other ways of relating with each other and with nature.
Speaker 9: He borrows from the ecological language of commends, salistic and
Speaker 9: mutualistic relationships. In mutualistic relationships, organisms benefit each other. For example,
Speaker 9: we provide hives and protection, while bees pollic crops and
Speaker 9: produce honey. And commends salistic relationships, one organism captures energy
Speaker 9: from another while doing neither harm nor good to the other.
Speaker 9: There's lots of animals and plants who make their home
Speaker 9: among trees while neither harmon nor help in the tree itself,
Speaker 9: although some of them do end up helping the tree
Speaker 9: in more indirect ways. But finally, in parasitic relationships, which
Speaker 9: is the kind that has proved disastrous for our world,
Speaker 9: one organism that be in us has captured the energy
Speaker 9: of another, or of multiple others to those others detriment
Speaker 9: our system has put us in the position of essentially
Speaker 9: be in mosquitoes on planet Is, and not in the
Speaker 9: role that mosquitoes play in the overall health of the ecosystem,
Speaker 9: but literally sucking more blood than the system consistin, and
Speaker 9: so we have to shake things up, we have to
Speaker 9: imbolden I think new forms of relations and what those
Speaker 9: relations look like after you as usual, All power to
Speaker 9: all the people, peace.
Speaker 8: Welcome to it could happen here a podcast where the
Speaker 8: thin veneer of democracy that has hitherto veiled the settler
Speaker 8: colony of the United States in the mask of humanity
Speaker 8: is being increasingly ripped away, leaving behind. I think calling
Speaker 8: it a new gym crow is that title has already
Speaker 8: been used for something else. But it's a return overtly
Speaker 8: to some of the worst discrimination of the Jim Crow era.
Speaker 8: So I'm your host, Mio Wong. Let's talk about what
Speaker 8: is actually at issue here, and that is a recent
Speaker 8: Supreme Court ruling called Louisiana v. Kalay. On a sort
Speaker 8: of micro level, this is about the question of can
Speaker 8: Louisiana just eliminate the two majority black districts that it
Speaker 8: had in its congressional map in twenty twenty four. Getting
Speaker 8: to this map in the first place was a subject
Speaker 8: of really intense civil rights litigation to get to the
Speaker 8: point where there were two majority black districts in twenty
Speaker 8: twenty four. On a macro level. What is that stake
Speaker 8: here is canny state create an electoral map where they
Speaker 8: spread all of the black voters across different districts in
Speaker 8: order to make them a minority in every district, thus
Speaker 8: making it impossible for black voters select the candidate if
Speaker 8: they're choosing. Until now, the answer was no, because this
Speaker 8: is specifically what the Voting Rights Act was passed to stop.
Speaker 8: Like this, specifically like this, this is one of the
Speaker 8: very specific things. I cannot emphasize this enough, this specific thing,
Speaker 8: which is spread out the black vote across a whole
Speaker 8: bunch of districts where everyone else is white, so that
Speaker 8: black people cannot choose who they want to elect. This
Speaker 8: is like one of the specific things it was designed
Speaker 8: to stop. Again, up until now, you have not been
Speaker 8: allowed to do this, and this has led to the
Speaker 8: creation of what are called minority majority districts. This is
Speaker 8: a long and complicated history that frankly could be its own.
Speaker 8: It probably is like multiple people's doctoral dissertations. The short,
Speaker 8: short version of what a minority majority district is is
Speaker 8: it's a district where the majority of voters are from
Speaker 8: a minority group, thus allowing people from a minority group
Speaker 8: to select a candidate of their choosing. There are a
Speaker 8: lot of these districts in the South, specifically to prevent
Speaker 8: Republican politicians from making it impossible for black voters to
Speaker 8: elect anyone they chose. And fundamentally, what's at stake here, right,
Speaker 8: is the constitutional right to elect a candidates of your
Speaker 8: choosing if you are part of a minority group.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 8: This is why all of this stuff was passed in
Speaker 8: the first place, because under what we call Jim Crow,
Speaker 8: it was extremely easy for a white majority to simply
Speaker 8: effectively deny the rights of black people. And this is
Speaker 8: other non white people too, but like this is primarily
Speaker 8: black people. It was it was very, very easy to
Speaker 8: simply deny them from ever getting to elect anyone by
Speaker 8: just drawing maps where a candidate they would vote for
Speaker 8: can never be elected. This is one of the basis
Speaker 8: of Jim Crow over discrimination. The Supreme Court has decided no, actually,
Speaker 8: what they decided is that if the Republican party that
Speaker 8: controls the legislature draws a map that does the thing
Speaker 8: we've been talking about, where they spread out all of
Speaker 8: the specifically the black vote into a bunch of districts
Speaker 8: so that black people can't elect a representative. In order
Speaker 8: to challenge this as violation of your voting rights, you
Speaker 8: have to prove definitively prove that the intent was racism
Speaker 8: and not literally anything else. So, for example, and this
Speaker 8: is the thing that's really at issue here, right, you
Speaker 8: have to prove that they specifically wanted to do this
Speaker 8: out of racism and not just because they want to
Speaker 8: elect Republicans by gerrymandering it partisan lee, which is amazingly
Speaker 8: a thing that's legal to do in the United States
Speaker 8: for reasons that are incredibly baffling. And also you have
Speaker 8: to be able to prove that they created this map
Speaker 8: specifically out of the intention to disenfranchise a minority group.
Speaker 8: And also you have to create a app that would
Speaker 8: allow them to achieve whatever other goals they supposedly want, like,
Speaker 8: for example, again making sure that Republicans have all the
Speaker 8: seats in a state, but also would not be racist.
Speaker 8: So you have to create a map for them that
Speaker 8: would allow them to do this in order to prove
Speaker 8: that there could be another map that achieves their goals
Speaker 8: of like partisan jerrymandering, that isn't also racist. It's completely
Speaker 8: unhinged legally. This is this is a shambles. We have
Speaker 8: covered some downright like hideous nonsense on this show in
Speaker 8: terms of Supreme Court decisions, right like that. This Supreme
Speaker 8: Court has just the lowest level of legal literacy in
Speaker 8: like living memory of any Supreme Court. It is astounding
Speaker 8: the kinds of just absolute horseshit they are popping out
Speaker 8: with this. This is maybe their worst ruling, which is
Speaker 8: difficult to prove because there have been so many abhorrent ones.
Speaker 8: Even just just from a pure legal perspective, this one
Speaker 8: is so bad it defies belief. So, okay, One of
Speaker 8: the main issues here is Section two of the Voting
Speaker 8: Rights Act. I'm just going to read what it says, quote,
Speaker 8: No voting qualifications or prerequisite to voting, or standard practice
Speaker 8: or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state
Speaker 8: or political subdivision in a manner which results keep that
Speaker 8: in mind later, which results in a denial or abridgment
Speaker 8: of the right of any citizen of the United States
Speaker 8: to vote on account of race or color, or in
Speaker 8: contravention of the guarantees set forth in section nineteen seventy
Speaker 8: three B. So again I kind of emphasize this enough.
Speaker 8: Right the way this is written is that it says
Speaker 8: that you can't apply qualification or prerequisite to voting, or
Speaker 8: have any standard or practice or procedure cannot be imposed
Speaker 8: by the state or any other politicals of that results
Speaker 8: in the denial or abridgment of the rights of citizens
Speaker 8: vote and account of race.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 8: It specifically says results. It does not say intent. Now
Speaker 8: this is incredibly important because Alito is like, no, fuck that,
Speaker 8: Actually you have to prove intent. I'm going to quote
Speaker 8: from a piece of Scotis blog by Edward Foley, who
Speaker 8: has an extremely long title of the Charles b Ever
Speaker 8: Sold in Florence Whitcomb Ever Sold share and constitutional law.
Speaker 8: As the director of Election at Law at Ohio State University,
Speaker 8: They're written a book on electoral law. He is a
Speaker 8: constitutional law professor who specifically does election law. He is like,
Speaker 8: by no means a leftist. He's coming into the right
Speaker 8: of like Justice Jackson in her dissent in this case. Right,
Speaker 8: but even he I'm going to quote what he writes
Speaker 8: about this. He calls this ruling an abomination, which is
Speaker 8: like a thing that you don't really get from like
Speaker 8: legal people. They don't say shit like that. I'm going
Speaker 8: to quote what he says about this quote. The ruling
Speaker 8: purports to interpret the Voting Rights Act Section two, but
Speaker 8: it destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it
Speaker 8: into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it
Speaker 8: to do. The one thing that is unambiguous about Section
Speaker 8: two is that the nineteen eighty two amendment to the
Speaker 8: section's test creates a quote results test for determining whether
Speaker 8: there is liability under the section, replacing the intent test
Speaker 8: that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section two claims.
Speaker 8: As the text states, quote, no standard practice or procedure
Speaker 8: shall be imposed which results in a denial or abridgment
Speaker 8: of the right of any citizen to vote on account
Speaker 8: of race. Yet the case defiantly converts Section two back
Speaker 8: to an intention inquiry rather than a results analysis. So
Speaker 8: what happened here, right, To make this extremely clear, is
Speaker 8: that Congress in nineteen eighty two had amended this. They
Speaker 8: amended what this thing said, right, because Supreme Court had
Speaker 8: been adopting a standard of intent, right, which means that
Speaker 8: you have to prove that like these people were like
Speaker 8: mustache whirling saying the N word in fucking clan robes,
Speaker 8: doing Nazi salutes. You have to like prove that they
Speaker 8: intentionally did this for racist reasons and not any other reason.
Speaker 8: And Congress went back and went, no, fuck that. If
Speaker 8: the result of it is racist, then you can't do it,
Speaker 8: even if, like nominally what you're saying out loud is
Speaker 8: that you're doing this for non racist reasons. If the
Speaker 8: result is racism, then you have to not do it.
Speaker 8: And Alito goes, yeah, no, fuck that, we're just like
Speaker 8: flipping it back to an intent standard for no reason
Speaker 8: other than I want to be able to do racism
Speaker 8: and help the Republican Party win seats. The other thing
Speaker 8: that fully talks about is the court is arguing that, like,
Speaker 8: Congress can't draw from the fifteenth Amendment in order in
Speaker 8: order to like have the Voting Brice Act work. In
Speaker 8: the first place, I'm going to quote again, Yeah, the
Speaker 8: Court in this decision did not need to consider the
Speaker 8: question of congressional power to enforce the fifteenth Amendment. That is,
Speaker 8: because the power of Congress to enact Section two with
Speaker 8: the Voting Rights Amendment for the purposes of the case
Speaker 8: could have been sustained not under the Fifteenth Amendment, but
Speaker 8: under Article one, Section four of the Constitution. Congress has
Speaker 8: full power under Article one, section four to enact laws
Speaker 8: governing the quote, time, place, and manner of congressional elections. Thus,
Speaker 8: Congress can enact a prohibition against minority vote dilution for
Speaker 8: congressional districts under a disparate impact theory without any consideration
Speaker 8: of discriminatory attent, and not rely on the Fifteenth Amendment
Speaker 8: at all. So, okay, what does this mean? Right? What
Speaker 8: Alito is saying is that, like, oh well, actually, Congress
Speaker 8: doesn't have the authority to like write the secution of
Speaker 8: the Voting Rights Amendment. They don't have the authority to
Speaker 8: do it under the fifteenth Amendment because it like oversteps
Speaker 8: the rights of states to you know, run their own elections. Right,
Speaker 8: So I'm gonna do a thing I did last time
Speaker 8: with Fully's thing and just read the full Article one,
Speaker 8: section four of the Constitution. By the way, when something
Speaker 8: says like Article one, section four, you have to remember
Speaker 8: that all of the amendments, right, the amendment that got
Speaker 8: rid of slavery, even like the first Amendment, right, the
Speaker 8: freedom of speech, that's an amendment that's not in the
Speaker 8: original text that had to be added onto it. And obviously,
Speaker 8: we have something called the Bill of Rights that, like
Speaker 8: you know, was like the first ten amendments that was
Speaker 8: passed with the Constitution. But that's not stuff that was
Speaker 8: like put like a freedom of speech, freedom of assembly,
Speaker 8: freedom of worship that was not in the original text
Speaker 8: of the Constitution. That was the amendments put on. This
Speaker 8: is something that the people who wrote the Constitution were like,
Speaker 8: fuck if this is going to be in the original thing, right,
Speaker 8: So Article one, Section four, this is from like the
Speaker 8: original fucking body of text of the Constitution says, quote,
Speaker 8: the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators
Speaker 8: and Representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the
Speaker 8: legislature thereof. But the Congress may at any time, by law,
Speaker 8: make or alter such regulations, except as to the places
Speaker 8: of choosing senators. So yes, obviously they can fucking do
Speaker 8: the Voting Rights Amendment. They literally have the ability. Like
Speaker 8: it says in section one, Congress may at any time,
Speaker 8: by law make or alter such regulations. By such regulations
Speaker 8: they mean the times, places and manner of holding elections.
Speaker 8: They could just do this, right, So obviously they can
Speaker 8: fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment. It's just it's literally
Speaker 8: just there in the custumation. It just says that it's
Speaker 8: all like this, it's gibberish. It's like, oh my god,
Speaker 8: you can just read the text of the Constitution and
Speaker 8: it says you can do this. It's god, holy shit.
Speaker 8: Even from the perspective of like if you treat the
Speaker 8: law as real, this is just pure Calvin Ball shit,
Speaker 8: Like I mean, it's just Jesus Christ. Okay, you know
Speaker 8: what's real and not Calvin Ball. It's it's these products
Speaker 8: and services. We are back. So okay, what has the
Speaker 8: result of this been. It's been about two weeks since
Speaker 8: the Court did this decision. The Court immediately followed this
Speaker 8: up by allowing Alabama to jerrymander the shit out of
Speaker 8: their upcoming election. They're doing this via again, the shadow docket,
Speaker 8: which is their ability to just be like, no, fuck you,
Speaker 8: we're not ruling on this case without actually issuing a decision.
Speaker 8: An unsigned, one paragraph thing from the court can just
Speaker 8: dictate what the law is. It's great, it's amazing, and
Speaker 8: by amazing, I mean Jesus fucking Christ. This happens about
Speaker 8: a week after the original Screme Court decision. This shadow
Speaker 8: dockett allows Alabama to put in place a map that
Speaker 8: was already found to be explicitly racially motivated. Thing Alito
Speaker 8: said in a decision that he wouldn't do right. Alito
Speaker 8: says in a decision that he won't overturn a cases
Speaker 8: that are like avert discrimination and b that he wouldn't
Speaker 8: overturn this exact case. And then they did it.
Speaker 2: Anyways, It's like Jesus Christ'.
Speaker 8: Just like, oh my god. So the short version of
Speaker 8: the Alabama conflict I'm drawing here from Slat's story on
Speaker 8: this thing is that Alabama tried to do a map
Speaker 8: that would let them get rid of like both of
Speaker 8: the congressional black congressional candidates in the states by jerrymandering
Speaker 8: the black vote. There's a whole bunch of court cases
Speaker 8: about this. In twenty twenty three, the Supreme Court said
Speaker 8: that they couldn't do this and they had to make
Speaker 8: fairer districts that didn't like violate the Voting Rights Act.
Speaker 8: So this was three years ago. This, like the Supreme
Speaker 8: Court said they had to do this. Here's some Slate quote. Alabama, however,
Speaker 8: refused to comply with that order to get like they
Speaker 8: got an order from the Supreme Court and refused to
Speaker 8: do it. Quote, so the lower court imposed its own map,
Speaker 8: featuring two districts where black voters had a real shot
Speaker 8: at choosing their representative. The court also found that in
Speaker 8: defying its previous mandate, the Alabama legislature had engaged in
Speaker 8: intentional racial discrimination, violating the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection Clause
Speaker 8: in addition to the Voting Rights Act. Up until Monday,
Speaker 8: this decision had prevented the legislature from joining the former
Speaker 8: Confederate states now racing to eliminate black representatives from their
Speaker 8: congressional delegations. Alabama Republicans pressed the district court to lift
Speaker 8: its bar, but it refused, so they filed an emergency
Speaker 8: request at the Supreme Court asking permission to re jerrymander
Speaker 8: black communities in light of this decision. Now, I cantdatmaicize enough.
Speaker 8: This vote from when they were granted this position. This
Speaker 8: vote is in like eight days, right, people had already
Speaker 8: started voting for candidates and primaries, right, And Supreme Court
Speaker 8: was like, yeah, sure, yeah, you can. You can fucking
Speaker 8: rejerry mander this thing eight days before the election. That's
Speaker 8: absolutely fine. Even though again I can'da emphasize this enough
Speaker 8: in the ruling, Alito specifically said in the majority opinion
Speaker 8: that they wouldn't overturn this exact case, and then they
Speaker 8: did it. It's mind boggling. It used to be, like
Speaker 8: it really truly did. Used to be that if you
Speaker 8: were going to do shit like this, you had to
Speaker 8: like sort of like pretend that you were following some
Speaker 8: kind of legal order. And now you just don't. You
Speaker 8: can just fucking do Calvin bullshit. You can just literally
Speaker 8: lie about what you're doing in your decisions and then
Speaker 8: just fucking do whatever you want about it. And obviously,
Speaker 8: you know, as slave points on. This has been pointed
Speaker 8: out by a whole bunch of different outlets. The Supreme
Speaker 8: Court also had used another legal principle to prevent states
Speaker 8: that would have were trying to like make more democratic maps,
Speaker 8: both in the sense of like not being racist and
Speaker 8: also that would elect more democratic politicians. And even though
Speaker 8: it was three months before the election, the court was like, wow,
Speaker 8: it's actually too soon, like it's too close the election
Speaker 8: for you to be changing this stuff. But then also
Speaker 8: now they're just letting Alabama do one of these like
Speaker 8: eight days before an election. So it's so incredibly clear
Speaker 8: about what's happening here is that the Court is trying
Speaker 8: to allow Republican politicians to just straight up rig elections
Speaker 8: for them by doing gerrymandered districts in a way that
Speaker 8: lets them eliminate the ability of non white people to vote.
Speaker 8: And this is a huge fucking deal. Getting the nineteen
Speaker 8: sixty five Voting Rights Act was one of the major
Speaker 8: achievements of the civil rights movement, right, It's like, one
Speaker 8: of the biggest goals of the moderate wing of the
Speaker 8: movement was to have elections in which black people got
Speaker 8: to actually fucking vote and not have their vote intentionally
Speaker 8: diluted so they could never actually elect a candidate. And
Speaker 8: that's what's being done here, right, And this has been
Speaker 8: pointed out. It's like anyone who's read any kind of
Speaker 8: analysis of racial politics in the US. One of the
Speaker 8: consistent themes of the sort of you know what you
Speaker 8: would call, I guess like the era of black uprising, right,
Speaker 8: the sort of modern era stretching from roughly Ferguson. I thought,
Speaker 8: I guess you could talk about the stuff in the
Speaker 8: Bay before that, or roughly from Ferguson through twenty twenty
Speaker 8: was that the US was not a democracy before the
Speaker 8: nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act because the principle of
Speaker 8: one person, one vote was not real because you could
Speaker 8: simply disenfranchise anyone from a minority group, and that was
Speaker 8: the status quo of the South, and also like a
Speaker 8: lot of other parts of the country too, was this
Speaker 8: very overtibility of these people to you know, not only
Speaker 8: just like this, this is one of the components of segregation. Right,
Speaker 8: It's not just like imposing segregation legally in public spaces, right,
Speaker 8: it's also you know, like it's preventing black people from voting.
Speaker 8: And this is the thing that the Supreme Court ruling
Speaker 8: has just effectively destroyed.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 8: It's the thing that made it possible to even sort of,
Speaker 8: like in the loosest sense possible, called this country a democracy.
Speaker 8: And it's gone. It's just gone. And now you know,
Speaker 8: it's like, okay, like what fucking is this now? And
Speaker 8: you know, I don't know, it's like it's it's an
Speaker 8: even more just extremely overt Jim Crow state, this is
Speaker 8: what the goal of the Republican Party has always been,
Speaker 8: Like they want resegregation. It's been the basis of modern
Speaker 8: Republican politics forever. Right, it's you know, dating back to
Speaker 8: you if you want to look at like what Trump
Speaker 8: is and descendsful. We've talked about this at length on
Speaker 8: the show. The thing that became the sort of religious
Speaker 8: right was originally born out of like the school choice movement.
Speaker 8: And the thing about the school choice movement was that
Speaker 8: it was an anti integration thing. After losing their fight
Speaker 8: to be able to have whites on these schools, a
Speaker 8: bunch of these sort of right wingers were like, Okay, well,
Speaker 8: we'll just do private schools where we can do that.
Speaker 8: And that's the basis of modern Republican politics, right, you know,
Speaker 8: sort of both evangelicalism and sort of Bush administration and
Speaker 8: trump Ism and Reagan too. Is this shit and this
Speaker 8: has been what the Republicans have done when they've been
Speaker 8: in power. Right, this is a lot a lot of
Speaker 8: the Trump administration, like what they're doing, Like all of
Speaker 8: the stuff about DEI, all this stuff about wokeness like
Speaker 8: this is also a lot of what Dog is doing.
Speaker 8: Was trying to make it so that black people like
Speaker 8: couldn't work for the US government.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: It was a huge purge of black women from the
Speaker 8: US government and you know, now we're seeing this on
Speaker 8: the level of elections and on this level, what Republicans
Speaker 8: are trying to do with these jerrymandered maps is remove
Speaker 8: non white people and especially black people from Congress so
Speaker 8: they can just have untrammeled white supremacist rule. And they're
Speaker 8: doing it by claiming both that it's actually partisan. It's
Speaker 8: just partisan jerrymandering, which is legal to disenfranchised black vetters
Speaker 8: because black vetters won't openly vote for the party of
Speaker 8: white supremacy. And they're also claiming that like, not doing
Speaker 8: this is like infringing on the civil rights of white people,
Speaker 8: a thing that like is completely you know, just gibberish
Speaker 8: world turned upside down nonsense. But if they can just
Speaker 8: do that now because they're in power, because the court
Speaker 8: will just let them do this shit. And so I
Speaker 8: think in a way that really has not been conveyed
Speaker 8: in the media in the discourse, like this is one
Speaker 8: of the bleakest moments of this administration, right, you know,
Speaker 8: on top of just the multiple genocides they're committing, right
Speaker 8: on top of you know, just like the ethnic cleansing
Speaker 8: of non white people from the US that ICE is doing,
Speaker 8: They're what they're doing right now is attempting to end
Speaker 8: multiracial democracy in the US. And obviously, politically, I have
Speaker 8: my critiques of like electoral democracy as a concept, but
Speaker 8: having it just revert back to only white people get
Speaker 8: to decide who politicians are is something even worse than
Speaker 8: what we've had so far. You know, it's a seismic
Speaker 8: shift in just literally what this country is towards something
Speaker 8: that unbelievably an unfathomably weak state of pure white rule.
Speaker 8: And the people who are talking about this think that
Speaker 8: it can be reversed just by voting more, but no,
Speaker 8: it can't. The whole point of this right is to
Speaker 8: make sure that elections and you know, whatever the will
Speaker 8: of the people is is incapable of actually affecting the
Speaker 8: white supremacist state because not white people just don't get votes.
Speaker 8: You can't just vote harder your way through all of
Speaker 8: this shit. You have to actually do things. And you know,
Speaker 8: if we don't want to live in a white supremacist society,
Speaker 8: we're going to have to actually take action to combat
Speaker 8: and actually resist the fact that this is like this
Speaker 8: is just a pure white supremacist Jim Crow state. Now, yeah,
Speaker 8: so this has been, it could happen here. I don't
Speaker 8: have a non bleaque way to end this, but the
Speaker 8: common refrain is, if you've ever asked yourself what you
Speaker 8: would be doing in Nazi Germany, it's right now. And
Speaker 8: I think you can also add to that right if
Speaker 8: you've ever asked yourself what would you be doing during
Speaker 8: Jim Crow, The answer is whatever the fuck you're doing now,
Speaker 8: And if you're not happy with that answer, then it's
Speaker 8: time to move.
Speaker 2: Speaking of things that are on fire America, all right,
Speaker 2: I did my job, Garrison. What are we doing? Are we?
Speaker 10: This is? It could happen here? Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 10: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, their crumbling world,
Speaker 10: and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today,
Speaker 10: joined by James Stout and Robert Evans YEP. This episode
Speaker 10: recovering the week of May sixth through May thirteenth. YEP, James,
Speaker 10: some small news items to open us up.
Speaker 3: My little grab bag of news stories. Yeah, the United
Speaker 3: Kingdom parachute drop supplies and medical personnel into Tristan d'acuna
Speaker 3: last weekend to respond to the hunt of virus outbreak.
Speaker 3: A man had got off the cruise ship where the
Speaker 3: outbreak began in April and returned to Tristan Ta Cuna,
Speaker 3: where he resides. I think the cruise ship stopped Tristan
Speaker 3: da Cuna this weekend. British paratroopers from the Pathfind a
Speaker 3: platoon tandem jumped a doctor and a nurse onto the island,
Speaker 3: along with supplies, including oxygen, which was critically low on
Speaker 3: the island. The patient had reported symptoms two weeks after
Speaker 3: disembarking the cruise ship, and they'd spent that time on
Speaker 3: the island, and therefore there's a fairly high chance that
Speaker 3: that they've interacted with other people. Right, the island has
Speaker 3: no air strip. They was such a low supply of
Speaker 3: oxygen that there obviously wasn't time for a boat to
Speaker 3: get to Tristan Pakuna. So the UK conducted this fairly,
Speaker 3: I mean extremely You sure this is the first time
Speaker 3: the UK has ever done it. The island has a
Speaker 3: populace around two hundred and twenty people and only two
Speaker 3: medical professionals who are obviously exhausted after delivering care to
Speaker 3: this person who's on oxygen for several weeks. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: they jumped a couple more in there, fairly audacious response
Speaker 3: to the hunt virus. Secondly, and I think we can
Speaker 3: also agree of equal importance, Japanese snack food giant Cowbi
Speaker 3: is switching to black and white packaging.
Speaker 2: For its ooh no, Garrison is loading a gun right now.
Speaker 10: This is a significant portion of my daily diet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Garrison won't be able to make it through this.
Speaker 3: One is going on hunger strike.
Speaker 2: They are wiring a crew detonator together. It looks like.
Speaker 10: I'm going to join orant an enter to this madness.
Speaker 4: That is.
Speaker 3: This is because ingredients used for the ink on its
Speaker 3: normal colorful packages are hard to come by thanks to
Speaker 3: the war with a run and thanks. Yeah. So if
Speaker 3: you want, if you've got one of those little stickers
Speaker 3: that says I did that, and you've got a packet
Speaker 3: of black and white crisps, now you can combine the two.
Speaker 2: And your black and white layme ash ships.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The one thing that gave us joy is gone. The
Speaker 3: Nigerian military has once again carried out an air strike
Speaker 3: on a market, killing at least one hundred civilians. Going
Speaker 3: Damnasty International. The strike on the Tumfo market is the
Speaker 3: second in a month to hit a market. The Nigerian
Speaker 3: military claims the area was to hide out for bandits.
Speaker 3: It has yet to acknowledge the civilian death toll. Government
Speaker 3: in this area is more or less like only present
Speaker 3: through its ability to project force like this, and I've
Speaker 3: seen interviews as locals suggesting the town was under the
Speaker 3: control of non state groups previously. People remember, the Nigerian
Speaker 3: government has suggested that anyone doing business with the people
Speaker 3: at targeting is also a legitimate target, which is how
Speaker 3: it has justified dropping bombs on crowded markets like this.
Speaker 3: CNN is claiming that the CIA facilitated a car bomb
Speaker 3: in Sinaloa. The article seems to have sources in or
Speaker 3: very familiar with the operations of Ground Branch. It also
Speaker 3: alleges that the US government employees who were killed in
Speaker 3: the car crash last month were members of Ground Branch.
Speaker 3: More than the fact of this story, it doesn't shock
Speaker 3: me that the CIA is killing people in weird ways
Speaker 3: in different countries now that it's one of the things
Speaker 3: that they do.
Speaker 2: That's like the CIA's job.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the fact that CNN, as a source CITI is
Speaker 3: leaking Ground Branch operations, that is not usual for someone
Speaker 3: in the CIA to be talking to someone at CNN. Well,
Speaker 3: these operations are ongoing, right, and like, yeah, operations in
Speaker 3: Mexico are exceptionally high risk for these kinds of folks,
Speaker 3: Like in twenty twelve, some Mexican federal cops opened fire
Speaker 3: on US government employees, presumably not acting on behalf of
Speaker 3: the federal government.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 3: Obviously, it puts this mission at risk, which isn't like
Speaker 3: this is already a high risk thing, but the fact
Speaker 3: that somebody has felt the need to leak this CNN
Speaker 3: is pretty remarkable.
Speaker 10: Speaking of potential CIA leaks, former director of the National
Speaker 10: Counter Terrorisment Center, Joe Kent claimed on x the Everything
Speaker 10: app that before the President launched the war in Iran, quote,
Speaker 10: the US intell community, including CIA, was an agreement that
Speaker 10: Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon and that Iran would
Speaker 10: target US base in the region and shut down the
Speaker 10: straight of Horror moves if they were attacked by Israel
Speaker 10: and the US en quote. The Supreme Court extended access
Speaker 10: to remote prescription at melt delivery of the abortion pill
Speaker 10: with pristone until Thursday, May fourteenth, which is the day
Speaker 10: this episode releases. The night this episode releases around Thursday.
Speaker 10: They're expected to make a shadow docket ruling on whether
Speaker 10: Louisiana's ban on mail order abortion pills can go into
Speaker 10: effect as the case continues through a lower court. A
Speaker 10: golden statue of President Trump was unveiled at a Trump
Speaker 10: resort in Miami last week. The statue was blessed by
Speaker 10: evangelical pastor Mike Burns, who said, quote, let me be clear,
Speaker 10: this is not a golden calf unquote.
Speaker 2: God, it's so hard. I like you went through everything,
Speaker 2: you just like the little parade of horrors like you
Speaker 2: do every week, and then you just drop that that
Speaker 2: there's there's a priest blessing a golden statue.
Speaker 8: Past pastor.
Speaker 2: Sorry, you're right, pastor. And I know that like they
Speaker 2: that he addressed in the moment, like the whole golden
Speaker 2: cat it all, which just funnier that like he knew
Speaker 2: I gotta say something like I got to make a comment.
Speaker 3: That's what got me that he felt that he needed
Speaker 3: to address the golden calf in the room.
Speaker 10: Really genuinely funny, My, this is not a golden calf shirt.
Speaker 10: As a lot of people ask few questions already answered
Speaker 10: by the shirt. Oh fuck yeah, that's great, but yeah,
Speaker 10: grim stuff yep So.
Speaker 3: A national survey of one thousand Americans by NewsGuard and
Speaker 3: YouGov suggests that about half of people in the United
Speaker 3: States he surveyed think each of the attempts on Donald
Speaker 3: Trump's life was staged or they're not sure if it
Speaker 3: was real. For the White House Correspondent dinner attempt and
Speaker 3: the Butler Pennsylvania attempts, twenty four percent of those surveyed
Speaker 3: thought the attempts were staked. Thirty two percent why not
Speaker 3: sure in the White House Correspondents to dinner attempt, and
Speaker 3: twenty nine percent for the Pennsylvania event. It's more than
Speaker 3: half if you add them up.
Speaker 8: I'm not convinced.
Speaker 2: Super funny.
Speaker 3: I'll quote from the report here. Of the twelve percent
Speaker 3: of Americans who said all three attempts were staged, fifty
Speaker 3: five percent with Democrats, thirty eight percent were independents. It's
Speaker 3: seven percent were Republicans, according to the report.
Speaker 10: Really interested in that seven percent? Yeah, what are they
Speaker 10: getting out of that? I just I don't.
Speaker 8: Like, what way do they think? It was?
Speaker 3: Just like, hell, yeah, we're owning the Libs, We're stagings
Speaker 3: what we did.
Speaker 8: Look at US go. I think it may just be like.
Speaker 2: Well, I voted for Trump because I wanted my taxes
Speaker 2: to be lower.
Speaker 8: But I know he thinks that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, this is obviously worrying, and this, this trend is
Speaker 10: something we've been talking about for years at this points.
Speaker 10: Is why I've been kind of such a such a
Speaker 10: hard ass about the about like the brul conspiracism that
Speaker 10: is growing.
Speaker 2: I don't even to find it worrying anymore, Garrison. I
Speaker 2: find it liberating that we're finally.
Speaker 10: Look at that we're finally free from the shackles of truth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, everyone's everyone's down on the muck together, nobody's nobody's
Speaker 2: standing pretty anymore. Everybody's just wallowing like a filthy pig
Speaker 2: and shit.
Speaker 3: That it's pretty much the status of the Yeah, the
Speaker 3: US news market right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm fine with it.
Speaker 3: God, it's fucking bleak. It's so bleak. Like I just
Speaker 3: I don't want to address like the factual elements of
Speaker 3: each thing because there's no point, right, But like.
Speaker 2: No, we we should all know that's useless by now, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: just have we not gotten to a place free of
Speaker 2: that yet?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I know, I uh, I already don't know what to
Speaker 3: say about that.
Speaker 10: I mean, there are like real issues here. A conspiratorial
Speaker 10: base can be more easily recruited into a reactionary thought. Right,
Speaker 10: this is the idea of the cultic you and we
Speaker 10: can see a version of this happening with certain portions
Speaker 10: of the left. Might engage with people like Tucker Carlsen
Speaker 10: or Margie Taylor Green right now. But for me, kind
Speaker 10: of the biggest issue with this is that it's a
Speaker 10: refusal to understand or accept the particular moment that you
Speaker 10: find yourself with them, like a resistance to the self
Speaker 10: realization that you are living through history and that people
Speaker 10: are active agents in history. It's an ahistorical rejection of
Speaker 10: the fact that some people may look at some of
Speaker 10: the actions that someone like Trump is doing, whether regarding
Speaker 10: Ice or the war with Ron, and then choose to
Speaker 10: act in response, or in the case of the Butler shooting,
Speaker 10: the result of social disintegration or underregulation manifesting as someone's
Speaker 10: violent nihilistic expression, similar to the mindset of like a
Speaker 10: school shooter. My last issue relates kind of to the
Speaker 10: second issue, like the ahistorical element, how these false flag
Speaker 10: shooting conspiracy theories also prescribe Trump too much power by
Speaker 10: not just turning him into this like invincible god, but
Speaker 10: then also assuming that, like the US deep State is
Speaker 10: capable and competent enough to stage major world events like
Speaker 10: this like brainwash and groom patsies into doing these shootings,
Speaker 10: and like this also obviously removes the agency and the
Speaker 10: clearly defined history other people that do these own shootings. Right,
Speaker 10: it rejects this Like, like I said, this relates to the
Speaker 10: second thing. It rejects or refuses to understand the moment
Speaker 10: that you're living in, and that people actually are active
Speaker 10: agents of history. And like the people that do these
Speaker 10: shootings have their own family and their own friends, They
Speaker 10: have their own history that we can show and prove.
Speaker 10: And assuming that all this is like fake, that like
Speaker 10: the government has like manufactured this or somehow like turned
Speaker 10: someone who is a normy kind of liberal suddenly into
Speaker 10: like doing a shooting, or has like fake this backstory. Right,
Speaker 10: it gives the government so much power. Right, it assumes
Speaker 10: that the government has power like a magical wizard that
Speaker 10: totally controls reality.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Anyway, for our first main story today, let's talk about
Speaker 10: turning Point USA. But first on Sunday, night in Seattle,
Speaker 10: a nineteen year old transgender girl was murdered. She was
Speaker 10: a student at University of Washington and was found with
Speaker 10: stab wounds in the laundry room of an off campus
Speaker 10: apartment that she lived in. No suspect has yet been identified.
Speaker 10: While horrific in and of itself, turning point, USA was
Speaker 10: scheduled to hold an anti trans debate event just days
Speaker 10: later at the very campus this trans student attended. This
Speaker 10: event was going to be hosted by a far right
Speaker 10: anti trans lobbyist and influencer named Chloe Cole, a teen
Speaker 10: transitioner who subsequently de transitioned a few years later following
Speaker 10: an acid trip and then conversion to Christianity. Any such cases,
Speaker 10: that's fascinating, Yeah, most normal Christian d transitioner.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 10: She made an appearance at Trump's last State of the
Speaker 10: Union address when the president talked about restricting gender affirming
Speaker 10: care minors. After the murder in Seattle, Cole and TPUSA
Speaker 10: continued plugging their anti trans event online, prompting students to
Speaker 10: plan a protest to quote unquote shut the event down,
Speaker 10: calling to bring quote flags, drums, or anything to make
Speaker 10: noise unquote. Then on Tuesday, the National Turning Point USA
Speaker 10: organization decided to cancel the event, according to University Washington
Speaker 10: spokesperson Victor Balta. Later that night, Tuesday night, Chloe Cole
Speaker 10: announced the event was postponed because quote Antifa has assembled
Speaker 10: a local militia in their own words unquote.
Speaker 2: Oh that's that's alarming.
Speaker 8: A militia now.
Speaker 10: I was not able to find an instance of Antifa
Speaker 10: claiming to have assembled a quote unquote militia.
Speaker 2: Really, no photos of the militia, the documentation of the militia,
Speaker 2: nor was this language.
Speaker 10: This this this claim of a militia in their own words,
Speaker 10: nor was this language included in right wing reporting of
Speaker 10: the planned protest. I cannot find a so horse fist.
Speaker 10: I really looked like I went through Fox articles, post
Speaker 10: millennial articles. There was nothing about Antifa using the word militia.
Speaker 10: No one, no, no counter, no protester that I could
Speaker 10: find was using the word militia now. Klokkol also claimed
Speaker 10: that they were quote explicit threats on my life and
Speaker 10: that the protest caused a quote level of attention our
Speaker 10: security team and the local PD are frankly unprepared for unquote.
Speaker 10: She shared an article from the Canadian far right outlet
Speaker 10: the Post Millennial documenting threats against the TPUSA event. Threats
Speaker 10: like one Twitter user in Canada saying that people should
Speaker 10: shut down the event, like Milo Unopolis's Berkeley campus event
Speaker 10: in twenty seventeen, writing quote, make them hurt for scheduling
Speaker 10: this one other Twitter post with two likes red quote
Speaker 10: Luckily the bricks in Red Square are easy to grab
Speaker 10: this time of year. Okay, that's the evidence that Andy
Speaker 10: No used to claim that quote. Far left extremists are
Speaker 10: urging their comrades to carry out deadly violence on two posts,
Speaker 10: just those two posts. That that was the post that
Speaker 10: Chloe Cole was sharing via this Post Millennial article, that
Speaker 10: that was the evidence for these deadly threats. Now, I
Speaker 10: do think it's worth reiterating that to these people. They
Speaker 10: also believe that just calling someone a fascist constitutes a
Speaker 10: threat of violence, right, something they've been repeating a lot
Speaker 10: since the death of Charlie Kurk, that just calling someone
Speaker 10: a fascist constitutes a deadly threat. In Chloe Cole's video
Speaker 10: announcing that the TPUSA event was, in her words, postponed,
Speaker 10: she said that after charlie'ssassination quote speaking on a university
Speaker 10: campus in twenty twenty six can come with deadly consequences.
Speaker 10: But towards the end of the video, she stressed that quote,
Speaker 10: this is not a win for Antifa because truth will
Speaker 10: always win. I am not afraid of Antifa. That a
Speaker 10: quote ragtag group of wanna be revolutionaries on cross sex
Speaker 10: hormones won't scare her. The enemy is both strong and weak.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, good for her.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, yeah, that's how these people work.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 10: While I was watching Chloe Cole's video, something sprank to mind.
Speaker 10: Last week, the White House released a new counter terrorism
Speaker 10: strategy that named three major threat groups the country is
Speaker 10: currently facing Narco terrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamist terrorists,
Speaker 10: and violent left wing extremists, including anarchists and anti fascists.
Speaker 10: The document says that counter terrorism activities will quote prioritize
Speaker 10: the rapid identification and neutralization of violent, secular political groups
Speaker 10: whose ideology is anti American, radically pro transgender, and anarchist unquote.
Speaker 10: I did a full episode about this with Robert earlier
Speaker 10: this week, if you want to check that out.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 10: But the left wing, transgender, anarchist antifa stuff mix up
Speaker 10: just a handful of sentences in a sixteen page document
Speaker 10: which is mostly focused on Islamic terrorism cartels and complaining
Speaker 10: about the Biden administration. For a TLDR, there's nothing new
Speaker 10: in this counter terrorism document pertaining to the left that
Speaker 10: wasn't already in National Security Presidential Memorandum number seven. It
Speaker 10: does not grant any new powers nor designate trans people
Speaker 10: as terrorists. Like NSMP seven, it essentially states that being
Speaker 10: quote unquote extremely pro transgender can be a motivating factor
Speaker 10: in carrying out terroristic violence or threats. Since last October,
Speaker 10: joint Terrorism task forces across the country had been directed
Speaker 10: to investigate ANTIFA aligned groups and individuals quote engaged in
Speaker 10: acts of political violence and intimidation. This new document is
Speaker 10: just describing things that are already happening while building Trump's
Speaker 10: justification for military strikes on suspected drug boats in the
Speaker 10: Western Hemisphere, regime change in Venezuela, and the ongoing war
Speaker 10: in the Middle East. But in the wake of this
Speaker 10: new strategy being released, I wonder if tpusay's canceling of
Speaker 10: the event and Chloe Cole's language in the announcement might
Speaker 10: also be designed to coax Trump's FEDS into going after
Speaker 10: radical transgender ANTIFA terrorists, whether that may be individuals who
Speaker 10: possibly sent threats online that I just couldn't see, or
Speaker 10: just made semi questionable posts on Twitter dot com, or
Speaker 10: who simply spread the protest flyer online, or the protest
Speaker 10: organizers themselves. Yeah, I think that is something to keep
Speaker 10: in mind. This new counter terrorist strategy, it mostly serves
Speaker 10: as a chilling effect for speech and for organizing. Like
Speaker 10: I said, it doesn't actually grant new powers, but it
Speaker 10: can scare people into thinking that the Trump administration is
Speaker 10: designating a whole class of people as terrorists and stuff
Speaker 10: like this, you know protests. Right, that is one thing
Speaker 10: that they can investigate. Your threats online, That is something
Speaker 10: that they can investigate, right, That is what they are
Speaker 10: actually looking into. They're not just investigating random trans people
Speaker 10: as terrorists. They will be looking into you know, threats
Speaker 10: or questionable hosts made on social media. Right, those are
Speaker 10: the things they actually can look into. And I think
Speaker 10: some of Chloe Cole's language about the quote unquote deadly
Speaker 10: threats she received, stuff like that could be used bunch
Speaker 10: of up administration as a pretext to investigate people. Yeah,
Speaker 10: whether or not those threats even were real. Right, I
Speaker 10: did not see anything that I think constitutes a deadly
Speaker 10: threat based on the post millennials reporting, but her saying
Speaker 10: that might be enough for a local FBI field office
Speaker 10: to want to investigate, you know, student activists at this university.
Speaker 2: Right, right, Yeah, I think that makes sense.
Speaker 10: So that's what I wanted to talk about here.
Speaker 2: This is by far the thing I'm seeing people freak
Speaker 2: out about the most right now is like overall the
Speaker 2: idea that like they've just declared it, you know, a
Speaker 2: terrorism of violent terrorism to be trans or to be
Speaker 2: anarchist or to be you know, any of the things
Speaker 2: like anti capitalists mentioned in that in that document. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And what I'm actually seeing on the ground so far
Speaker 2: is very much the same kind of prosecutions that they've
Speaker 2: been doing and the same kinds of like messaging that
Speaker 2: they've been making. And I think that, like you're right
Speaker 2: on the money, this is something to pay attention to,
Speaker 2: Like does this get a response? Is there an actual
Speaker 2: like investigation? Do we wind up see someone get indicted
Speaker 2: for a Twitter post? Or you know, if someone made
Speaker 2: a threat that we're not privy to, do they get
Speaker 2: indicted for that, like or do we see something that
Speaker 2: does look more like a witch hunt where they're going
Speaker 2: after like a protest organizer. That'll tell us a lot
Speaker 2: about kind of what's coming in the immediate future. But
Speaker 2: right now, I don't see anything different than what they've
Speaker 2: been doing, which is kind of like incompetently and haphazardly
Speaker 2: flailing at everything, sort of vaguely lefty.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 10: And you know, I think including this in a document
Speaker 10: like the counter Terrism strategy, you know, also serves as
Speaker 10: a chilling effect. Right, This is this is to scare
Speaker 10: people they're trying to into not doing anything, right, That
Speaker 10: is a part of their strategy.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 10: But you know they have investigated people for making death
Speaker 10: threats four years right, the Biden administration and and their
Speaker 10: FBI is.
Speaker 2: Able to make death threats, by the way, if their
Speaker 2: actual threats that is illegal.
Speaker 10: Yeah, The FBI under Biden investigatives top Cop City, the
Speaker 10: charges against the protesters at Prairie Land started. That the
Speaker 10: investigation started before ns MP seven was even you know, released, Right,
Speaker 10: This is not new, but it is something to to
Speaker 10: keep an eye on, yeah, to see if they're if
Speaker 10: their scope is actually changing.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: You know what else is changing in scope our sponsors,
Speaker 2: are they not really no same ship?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we are back and we are back to
Speaker 3: talking about the war in Ron. So I want to
Speaker 3: start off with President Trump's extremely a vocal criticism of
Speaker 3: Curtish groups. One can assume in Iran that it doesn't
Speaker 3: necessarily seem that his criticism is limited to Curtis's groups
Speaker 3: in Iran. Let's play the clip the.
Speaker 11: Level of ferocity for protests. You know, the people are
Speaker 11: watching that they want to go out on the streets.
Speaker 11: They have no weapons, they have no guns. We thought
Speaker 11: the Curds were going to give us weapons, but the
Speaker 11: Curds disappointed us.
Speaker 5: The couras take take take.
Speaker 11: They have a great reputation in Congress. Congress is oh
Speaker 11: they fight so hard. They fight hard when they get paid.
Speaker 11: So I'm very disappointed in the Curds. But they were
Speaker 11: given I said it wasn't going to work. By the way,
Speaker 11: I just have to say it. I disagreed with what
Speaker 11: they did.
Speaker 9: They gave it.
Speaker 11: I said they'll never get there, and I was right.
Speaker 11: I like to be right in this case.
Speaker 5: Too bad. But we sent some guns with.
Speaker 11: Ammunition and they were supposed to be delivered, but they
Speaker 11: kept it. I said, they're gonna keep it. But what
Speaker 11: do I know, I've only been noticed.
Speaker 5: What do I know?
Speaker 3: Yeah, fascinating his Dia coda asking him about this.
Speaker 8: Thank you so much, mister person.
Speaker 13: Mister Preson yesterday said you gave the courts arms, but
Speaker 13: they took it for themselves. US military officials says that
Speaker 13: the Kurds have noticeived on arms on the Kurtish political
Speaker 13: parties are denying to sing on armis wrong.
Speaker 10: So that the officials, the officials are wrong.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, well there's the Kurds could be so many things,
Speaker 2: like they just said that officials. I'm assuming the KDP
Speaker 2: and the p u K is WHI they're referring to.
Speaker 2: But that's just like the two big parties in Iraq,
Speaker 2: which isn't even all of the Courtish parties in Iraq. Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: not to mention all of the different armed groups and
Speaker 2: the But I have no idea who he sent guns to,
Speaker 2: and I don't know that he does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or if he did, he seems pretty confident that
Speaker 3: he did.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is like the opposite of Iran Contra, with
Speaker 2: the president saying like these.
Speaker 8: Synth them guns, I'm running guns. I was running.
Speaker 2: Guns, and everyone else is like, we have no fucking
Speaker 2: clue what he's talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm guessing this refers to his previous theory
Speaker 3: that they had supplied guns to Iranian courtage groups in January.
Speaker 3: It's the time where they were a large scale protests
Speaker 3: in Iran that those Iranian courtage groups were expected to
Speaker 3: deliver to presumably Persian protesters, presumably in large cities such
Speaker 3: as Tehran. The Jerusalem Post has reported that Trump himself
Speaker 3: personally vetoed this exact plan in January, after receiving pressure
Speaker 3: from Turkey to do so. There were some und backs
Speaker 3: to January, but small arms, as we've said before, would
Speaker 3: not really have tipped the balance here. Ram's army police
Speaker 3: besiege the IGC, as we've seen since February, can survive
Speaker 3: assault from the US and Israel. It's not going to
Speaker 3: be toppled by a bunch of people with aks. They
Speaker 3: would have bombed the whole city, so they had to.
Speaker 3: We covered this at a time in our episode about
Speaker 3: it with Gordayin, but most of the Curtiss groups I've
Speaker 3: spoken to don't have responses at this time. But the
Speaker 3: PAK that's the Kurdistan Freedom Party sent me this comment
Speaker 3: regarding the protest in January. Quote from the end of
Speaker 3: December twenty twenty five through approximately January twentieth, twenty twenty six,
Speaker 3: the Iranian regime committed an unprecedented massacre across the Ilam,
Speaker 3: Kamanchan and Lauristan. The mobilized hashtal Chaby militias into Persian
Speaker 3: cities and deployed a massive military presence into our territories.
Speaker 3: In order to defend our citizens, we targeted the outposts
Speaker 3: and military basis where these forces were stationed. We confirmed that, yes,
Speaker 3: we carried out these operations. So what they're confirming there
Speaker 3: is that they carried our operations, not where the weapons
Speaker 3: came from, right, but we saw those operations in January.
Speaker 3: Pull at Yan put at Yan, famous I guess for
Speaker 3: being a founding member of the epigae or of Fuendecard,
Speaker 3: an SDF commander. He's also an author in the politicians,
Speaker 3: did make a statement which I thought was interesting. I'm
Speaker 3: going to read it at least a good amount of
Speaker 3: it because I think it's worth it. Quote. The Kurds
Speaker 3: are not mercenaries, Kurdish blood is not cheap, and the
Speaker 3: lives of Kurdish youth are not for sale. The Kurds
Speaker 3: are fighting for their freedom, dignity, and political rights, not
Speaker 3: to serve the temporary agendas of regional or international powers
Speaker 3: without any clear outcome for the Kurdish people themselves. At
Speaker 3: the same time, the Curds have repeatedly shown their willingness
Speaker 3: to cooperate in fighting terrorism, extremism, and instability in the
Speaker 3: Middle East. Kurdish forces played a central role in the
Speaker 3: defeat of ISIS and contributed greatly to regional security, but
Speaker 3: cooperation must be based on mutual respect, clarity, and long
Speaker 3: term political understanding. I do not know the acurity of
Speaker 3: the recent claims regarding weapons are literally sent to protesters
Speaker 3: inside it Ran. If such operations truly existed, then the
Speaker 3: American side should clearly explain which group, force, or individuals
Speaker 3: receive those weapons. A nation of tens of millions of
Speaker 3: people should not be collectively accused through vague and unverified statements. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's pretty good.
Speaker 10: It sounds reasonable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it sounds like a really reasonable thing.
Speaker 3: It does seem that Trump has some personal animus against
Speaker 3: the goods.
Speaker 2: I wonder if what he's referring to is that like
Speaker 2: a year or so ago the last time they sent
Speaker 2: over more weapons. If he sent some message more recently
Speaker 2: being like hey, could you send some of those guns
Speaker 2: that we already gave you over to rebels in Iran?
Speaker 2: And they were like no, no, what do you mean?
Speaker 2: And he's pissed. I wonder if that's what he's pissed about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so hard for me to say. Is he
Speaker 3: talking about the SDF. Is he talking about groups in
Speaker 3: southern Kadistan? They did, Yeah, he asked him to like
Speaker 3: pass Malone. I have never seen large numbers of Americans
Speaker 3: supplied weapons among the Rojilazzi groups.
Speaker 2: No, although they do. Some of their aks come from
Speaker 2: the US. If you look at like what's sent out
Speaker 2: a bunch of and like body armor, a lot of
Speaker 2: like what the SDF like, the armor they have came
Speaker 2: from Americans. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and with the highest speed SDF guys, you'll see
Speaker 3: like mphors but even like night vision, like yat the
Speaker 3: anti terror forces in the SDF, you'll see. But like
Speaker 3: on on the Iranian side, I have not seen that.
Speaker 3: And it's he's repeated this several times ever quite a
Speaker 3: long period of time. It seems to be something he
Speaker 3: genuinely believes, but I have seen no evidence aside from
Speaker 3: his claims to support it. It doesn't matter, But it
Speaker 3: does matter in the sense that Trump clearly is personally
Speaker 3: mad at Kurdish groups and does not seem to be
Speaker 3: interested in supporting their aspirations for autonomy, which is disappointing.
Speaker 3: But I guess I don't know why. Maybe because he
Speaker 3: feels that he alone to take credit for the defeat
Speaker 3: of the Islamic State, like I can't. I can't quite
Speaker 3: work out what to cause this, other than maybe he
Speaker 3: perceives them to have slighted him by not giving weapons
Speaker 3: that we don't know anything about. Yeah, let's talk a
Speaker 3: little bit about the broader situation in Iran. I don't
Speaker 3: want to make this true social review. I know I've
Speaker 3: read Trump's truth in the past. I have reached a
Speaker 3: point where I can't do that anymore.
Speaker 8: That's fair, Yeah, like I can't.
Speaker 3: People are dying, right, they bombed a girls school, Like
Speaker 3: this is serious and horrible, and it's really hard to
Speaker 3: bring the gravity that needs to be brought to this
Speaker 3: and also read out the absolutely bonker stuff that gets posted.
Speaker 3: And Trump described a missile strike on Iran as a
Speaker 3: love tap. Yeah, this past week. So I'm just gonna
Speaker 3: not gonna do that this week. I am going to
Speaker 3: say that both sides have repeatedly and openly violated the ceasefire,
Speaker 3: which Trump describes to reporters and dr Oz as being
Speaker 3: on quote massive life support. Meanwhile, Iran's parliamentary speaker Mohammed
Speaker 3: Galibath has said quote around forces are ready to deliver
Speaker 3: a well deserved response to any aggression. Mistake and strategy
Speaker 3: and mistaken decision will always lead to mistaken results. The
Speaker 3: whole world has already figured this out. We have prepared
Speaker 3: for all options. They will be surprised. This comes as
Speaker 3: Trump calls Iran's peace demands quote a piece of garbage
Speaker 3: and quote a stupid proposal. Iranian demands allegedly included an
Speaker 3: end to Israeli aggression in Lebanon and sovereignty overit straight
Speaker 3: at home moves. Trump has also alleged that they walked
Speaker 3: back an agreement to surrender and rich Ranian. We've also
Speaker 3: found that ran has retained a large number of their
Speaker 3: missiles and their launch capacity this week. It's also been
Speaker 3: reported by Jim Laporter, who is one of the few
Speaker 3: people still doing decer reporting at CBS that Pakistan has
Speaker 3: provided safe haven for Iranian aircraft, shielding them from US strikes. Allegedly,
Speaker 3: some civilian aircraft were also sheltered in Afghanistan, but then
Speaker 3: had to be moved when Pakistan began bombing Afghanistan in March.
Speaker 3: Iran has friends everywhere, I guess. The United States sent
Speaker 3: a ballistic missile submarine to Gibraltar this week. These higher
Speaker 3: class submarines to provide the survivable element of the nuclear triad,
Speaker 3: or the most survival element of the nuclear triad.
Speaker 2: You can't strike a nuclear submarine before it gets a
Speaker 2: chance to strike. It's it's basically impossible.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's that's the reason that they exist.
Speaker 2: Guarantees that you will get to do your thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for mutually assured destruction reasons. It's not super normal
Speaker 3: to announce their presence in places I don't think, but
Speaker 3: the Navy did this week.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean it can't be. It depends on the situation,
Speaker 2: depending on going is a little weird, yes.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: The Pentagon seems to be planning to rename the war
Speaker 3: in Iran Operation Sledgehammer. This seems to be an attempt
Speaker 3: at end run around the nineteen seventy three War Powers revolution.
Speaker 3: They claimed already where we spoke about this last week,
Speaker 3: the claiming epic fury is over now and that this
Speaker 3: is a new and distinct operation. In a congressional hearing,
Speaker 3: Hexceth denied that they needed authorized use of military force.
Speaker 3: Let's play the clip.
Speaker 14: It doesn't appear that hostilities have ended, and so the
Speaker 14: question to you is whether or not the administration has
Speaker 14: has considered or had intended to seek an authorization of
Speaker 14: use of military force from the Congress.
Speaker 4: Senator, our view is that should the President make the
Speaker 4: decision to recommence, that we would have all the authorities
Speaker 4: necessary to do so.
Speaker 8: Do you think that it.
Speaker 14: Would be helpful to the president if it was made
Speaker 14: clear that, in fact, the Congress did allow did provide
Speaker 14: an au MF.
Speaker 4: I think the president our view is that he has
Speaker 4: all the authorities he needs under Article two to execute.
Speaker 14: Thank mis Chairman.
Speaker 3: That's more or less he's saying they didn't need Congress,
Speaker 3: which is great. Yeah. Access face pointed questioning from the
Speaker 3: House and Senate creation to defend subcommittees, He repeatedly batted
Speaker 3: away questions about munitions depletion and suggested that it wasn't
Speaker 3: appropriate to answer them in public on the record like this.
Speaker 8: Oh, I'm sure.
Speaker 3: He also did not directly confront the cost of the war,
Speaker 3: which is now approaching thirty billion, instead saying, quote, what
Speaker 3: is the cost of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon? And
Speaker 3: the fact that this president has been willing to make
Speaker 3: a historic and courageous choice to confront that it comes
Speaker 3: with cost, and we recognize that kind of an exercise
Speaker 3: in an evasion on excess part there apart from his
Speaker 3: pretty emphactic statement that he didn't think that they needed
Speaker 3: any permission from Congress to continue with this war. So
Speaker 3: we will be back next week to keep you updated
Speaker 3: on what might be operations sledge Hammer.
Speaker 2: Great great stuff, very exciting. So on May twelfth, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six, the former mayor of Arcadia, California, Eileen Wang,
Speaker 2: pled guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of a
Speaker 2: foreign government and is being sentenced in the near future
Speaker 2: for being an unregistered agent of a foreign government. People
Speaker 2: have taken this news normally the foreign government is China.
Speaker 2: I did a quick little bit of googling before coming
Speaker 2: around here and found some fun headlines, one of them
Speaker 2: in the Lion California mayor pleads guilty to serving Communist China.
Speaker 2: And that article was written by John Ransom, who's a
Speaker 2: senior contributor at The Lion and also has written for
Speaker 2: The Epic Times, which itself is like the agent of
Speaker 2: a foreign power effective. Yeah, the WCBM had a headline
Speaker 2: this democrat mayor just came clean about working for communist China.
Speaker 8: She could come clean.
Speaker 2: Clean, she pled guilty and for that, you know. And
Speaker 2: then from the House Committee on China's website, mulinar warrants
Speaker 2: of CCP influence after California mayor charged in foreign influence plot.
Speaker 2: These charges highlight the very real threat of the Chinese
Speaker 2: Communist Party's attempts to influence are free and open society. Well,
Speaker 2: it denies freedom and liberty for the Chinese people. The
Speaker 2: CCP is actively working to subvert our institutions and divide
Speaker 2: us against one another. In this case, an elected mayor
Speaker 2: acted at the direction of CCP handlers, coordinated with Chinese
Speaker 2: intelligence linked individuals, and used a local news platform to
Speaker 2: spread CCP propaganda. And so let's talk about that. How
Speaker 2: much of this is true? Right?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean technically, yeah, Like that's that's kind of what happened,
Speaker 2: except for the part where they were like coordinating to
Speaker 2: drive Americans apart from each other and create unrest and whatnot.
Speaker 2: That's not what the purpose of this thing that Eileen
Speaker 2: got wrapped up in was. She and her former fiance,
Speaker 2: a fellow named Son who got sentenced before she did.
Speaker 2: Mike's son, are accused of basically having run like content
Speaker 2: farms at the behest of Chinese government officials, Like they
Speaker 2: were putting out articles on like the alleged genocide in Zinjang,
Speaker 2: denying like the Chinese government had done anything wrong there
Speaker 2: there was any genocide at all in the region, and
Speaker 2: so it's kind of like propaganda stuff like that they
Speaker 2: were serving as like a fire hose of propaganda. Per
Speaker 2: the Justice Department. In June of twenty twenty one, a
Speaker 2: PRC official contacted Wang and other individuals via the we
Speaker 2: chat encryptid messaging application with pre written news articles, including
Speaker 2: a PRC official written essay in the Los Angeles Times
Speaker 2: that stated China's stance on the Zinjang issue. There is
Speaker 2: no genocide in Zinjang. There is no such thing as
Speaker 2: forced labor in any production activity, including cotton production, spreading
Speaker 2: such rumors due to fame, China destroys Zinjang safety and stability,
Speaker 2: weakened local economy, and suppressed China's development. Minutes later, when
Speaker 2: posted the article on her own website and responded to
Speaker 2: the PRC official with a link to the article on
Speaker 2: her website, the others in the group did the same.
Speaker 2: The PRC official responded, so fast, thank you everyone, and
Speaker 2: this is bad. Genocide denials bad. The spreading slop content
Speaker 2: on behalf of a foreign government is like bad. It
Speaker 2: is important to note that this is not like spying
Speaker 2: or sabotage in any meaningful way. She's not acting to
Speaker 2: like try to damage the United States. She's acting as
Speaker 2: like an unregistered pr agent for the Chinese government, or
Speaker 2: at least that's what she had done up to this
Speaker 2: point in her life, and like everything that she was
Speaker 2: doing was legal if she had disclosed who she was
Speaker 2: working for, which I think is also an important thing
Speaker 2: to note because sh like this happens all the time
Speaker 2: in the media, Like we all see, there's tons of
Speaker 2: content that is the result one way or the other
Speaker 2: of some government's influence operation, and for the majority of
Speaker 2: the time when it happens, nobody gets tripped up, you know,
Speaker 2: either because they have friends in power or because they
Speaker 2: don't quite cross a line. And I lead in her
Speaker 2: friends were not very savvy about what they were doing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but they were also not operating on a very large level,
Speaker 2: like this is not a big operation. One of the
Speaker 2: notes in this charging document is that Eileen sent this
Speaker 2: Chinese government official at screenshot showing that the article had
Speaker 2: been viewed fifteen one hundred and twenty eight times through
Speaker 2: her site, which is like, not, we're not talking like
Speaker 2: big deal influence ops here. We're not talking like sweeping
Speaker 2: powers over like public opinion. Now, perhaps that's what they
Speaker 2: hoped Eileen would kind of rise to over time. She
Speaker 2: didn't seem to be like a kind of rising star
Speaker 2: in local government in southern California. She got endorsed by
Speaker 2: some prominent Democratic Party officials, and she was still in
Speaker 2: touch with her Chinese government handlers at this time. This
Speaker 2: whole period in which she's like being charged for working
Speaker 2: as an agent of the Chinese government is like twenty
Speaker 2: twenty through at least twenty twenty two. So yeah, this
Speaker 2: is like, you know, a bad thing, and it's good
Speaker 2: that this got found out and that she's not continued
Speaker 2: to be the mayor of Arcadia. But also this is
Speaker 2: not like the scary thing that the right wing press
Speaker 2: is making it out to you. She was not here
Speaker 2: to like subvert the US so that it could be
Speaker 2: invaded or destroyed. She was there to try to stop
Speaker 2: people on the internet from being mean to the Chinese government.
Speaker 2: Like that was the primary use that they had with her.
Speaker 2: It's just not that like actually scariest story or anything.
Speaker 2: It's just a kind of thing that happens. This lady
Speaker 2: happened to become mayor of a small down basically, which
Speaker 2: is wild. It's crazy if that happened. But like this
Speaker 2: is going on all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, yeah, people have lost their minds about
Speaker 3: this one in a way that like.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect California city, like it's a southern California town,
Speaker 2: and it's a government female spy like a course of course.
Speaker 10: There's a lot of stuff. Back when Eric Swalwell was
Speaker 10: still a relevant human being, there was some attacks on
Speaker 10: him for associating with a quote Chinese female spy man
Speaker 10: ten years ago, and that was like one of the
Speaker 10: lines of attack against him. Sure because like someone someone
Speaker 10: he had like relations with in like twenty fourteen, what
Speaker 10: was alleged or found to be a working as a
Speaker 10: spy for the Chinese government. It's interesting that they're doing
Speaker 10: this type of stuff at like the exact same time
Speaker 10: that Trump just got just like it is like arriving
Speaker 10: in China.
Speaker 2: Yeah right now, yeah, yeah, it's really great timing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, curious timing there. But I'm guessing she took them leave.
Speaker 3: This has been a period of some time, right, like
Speaker 3: her fiance.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, because first first her former fiance got busted,
Speaker 2: and then she was like, I didn't do anything wrong,
Speaker 2: and then it became clear that she very much had. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: so there was this was like a thing that yeah,
Speaker 2: this has been going on for a little while. It
Speaker 2: just sort of once she pled guilty, then you could
Speaker 2: do the article like California mayor pleads guilty to working
Speaker 2: for the Chinese government.
Speaker 10: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just funny timing. Yeah,
Speaker 10: speaking of timing, here are some ads. Great, yay, okay,
Speaker 10: we are back for one of our last main stories.
Speaker 10: Let's talk about Virginia and the redistricting efforts. Last week,
Speaker 10: in a four to three ruling, the Virginia Supreme Court
Speaker 10: blocked the voter approved redistricting map that passed in April
Speaker 10: with almost fifty two percent of the vote. The court
Speaker 10: found the process used to advance the referendum violated the
Speaker 10: state constitution. According to Virginia's constitution, the legislature has to
Speaker 10: vote twice to pass any proposed constitutional amendment before it
Speaker 10: gets put on the ballot for Virginia voters, but these
Speaker 10: two General Assembly votes must be separated by a state
Speaker 10: general election. The first General Assembly vote for this redistricting
Speaker 10: amendment passed in October twenty twenty five, before the November
Speaker 10: general election, and the second vote to approve the referendum
Speaker 10: happened next January, so a few months ago. The Republican
Speaker 10: challengers to the new voting map argued that because early
Speaker 10: voting had already begun, the General Assembly's first vote in
Speaker 10: October did not actually occur before a general election, and
Speaker 10: that was the grounds the State Supreme Court used to
Speaker 10: block the voter approved amendment. The four judge majority ruled
Speaker 10: the intervening election requirement was violated because the general election
Speaker 10: quote began on September nineteenth, twenty twenty five, and just
Speaker 10: ended on election day November fourth, yeah I.
Speaker 3: Feel like you're kind of outside the spirit of what
Speaker 3: they were going for that one.
Speaker 10: But no, this on the face sounds quite absurd.
Speaker 3: It's one of those things that is technically correct, but
Speaker 3: at the same time.
Speaker 10: Well, and there's some complicating factors because of Trump's own
Speaker 10: attempts to restrict early voting or deem early voting like
Speaker 10: not constitutionally like appropriate, or like it defies the federal
Speaker 10: government's definition of the word election. And so now you
Speaker 10: have some groups in Virginia who are trying to pass
Speaker 10: this amendment, Democrat groups who are using kind of similar
Speaker 10: rhetoric as Trump. We'll get to that in a sec
Speaker 10: So Justice de Arthur Helsey wrote to the majority opinion, saying, quote,
Speaker 10: this violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum
Speaker 10: vote and renders it null and void. Early Virginia voters
Speaker 10: unknowingly forfeited they're constitutionally protected opportunity to vote for or
Speaker 10: against delegates who favor or disfavor amending the constitution by
Speaker 10: not anticipating a legislative vote on a constitutional amendment four
Speaker 10: days before the last day of voting, unquote. So the
Speaker 10: court said that the reason why they have this to
Speaker 10: vote requirement across two different general assemblies is to give
Speaker 10: voters enough time to not just support or not support
Speaker 10: a constitutional amendment on the ballot, but then also vote
Speaker 10: for state lawmakers who will either approve or not approve
Speaker 10: the constitutional amendment in the legislature itself. Right, So that's
Speaker 10: what they're saying. It's like this, this process of having
Speaker 10: these two votes is to ensure that voters have a
Speaker 10: say both in who they put into office as well
Speaker 10: as on the ballot. And they're saying that this process
Speaker 10: was violated because early voting had already commenced by the
Speaker 10: time that the legislature actually voted on this proposed amendment.
Speaker 10: Chief Justice Cleo. Powell wrote in the dissent that the
Speaker 10: majority quote broadened the meaning of the word election as
Speaker 10: used in the Virginia Constitution to include the early voting period.
Speaker 10: This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and
Speaker 10: federal law define an election. By extending elections in the
Speaker 10: Commonwealth of Virginia beyond a single day, the Majorities formulation
Speaker 10: would directly conflict with the federal mandate that elections for
Speaker 10: federal officials be held on a single day, so under
Speaker 10: the Supreme Court of Virginia's new ruling, the district map
Speaker 10: drawn in twenty twenty one must be used for the
Speaker 10: upcoming election this November. The midterms, the new map would
Speaker 10: have won Democrats four more House seats, but considering this
Speaker 10: ruling by the state Supreme Court, Dems are now eight
Speaker 10: seats down in the national redistricting battle, which the latest
Speaker 10: gutting of the Voting Rights Act will only make worse.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Over this past weekend, Virginia Democrats Hakeem Jeffries and Governor
Speaker 10: Abigail Skpenberger held discussions on what to do about this ruling.
Speaker 10: Times reported that Virginia Democrats expressed determination to win two
Speaker 10: or three of the Republican held seats even with the
Speaker 10: current map, but also discussed a few long shot options
Speaker 10: to change the ruling or push forward the map anyway.
Speaker 10: One of the more extreme measures debated was the possibility
Speaker 10: of replacing the entire Virginia Supreme Court by lowering the
Speaker 10: mandatory retirement age from seventy five to fifty four and
Speaker 10: then having a new court rehear the case.
Speaker 3: Sounds great, Let's do it in between now and novemb.
Speaker 10: So it seems the Democrats decided against this path ultimately
Speaker 10: in part because the state Department of Elections deadline for
Speaker 10: congressional maps is May twelfth, which is a day before
Speaker 10: we're recording. Yeah, they kind of ran out of time
Speaker 10: on this. It's also unclear if they really would have
Speaker 10: had the bravery to pull such an extreme maneuver, right,
Speaker 10: something that may be the correct thing to do and
Speaker 10: maybe something they should just do anyway, if they have
Speaker 10: the power to fully replace their Supreme Court, why not.
Speaker 10: Because the Democrats are currently in a majority of control
Speaker 10: of the state legislature right now, why not do this anyway?
Speaker 10: To a certain extent, Also, Abigail Stanberger can only serve
Speaker 10: one term, so you know, you're not going to lose
Speaker 10: much political capital by pulling a kind of insane move
Speaker 10: like this. But it's not going to happen at least
Speaker 10: right now. Yeah, nope, Virginia State Senate Majority Leader Scott
Speaker 10: Sortiville told The New Republic quote, as a practical matter,
Speaker 10: the move would not be capable of being implemented given
Speaker 10: the time frame. Now, despite that May twelfth deadline. On Monday,
Speaker 10: Virginia Attorney General j Jones and Democratic State lawmakers filed
Speaker 10: an emergency appeal asking the US Supreme Court to put
Speaker 10: the state Supreme Court order on hold for the upcoming
Speaker 10: midterm election, arguing that the state court based their ruling
Speaker 10: on misreading the federal definition of election and by adopting
Speaker 10: its own definition, the state Supreme Court infringed on the
Speaker 10: state legislature's power to regulate federal elections quote. By forcing
Speaker 10: the Commonwealth to conduct its congressional elections using districts different
Speaker 10: from those adopted by the General Assembly pursuant to a
Speaker 10: constitutional amendment that people just ratified, the Supreme Court of
Speaker 10: Virginia has deprived voters, candidates, and the Commonwealth of their
Speaker 10: right to the lawfully enacted congressional districtsuot. This case will
Speaker 10: be initially decided by Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles
Speaker 10: the emergency appeals from states covered by the Fourth Circuit
Speaker 10: Court of Appeals, but the US Supreme Court may argue
Speaker 10: that they don't have the authority to intervene because the
Speaker 10: Virginia Supreme Court ruling cites state law, not federal law.
Speaker 10: And The New Republic also reported that state Senate majority
Speaker 10: leader Scott Saureville confirmed even if the Supreme Court gives
Speaker 10: them a good ruling, that ruling could be unlikely to
Speaker 10: impact this upcoming election cycle due to this May twelfth deadline.
Speaker 3: I guess it's just what we're saying that, like the
Speaker 3: nature of this midterm will be very important for the
Speaker 3: way you get to vote in America going forward.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they're they're pulling out all the stops,
Speaker 2: like they're throwing any kind of plausible deniability in the trash,
Speaker 2: because this is the get it the lose it moment
Speaker 2: for the right, you know, Like that's very much how
Speaker 2: they're looking at this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a locking in forever we'll see.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: A few years ago, Ohio pushed through unconstitutional maps, but
Speaker 10: maps that were deemed unconstitutional by state courts. Yeah, one
Speaker 10: federal court did authorize them to use these maps in
Speaker 10: like an interim period and they're still using them. And
Speaker 10: in a piece by the Nation, they mentioned this option
Speaker 10: was said that they would need to have the backing
Speaker 10: of the state Board of Electors, and Virginia might not
Speaker 10: have that. There's lots of people on the Democratic side
Speaker 10: that are much more rule followy than a lot of
Speaker 10: the Republicans, as we have seen now Virginia may be
Speaker 10: able to still pass this redistricting map in the future
Speaker 10: by spreading out the process over a bigger period of
Speaker 10: time to not create this confusion about the early voting period.
Speaker 10: But the map will not be able to go into
Speaker 10: effect before the midterms, but it still may be able
Speaker 10: to go into effect in the future. I do think
Speaker 10: it's also worth noting that the same day that Virginia
Speaker 10: filed this appeal with the Supreme Court, the US Supreme
Speaker 10: Court also paved the way for Alabama to eliminate one
Speaker 10: of two majority black districts before the midterm elections by
Speaker 10: overturning a lower court order that blocked the use of
Speaker 10: a Republican backed map from twenty twenty three. So the
Speaker 10: Supreme Court is currently weighing in on not exactly the same,
Speaker 10: similar similar things in other states.
Speaker 3: That was because it was basically pointing to it Sluisiana
Speaker 3: rule and saying like, we've ruled on this, Yes, this
Speaker 3: is right.
Speaker 10: This was following the Louisiana ruling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, okay, that makes sense. You know, great videos
Speaker 3: Democratic Process Voting Rights Act.
Speaker 8: Oh.
Speaker 2: So, there's an increasing movement in the United States, both
Speaker 2: at the state and the federal level to repeal gas taxes.
Speaker 2: So in the United States, there's federal gas taxes that
Speaker 2: that everybody pays. The current federal gas tax rate is
Speaker 2: about eighteen point three cents per gallon for gasoline and
Speaker 2: gas a hall, which is the actual official name of
Speaker 2: fuel mixed with unleaded gas that's like unleaded and ethanol
Speaker 2: together is actually just called gas a hall.
Speaker 3: Okay, I never knew that. What, Yes, what I Loveny would.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they couldn't think of anything better. And then twenty
Speaker 2: four point three cents per gallon for diesel fuel, right,
Speaker 2: And then some states have their their own like Oregon
Speaker 2: has its own like gas taxes California senty does at
Speaker 2: both levels. Like the federal gas tax is there in
Speaker 2: short because it helps to pay for the roads, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's that's why we need a federal gas tax
Speaker 2: is because it funds what's called the Highway Trust Fund
Speaker 2: or the HTF, which is a big part of like
Speaker 2: what keeps our interstate infrastructure functional. And then state level
Speaker 2: gas taxes are often also like supporting like state local roads, right.
Speaker 2: And so Trump has talked about temporarily repealing the gas
Speaker 2: tax for like a couple of months, there have been
Speaker 2: Democratic proposals that are very similar. Graham Platner, who's about
Speaker 2: to be a Congressman from Maine, it's a Democratic nominee. Yeah,
Speaker 2: who's currently the nominee but is almost certainly going to win.
Speaker 3: The presumptive nominee I think.
Speaker 2: Has expressed support for ending the gas tax outright, and
Speaker 2: his basic plan was something like, you have wealthy corporations
Speaker 2: pay the money that the gas tax is currently going to,
Speaker 2: and you put that burden onto you know, corporations instead
Speaker 2: of people. Not uncommon, by the way, for the gas
Speaker 2: tax to be temporarily repealed. During the early months of
Speaker 2: the most recent escalation of the Russian invasion into Ukraine
Speaker 2: and the Biden administration back in twenty twenty two, Biden
Speaker 2: temporarily paused the federal gas tax. Right, So this is
Speaker 2: the thing that happens. It's just always a bad idea
Speaker 2: because it's the reason why you see people in the
Speaker 2: left and right make suggestions like this repeal state or
Speaker 2: federal gas taxes is because it's really easy. It's an
Speaker 2: easy way to say, like I'm looking out for you,
Speaker 2: I'm trying to take care of regular people. Gas is
Speaker 2: too darn expensive already, We've got to do everything we
Speaker 2: can to make your life easier. The problem is the
Speaker 2: Highway Trust Fund, which is absolutely critical for our roads
Speaker 2: being functional, is already always running at a deficit. In
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, it was a deficit of about thirteen
Speaker 2: billion dollars. The main reason for this is that, like transportation,
Speaker 2: infrastructure is aging every single year and falling behind. And
Speaker 2: at the same time, that gas tax is not like
Speaker 2: peg to inflation or anything, so it has not been
Speaker 2: keeping pace with the actual needs of the Trust Fund.
Speaker 2: So anyway, we're already in a really bad situation with
Speaker 2: the HTF. Every time we pause these taxes, it gets
Speaker 2: much worse. And I'm worried right now that it was
Speaker 2: reasonable it may sound and say something like, well we
Speaker 2: should just have the rich pay for that. You're never
Speaker 2: going to have any kind of like move that does
Speaker 2: both of those things at once. They're going to start
Speaker 2: by repealing the gas tax, and then they'll never get
Speaker 2: around to replacing it with anything, and then the roads
Speaker 2: will just be bad forever. I think this is a
Speaker 2: bad idea, and I think you should be a little
Speaker 2: wary of politicians doing this because it's an easy way
Speaker 2: to get a win. But that said, damn near everybody
Speaker 2: is so how wary can you actually be? It's just
Speaker 2: a really irresponsible, bad idea that has a lot of
Speaker 2: bipartisan support.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Really, Ever since the no tax on Tips things, there's
Speaker 10: been this wave of of you know, people have called
Speaker 10: this like slopulist policies or like things that are that
Speaker 10: are that are you know, populist in framing, but have
Speaker 10: certain like economic problems or or get dispersed in weird ways.
Speaker 10: You knows. Me has talked about some specifics around the
Speaker 10: no tax on Tips policy, but there's there's there's been
Speaker 10: like a wave of these, you know, small targeted tax
Speaker 10: cuts on on on on various little things to kind
Speaker 10: of lift lift the financial burden that Americans are facing,
Speaker 10: you know, the better ones, you know, the ones like
Speaker 10: like like Platinum Strategy, which has a part of his
Speaker 10: plan increasing taxes on billionaires and oil corporations. But these
Speaker 10: sorts of taxes are just like little band aid solutions
Speaker 10: and that are almost like consolation prizes for not being
Speaker 10: able to just raise the corporate tax rate or income
Speaker 10: tax brackets. Right, And it's it's like we're adopting these
Speaker 10: consolation taxes for this presumed impossibility just actually raising taxes
Speaker 10: to the level of you know, if you look at
Speaker 10: the United States in like the nineteen fifties, super super high,
Speaker 10: super high level of taxes that actually funded social services.
Speaker 10: And you know one thing that could be frustrating about
Speaker 10: these these sorts of more like slopulist tax angles is
Speaker 10: it you know, it undermines the vital role of taxes
Speaker 10: to actually fund social services.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 10: Now should more of those taxes be funded by corporations
Speaker 10: and billionaires?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 10: Absolutely, Yeah, But I think that should be the focus
Speaker 10: rather than these little itty bitty kind of you know,
Speaker 10: cutting away at the corners of like small, small targeted
Speaker 10: taxes that are that are again like us used as
Speaker 10: like you know, consolation prizes, rather than actually addressing the
Speaker 10: pretty significant, you know, tax reforms that need to happen
Speaker 10: in this country.
Speaker 2: And it's it's just dangerous in part because it acts
Speaker 2: as if what the gas tax is there to fund
Speaker 2: is optional, is not like necessary, like, well, we don't
Speaker 2: really need this, so we'll pause this whenever like things
Speaker 2: get bad because we don't need them. But will you
Speaker 2: do like our society is reliant upon the maintenance of
Speaker 2: that fund, and we shouldn't act like it's Yeah, this
Speaker 2: is very frustrating to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can see why the gas tax and particularus
Speaker 3: appealing right now. Right now, Yes, people are struggling, like
Speaker 3: it is literally seven dollars a gallon in pods of California.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's fucking nuts.
Speaker 3: Like people who like a lot of people who struggle
Speaker 3: to make it are really struggling to make it now. Yeah,
Speaker 3: why our society is set up means it's very hard
Speaker 3: for people to exist without a car. So you're like, yes,
Speaker 3: the populist appeal is obvious, and.
Speaker 2: As is always the case with this sort of thing,
Speaker 2: the fact that it has an appeal is based on
Speaker 2: ignorance because when roads are poorly maintained, it hosts regular
Speaker 2: people huge amounts of money, and the damage it does
Speaker 2: to their car far more than the gas tax costs them.
Speaker 2: This has been established. This is not like I think
Speaker 2: we have to wonder about. There have been studies into this,
Speaker 2: like you pay more money when the roads are bad
Speaker 2: because your car gets fucked up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's reasonable for people to say, well, a
Speaker 3: country has enough money, you can't we unfunck the roads,
Speaker 3: and yes, not charge me a lot of money. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: we just spent thirty billion fucking invading Iran, so no
Speaker 3: we can't.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you have to not do some of the
Speaker 2: other things that we're doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah that it's not up for grabs in the current
Speaker 3: political atmosphere, right, and even your d you're like mainstream Democrats, Yeah,
Speaker 3: aren't going to ride for that.
Speaker 10: No, I mean it requires pressure against mainstream Democrats and
Speaker 10: obviously the Republican establishment as well. Right, Like, part of
Speaker 10: Plantner's plan is a fifty percent per barrel windfall tax
Speaker 10: on big oil profits, which would be significant, but there
Speaker 10: will be a lot of pushback against this, including among
Speaker 10: the democratic establishment, and that might require getting rid of
Speaker 10: a whole bunch of these democratic establishment figures who are
Speaker 10: currently occupying seats of power.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, well everyone think about that.
Speaker 3: On that hopeful note, on that optimist how to do
Speaker 3: it note?
Speaker 10: Where can people send us a news related tips chase?
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Speaker 10: No, I think part of part of those anarchists that
Speaker 10: left being and streamers' threats might be against the marketing corporations.
Speaker 10: If James keeps a keeps threatening again at the end of.
Speaker 3: This episode, anyone to prison, I'll just blog advocating violence.
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