Speaker 1: All 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, and welcome. Today could happen here podcast the world
Speaker 3: falling apart, and its mostly just about that at the minute,
Speaker 3: but we do sometimes talk about how to put it
Speaker 3: back together as well. Joining me today is Garrison Davis.
Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 3: Garrison, Hello, Hi, And we're on the falling apart theme,
Speaker 3: and I think that we've been on that one quite
Speaker 3: a lot that last few weeks, but today we are
Speaker 3: specifically talking about the what I'm going to call the
Speaker 3: rendition of non US nationals by the Trump administration over
Speaker 3: the last week. The reason I'm calling it gets rendition
Speaker 3: and not deportation is because these people aren't being sent
Speaker 3: back to the countries they're from. They are being sent
Speaker 3: to El Salvador. Specifically, they're being sent to a place
Speaker 3: called second. So the Trump administration has attempted to send
Speaker 3: three hundred people who it accuses of being members of
Speaker 3: a foreign terrorist organization. We're going to get to how
Speaker 3: they get there under the Alien Enemies Act to a
Speaker 3: prison in El Salvador where they will be detained for
Speaker 3: a year at the expense of the United States.
Speaker 2: We're going to.
Speaker 3: Break down exactly how we got there over the course
Speaker 3: of this episode. So, the Trump administration has accused these
Speaker 3: people of being members of two different gangs. The majority
Speaker 3: of them, there's two hundred and thirty eight people are
Speaker 3: accused of being members of trend de Ragua. Trindragua is
Speaker 3: a Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration recently declared a
Speaker 3: foreign terrorist organization. Another twenty three it's accusing of being
Speaker 3: members of MS thirteen, which is a Salvadoran gang. The
Speaker 3: Trump administration use something called the Alien Enemies Act to
Speaker 3: remove these people. The Alien Enemies Act we actually spoke
Speaker 3: about it in November of last year when we were
Speaker 3: looking at provisions of US law that the Trump administration
Speaker 3: could use for its mass deportation gender. This is when
Speaker 3: we spoke about the Trump administration in the past has
Speaker 3: been quite good at finding obscure provisions of the United
Speaker 3: States law to exclude migrants. You can hear my whole
Speaker 3: series about Title forty two on that. That's kind of
Speaker 3: the paramount example. Right. The Alien Enemies Act is a
Speaker 3: two hundred and twenty six year old piece of legislation.
Speaker 3: The last time it was used was to inter Japanese
Speaker 3: people during the Second World War. Right, that's a pretty
Speaker 3: shameful part of United States history, and it's great that
Speaker 3: we're going back there. So who are the enemies in
Speaker 3: this case? Right, it's generally, like I should probably point out,
Speaker 3: the Alien Enemy Act is intended for like the people
Speaker 3: you were at war with. Right, So, if the United
Speaker 3: States is at war with let's say Canada, and there
Speaker 3: are Canadian citizens in the United States and people who
Speaker 3: have dual citizenship with Canada, and those people that are
Speaker 3: individuals within that group are suspected to be spies or
Speaker 3: suspected to be like serving the interest in Canada not
Speaker 3: the United States, that they could be excluded or detained
Speaker 3: under the Alien Enemies Act or sent out of the country,
Speaker 3: as it's the case here, and as we saw in
Speaker 3: this instance, there is very little recourse to appeal. Right,
Speaker 3: This isn't like a deportation hearing or an asylum hearing
Speaker 3: where you have a lawyer representing you, where you have
Speaker 3: even a hearing. Right. These people were rounded up and
Speaker 3: booted out the country in very short order.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like with or without due process, Like we
Speaker 4: should not be black begging people and sending them to
Speaker 4: the like Al Salvador Labor prison, right, Like this is
Speaker 4: like just doing this at all, even with du process
Speaker 4: would already be horrifying.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The fact that they're just doing it like without even
Speaker 4: any like court process entirely and like trying to like
Speaker 4: bypass that just adds like another level to an already
Speaker 4: like horrifying and you know, evil and shameful action.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's terrible. I want to define some of the
Speaker 3: categories here. I want to start with Tendgua. Spanish understanders
Speaker 3: will will notice the word trend meaning train. That's because
Speaker 3: they came out of construction unions who are building trains
Speaker 3: as part of a Venezuelan infrastructure project in Aragua, which
Speaker 3: is part of Venezuela. There are other Venezuelan gangs. Trendliano
Speaker 3: is the other one that springs to mind, which has
Speaker 3: come from the same place, and that's have similar names,
Speaker 3: but just people should understand that they're different organizations. They
Speaker 3: also have a strong presence of Venezuelan prisons. They have
Speaker 3: in the past been accused of doing violence on behalf
Speaker 3: of the Venezuelan state. By twenty twenty four, I thought
Speaker 3: to blame them for the protests after his election. People
Speaker 3: remember that election was widely seen as fraudulent, and I
Speaker 3: covered that in my series on the Dariant Gap. If
Speaker 3: people want to learn more about Venezuelan politics of migration
Speaker 3: to the United States. In twenty twenty four, Biden names
Speaker 3: that I were a transnational criminal organization, and then Trump
Speaker 3: named them a foreign terrorist organization. He labeled several cartels
Speaker 3: as ftos as well. At the time, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of speculation about why was it to allow for like
Speaker 3: drone strikes or co operations. I think we're now seeing
Speaker 3: that this was part of this large employ of deportation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because like quote unquote terrorists had even less quote
Speaker 4: unquote rights than quote unquote criminals. Yes, right, Like it's
Speaker 4: it's like like the like the triangle of like which
Speaker 4: which deplorable class has the least about of rights. Terrorists
Speaker 4: are always like the ones with the least.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And we've been doing that for twenty odd years
Speaker 3: now with Tiamo Bay and renditions to Egypt and Syria
Speaker 3: and other places. In this case, people are being sent
Speaker 3: to Sikot, which is this prison in El Salvador sometimes.
Speaker 3: Can you spell that, yeah, Cecot centrocult Yeah, sea Cott. Yes.
Speaker 3: It stands for Terrorism Confinement, Terrorism detention Center. It is
Speaker 3: largely referred to as a super prison. Right. It was
Speaker 3: built in El salbad Or by part of his Iron
Speaker 3: Fist would be the way you translate. It's iron Fist
Speaker 3: policy against gangs and against crime, and it has been
Speaker 3: widely condemned for human rights abuses. People are crammed into
Speaker 3: cells with more than one hundred people, but there are
Speaker 3: fewer bunks than there are prisoners, right, so they can't
Speaker 3: even all lie down at the same time. The bunks
Speaker 3: don't have bedding, they're just flat like metal sheets. They're
Speaker 3: four high, so you have to climb over other people
Speaker 3: to sleep. For more than one hundred prisoners, there are
Speaker 3: two open toilets. That's the only access to a bathroom
Speaker 3: that you have. They might be allowed out for half
Speaker 3: an hour each day. They're not allowed to communicate with
Speaker 3: their families or the outside world. They're forced to shave
Speaker 3: their heads and they all wear white. The lights are
Speaker 3: left on all day. As I said that, they're provided
Speaker 3: with no bedding, no contact with the outside world, very
Speaker 3: little access to anything other than standing in that cell.
Speaker 3: There's two bibles in each sat. It's the only sort
Speaker 3: of entertainment they're allowed. It just sounds like a torture camp. Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is completely inhumane, right, It's horrific. And for a
Speaker 3: couple of years now, bu Kelly has been doing like
Speaker 3: these media tours the of SICOT like using it to
Speaker 3: generate content. It's very much designed to generate this image
Speaker 3: of like, this is what will happen to quote unquote,
Speaker 3: what will happen to you if you're a quote unquote
Speaker 3: in a gang. It's sort of been used to promote
Speaker 3: his image of someone who's taking an iron fist to gangs.
Speaker 3: And as we saw when these people were sent to
Speaker 3: us ABAD or this tendency to use I don't know
Speaker 3: what you would call it, incarceration as a way of
Speaker 3: making content, it was was very much the case here, right, Yeah, I'm.
Speaker 2: Going to break for ads.
Speaker 3: When we come back, we will be consuming content that
Speaker 3: is people being stripped of their human rights and we
Speaker 3: are back, Garrison, Do you want to go ahead and
Speaker 3: play this? And so the the tweet in question, the
Speaker 3: zet in question, it's by Naibuke, the president of Bel Salvador. Right,
Speaker 3: should I read out?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I think you should. I think it's worth noting that
Speaker 4: like this style of propaganda close to the mirrors a
Speaker 4: lot of what like DHS and the Trump administration is
Speaker 4: doing on their official accounts. So a lot of a
Speaker 4: lot of the like mimified content creation format and like
Speaker 4: aesthetics being used to just display like torture and deportations
Speaker 4: and human arts abuses is very common among government accounts
Speaker 4: in the States right now. It's pretty pretty horrifying to
Speaker 4: look at. And this this kind of follows this suit
Speaker 4: and is possibly even more bleak. Yeah, but yeah, we
Speaker 4: should read read this whole message and then and then
Speaker 4: we'll price skip around on the video and talk about
Speaker 4: what we're seeing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I'll just read it obviously, you know, to
Speaker 3: understand I'm quoting it hit early from him today. The
Speaker 3: first two hundred and thirty eight members of the Venezuelan
Speaker 3: criminal organization trend Raguas arrived in our country. They were
Speaker 3: immediately transferred to sikor the Terrorism Confinement Center for a
Speaker 3: period of one year. Parentheses renewable. The United States will
Speaker 3: pay a very low fee for them, but a high
Speaker 3: one for US over time. These actions, combined with the
Speaker 3: production already being generated by more than forty thousand inmates
Speaker 3: engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program,
Speaker 3: will help make our prison system self sustainable. As of today,
Speaker 3: it costs two hundred billion per year. On this occasion,
Speaker 3: the US has sent us twenty three MS thirteen members
Speaker 3: wanted by Salvadory Injustice, including two ring leaders. One of
Speaker 3: them is a member of the criminal organization's highest structure.
Speaker 3: This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after
Speaker 3: the last remnants of MS thirty, including its former and
Speaker 3: new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors. As always,
Speaker 3: you continue advancing in a fight against organized crime, but
Speaker 3: this time we're also helping our allies, making our prisonessest
Speaker 3: them selves sustainable and obtaining vital intelligence to make our
Speaker 3: country an even safer place. All in a single action.
Speaker 3: They God blessed Sarbador, and may God bless the United States.
Speaker 3: I should probably just add that the US sent three
Speaker 3: million dollars to pay for these six million dollars I'm
Speaker 3: sorry to pay for the three hundred prisoners that intended
Speaker 3: to send.
Speaker 4: The Zero Idleness program is like one of the most
Speaker 4: sinister things I've read recently.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you could put out of a George
Speaker 3: Orwell or like a old Huxley or something right, and
Speaker 3: it wouldn't sound out of.
Speaker 4: It's even like you know, it's almost cliche now to
Speaker 4: point like German work camps.
Speaker 3: But like yeah, I mean come on, yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 3: we're doing it again.
Speaker 4: So yeah, we'll probably play a clip of the music
Speaker 4: and then I'm going to skip around on the video.
Speaker 4: You can just talk about what we're seeing here. It's first,
Speaker 4: we have a shot of an airport with three different
Speaker 4: planes and people getting rounded up and pushed on in
Speaker 4: single file. It has like this like action movie type
Speaker 4: music lines of soldiers.
Speaker 3: So as as the.
Speaker 4: People getting loaded on the plane, they're getting like forced
Speaker 4: forced down. There's like people with like guns, police military
Speaker 4: like manhandling people pushing their heads down, physically removing clothing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're showing their tattoos there, right, that's what they're
Speaker 3: pulling up his shirt. Yeah.
Speaker 4: But like even the way that they just like walk
Speaker 4: around with these people like like like forcing their heads
Speaker 4: almost to like their concrete as they make them shuffle
Speaker 4: on the ground, like basic dehumanization. Shows them getting transported
Speaker 4: onto buses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they said they're arriving at SECOD now sort
Speaker 3: of bright white, very sterile facility. Now they're being forced
Speaker 3: onto their knees, yeah, and shaved.
Speaker 4: Getting their beards shaved, heads shaved, getting shackled, all while
Speaker 4: being forced onto their knees on the ground.
Speaker 3: Then the cops doing this are all wearing I guess balaklavas.
Speaker 3: I would describe them as face masks and hats.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all of all of the military police officials are
Speaker 4: trying to hide their identity as they you know, publicly
Speaker 4: display the actions that they're doing, as when they're you know,
Speaker 4: shaving and holding people's heads up for the camera.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So it it's it's a lot of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: You see.
Speaker 4: You see them like pushing some pushing people all in
Speaker 4: matching white clothes in single file into cells.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is the cell. So we spoke about before.
Speaker 3: We will include this link in the in the sources.
Speaker 4: It's basically just three minutes of torture porn. Like that's like,
Speaker 4: that's what that's what they're doing.
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, it's it's it's pretty bleak, honestly, Like, I.
Speaker 4: Don't know what else to say about it, besides like
Speaker 4: it's it's just it's just like channeling pure evil, Like
Speaker 4: I like, it's it's I there's nothing else to say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's I mean, that's I don't know how anyone
Speaker 3: can watch that and think good. So we should talk
Speaker 3: about how they're identifying these people, and we should talk
Speaker 3: about the process by which they were sent there. ICE
Speaker 3: policy says a person could be deemed a gang member
Speaker 3: if they office a note to quote gang membership identification criteria.
Speaker 3: One of the criteria that they seem to be using
Speaker 3: in this instance is their tattoos. So there are some
Speaker 3: gangs that have a process of tattooing to enter the gang.
Speaker 3: Right MS thirteen Mara Salvastructure, it's what they're mess stands
Speaker 3: for being one of them. These like Mara Central American
Speaker 3: gangs have tended to use that in the past. This
Speaker 3: isn't really something that happens with Trend de Ragua as
Speaker 3: far as I'm aware of. Some people they've pointed to
Speaker 3: tattoos of trains in a document they get found from
Speaker 3: the Texas Department of Public Safety. They're pointing to stars
Speaker 3: as evidence that people were part of Trend de Ragua.
Speaker 3: So I remember where Trend de Dragua does not have
Speaker 3: a policy of tattooing people specifically, because this is a
Speaker 3: thing that has been used by law enforcement to identify members,
Speaker 3: right like, it would be silly to keep doing that
Speaker 3: once once it's become so clear that the state uses that.
Speaker 3: So the one sort of case that I've seen legal
Speaker 3: documents on of these people, the one name we have
Speaker 3: one of these people who's been sent is a man
Speaker 3: named Hersirees Barrios.
Speaker 5: He was a.
Speaker 3: Footballer professional football in Venezuela who protested against my daughter regime,
Speaker 3: was tortured and detained a result I've spoken to. Probably
Speaker 3: I would imagine thousands of Venezuela and migrants. Right again,
Speaker 3: I would like you to listen to my series on
Speaker 3: Italian Gap if you haven't put a lot into it.
Speaker 3: All of these people have stories of watching people be shot,
Speaker 3: the brutal repression of protest, state violence, economic collapse, persecution
Speaker 3: for supporting the opposition in the country, right, and this
Speaker 3: is one of those stories. The criteria that they used
Speaker 3: to identify him were a tattoo which had a football
Speaker 3: with a crown over the top and then the word
Speaker 3: Dios God in English underneath. Rais Barrios' lawyer says that
Speaker 3: this is an homage the logo of Reel Madrid, his
Speaker 3: favorite football club. They have claimed that his evidence of
Speaker 3: gang membership. That's what the government is claiming here. The
Speaker 3: other criteria that they used is a picture of him
Speaker 3: throwing up the horns. I guess which I believe it
Speaker 3: means I love you in sign language, I'm not sure
Speaker 3: if I think an urban legend or of that's the case,
Speaker 3: and there are obviously different languages. But this is a
Speaker 3: hand gesture. It's especially common in the Spanish speaking world.
Speaker 3: If you're not familiar, I have my little finger and
Speaker 3: my index finger extended and my two other fingers curled
Speaker 3: up as if I was making it fist.
Speaker 4: Almost like almost like a spider man hand symbol.
Speaker 3: I guess sure, I'm not familiar, but if you say
Speaker 3: so to visually reference for people, if you are making
Speaker 3: a little cow like a bulk with your hands, sure
Speaker 3: you would be doing your shadow puppeting.
Speaker 5: It's very common. Like, yes, it's a very typical hands.
Speaker 3: It's a thing that people do when they're taking photos,
Speaker 3: like I've even seen it, like when you know, if
Speaker 3: there's if I'm working with a photographer and they're snapping
Speaker 3: photos of larger groups of people, people just do it,
Speaker 3: like just like people do the peace sign. You know,
Speaker 3: it's a thing to do with your hands. Those are
Speaker 3: two criteria they use. So I should point out that
Speaker 3: none of these people have been accused or convicted of
Speaker 3: a crime, either in the United States or in El Salvador. Right.
Speaker 3: Even if they had been accused of a crime, even
Speaker 3: convicted of the crime, the United States is very unclear
Speaker 3: what legal basis they would be to then detain them
Speaker 3: in Thel Salvador, right, Like the United States doesn't have
Speaker 3: a system whereby we can send people to penal colonies.
Speaker 3: At the time of writing, this has been challenged in court. Right,
Speaker 3: a district court judge attempted to block the A district
Speaker 3: court judge did block these removals. Now he actually blocked
Speaker 3: them before the people had arrived in El Salvador. However,
Speaker 3: despite this, the planes didn't turn around. And I'm just
Speaker 3: going to quote directly from what the judge said here
Speaker 3: quote any plane containing these folks and it's going to
Speaker 3: take off or is in the air, needs to be
Speaker 3: returned to the United States. And then it's another quote later.
Speaker 3: This is something you need to make sure he is
Speaker 3: complied with immediately. This didn't happen, right. The planes went
Speaker 3: from the US torn d Salvador. They didn't stop even
Speaker 3: when the judge had given its order for them to stop. Now,
Speaker 3: normally in illegal proceeding such as this, right that the
Speaker 3: government or one of the parties may not agree with
Speaker 3: the findings of the judge, and they may choose to
Speaker 3: appeal it right, that's very normal. You still comply with
Speaker 3: the order, then appeal it right. You don't just keep
Speaker 3: doing whatever you feel like doing because you don't think
Speaker 3: the judge was right. Like, that's in theory, not how
Speaker 3: this works. Now in practice, what means does a judge
Speaker 3: have to force the executive to listen to him?
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 3: We're not seeing any of them on display at the minute.
Speaker 3: The government has cited various reasons for ignoring the ruling.
Speaker 3: One of them, Press Secureary Caroline leave It claimed that
Speaker 3: there was quote no lawful basis for the ruling. Go
Speaker 3: back to my previous statement about how you're supposed to
Speaker 3: appeal things. They also claimed in court that a verbal
Speaker 3: order is not the same as a written one. That's
Speaker 3: not something that's generally understood to be the case, and
Speaker 3: that because the flights were over international water, the order
Speaker 3: did not apply. This was then part of the foreign
Speaker 3: policy powers reserved to the president. That last one is
Speaker 3: particularly worrying. It's you effectively don't have your rights in
Speaker 3: international waters role like humans don't have rights in international waters.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just allowing the US government or the EUSt
Speaker 4: government trying to say that it's allowed to do whatever
Speaker 4: it wants if the action is being taken or not,
Speaker 4: like immediately on US soil or other foreign soil.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So we're going to take another break, and when we
Speaker 3: come back, we will talk about their response to this
Speaker 3: judges ruling.
Speaker 5: All right, and we are back.
Speaker 3: So Tramp's response to this Judge Boseberg's ruling was I'm
Speaker 3: just going to read this is a true social post
Speaker 3: aka a truth quote. This radical left nudatic of a judge,
Speaker 3: a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barak Hussein.
Speaker 3: Obama was not elected President.
Speaker 2: M Dash.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to say when it's capitalized, just to
Speaker 3: understand that it's sporadically capitalized in the fashion that Trump
Speaker 3: likes to do. He didn't win the popular vote parentheses
Speaker 3: by a lot exclamation mark comma. He didn't win all
Speaker 3: seven swing states. He didn't win two seven hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty to five and twenty five counties. He didn't win anything.
Speaker 3: I won for many reasons in an overwhelming mandate, but
Speaker 3: fightaling illegal immigration may have been the number one reason
Speaker 3: for this historic victory and just doing what the voters
Speaker 3: wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the
Speaker 3: crooked judges I'm forced to appear before, should be impeached.
Speaker 3: We don't want vicious, violent and tormented criminals, many of
Speaker 3: them deranged murderers, in our country. Make America great again,
Speaker 3: Tom Homan. The borders are also told Fox News quote,
Speaker 3: I don't care what the judges think.
Speaker 6: We made a promise to American people. The President Trump
Speaker 6: has made a promise to American people we're going to
Speaker 6: make this country say again, I wake up every morning
Speaker 6: loving my job because I work for the greatest president
Speaker 6: in the history of my life, and we're going to
Speaker 6: make this country safe again. I'm probably be a part
Speaker 6: of this administration. We're not stopping. I don't care what
Speaker 6: the judges think. I don't care the left. Thanks, we're
Speaker 6: coming too.
Speaker 7: I just love seeing you going through these protests. Is
Speaker 7: just crunching on the apple as they're liberal tears just
Speaker 7: just fle out the hallway. Tom Holman, thanks so much
Speaker 7: for joining the program.
Speaker 3: You gotta think this is open defiance of the courts, right, Like,
Speaker 3: I don't really know.
Speaker 4: It's what we've been talking about the past month on
Speaker 4: executive disorder. How we are just continually like ramping up
Speaker 4: this clash between the executive branch and the judicial branch.
Speaker 4: The congressional branch has already basically given up all of
Speaker 4: their power, and yeah, this is like an actual constitutional crisis. Yeah,
Speaker 4: very few people are taking this as seriously as what
Speaker 4: it should be, and even the courts seem a little
Speaker 4: bit tepid to like actually enforce their own power or
Speaker 4: like try to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean Boseberg mentioned contempt once from what I
Speaker 3: can find on PACER. But like, obviously these judges I
Speaker 3: think are somewhat concerned that if they, you know, they
Speaker 3: find the government in contempt to court, then what happens
Speaker 3: because if you, like, yeah, if you play your Trump
Speaker 3: card and no one cares, then you have no carves
Speaker 3: left to play.
Speaker 4: It's it's kind of odd how the judges themselves are
Speaker 4: seemingly afraid of like pushing this constitutional crisis into a
Speaker 4: explicit territory right to be like what if we do
Speaker 4: the thing that then makes it clear to everyone else
Speaker 4: like we have no power, like like we actually have
Speaker 4: like like it is just authoritarianism via the executive branch. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's almost like they're trying to like backpedal from this
Speaker 4: like very obvious accelerationist push of like, no, we need
Speaker 4: to actually test test this out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because we need to know where we're at.
Speaker 4: Like, and they're scared too, because they're scared what if
Speaker 4: what if that testing causes like the Trump side to win?
Speaker 3: Yeah, but they were already winning in the in the
Speaker 3: absence exactly.
Speaker 4: And the problem is that in absence of that, you
Speaker 4: were just giving up and letting Trump win.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like after Trump called.
Speaker 4: To impeach the quote unquote radical leftist lunatic of a
Speaker 4: judge who tried to temporarily halt the deportation of of
Speaker 4: these three hundred Venezuelan immigrants. Chief Justice John Roberts made
Speaker 4: a rare public statement rebuking calls to impeach judges for
Speaker 4: rulings that don't align with political agendas. And that's as
Speaker 4: far as they're going right now. They're making rare public
Speaker 4: statements saying you probably shouldn't call to impeach a judge. Meanwhile,
Speaker 4: Musk complaints on Twitter dot com about a quote unquote
Speaker 4: judicial coup, and it mistakenly calls for sixty senators to
Speaker 4: impeach a leftist to judges. Now, of course, the Senate
Speaker 4: does not do impeachments. The House does, and the Senate
Speaker 4: requires sixty seven votes to convict it and remove someone
Speaker 4: from office once impeached. So, haha, we got you, We
Speaker 4: got you, Elon, you made a mistake, We win, not coing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's where we're at right now with this case.
Speaker 3: We're recording this. On Thursday, Boseberg gave them twenty four
Speaker 3: our extension to provide details about the flights. The government
Speaker 3: has suggested that it might claim that these are state secrets,
Speaker 3: despite the fact that it has widely publicized these flights,
Speaker 3: including in the video that we discussed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're turning these into fucking like tiktoking Instagram real
Speaker 4: hype videos.
Speaker 5: They're not state secrets publicly.
Speaker 4: You're publicly displaying these to show that these people are
Speaker 4: not human. Yeah, like you're trying to scare everyone into saying,
Speaker 4: we decide if you are a person or not, and
Speaker 4: if you're not a person, this is what we can do.
Speaker 3: This, we can do whatever we want to. Yeah, it
Speaker 3: should be noted as well. There is actually a process
Speaker 3: in US law, through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court for
Speaker 3: the expedited removal of terrorist suspects without revealing classified information publicly.
Speaker 3: In fact, Bosberg was chief judge on that.
Speaker 5: Court for five years.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: But we are not using that process where were using
Speaker 3: their Alien Enemies Acted today. So yeah, this is a
Speaker 3: new exciting territory. In On Monday, so that's the day
Speaker 3: that you're hearing this, a panel of judges from the
Speaker 3: District Court in DC will hear an appeal by the
Speaker 3: United States Government against Bozberg's attentive restraining order, the one
Speaker 3: that it didn't obey anyway, So we will have more
Speaker 3: on this, and we will keep updating you on this,
Speaker 3: and suffice it to say that I guess again this
Speaker 3: is a constitutional crisis. Like this is what it looks like.
Speaker 3: I don't know if people expect like fireworks to go
Speaker 3: off or like some confetti to drop and it to
Speaker 3: be like the separation of powers is gone, but if
Speaker 3: the government can ignore the courts, and that is what
Speaker 3: is happening. So I guess we will see in the meantime.
Speaker 3: These people, many of whom one of them was a musician,
Speaker 3: one of them was a football player, right Like, I've
Speaker 3: interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of fens word of migrants,
Speaker 3: and most of them, it will shock you to hear,
Speaker 3: are just people who don't want to live with the
Speaker 3: state on the neck, people who want to make a
Speaker 3: decent living for their their families. For what it's worth.
Speaker 3: None of the Venezuelan migrants are met in the Dadian
Speaker 3: Gap or in the United States or have come to
Speaker 3: United States or my knowledge, just for people who are
Speaker 3: like wondering how those stories kind of resolve, they resolve
Speaker 3: with people currently stuck in Mexico in pretty terrible conditions,
Speaker 3: either working for very little or unable to work at all,
Speaker 3: and trying to work out what to do. It's pretty
Speaker 3: bleak for them, it's pretty bleak for us to if
Speaker 3: this is the duration that things are going. I don't
Speaker 3: ever have much more to say.
Speaker 4: No, I don't know what else there is to say
Speaker 4: about them, just bypassing the courts to do a complete
Speaker 4: authoritarian overgrab so that they can send hundreds of people
Speaker 4: to essentially like a labor camp black site in a
Speaker 4: different country for an unknown period of time without any
Speaker 4: legal process.
Speaker 3: Gets to be clear, not all of these people even
Speaker 3: entered the United States between ports of entry, which has
Speaker 3: been charged as a misdemeanor generally isn't charged. Some of
Speaker 3: them came with the CBP one the fucking app the
Speaker 3: thing you're supposed to do.
Speaker 5: These are not proven criminals like these.
Speaker 4: These these are just people, some of whom who immigrated
Speaker 4: legally and have been detained by ICE. I don't now
Speaker 4: shipped off to a like torture labor prison in a
Speaker 4: different country where they're going to stay for at least
Speaker 4: a year in parenthesis renewable, so like in depth ary,
Speaker 4: Like it's like.
Speaker 3: They can be forced to labor for the rest of
Speaker 3: their lives, a thing that has happened before in human history.
Speaker 4: No, Like, if you're like history understanders should look at
Speaker 4: what's happening and be like, oh, we're doing that again, huh.
Speaker 4: And the only way that this ends is with people
Speaker 4: getting angry enough to start doing something about it. And
Speaker 4: I feel like we are we're so like everyone's become
Speaker 4: so complacent that it's even hard to get people to
Speaker 4: care or like hear about this sort of thing from happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you don't have to be like, I want
Speaker 3: to phrase this in radical terms that you don't have
Speaker 3: to be like anywhere on the left to understand that, like,
Speaker 3: this is an assault on basic human rights. It's a
Speaker 3: sort on the foundational principles of the United States government.
Speaker 3: And everyone should be concerned about this. You shouldn't be
Speaker 3: a left right issue. This should be like a right
Speaker 3: wrong issue. So hopefully you can all have some talks
Speaker 3: with your family this week. I don't know, like, I
Speaker 3: think it's really important to push back on the idea
Speaker 3: that these people have done any crimes, because they have not,
Speaker 3: that they have been convicted or found using any reasonable
Speaker 3: degree of evidence to be members of gangs like trend
Speaker 3: de Ragua.
Speaker 4: And even if they have been convicted, they should not
Speaker 4: be sent to the Al Salvador Order labor camp. But
Speaker 4: the fact that they're not even convicted, these are just
Speaker 4: random in some cases, like random Venezuelan men who have
Speaker 4: been rounded up.
Speaker 3: For the crime of having tattoos. For the most part, horrifying.
Speaker 3: It is petrifying.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's happening like it.
Speaker 3: Is happening here.
Speaker 4: Every every day, We're getting closer to the Cool Zone
Speaker 4: as more and more people start taking this situation seriously.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, yeah, take it seriously, you know, advocate for
Speaker 3: these people. Best of luck, And if you want to
Speaker 3: email us, you can do Cool Zone tips at proton
Speaker 3: don't me that's an encrypted email address, but it's only
Speaker 3: encrypted end to end. If you also send from an
Speaker 3: encrypted email address, do your due diligence, and yeah, send us,
Speaker 3: send us tips if you have tips, ideas, if you
Speaker 3: have ideas, and we will be back tomorrow with more
Speaker 3: things that are happening here.
Speaker 5: Welcome to could Happened Here? A podcast about bad things.
Speaker 5: Usually I don't know. This is mostly a bad Things episode.
Speaker 5: I am your host, Miya Wong, And one of the
Speaker 5: kind of things we've emphasized on the show a lot
Speaker 5: is that a lot of the structure of the kind
Speaker 5: of open fascism that we're seeing now is stuff that
Speaker 5: was put in place under liberal administrations and it's practices
Speaker 5: that are carried out by Democrats. And one of the
Speaker 5: biggest ones of those and this is something that I
Speaker 5: think you can trace the violence here and you can
Speaker 5: trace the politics that it inspired directly to how we
Speaker 5: got to Trump being in power is the just continuous
Speaker 5: crisis in the US of governments doing sweeps of encampments
Speaker 5: of unhoused people. And to talk about really one of
Speaker 5: the most horrifying things that happens regularly in a country
Speaker 5: of just unhinged and hideous horror is Emma, who does
Speaker 5: advocacy work for on house and disabled people and Alameda County,
Speaker 5: and Satya, who does support drink sweeps in Oakland when yeah,
Speaker 5: this fucking got hintshit happens. So both of you two,
Speaker 5: welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you appreciate the chance
Speaker 1: to talk with you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I always want to say that I'm excited and
Speaker 5: like it is true. However, I wish I ran a
Speaker 5: podcast that was about like good things, so that why
Speaker 5: I could talk to people. It wasn't like, it wasn't
Speaker 5: me being like, yeah, I'm excited to talk about like
Speaker 5: the worst thing that happened. So I think a place
Speaker 5: to start on this is when we talk about what
Speaker 5: a sweep actually is on a physical level of what happens,
Speaker 5: because I think people really don't have a sense of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think stopped ya. Maybe you want to
Speaker 1: take this one.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm happy to take this one. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 8: I feel like, first of all, before I even go
Speaker 8: into it, yes, I think a lot of people who
Speaker 8: have never experienced a sweep or don't have loved ones
Speaker 8: who have been swept. I think a lot of people
Speaker 8: have no idea what a sweep actually can, even if
Speaker 8: in a general sense they feel that it's a bad
Speaker 8: thing or a wrong thing. And I think part of
Speaker 8: that is deliberate. Sweeps usually happen during business hours, during
Speaker 8: nine to five hours, because at least in Oakland, they're
Speaker 8: conducted by the Department of Public Works. They're city employees,
Speaker 8: they work nine to five, so accept in cases where
Speaker 8: they work over time, or when the city uses loopholes
Speaker 8: to get around posting notice and ends up doing a
Speaker 8: sweep on the weekend. They're usually happening when a lot
Speaker 8: of middle class housed folks are at work and not
Speaker 8: out and about seeing what's going on. So a sweep,
Speaker 8: and I'm primarily talking in the context of Oakland, California,
Speaker 8: but I think it's safe to assume that these operate
Speaker 8: in similar ways around the country. Generally, what will happen
Speaker 8: is you, let's say you're living in an encampment, a
Speaker 8: sweep has been posted in Oakland. There is policy that
Speaker 8: states that you're supposed to have received at least a
Speaker 8: week's notice. However, a lot of people don't receive this notice,
Speaker 8: might not even know that it's happening. You might wake
Speaker 8: up at around nine am to a bunch of heavy
Speaker 8: machinery pulling up dump truck, small bulldozers, other types of
Speaker 8: sort of like heavy equipment. And then you'll have somebody
Speaker 8: from the city administration, like a city administrator's assistant, going
Speaker 8: around announcing that the city of Oakland is there, you know,
Speaker 8: making noise that your tent or your car or wherever
Speaker 8: you're staying, saying hey, this encampment is being closed down.
Speaker 3: You have to be out of here.
Speaker 8: There usually are representatives of the city's contracted outreach organization
Speaker 8: called Operation Dignity. They're supposed to be there. Very rarely
Speaker 8: do they actually have referral for somewhere to go. They'll
Speaker 8: basically just be like, hey, do you want services. They
Speaker 8: won't usually specify what the services are. They'll just show
Speaker 8: up and be like, hey, do you want services. If
Speaker 8: you say yes or have questions about what services are available,
Speaker 8: they may give you a sort of very vague rundown
Speaker 8: of whatever might be available that because they don't usually
Speaker 8: even find out what openings are available until ten am
Speaker 8: on any given day, so at the time that they
Speaker 8: roll up, they usually don't even know what's available yet.
Speaker 8: So it kind of progresses from there. I mean, every
Speaker 8: sweep is a little different, but the commonality between all
Speaker 8: of them is that what the city is there to
Speaker 8: do is essentially to erase all signed that anybody ever
Speaker 8: lived there. So either you are able to pack as
Speaker 8: much stuff as you can and get it out of
Speaker 8: the eviction zone before the city decides that it's your
Speaker 8: turn to be targeted, or all of your stuff ends
Speaker 8: up in the back of a dump truck. There are
Speaker 8: other sort of specific pieces of policy and operational things
Speaker 8: that can vary from time to time, like, for example,
Speaker 8: they're supposed to follow a bag and tag policy, which
Speaker 8: means that they're expected to store up to a cubic
Speaker 8: yard of somebody's belongings for ninety days at a storage
Speaker 8: location in East Oakland. They rarely do this unless hounded
Speaker 8: to do so, and most of the time, the actual
Speaker 8: process as of going back and reclaiming your belongings from
Speaker 8: that location has enough barriers that almost nobody ever manages
Speaker 8: to do it.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So, so to just make this clear, the thing
Speaker 5: that they're doing is they show up and then they
Speaker 5: fucking deshoil your property, yep. Like the thing that it
Speaker 5: most closely resembles is like we're doing our own miniature
Speaker 5: ethnic cleansings. Like that's just like what that is.
Speaker 1: Ye, Yes, And every suite there are at least several
Speaker 1: police you know, depending on the size of the sweep,
Speaker 1: that can be even more. And so there is a
Speaker 1: very real threat of police violence like underlying every single
Speaker 1: encampment suite. And so the SUITEP that Oakland this week
Speaker 1: practices that Oakland has set up are like very kind
Speaker 1: of odd, and they are associated with different like lawsuits
Speaker 1: that have occurred in the past couple of actually since
Speaker 1: the seventies. But so there are certain requirements that the
Speaker 1: City of Oakland is obligated to follow in like certain
Speaker 1: provisions and offers that like homeless people are technically supposed
Speaker 1: to be receiving and for a bunch of complicated reasons,
Speaker 1: like rarely ever are so for instance, like the bag
Speaker 1: and tag policy that Satya was just discussing, Like da've
Speaker 1: recently somebody did a pra request to see whether or
Speaker 1: not to say he was actually following faithfully following that policy.
Speaker 1: And I think in like over a year there were
Speaker 1: I believe eight bagging tags that were registered in the
Speaker 1: city system. And that was in that same period there
Speaker 1: were like well over one hundred sweeps you know, I
Speaker 1: don't have the exact number on me, but or yeah,
Speaker 1: actually five hundred and thirty seven closure two instances of
Speaker 1: storing property. So you know that's people's their whole lives.
Speaker 1: All their possessions like precious items that they they're able
Speaker 1: to hang on to are just yeah, destroyed and they
Speaker 1: never see them again.
Speaker 8: And I would also add to the piece around like
Speaker 8: the quote like offer of services, Like that's also something
Speaker 8: written into their policy that they're supposed to be connecting
Speaker 8: people to housing ahead of sweeps, and that's what they
Speaker 8: use to continually justify the way that they operate. Is
Speaker 8: that in for example, city council meetings and Homelessness Commission
Speaker 8: meetings where city admin is questioned on their procedures because
Speaker 8: they get complaints, like the Homeless Commission gets complaints constantly
Speaker 8: of people being mistreated, losing all their belongings, never getting
Speaker 8: referred to housing, and so forth. And the justification that's
Speaker 8: constantly used is like, well, we're offering people service, says
Speaker 8: every time, and they just refuse them. And I think
Speaker 8: that that is pretty much the number one mythology that
Speaker 8: is continuing to spur a lot of the like pro
Speaker 8: sweep discourse in Oakland specifically, and I'm sure in other
Speaker 8: parts of the country as well, and people are not
Speaker 8: like to be clear, most of the time, people are
Speaker 8: not actually being offered services. It's just not happening.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is a national discourse, he shares alt. I mean,
Speaker 5: you know, I think a lot of it kind of
Speaker 5: is concentrated in the most unhinged like tech sectors in
Speaker 5: the Bay. But like you hear like officially Elon Musk
Speaker 5: has talked about like, oh, there's there's like a homeless
Speaker 5: industrial complex and like all of these people are just
Speaker 5: like they want to live on the street, and like
Speaker 5: they're like turning down houses all the time, and it's
Speaker 5: just like it's so it's so completely unmored from reality.
Speaker 8: But what's funny is I've actually used the term homeless
Speaker 8: industrial complex myself. I didn't know that that's hilarious. There
Speaker 8: is a homeless industry, it's just that the people making
Speaker 8: money off of it are the people who are perpetrating
Speaker 8: those sweeps. The reason that they're not actually putting forth
Speaker 8: real solutions that will get people into safe shelter and
Speaker 8: housing is because they're the ones benefiting from the perpetuation
Speaker 8: of these economic conditions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's so many things that I want to pick
Speaker 1: up on, but I guess just on that point specifically, Like,
Speaker 1: there was an audit into California spending on homelessness. I
Speaker 1: believe it was over a period of seven years, and
Speaker 1: it showed that there was twenty four billion dollars spent
Speaker 1: on grants to nonprofits or cities to provide people with
Speaker 1: different services that are kind of designed around homelessness and
Speaker 1: providing housing or legal services. Like there's a whole range
Speaker 1: of things that's out there, but a lot of the
Speaker 1: time like these are the only options that are available
Speaker 1: to people, and they tend to produce less than stell
Speaker 1: the results. So, out of the twenty four billion dollars
Speaker 1: that was allocated to help homeless people in that same
Speaker 1: period of time, homelessness in California just like skyrocketed, right,
Speaker 1: So rates of homelessness increased while this money was getting
Speaker 1: plumped into the pockets of the bank accounts of landlords
Speaker 1: and developers. It is an issue that people on every
Speaker 1: side of the political compass like they like to use
Speaker 1: this point to their own ends, right, So Elon Musk
Speaker 1: talks about it, and like people on the left will
Speaker 1: talk about it. But I think like the experience that
Speaker 1: people on the street have is very different than any
Speaker 1: of these narratives that you tend to hear in the media.
Speaker 5: Yes, unfortunately, we need to take an ad break. I
Speaker 5: don't have a good transition here. I don't know, We'll
Speaker 5: move of one set of horrors to a slightly different
Speaker 5: set of horrors and go back to the first set
Speaker 5: of horrors.
Speaker 1: All of this money is being dedicated to these programs,
Speaker 1: and homelessness is only rising. I think, like one thing
Speaker 1: that I've heard before that's a kind of useful way
Speaker 1: to think about this kind of government spending is if
Speaker 1: homeless people would be better off if you just gave
Speaker 1: them the money directly, you know, then that kind of way,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to justify these programs when that can't
Speaker 1: be said of them, you know.
Speaker 8: And I think the thing that you pointed out, Emma,
Speaker 8: about the fact that we have huge amounts of money
Speaker 8: allegedly being spent on my homelessness abatement or homeless services
Speaker 8: at the same time that homelessness is skyrocketing is really
Speaker 8: not an accident, because what that money is really being
Speaker 8: spent on is to fuel exactly what is it, like,
Speaker 8: the homeless industrial complex. There's a reason that most of
Speaker 8: that money is going into the pockets of landlords and
Speaker 8: developers and then sort of like these sort of large
Speaker 8: like nonprofit almost like conglomerates of like service providers. And
Speaker 8: it's because the primary point of homelessness services as it
Speaker 8: exists in this country is not to get homeless people
Speaker 8: into housing. It's to line the pockets of the people
Speaker 8: that are making the most money off of the real
Speaker 8: estate market anyway. And so because of that, it is
Speaker 8: not an accident that you see homeless spending and homelessness
Speaker 8: like escalating at the same time. It's because this is
Speaker 8: the feedback loop, Like, this is the way that our
Speaker 8: you know, economic priorities in this country are structured, are
Speaker 8: such that those two things are going to feed into
Speaker 8: each other because that money doesn't actually exist to serve
Speaker 8: the populations that they say that they're using it to serve.
Speaker 8: What they do get to do is by claiming that
Speaker 8: that money is going into homelessness abatement, when clearly it isn't.
Speaker 8: They then get to spend a narrative where they say, oh,
Speaker 8: we've spent all this money, but the problem is just
Speaker 8: getting worse. That must mean that it is the fault
Speaker 8: of unhoused people and that they're choosing this because clearly
Speaker 8: the services must exist to get them off the street.
Speaker 8: In reality, that's not the case at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think also it's super important for people to
Speaker 1: understand that these programs, housing programs, shelter programs, they are
Speaker 1: out there but they are decoupled from the sweep operations
Speaker 1: that are occurring. Right So, the City of Oakland, they
Speaker 1: are contracted with a nonprofit softia mentioned earlier called Operation Dignity,
Speaker 1: and they are required to check in with its different
Speaker 1: encampments that are scheduled to be closed at least a
Speaker 1: week before the suite and the purpose of that is
Speaker 1: to notify people that it's happening. The City of Oakland
Speaker 1: is required for the terms of this lawsuit back in
Speaker 1: I believe twenty nineteen, the Moralees lawsuit, and there was
Speaker 1: a settlement that resulted in the city being required to
Speaker 1: provide clear notices whenever they're going to close like a site.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this nonprofit providers was to like notify people
Speaker 1: and try to get them connected with services. However, the
Speaker 1: services for the most part, like housing for people who
Speaker 1: are unhoused, is largely funded through the federal government and
Speaker 1: through this very like complex and inaccessible system called coordinated entry.
Speaker 1: The coordinated Entry system is not something that the City
Speaker 1: of Oakland or Operation Dignity like that is not something
Speaker 1: that they're providing people with during the sweep. So when
Speaker 1: the City of Oakland, like for instance, and one of
Speaker 1: the Commissions on Homelessness meetings, the city administrator Harold Duffy.
Speaker 1: He presented actually in response to a question about somebody's
Speaker 1: wheelchair being destroyed by public works. Yeah, he gave this
Speaker 1: really like roundabout deflecting answer where he said basically that
Speaker 1: everyone who is at an encampment at the time of
Speaker 1: the sweep has like expressly refused services like shelter or
Speaker 1: housing or whatever, and that they kind of presumes that
Speaker 1: the city actually has opportunities that they can provide people with,
Speaker 1: which is just not the case. The Coordinated Entry System,
Speaker 1: it is a program that is first of all, like
Speaker 1: only people who are disabled can get what's called permanent
Speaker 1: supportive housing through the program. But also it is in
Speaker 1: such high demand and is so inadequate to the needs
Speaker 1: that Alameda County is currently like the situation that we're
Speaker 1: in that the wait list is like thousands of people long,
Speaker 1: and it can take well over a year before someone
Speaker 1: can get housing through that system. So it's just like
Speaker 1: it's not true. They do offer people what are called
Speaker 1: community cabins, which are tough sheds.
Speaker 8: They're not even offerend people that they're full.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what they say. They offer sorry I had
Speaker 1: me to cut you off.
Speaker 8: I feel strongly about this, so I think it's also
Speaker 8: worth saying, like in terms of I feel like that's
Speaker 8: a really a really useful layout, Emma, in terms of
Speaker 8: like the way that the system is actually structured for
Speaker 8: people not to be able to access services, I feel
Speaker 8: like it's also worth pointing out that just day to
Speaker 8: day on the ground, I feel like I feel like
Speaker 8: I get to see a lot of sort of like
Speaker 8: minute details and changes in the way that they're operating
Speaker 8: in response to what they're like internal systems actually look like.
Speaker 8: And what we have seen over the last six months
Speaker 8: to a year is not only this pattern that I'm
Speaker 8: I was talking about of like they're like people are
Speaker 8: consistently not getting connected with services and then being accused
Speaker 8: of refusing services just due to the conditions that they're
Speaker 8: living under, but also everything that Oakland has and that
Speaker 8: approaches like livable transitional housing, which is kind of laughable
Speaker 8: in this case because we can also go into like
Speaker 8: the conditions of the transitional housing programs and shelters in
Speaker 8: Oakland which are abysmal, but everything that they have that
Speaker 8: approaches livable transitional housing is full.
Speaker 5: I very rarely.
Speaker 8: Every few weeks, maybe I see one or two people
Speaker 8: get referred to one of those programs, and far more
Speaker 8: often I'll be in a situation. For example, I was
Speaker 8: I was at a sweep over near twenty third and
Speaker 8: Northgate a couple of weeks ago, and I was there
Speaker 8: when Operation Dignity rolled up and I heard what they
Speaker 8: were saying when they were talking to people, and this
Speaker 8: one dude was going around talking to folks and he
Speaker 8: kind of he wasn't even approaching talking about services. He
Speaker 8: was approaching being like, Hey, I just here to let
Speaker 8: you know that this area is going to be closed down,
Speaker 8: Like there's so sweet that's going to be happening. So
Speaker 8: you guys have to be out of here. So that
Speaker 8: was what they led with. And then I prompted him
Speaker 8: because I was there chatting with one of the guys
Speaker 8: that he was talking to, so I prompted him. I
Speaker 8: was like, do you have any services to offer? And
Speaker 8: then he was like, oh, you can go over to
Speaker 8: Saint Vincent de Paul, which is congre Get shelter in
Speaker 8: West Oakland with about four and nobody is guaranteed a
Speaker 8: spot is just a room full of cots, a lot
Speaker 8: of people refuse to go there because the conditions are
Speaker 8: so terrible and they don't feel comfortable or safe sleeping
Speaker 8: in a room full of a bunch of strangers with
Speaker 8: no kind of security, no guarantee of being able to
Speaker 8: hold onto their stuff. People are only allowed to bring
Speaker 8: in like a backpack sort of stuff, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 8: And you also have to it's first come, first service.
Speaker 8: You have to line up outside every single day, and
Speaker 8: you are not guaranteed an indoor place to sleep even
Speaker 8: if you line up outside. So what we have is
Speaker 8: a situation where the availability of services varies from day
Speaker 8: to day. I cannot think of a single sweep in
Speaker 8: the last year that I have been to, and I'm
Speaker 8: at usually multiple sleeps a week where there were enough
Speaker 8: guaranteed spots available for every person being swept. So the
Speaker 8: implicit assumption at every single sweep and the Operation Dignity
Speaker 8: people know this too, like they know this, the implicit
Speaker 8: assumption when they roll up, and the assumption that colors
Speaker 8: even the tenor of all of their conversations that they're
Speaker 8: having with people, is that the majority of people are
Speaker 8: just going to have to figure out how to pack
Speaker 8: their shit up and find another.
Speaker 4: Place to camp.
Speaker 8: It's the assumption, and it's gotten to the point where,
Speaker 8: like od employees will roll up and like I said,
Speaker 8: they won't even necessarily lead with an offer of services.
Speaker 8: They'll lead almost in the hopes that the majority of
Speaker 8: people already have a place to relocate. They'll ask do
Speaker 8: you have a place to go before they offer services,
Speaker 8: or ask if people are entered as services, they'll ask
Speaker 8: like do you have another spot to move this stuff first?
Speaker 8: Because what they're hoping to do is eliminate as many
Speaker 8: people as possible from their list of people that they
Speaker 8: feel obligated to offer services too because they know they
Speaker 8: don't fucking have anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's super important to just emphasize that point.
Speaker 1: The city is telling the media, they're telling businesses, anyone
Speaker 1: that comes to them with problems related to like hopelessness
Speaker 1: or concerns, they're telling them that everyone is being offered
Speaker 1: shelter and housing and it's just not true. That is
Speaker 1: reflective in the city's own publicly available data. So they
Speaker 1: actually publish like a list of all of the encampment
Speaker 1: suites that they've they do throughout the year, and in
Speaker 1: the Commission on homelessness meetings will report back to the
Speaker 1: Commission about like service enrollments that they've done through a
Speaker 1: certain period of time, and like from May to September
Speaker 1: they had enrolled I believe it was sixty people and
Speaker 1: to services like non specified services. And during that period
Speaker 1: there was approximately eighty sweeps. And if you assume there's
Speaker 1: at least five to ten people at every encampment when
Speaker 1: they do a sweep, and usually it's more that is
Speaker 1: like nine percent four point five of people like getting
Speaker 1: enrolled into into services, and like of those, maybe a
Speaker 1: smaller traction getting into shelter. And when they get into shelter,
Speaker 1: they just languish there, right, they aren't connected with case
Speaker 1: workers who help them get through this really convoluted coordinated
Speaker 1: entry process and like lengthy coordinated entry process, and so
Speaker 1: within a few months they're just right back on the street.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just ridiculous. And unfortunately, because homeless people
Speaker 1: have very little, like I guess you could call it
Speaker 1: social capital, you know, the city can get away with
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff they do, like blatantly illegal
Speaker 1: things that are against even their own policies, and nothing happens.
Speaker 1: And I guess maybe we should back up a little
Speaker 1: bit and discuss the city's policy.
Speaker 5: It's from second at break and then we will come
Speaker 5: back more ads. I don't know by them question mark
Speaker 5: we are back. Yeah, so yeah, let's talk about I
Speaker 5: think what the city's policies are supposed to be versus
Speaker 5: like what they're actually doing on the ground.
Speaker 8: Yeah. I mean, their policy is their cover your ass technique, right.
Speaker 8: Their policy is what they refer back to whenever they
Speaker 8: want to sort of like like Emma said, if they're
Speaker 8: interfacing with businesses or house people, you know, and we
Speaker 8: have a whole range of house people calling free one one,
Speaker 8: which is basically their tip line for like go you
Speaker 8: see a homeless person that you don't want to be seen.
Speaker 8: But there's all a range of people. There's people that
Speaker 8: are actively malicious and violent, and there's literally people going
Speaker 8: out doing vigilanti shit and like destroying almost people's stuff
Speaker 8: on their own. And then you also have people that
Speaker 8: are well intentioned and really think the city is offering services.
Speaker 8: So you have this whole umbrella and the narrative that
Speaker 8: the city sells to everybody is bolstered by their policy.
Speaker 8: That's the purpose their policy services, not to inform their actions,
Speaker 8: but to inform their pr So I think it would
Speaker 8: be helpful. Emma, how do you feel about if you
Speaker 8: want to kind of give a breakdown of the city's
Speaker 8: policy and then I can kind of give a breakdown
Speaker 8: into what that translates into on the ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So this is like, it's kind of a complicated situation.
Speaker 1: But the city has what's what they call their Encampment
Speaker 1: Management policy, and it was initially passed in I believe
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, but it's gone through like several evolutions over
Speaker 1: the past ten years or so, and it is related
Speaker 1: to different Supreme in Court cases and the settlement that
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier. So this policy, it provides certain very
Speaker 1: limited protections for people who are homeless in the city limits.
Speaker 1: The city is required by this policy to offer shelter.
Speaker 1: I believe it's a week for any person who's subject
Speaker 1: to one of their encampment closures. And also we mentioned
Speaker 1: the bag intag policy. So if somebody, you know, they
Speaker 1: are evicted and they move somewhere outside with the tent,
Speaker 1: they bring all of their possessions with them, they are
Speaker 1: provided with I believe three foot by three foot like
Speaker 1: storage space. And this facility that is super inaccessible and
Speaker 1: kind of like, I don't even know if it's actually real,
Speaker 1: to be honest, because it's just like nobody ever. I've
Speaker 1: never heard of anybody actually like getting their stuff stored
Speaker 1: and getting back. But technically that is a possibility. However,
Speaker 1: the city will only hold on to it for so
Speaker 1: long before they throw it away. And then the last
Speaker 1: protection or provision is the city was until recently supposed
Speaker 1: to provide people with shelter. So a few different Supreme
Speaker 1: Court cases are behind that provision specifically, and I think
Speaker 1: a lot of cities kind of had a similar policy
Speaker 1: framework that they were following until the Grant's Pass ruling,
Speaker 1: and I guess maybe we don't need to get into
Speaker 1: that too much, but basically, the whole idea of that
Speaker 1: policy was like, if somebody is outside the thing outside
Speaker 1: and the city suites them, they have to provide them
Speaker 1: with some kind of alternative accommodation, because according to like
Speaker 1: the Ninth District Court, it was consideredly cruel and unusual
Speaker 1: punishment to penalyze somebody for being homeless without offering them
Speaker 1: some kind of temporary like accommodations, And so that was
Speaker 1: more or less the city's nominal framework for several years basically,
Speaker 1: and the degree to which they actually followed these policies,
Speaker 1: you know, they really didn't, except for in certain situations
Speaker 1: where there are like, for instance, legal advocates who will
Speaker 1: file injunctions to stop the city from doing a sweep
Speaker 1: on the basis of like failure to provide an alternative accommodation.
Speaker 1: And typically those arise when there is a very large
Speaker 1: encampment clearing operation that is scheduled and a contentious issue.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of the time, for instance, they'll
Speaker 1: be people staying on city or like California state land
Speaker 1: and the city will like force them to move because
Speaker 1: of some development project that they're planning to do. And
Speaker 1: so in those situations when the media has kind of
Speaker 1: narrowed their their focus and begun like discussing some of
Speaker 1: this stuff and the local press, then like something like
Speaker 1: that became possible. But after the Grants Past ruling this
Speaker 1: past year, the city was no longer like obligated under
Speaker 1: federal law to follow those policies, and in September of
Speaker 1: last year, the late mayor Shankal she issued an executive
Speaker 1: order that more or less like just totally rendered that
Speaker 1: policy framework irrelevant. So she put forth a new framework
Speaker 1: that allows the city to sweep encampments under a tiered
Speaker 1: system of what are called emergency suites. So if for instance,
Speaker 1: a encampment is blocking a roadway or a sidewalk, then
Speaker 1: it is a hazard to the public quote unquote, or
Speaker 1: if it's somebody has a tent that is up against
Speaker 1: a building of some sort, it's a fire hazard. And
Speaker 1: so in this tiered system, there's like different levels of
Speaker 1: safety hazards that they're doing. And basically what that looks
Speaker 1: like is like a fire marshal and the city administrator
Speaker 1: will convene after somebody calls in a complaint about somebody
Speaker 1: that's staying outside by their business. And with the fire
Speaker 1: hazard one, I believe that they can just sweep without
Speaker 1: any prior notice, whereas the other two there is some
Speaker 1: level of notice that they're technically required to provide. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so the shelter provisions and the notice and storage like it,
Speaker 1: they're technically still supposed to follow that by their own
Speaker 1: city resolution, but there is this provision that like, if
Speaker 1: for instance, they issue somebody like a no or a
Speaker 1: one hour notice to leave because of like a fire hazard,
Speaker 1: and like advocates can't make it there because they don't
Speaker 1: really know they know but knows it's happening. Then the
Speaker 1: city can just do that and not offer people anything. Right,
Speaker 1: So these policies have the effect of disempowering our ability
Speaker 1: to respond to like a scheduled operation, Then the city
Speaker 1: can really just do whatever they want because nobody's watching
Speaker 1: what they're doing.
Speaker 5: And I guess we can. I think we can take
Speaker 5: this here towards something I think probably good to start
Speaker 5: closing on, which is like, what can people actually do
Speaker 5: about this?
Speaker 8: First of all, I think listening to all of this,
Speaker 8: it can be really easy to feel disempowered and to
Speaker 8: feel like, you know, the walls are closing in and
Speaker 8: there's nothing that we can do. And that remains not
Speaker 8: the case, you know. I think people should feel empowered
Speaker 8: to be able to physically intervene, because the most effective
Speaker 8: way of physically intervening with this kind of violence is
Speaker 8: to commit to relationship building. Something that I've talked about
Speaker 8: a lot with sort of like fellow advocates and folks
Speaker 8: that are kind of involved in like sweeps response and
Speaker 8: crisis response in Oakland, is that the one thing that
Speaker 8: the city cannot take away from us, that we have
Speaker 8: an advantage over them in is relationship building. Part of
Speaker 8: the reason that, for example, the Operation Dignity employees are
Speaker 8: so inefficient and so you know, seemingly bad at their
Speaker 8: jobs is not just the fact that they don't have
Speaker 8: anything to offer, but also because everybody on the street
Speaker 8: knows they're full of shit because they never show up
Speaker 8: with anything real. And addressing house people in particular right, like,
Speaker 8: one of the things to get out of is sort
Speaker 8: of like the savior mentality or the guilt mentality of like, oh,
Speaker 8: like I don't have any housing to offer, therefore I
Speaker 8: can't do anything, Like I can't fix the problem, I
Speaker 8: can't fix the roots, so I can't do anything. In reality,
Speaker 8: all you really need to do is to learn to
Speaker 8: set that mentality aside and show up and like start
Speaker 8: meeting folks where they're at, Start meeting your neighbors where
Speaker 8: they're at, start building relationships. You need to know, like
Speaker 8: if you live in a particular neighborhood to yourself, I
Speaker 8: need to know that if any un housed person within
Speaker 8: a mile radius of my home was disappeared, I would
Speaker 8: need to I would need to know, you know what
Speaker 8: I mean, Like I would want to know if that happens.
Speaker 8: So if you go out with that understanding that you're
Speaker 8: starting to build lifelong relationships with the folks that are
Speaker 8: living outside in your neighborhood, ideally a lot of other
Speaker 8: people in your neighborhood too, you know what I mean.
Speaker 8: But like, what they're banking on is right now, while
Speaker 8: while they're still trying to use a pr cover for
Speaker 8: what they're doing, what they're banking on is people not
Speaker 8: talking to each other, people not finding out about the abuses,
Speaker 8: people not finding out about the violations, people not being there,
Speaker 8: and people not having relationships that will remain strong even
Speaker 8: as they try to physically scatter people's communities. And what
Speaker 8: you can do to start is start investing in those relationships.
Speaker 8: Make sure you know what people's names are, make sure
Speaker 8: you would know if somebody's routine was suddenly disrupted. Hey,
Speaker 8: Becky used to be on that corner, you know, every
Speaker 8: couple days of weekend. Now I never see him anymore?
Speaker 8: What happened to him? And I think you can start there,
Speaker 8: and there's much more that you can concretely do. I mean,
Speaker 8: one of the ways that I'm accustomed to showing up
Speaker 8: at this point is direct on the ground sweep's response.
Speaker 8: So we're still able to keep track currently of what
Speaker 8: their schedule is on a weekly basis more or less
Speaker 8: Like there's definitely operations we don't find out about until
Speaker 8: after the fact, but the majority of their weekday operations
Speaker 8: we do still know about ahead of time, and so
Speaker 8: we'll show up. We'll make sure we get there before
Speaker 8: the city does, so like by eight am ideally right,
Speaker 8: Like we show up, talk to people, will be like
Speaker 8: what do you need? Do you need physical help moving
Speaker 8: your belongings out of the eviction zone. Do you need
Speaker 8: to borrow somebody's phone so that you can call somebody
Speaker 8: who said they were going to come help you. Do
Speaker 8: you need help pushing or pulling your vehicle? Any number
Speaker 8: of things really, but just like being willing to show
Speaker 8: up and ask questions about necessarily knowing what answers you're
Speaker 8: going to get, and being down to follow up and
Speaker 8: like do aftercare with people and chicken on folks and
Speaker 8: like keep building those relationships. I think that those are
Speaker 8: the building blocks of the organizing that we're going to
Speaker 8: need to be doing in the future, because you know,
Speaker 8: what this he is counting on is that they're going
Speaker 8: to be able to successfully create a scapegoat. Right. They
Speaker 8: want to create like a faceless, nameless mass of people
Speaker 8: that they can pin all their problems on and then
Speaker 8: incarce rate. And the best thing that we can do
Speaker 8: is make sure that they can't successfully do that, because
Speaker 8: we all have relationships to each other.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really appreciate those sentiments. Yet, and I think
Speaker 1: like the Oakland like advocates doing like eviction defense for
Speaker 1: people who are living outside. It's grown in size and
Speaker 1: like capacity quite a bit in the past year, and
Speaker 1: like the city has noticed that, so they've actually like
Speaker 1: they've passed various resolutions and honestly, a lot of their
Speaker 1: practices and their policies, like their encampment management team, they
Speaker 1: seem to be like responding to the increasing effectiveness of
Speaker 1: this response, just like network of community defense. And so
Speaker 1: I think that like all of those things are are
Speaker 1: so important, especially as the term regime starts to eliminate
Speaker 1: the very like modest social safety net that there was.
Speaker 1: And you know, before we end this conversation, I just
Speaker 1: want to emphasize that in Oakland, like a majority of
Speaker 1: the people who are homeless and are subject to state violence.
Speaker 1: They are non white, mostly black, and are homeless in
Speaker 1: neighborhoods where they used to be housed. And so the
Speaker 1: gentrification that has happened, particularly in like West Oakland, and
Speaker 1: the like influx of high end tech workers that displaced
Speaker 1: them and moved into their family homes, they are the
Speaker 1: same people who are calling three one one to push
Speaker 1: the city to displace them again, but from a tent
Speaker 1: or a car this time. And I think it's it's
Speaker 1: just so so important that particularly like housed people try
Speaker 1: to tap into the networks of community defense that exist
Speaker 1: in their areas. I'm sure that most cities probably have
Speaker 1: something comparable to Oakland, but with the measures that we're seeing,
Speaker 1: cities begin to take, such as in Fremont, which is
Speaker 1: about thirty minutes south of Oakland, where they basically banned
Speaker 1: or criminalized mutual aid with unhoused people. So you can
Speaker 1: get one thousand dollars fine or for six months in
Speaker 1: jail for dating and a betting a homeless person. And
Speaker 1: you know, it's an extremely vague.
Speaker 8: Law, so like giving someone a blanket could fall under this,
Speaker 8: so you could be fined or put in jail for
Speaker 8: giving an unhouse personal blanket and free month currently.
Speaker 1: So it's very important that people try to be aware
Speaker 1: of their city government, how they're maybe passing anti homeless
Speaker 1: measures and they're in their cities and trying to mobilize
Speaker 1: against against that from happening.
Speaker 8: I also have one more thing to add to that.
Speaker 8: I'm so sorry, just specifically for anybody, for anybody thinking
Speaker 8: about getting involved or organizing strategically around community defense, sweep defense,
Speaker 8: whatever that looks like in your particular area, I would say,
Speaker 8: first of all, especially if you're a house person in
Speaker 8: this case, like invest valuable time into getting to know
Speaker 8: people on an interpersonal level and getting to know people's
Speaker 8: needs first, instead of falling into the trap of sort
Speaker 8: of imposing what you might have learned through like other
Speaker 8: sort of direct action organizing, because this is not that
Speaker 8: you know, like I think, yeah, first of all, just
Speaker 8: making sure that you're being you're organizing is being led
Speaker 8: by the needs of you know, homemost residents that are
Speaker 8: expressing what they need to you. But also on top
Speaker 8: of that, when it comes to this particular draconian waves
Speaker 8: of legislation that are being passed around like anti homeless
Speaker 8: laws and stuff. Don't preemptively obey, you know what I mean, Like,
Speaker 8: if you live in Fremont, don't preemptively say, oh fuck,
Speaker 8: I better stop passing out blankets. Because what we've seen
Speaker 8: in Oakland with the particular iterations of anti homeless legislation
Speaker 8: that they've passed here is that just because they've passed
Speaker 8: legislation doesn't mean that they feel confident enforcing it yet.
Speaker 8: And what you need to do really is step up
Speaker 8: real hard and show them you can't enforce this the
Speaker 8: way that you want to, and they're going to push back.
Speaker 8: There's going to be this back and forth interplay that
Speaker 8: we've seen, you know, for example in Oakland with the
Speaker 8: safe works and ordinance, which we can probably get into
Speaker 8: another time because it's way too much to get into
Speaker 8: right now, I think at this point in the episode.
Speaker 8: But it's a two way street. It's this fight that
Speaker 8: you have to play to show them just because you've
Speaker 8: passed this legislation doesn't mean you can enforce it in
Speaker 8: a particular way. You have to give them something to
Speaker 8: fight against, you know what I mean. So that's just
Speaker 8: the other piece, yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like and the rest of their policy is
Speaker 5: absolutely one hundred percent evidence that if the state doesn't
Speaker 5: want to follow the law, it isn't real. But that
Speaker 5: also means that, like, if they can't enforce a law
Speaker 5: like it also effectively ceases to exist. That's just the
Speaker 5: sort of balance of forces here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And there is a lawsuit currently against that,
Speaker 1: and it sounds like, you know, the City of Fremont
Speaker 1: is probably going to be removing that aiding in a
Speaker 1: betting clause from the resolution, but because that specific provision
Speaker 1: is actually like in the city's municipal code as a
Speaker 1: general provision provision, so you know, even if they do
Speaker 1: remove it, charges could still be brought against somebody. So like,
Speaker 1: really the entire ordinance needs to be eliminated all together.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I guess do you have anything else that you
Speaker 5: want to make sure that you get in before we
Speaker 5: close up?
Speaker 1: I don't think so, not nothing that comes to mind.
Speaker 1: But yeah, again, I super appreciate you having us on
Speaker 1: to talk about this. Yeah, you know, shit is rough
Speaker 1: right now. I think for me personally, it's been really
Speaker 1: helpful to direct my energy towards things in my social
Speaker 1: network in a way that's like constructive and helpful to others.
Speaker 1: So I would definitely suggest if you're feeling like any
Speaker 1: despair or like worried about becoming like black pilled or whatever, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: just try to tap in and focus on things that
Speaker 1: are happening in your community. It's good for you and
Speaker 1: it's good for the people in your community.
Speaker 8: Yeah, just seconding that, I think like being able to
Speaker 8: tap in specifically with like the types of unhoused organizing
Speaker 8: and underground economies that exist wherever unhoused people exist, and
Speaker 8: like being able to like tap into that and like
Speaker 8: you know, again like speaking from the perspective of a
Speaker 8: house person, like really humble yourself and learn from that.
Speaker 8: Like you're going to learn a whole lot more relevant
Speaker 8: life skills just hanging out in social settings with people
Speaker 8: in the street than you are in any other area
Speaker 8: of your life. So just go balls to the wall,
Speaker 8: just start hanging out, just like spend all your time loitering,
Speaker 8: Like just that's that's where we need to be right now.
Speaker 8: Is loitering in the street. That's where the organizing is happening.
Speaker 1: So yeah, street claim space, Oh yeah, this.
Speaker 5: Has been ni could happen here. Go loiter on street
Speaker 5: quarters and make the state's life miserable until it cannot
Speaker 5: do the things that is doing right now.
Speaker 2: Oh, welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about
Speaker 2: how it's happened here and it continues to happen here.
Speaker 2: Sorry about that, but we're not changing the name of
Speaker 2: the podcast, you know, because we're not anyway. I got
Speaker 2: Jams stout with me, I got Garrison Davis with me.
Speaker 3: Woot woot, huzzah.
Speaker 4: So the past few weeks, myself is as well as
Speaker 4: probably everyone else on this call, has been getting a
Speaker 4: lot of questions from listeners via the various social media
Speaker 4: apps that we damage ourselves by logging into on a
Speaker 4: much more than needed frequent basis. But one question that's
Speaker 4: been kind of on a lot of people's minds and
Speaker 4: something that we've been discussing as like a group, is
Speaker 4: the idea of should you flee the country?
Speaker 5: Is the party over?
Speaker 4: Do we need to use the time we have now
Speaker 4: to get out? The Trump administration is cracking down on
Speaker 4: a whole bunch of groups of already marginalized people, people
Speaker 4: with fewer resources, immigrants, people who are here for asylum,
Speaker 4: trans people, queer people in general. It's getting pretty scary
Speaker 4: out there, and the thought crosses your mind, maybe there's
Speaker 4: somewhere else that's better. And this has always been a
Speaker 4: tough question for us to kind of think about because
Speaker 4: we don't want to like inspire panic. That's not the
Speaker 4: purpose of what we do here.
Speaker 2: You should try to spread calm when times are bad
Speaker 2: if you can here.
Speaker 4: But the situation politically in the country and in many
Speaker 4: parts of the world right now is extremely fraud and
Speaker 4: it does feel how closer towards like the bad nightmare
Speaker 4: scenario than kind of I've ever thought it has before.
Speaker 4: So it's so.
Speaker 5: It's a really tough question.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think what we're going to be doing
Speaker 4: this episode is just kind of talking about this question
Speaker 4: and our thoughts around, you know, various responses to this
Speaker 4: line of thought, And I guess Robert kind of has
Speaker 4: a baseline like, kind of quasi answer that I think
Speaker 4: we can use as a jumping off point.
Speaker 2: You know, if you're someone who is being targeted, you know,
Speaker 2: or in a community of people who are being targeted,
Speaker 2: you know, you're a naturalized citizen, your hair on a
Speaker 2: green card, you're trans, you're any kind any of the
Speaker 2: many different groups of people that are being targeted right now.
Speaker 2: And you have the opportunity to leave and you think
Speaker 2: that that's the right thing for you, and you should
Speaker 2: do it. You shouldn't feel bad about it. You know,
Speaker 2: if you've got a job that is in demand in
Speaker 2: other countries and you know the process and can start
Speaker 2: the process to like get residency somewhere else and work
Speaker 2: somewhere else, and you know, make your life work that way,
Speaker 2: then I don't think you should feel bad about doing that.
Speaker 2: If that's what you decide is the right thing for you.
Speaker 2: That said, it's not, it's just simply not going to
Speaker 2: be a realistic possibility for most people. What is more
Speaker 2: realistic for a lot of people is, for example, moving
Speaker 2: from states where the risk is higher to states where
Speaker 2: maybe the risk is lower. Hard to say how long
Speaker 2: the risk will be lower, you know, but I, you know,
Speaker 2: I certainly that's more achievable for a lot of people
Speaker 2: than getting set up in a foreign country, as James
Speaker 2: will talk about, if your hope is just I'm going
Speaker 2: to try to go somewhere else like Europe or whatever
Speaker 2: as an asylum seeker. As again, James will go into
Speaker 2: more detail on life ain't easy for asylum seekers, and
Speaker 2: that's not really again, it may not be nearly as
Speaker 2: much of an option as you think that is right now,
Speaker 2: I you know, had to go through kind of my
Speaker 2: own process after the election of like, well, am I
Speaker 2: going to like, you know, get my finances in order
Speaker 2: and move to another country and basically try to like
Speaker 2: pay my way into getting a visa somewhere like in Spain,
Speaker 2: which is an option for someone like me. And I
Speaker 2: came to the conclusion that like, nah, you know, if
Speaker 2: the worst case thing happens, I'd rather like die here
Speaker 2: or whatever. It's just not worth it, you know, to
Speaker 2: try to get out. So I'm committing to trying to
Speaker 2: like hold the line here with everybody basically that I
Speaker 2: love in the world, because like what else are you
Speaker 2: going to do? You know?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I will just say that, you know, I
Speaker 3: probably have met more asylum seekers than most people, you know,
Speaker 3: and it is one of the more miserable fates available
Speaker 3: to a human. It will if large numbers of people
Speaker 3: start leaving the US, only get worse. If you're someone
Speaker 3: who's a US citizen, you have probably not experienced much
Speaker 3: in the way of like strict immigration enforcement. If you
Speaker 3: have traveled around the world, right, you have one of
Speaker 3: the more high value passports in the world. You can
Speaker 3: you can go almost anywhere with a visa or in
Speaker 3: many cases without a visa. Seeking asylum is an extremely
Speaker 3: different process. If you think you're just going to get
Speaker 3: on a flight and leave and stay somewhere, like understand
Speaker 3: that many countries will probably begin to require reciprocal visas
Speaker 3: with the United States soon if we continue our current
Speaker 3: sort of pathway with by more isolationist immigration policy, and
Speaker 3: then you'll have to get that visa. And then you know,
Speaker 3: if you overstay, you will be subject to enforcement. The
Speaker 3: sense of permanence that you enjoy here might never be
Speaker 3: something you enjoy again. And that's just if you're able
Speaker 3: to fly somewhere, and so you try and overstay a
Speaker 3: visa or you try and apply for asylum. I have
Speaker 3: people I've met in every facet of my life, Like
Speaker 3: I know guys who I met as a bike racer
Speaker 3: who have applied for asylum. Guys I met a bike
Speaker 3: racer are staying on that bus in the UK. It
Speaker 3: is it is a miserable fate. And I think that's
Speaker 3: that I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying that
Speaker 3: you need to understand that it is highly unpleasant and
Speaker 3: it's tripped you of all dignity and in some places
Speaker 3: extists people of of like their lives right, people die migrating.
Speaker 3: It's also like incredibly expensive to do the things that
Speaker 3: migrants do because that everyone is trying to make a
Speaker 3: buck off them.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: I was just talking on another podcast about how the
Speaker 3: journey that people took up through the Darien Gap who
Speaker 3: tried to come to the United States, it would have
Speaker 3: cost them way less just to fly, but they couldn't.
Speaker 3: They couldn't get the visas. Right. That doesn't mean like
Speaker 3: if you know, if you have a historical right to
Speaker 3: citizenship through various you know, certain people have rights to
Speaker 3: Spanish citizenship, or German citizenship or Irish. Irish is one
Speaker 3: that many people have access to. Yeah, why not? Why not?
Speaker 3: You know, if you have the financial resources, when not
Speaker 3: try and see where that will go? Why not begin
Speaker 3: pursuing that totally?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Sure, I think becoming a dual citizen, if you have
Speaker 4: the capability to, is a fantastic idea that I will
Speaker 4: like never dissuade someone from.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: I would go so far as to say, even if
Speaker 2: you plan to stay here. If you have the ability
Speaker 2: to get dual citizenship, you should be pursuing that right now, absolutely, Like.
Speaker 5: Is it's something that you should do.
Speaker 3: It's often not hideously expensive, and it's something that might
Speaker 3: be Yeah, you have options, and options are good.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I am very hesitant to like openly call for like
Speaker 4: now is the time to leave the country. I do
Speaker 4: not feel comfortable saying that for a number of reasons,
Speaker 4: like some of them are or more political, as in
Speaker 4: like I don't really subscribe to a politics of escape,
Speaker 4: even the idea of like fleeing states.
Speaker 5: I feel a little bit iffy about.
Speaker 4: Now. There's certainly, you know a lot of cases where
Speaker 4: families are trying to move, you know, outside states that
Speaker 4: have more restricted access to trans healthcare for minors towards
Speaker 4: more friendly states, which I totally understand.
Speaker 5: But I have greatly enjoyed getting.
Speaker 4: To know a whole bunch of trans people in the South,
Speaker 4: and a whole bunch of trans people here are not
Speaker 4: willing to leave their home. This is this is their
Speaker 4: home and it always will be and they're going to
Speaker 4: stay and fight for it even as things get you know, harder,
Speaker 4: And I don't think you should write these people off.
Speaker 4: I don't think you should write these places off. These
Speaker 4: these places are still a terrain of battle, and there
Speaker 4: are going to be places where trans people can still
Speaker 4: live and still live fulfilling lives in many cases. And
Speaker 4: that is that it's worth acknowledging, that's worth putting effort into.
Speaker 4: To the point that, like after the election, I was
Speaker 4: already considering maybe, you know, trying to travel around the
Speaker 4: country some more, And after this last election, my line
Speaker 4: of thought was way more on the side of I
Speaker 4: would actually like to spend as much time in Georgia
Speaker 4: as possible. I would actually want to stay in this
Speaker 4: South for as much as I can, because this is
Speaker 4: like not a place that I think people should be
Speaker 4: walking away from. And in some ways that does come
Speaker 4: from like a slightly privileged point of view for multiple reasons.
Speaker 4: As someone who's white and holds a Canadian passport as
Speaker 4: well as an American passport, that is, you know, something
Speaker 4: that I like to have as a back pocket option.
Speaker 4: But that's something I'm not like considering like at all,
Speaker 4: Like I do not want to move to Canada. All
Speaker 4: my friends are here, my life is here. There's certain
Speaker 4: scenarios where things get much much much worse, even though
Speaker 4: things are already getting quite bad, But there are certain
Speaker 4: scenarios where, yes, that passport will come in handy. And
Speaker 4: that's why I do encourage, like, no matter what you
Speaker 4: should you should see if you have any options to
Speaker 4: become a citizen in more than one country. It is
Speaker 4: a great thing to be. It's it's good to not
Speaker 4: be just tied down to one place. But the process
Speaker 4: of trying to to you know, immigrate somewhere where you
Speaker 4: do not have a citizenship is already quite challenging. And
Speaker 4: we will probably discuss some some more of this later
Speaker 4: because I think there's also a sort of like onion
Speaker 4: of a threat of people when you're when you're thinking
Speaker 4: of this question and like which people will will be
Speaker 4: or are currently being targeted the most, and how that
Speaker 4: kind of affects the options in terms of like relocation
Speaker 4: to places view it as like safer havens. And I
Speaker 4: like to jumpstart that onion of protection discussion. After these messages,
Speaker 4: we're back.
Speaker 2: And we're talking about onions which you need to wear
Speaker 2: around your neck to protect you from evil spirit scarce,
Speaker 2: And that's what you were getting at, right, Yes.
Speaker 3: Une move on to the next.
Speaker 4: Topic where five different onions to drive away the various
Speaker 4: secret police forces trying to hunt down individuals. Yes, speaking
Speaker 4: of I guess like the big thing I'm thinking about
Speaker 4: right now, or one of some big things, is there's
Speaker 4: different levels of scrutiny being placed on individuals currently in
Speaker 4: the United States. One you have like people who are
Speaker 4: completely undocumented, right. You have people who are who are
Speaker 4: currently here on like valid asylum claims who are about
Speaker 4: to get those rights like stripped away. I'm trying to
Speaker 4: think of like the list of refugees that were allowed
Speaker 4: under Biden that are now like like imminently going to
Speaker 4: get their stuff stripped away from the Trump administration. I
Speaker 4: know Venezuelan, Yeah, I know you run Haitian immigrants are
Speaker 4: another off God, but groups that have that have been
Speaker 4: able to come here the past few years that are
Speaker 4: going to be now seen as like quote unquote illegal
Speaker 4: by the White House and Immigration Customs Enforcement. You then
Speaker 4: have student visa holders which are already like currently under
Speaker 4: threat getting visas taken away. You have people on work visas.
Speaker 4: You have green card holders, and you even have naturalized
Speaker 4: citizens and among just regular citizens a naturalists, I guess
Speaker 4: people that were born here, you have other factors that
Speaker 4: could lead to potential hardship based on political affiliation or
Speaker 4: based on gender and sectional reality. And that's kind of
Speaker 4: like the bracket breakdown I'm working off of. So as
Speaker 4: much as it's like dangerous to be like, you know,
Speaker 4: like a trans anarchist right in the United States, I
Speaker 4: think that is that is fairly different than a Haitian
Speaker 4: immigrant who's about to get like literally hunted down by ice, right,
Speaker 4: And these people have wildly different realities, wildly different options
Speaker 4: for how they're going to like handle this question and
Speaker 4: handle like the decision of you know, preemptively choosing to
Speaker 4: relocate somewhere else. James, do you have any kind of
Speaker 4: thoughts on this like onion?
Speaker 3: I guess yeah. I mean, I think you described it well, right,
Speaker 3: Like I think a lot of folks are for the
Speaker 3: first time finding themselves in that onion at all, right,
Speaker 3: and certainly with respect to like immigration enforcement or potentially
Speaker 3: being forced to leave this country. And I think it
Speaker 3: would be good maybe to to look at folks who
Speaker 3: have been there for a long time and look at
Speaker 3: how they've done right, Because there have been people whose
Speaker 3: existence was precarious in this country for decades. Right, Maybe
Speaker 3: we'd go back to nineteen ninety four in Operation Gatekeeper,
Speaker 3: Maybe we go back further whatever, I don't care. Maybe
Speaker 3: we go back to the operation whose name is also
Speaker 3: a slur in the nineteen thirties. And I'm not going to.
Speaker 4: Say I mean, and indigenous people here have, like for
Speaker 4: all of America, I'm sure have been been people that
Speaker 4: like exist in a wildly different reality than like, yeah,
Speaker 4: most US citizens, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, where, Yes, this country is predicated on the genocide
Speaker 3: of indigenous people.
Speaker 4: Well, and even in the ways that they're the like
Speaker 4: continue to live here. It's it's like a different world from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like that genocide is ongoing, Like it's a it's
Speaker 3: not a thing that stopped. Yeah, it's not a historical thing.
Speaker 3: It's the thing that exists. As long as this country exists.
Speaker 3: I would look to those people, right, Like you said, Garrison,
Speaker 3: Indigenous communities, Indigenous people continue to exist in this country
Speaker 3: despite the best efforts of this country to eradicate them.
Speaker 3: Undocumented communities, right, Migrant communities of mixed status have continued
Speaker 3: to exist for a very long time. And like the
Speaker 3: way that they have got through this is together, and
Speaker 3: that's the way that we will get through this too.
Speaker 3: When there have been threats to migrant communities, migrant communities
Speaker 3: have shown up for each other. Right, they're doing that
Speaker 3: right now. You see groups like Anon dela Barrio in
Speaker 3: San Diego right like going around announcing when there are
Speaker 3: ICE presence of ICE offices in the neighborhood. The way
Speaker 3: that they have got through it is through other people
Speaker 3: in positions of procarity, showing up for one another and
Speaker 3: taking care of one another. And if that is a
Speaker 3: new position for you, if finding yourself further along the
Speaker 3: intersectional matrix of oppression is new for you, then like
Speaker 3: it's scary. I do understand that that that procurity is petrifying,
Speaker 3: but understand that communities and people have been here for
Speaker 3: a long time and look at how they've got through it.
Speaker 3: And in queer communities too to a degree, have been
Speaker 3: persecuted in this country for a very long time and
Speaker 3: have developed ways of not just like existing, but also
Speaker 3: like continuing to and to joy and experience joy and
Speaker 3: not just like live in fear, because I think if
Speaker 3: you live in fear, like you've kind of given up
Speaker 3: to a degree, oh you've let them win. To agree,
Speaker 3: I should say, like, I do understand that being new
Speaker 3: to this is petrifying for people, and like I don't
Speaker 3: want to just say like, oh, you shouldn't be scared,
Speaker 3: or you know, you should look at how migrant communities
Speaker 3: have taken care of one another, but like now is
Speaker 3: the time to begin establishing solidarity as well. So like
Speaker 3: those communities which have been precarious for some time, they're
Speaker 3: not closed spaces, right, Like you can be in solidarity
Speaker 3: with them and you can learn from them, and I
Speaker 3: think that now is the time to do that, Like,
Speaker 3: now is the time to build stronger links. If you're
Speaker 3: really worried about things being really bad in this country,
Speaker 3: and you have good reason to be right, like.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, shit's fucked up and bullshit, yeah it's really
Speaker 2: fucking bad, really bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like you know, we're sending people to labor camps.
Speaker 2: If you're scared, panicking thinking I got to get out
Speaker 2: of here, I get you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, No, I mean I think the thing that you
Speaker 4: should be doing, regardless of who you are, is you
Speaker 4: should be giving yourself options. You should be increasing the
Speaker 4: amount of options that you have, And like that is
Speaker 4: something that is never a bad idea. That is something
Speaker 4: that you can never do too early. It's something that
Speaker 4: you should have already been doing. Frankly, like I've been
Speaker 4: advocating for people to get passports, including an American passport,
Speaker 4: because that does make it easier to leave the country.
Speaker 5: You should be getting that.
Speaker 4: And it's going to be harder, especially if you're trends now,
Speaker 4: to get a passport that matches what you look like. Right,
Speaker 4: But this is still something I think is worth doing
Speaker 4: because it gives you an option, and you should be
Speaker 4: increasing the amount of options you have.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, yeah, it's never a bad thing. And
Speaker 3: like that community structure is an option too, right, Like
Speaker 3: people showing up for you and you showed up for them.
Speaker 3: That is one of your options. Don't forget that. And
Speaker 3: like that will also bring you join You will feel
Speaker 3: safer when you We're supposed to live in can munities.
Speaker 3: And like I you know, I've seen a lot of
Speaker 3: people in very difficult circumstances. And one of the Kurdish
Speaker 3: guys once said to me in the desert, he was like,
Speaker 3: whatever we do, we do together. And I thought that
Speaker 3: was very profound because they were at that time like
Speaker 3: dancing around a fire in the midst of what was
Speaker 3: like an open air concentration camp, you know. But if
Speaker 3: you can find a community, and you can find a
Speaker 3: way to continue to experience joy, then I promise that
Speaker 3: things won't be as bad as they seem right now.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: Within the Kurdish Shrina movement, there's a phrase that is
Speaker 3: commonly used a slogan. You could say, I guess in
Speaker 3: Kurdish you would say beershudan jiane means resistance is life.
Speaker 3: And we should remember that for whole groups of people,
Speaker 3: many of whom we've featured here, if they had all
Speaker 3: just left, they would no longer exist in the way
Speaker 3: that they exist now.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Kurdish people have been oppressed by various states for centuries, right, Turkish, Iraqi,
Speaker 3: Iranian and Syrian. They've been subject to genocidal violence, and
Speaker 3: they've still remained there, right, and they've continued to fight
Speaker 3: against that state oppression, and they've created something beautiful today
Speaker 3: as a result that we can see in Raja. But
Speaker 3: the same is true of the Karen and Kareni people
Speaker 3: we've spoken to in Meama. Right. They decided to remain
Speaker 3: rather than to leave, and in doing so that they
Speaker 3: created a culture that was based on resistance and that
Speaker 3: resisted the ability of the state to exercise a monopoly
Speaker 3: on violence and to determine their outcomes. And I think
Speaker 3: we should look to those examples as we consider, like,
Speaker 3: what does it mean if the state becomes more hostile here.
Speaker 4: Something that like I think I think Robert said in
Speaker 4: our work group chat, which thankfully has not been turned
Speaker 4: into an Atlantic article.
Speaker 2: I did invite Pete hegseeth, so we'll see if he
Speaker 2: happs in. You know, he's rejected us all the good times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you're trying to add the Atlantic editor in
Speaker 3: chief for years, he is not welcome.
Speaker 2: He's absolutely not Welbome fucked that guy.
Speaker 3: To seed him to manufacture consent for bombing another country
Speaker 3: in the Middle East on our podcast.
Speaker 2: It's so funny because it is like that is like
Speaker 2: the dream of every journalist that you just get added
Speaker 2: to the entire government's war planning chat and he just
Speaker 2: uses it to dunk on the Trump admin, like you
Speaker 2: get more info onlike anything.
Speaker 3: Than he like Home's back into the head.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's it's fucking hysterical.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they could have had four years and maybe not
Speaker 3: maybe even any one off chat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, would they would have they would have accidentally invited
Speaker 2: a different journalist. It was going to happen eventually.
Speaker 4: But yeah, But something Robert said in our chat is that, like,
Speaker 4: if you already had like plans or the ability to
Speaker 4: move to a different country of your choosing, then yeah,
Speaker 4: why not? Right Like if if you already were thinking
Speaker 4: about moving to Germany, which is very funny to say now, right,
Speaker 4: but if you already had plans and you had the
Speaker 4: ability to do that, then then sure that's something that
Speaker 4: that you that you should like consider. If you do
Speaker 4: not already have pre existing plans and means, maybe it's
Speaker 4: not something to put all of your effort into doing
Speaker 4: right now, because that is such a massive undertaking in general,
Speaker 4: and not everyone has that option, and there's gonna be
Speaker 4: people stuck here, and you know, part of like my
Speaker 4: thinking on this is is like I'm in a relatively
Speaker 4: privileged position. I would rather use the sort of benefits
Speaker 4: and the stability that I have to help other people
Speaker 4: that are going to be living in this country. So
Speaker 4: I'm going to stay here to do that. And that's
Speaker 4: part of kind of my thought process on a personal level,
Speaker 4: do I you know, one day, maybe one to live
Speaker 4: off the continent. Yeah, but that's like for personal reasons,
Speaker 4: not for political reasons. That that's because I think Glasgow
Speaker 4: looks pretty. And if you also think Glasgow's pretty and
Speaker 4: you want to move there, then that's fine. But I guess,
Speaker 4: like the politics of escape, I do find a little
Speaker 4: bit troubling in some ways, and I guess I would
Speaker 4: like to talk about that a little bit more after
Speaker 4: this at break.
Speaker 5: All right, we're back.
Speaker 4: James made a horrible face when I when I complimented Scotland.
Speaker 3: What was up with that when you said glass Gow? Like, oh,
Speaker 3: so Glasgow not not a city that's traditionally like aesthetically prized.
Speaker 5: I guess, uh, okay, well that's maybe Okay.
Speaker 2: Edinburgh is where if I was going to go to Scotland,
Speaker 2: I'd probably aim.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to live in the Harry Potter town.
Speaker 5: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 3: It existed? Okay, Yeah, that is rude, Garrison.
Speaker 2: Don't take that away from Edinburgh. I don't give her
Speaker 2: that all.
Speaker 4: The coffee shops are like fucking wizard themes. Now, absolutely not.
Speaker 2: You haven't been to Edinburgh. Don't tell me that ship.
Speaker 5: I've seen your travel pictures Robert.
Speaker 3: I'm they were mostly hard liquor themed.
Speaker 5: Okay, that's fair.
Speaker 3: You can Edinburgh is a nice city. Glasgow is a
Speaker 3: nice city.
Speaker 4: You can enjoy it.
Speaker 3: You can enjoy it by stop by Karla on your
Speaker 3: way down the Uh my family are from.
Speaker 2: My favorite Glasgow fact is that there's a beverage called
Speaker 2: Buckfast that is twenty percent alcohol mineral wine made by
Speaker 2: monks that has as much coffee as a red bull.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: And in Glasgow, Scotland, for a significant period of time,
Speaker 2: roughly one percent of all violent crimes were committed with
Speaker 2: the bottle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Bucky is it's it's a whole subculture.
Speaker 2: Buckfast gets you fucked fast, That's right, folks.
Speaker 4: So a term I've used for like the past few
Speaker 4: years to like discuss this, to discuss this question of
Speaker 4: like can you like outrun American fascism is the politics
Speaker 4: of escape. And for a while I really was vocally
Speaker 4: opposed to this sort of politics because it felt like
Speaker 4: the entire world was going through a global far right
Speaker 4: power grab and no matter where you run, you can't
Speaker 4: really get away from it. And now kind of curiously,
Speaker 4: you know, some of some of this is still happening right,
Speaker 4: you can look at the AfD in Germany. But but
Speaker 4: some of what's happened with this Trump administration has almost
Speaker 4: weakened a degree of like this global.
Speaker 5: Far right power grab.
Speaker 4: Like for a long time, it looked like the Conservative
Speaker 4: Party of Canada was about to just completely take control
Speaker 4: over the whole over the whole country due to like
Speaker 4: be pent up frustration over Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party. And
Speaker 4: now due to the actions of the Trump administration, the
Speaker 4: Liberals have retaken a significant portion of like popular support
Speaker 4: and are probably gonna do a big sweep in the
Speaker 4: general election. That's going to happen, I'm guessing next month
Speaker 4: with the new Prime minister like about about to call one,
Speaker 4: which makes sense because he should call one.
Speaker 5: At the at the peak of support for the Liberal Party.
Speaker 4: Yeah, after Conservatives have taken like a twelve to seventeen
Speaker 4: point depth, depending which pool you use. So for a
Speaker 4: while I was like, it doesn't even really make sense
Speaker 4: to flee to Canada because Canada is right on the
Speaker 4: coattails of America. Canadian politics are kind of historically but
Speaker 4: like ten years delayed from American politics, And now the
Speaker 4: new Trump administration is kind of thrown a curveball in this.
Speaker 4: British politics are always really hard for me to diagnose
Speaker 4: because all of their parties there are pretty wacky.
Speaker 5: In my mind.
Speaker 4: Oh, like, you know, what the Tories have been doing
Speaker 4: has been extremely worrying, Like the NHS, like trans stuff
Speaker 4: is pretty bad. Now that the you know, Labor Party
Speaker 4: is in, it's hard for me to figure out kind
Speaker 4: of where the country is going because this Labor Party
Speaker 4: is a pretty conservative labor party.
Speaker 5: But like, this idea of.
Speaker 4: Like being able to outrun American fascism is still something
Speaker 4: I find like unconvincing. I guess, like you can't fully
Speaker 4: run away from all of these problems, and there may
Speaker 4: be certain people that that it's still like makes sense
Speaker 4: to start making these moves, just to start planning for
Speaker 4: that option, right I am. I am pro options, even
Speaker 4: if this idea of like total escape I still find troubling. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and anyone else makes any kind of thoughts on this
Speaker 4: on this saw.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, like as goes to US, goes the world, right,
Speaker 3: and but that is changing. But like maybe I think
Speaker 3: if it gets to the point where large numbers of
Speaker 3: people are fleeing the US, we might see some of
Speaker 3: that same anti migrant rhetoric that we've seen in the
Speaker 3: US in even relatively liberal Canada, the United Kingdom or
Speaker 3: other anglophone countries. Right, Like, it's already very hard to
Speaker 3: immigrate to Australia. It's not the easiest to immigrate to Canada. Frankly, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm not as familiar with the Canadian.
Speaker 4: Ones, especially as like an American. Yeah, unless you have
Speaker 4: like a job that you need to do in Canada
Speaker 4: and you're the only one who can do that job,
Speaker 4: or you get a Canadian girlfriend, or that's that makes
Speaker 4: it slightly easier, but still still not like completely easier.
Speaker 3: Frankly, yeah, that is a I guess that's the alternative. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think, like, I know, like a lot of people
Speaker 3: who listen to this listen to this because they have
Speaker 3: a fairly radical politics, right or left politics, and like.
Speaker 5: Or you're a journalist or you're a federal worker.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're looking to steal our stories.
Speaker 3: Fuck off, if I may say so, But like, yeah,
Speaker 3: we've all grown up on the stories of people who
Speaker 3: stood up for what they believed in, right, And Margaret
Speaker 3: makes a whole podcast about it, and Robert does on Christmases, yep,
Speaker 3: and like there's a reason why they did that, Like
Speaker 3: you know they I know that the idea of running
Speaker 3: away and being safe could be tempting, but like, if
Speaker 3: this country gets as bad as it needs to be
Speaker 3: for people to run away in large number, it's then
Speaker 3: like the world gets markedly less safe. Oh yeah, you're
Speaker 3: going to be running for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: Just look at how much food the US produces, how
Speaker 2: much medicine. Seventy percent of all of the blood used
Speaker 2: in every single country's medical system around the world is
Speaker 2: exported from the United States. Oh wow, Yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 4: And like, particularly for for like US citizens right looking
Speaker 4: looking to flee, the people who are going to be
Speaker 4: able to pull it off are people with pretty pretty
Speaker 4: extraordinary means in most cases. I'm not saying all cases,
Speaker 4: but like, if if you have the capacity to move
Speaker 4: from the United States to Germany, you're probably not living
Speaker 4: on the poverty line, right, Like this is this this
Speaker 4: takes a considerable financial investment. So instead, part of what
Speaker 4: my opposition to this is that you're essentially abandoning a
Speaker 4: whole bunch of like the like most at risk people.
Speaker 4: A part of this even extends out to like moving
Speaker 4: from state to state. I'm obviously in support of free movement.
Speaker 4: I've traveled around, and I'm going to continue to travel around.
Speaker 4: I want to see as much as in the world
Speaker 4: as I can. But like another facet of this politics
Speaker 4: of escape is that something I hear very consistently from
Speaker 4: my my friends in Atlanta, And this is something like
Speaker 4: I can attest to, like personally, the most amount of
Speaker 4: like like vocal transphobia from people like on the street
Speaker 4: that they have faced has not been in Atlanta, where
Speaker 4: they live. It's been when they're visiting people in Seattle
Speaker 4: or Portland. Like you actually get a lot more like
Speaker 4: weird anti queer harassment in Seattle, which just just like
Speaker 4: on like the street level. It's bizarre, Like cities all
Speaker 4: have different kind of like modes of operation. People have
Speaker 4: different like informal like manners in terms of how how
Speaker 4: you like behave on the street. And it's it's it is.
Speaker 4: This is something I've definitely actually I've definitely experienced. There's
Speaker 4: there's a lot more like open openness towards like certain
Speaker 4: types of of like anti trans harassment in like these
Speaker 4: like liberal safe havens like quote unquote Yeah, I've been
Speaker 4: called slurs on the street way more or in Portland,
Speaker 4: Oregon than I have in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is
Speaker 4: this is another like interesting aspect which I'm not saying
Speaker 4: Atlanta is like quote unquote safer city than Seattle if
Speaker 4: you're trans I'm not saying the vice versa either, But
Speaker 4: this is like just an aspect of like the politics
Speaker 4: of escape, like especially in the in the United States,
Speaker 4: like the there like is really no like real escape
Speaker 4: like there there is no mythical safe haven where you
Speaker 4: can live your your free life and frolics through the
Speaker 4: park and never have to face any kind of hardship
Speaker 4: or like political disenfranchisement. If you still want to relocate somewhere,
Speaker 4: that's something that you should consider and again create options.
Speaker 4: But I also do not want to like abandon my
Speaker 4: friends here because I just you know, have a more
Speaker 4: stable job, Like I want to be here for them
Speaker 4: and and help them, and not in like a patronizing way,
Speaker 4: but in like a solidarity way. Like that's like really
Speaker 4: important to me. And I think of people who are
Speaker 4: who are thinking about these same things and kind of
Speaker 4: running these same questions of of if they want to
Speaker 4: commit to sting in the United States. I think should
Speaker 4: also make those considerations of is like you know, which
Speaker 4: which one of your friends is not going to be
Speaker 4: able to make the same calculation. Yep, And frankly, I
Speaker 4: feel I feel like better as a person and like
Speaker 4: my mental health feels better knowing I'm going to be
Speaker 4: here with them rather than going to a Berlin nightclub.
Speaker 5: Which does sound fun. And I still might on vacation.
Speaker 2: Oh, you definitely need to go to Bergain, Garrett.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I have.
Speaker 2: I have planned three days that feel like about four
Speaker 2: hours in Bergain.
Speaker 5: I am, I am, I'm excited.
Speaker 4: I am for the first time planning to leave the
Speaker 4: continent this year, which is a little bit scary because
Speaker 4: re entering the United States has is pretty tricky right now,
Speaker 4: which should also play into your considerations.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, the general safety of air travel at the.
Speaker 4: Moment, safety and air travel now that we don't have
Speaker 4: a gay man running the planes.
Speaker 5: Uh yeah, it turns out he was actually all right.
Speaker 1: At that.
Speaker 5: Woke was keeping those planes in in the area, you.
Speaker 3: Know, kudos to him. Turns out he was okay at
Speaker 3: that job.
Speaker 4: But yes, I don't know what I was saying, but
Speaker 4: I'm sure it was really important and well thought through
Speaker 4: about not abandoning people who maybe don't have the same
Speaker 4: resources that you do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to your point about like coming back to the US,
Speaker 3: understand that like one of the things that migrants to
Speaker 3: deal with, even if they get to a place and
Speaker 3: they have some degree permanents and they feel safe there,
Speaker 3: is that they will never be able to go back
Speaker 3: to where they're from in most cases, right that means
Speaker 3: when someone in their family passes away, they can't be
Speaker 3: there for the funeral. That means that when they have
Speaker 3: a grandchild, they have a niece or a nephew, something
Speaker 3: happens in their community and they want to be there
Speaker 3: to help. It's a natural disaster. They had just stuck.
Speaker 3: And that's not something to like to discount as something
Speaker 3: that's not important, Like that is really hard. And if
Speaker 3: you have a community now, especially for trans folks, right,
Speaker 3: Like I just think that like there are so many
Speaker 3: places where, like like you say, Garrison, where bigotry against
Speaker 3: transfolks is being more and more normalized. Like if you
Speaker 3: have a community where people where you're experiencing joy every
Speaker 3: day with the people you're around, like leaving that should
Speaker 3: be something that you really think hard about, because that
Speaker 3: can be hard to find. Yeah, yeah, especially in Edinburgh
Speaker 3: because they're all turfs with the in the cafes. That's
Speaker 3: not true.
Speaker 4: Just to be clear, Yeah, I mean, this is kind
Speaker 4: of the discussion I wanted to have. I'm sure we
Speaker 4: all have more thoughts on this that we will we
Speaker 4: will express very eloquently as soon as we close this
Speaker 4: recording session.
Speaker 3: That's how we do it.
Speaker 4: But but I know this is this is the type
Speaker 4: of stuff that we've been thinking about. I know, I
Speaker 4: know listeners have been too, because you're asking us these questions.
Speaker 4: So it's certainly annoying that we don't have a concise
Speaker 4: yes or no answer. But there isn't a concise yes
Speaker 4: or no answer. I think the most concise what I
Speaker 4: have is that you should be giving yourself as many
Speaker 4: options as you can. If that includes applying for Irish
Speaker 4: citizenship because your grandfather is Irish, then hey, why not
Speaker 4: go for it?
Speaker 2: Right, Ireland's great, nice country. You'll like it.
Speaker 4: But I am I am trepidacious. I guess about about
Speaker 4: you know, public calls to flee the country at this
Speaker 4: point and kind of the underlying politics and ideology of that,
Speaker 4: let alone the kind of the logistical aspects of trying
Speaker 4: to relocate to a different country where you are not
Speaker 4: a citizen. And frankly, I think there will be a
Speaker 4: lot of countries that are not super eager to take
Speaker 4: American immigrants. I think Canada is typically kind of, kind
Speaker 4: of low key been one of these places. Especially if
Speaker 4: we're going to go to war with Canada to make
Speaker 4: it the fifty first state, then it might also uh
Speaker 4: create create some some some tricky aspects.
Speaker 3: You could make it hot.
Speaker 4: But I know, if anyone else has any any other thoughts,
Speaker 4: air them now or forever. Be beholden to angry reddit comments.
Speaker 3: Yeah, please don't burn each other down on Reddit, Like
Speaker 3: now is the time to give people a little grace
Speaker 3: and be kind to other people.
Speaker 2: Don't flee to Belgium. Stay away from Belgium at all costs.
Speaker 3: I had a nice time in Belgium.
Speaker 5: What do you gets Belgium. I have a friend in Belgium.
Speaker 2: As an Italian. I think we need to go with
Speaker 2: a war with them again. You know, it's what made
Speaker 2: Caesar great. It could make us great again. That's that's
Speaker 2: my stance on Belgium. It's Italian territory.
Speaker 3: I stand with the Belgian people.
Speaker 5: Welcome to you can happen hear a podcast trying to
Speaker 5: figure out why some of the most powerful people in
Speaker 5: the world want everyone to think that they're gamers. It
Speaker 5: is it is host me along with me as Garrison Davis.
Speaker 4: Hi, I've I've played a video game before. I'm not
Speaker 4: very powerful, but I.
Speaker 5: Too have played many several video games.
Speaker 4: See I wouldn't. I wouldn't say several. I've I've played
Speaker 4: like a few many. I have played too many, simply
Speaker 4: too many video games. So okay, this is this is.
Speaker 5: In some ways kind of a lighter episode, because Jesus
Speaker 5: fucking Christ, everything's really depressing. Is something going on out there,
Speaker 5: It's all really bad, And one of the people who's
Speaker 5: been making everything really really bad is Elon Musk, who
Speaker 5: has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers. The
Speaker 5: PayPal guy, the PayPal guy, the owner of X I've
Speaker 5: I've been I've been locked in my uh in my
Speaker 5: gamer cave for the past like five months.
Speaker 4: I'm not left. I'm just hearing about this now.
Speaker 5: Yeah you might. You might. You might know of him
Speaker 5: as the guy who paid another guy to play Path
Speaker 5: of Exile two for him. We will get to that.
Speaker 4: See, I don't play those games. Those games are gay.
Speaker 4: I only play Nintendo Mecca games and Hell Divers too,
Speaker 4: like a loser.
Speaker 5: That's that's reasonable, that's reasonable. Those are those are Those
Speaker 5: are fine games. Oh and Sonic, Oh god, okay, pushing
Speaker 5: aside the subject the Sonic, So okay, I want to
Speaker 5: take a look a bit about why this sort of
Speaker 5: matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes
Speaker 5: are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers. And
Speaker 5: I think the place to start here is with the
Speaker 5: fact that gaming is in one hundred and eighty four
Speaker 5: point three billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is an
Speaker 5: extremely annoying guy but is also right, points out that
Speaker 5: this is more money than TV, movies, and music combined.
Speaker 5: So this is the largest entertainment market in the world
Speaker 5: by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value. Right,
Speaker 5: something like three billion people play video games. It's mostly
Speaker 5: mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell
Speaker 5: very weird because the actual people who play these games again,
Speaker 5: it's it's a lot of mobile games, and it's also
Speaker 5: mostly people who are women, and non white. And yet, however, Comma,
Speaker 5: when people think about like the gamer TM, you are
Speaker 5: not thinking about.
Speaker 4: That, yeah, like as a political class.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, you know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah,
Speaker 5: you're thinking of a bunch of weird in cell right
Speaker 5: wing dipshits who are white and suckass. And this is
Speaker 5: in large part because gamer Gate was sort of the first,
Speaker 5: like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as
Speaker 5: a political identity. And obviously this is you know, this
Speaker 5: is a fascist movement. Now. Part of the reason this works,
Speaker 5: and we're gonna be getting more into why this sort
Speaker 5: of works later, but part of the reason this works
Speaker 5: is that this is an extremely large group of people
Speaker 5: because it's new. No one has sort of defined it
Speaker 5: as a political identity before, and it's also filled with
Speaker 5: people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a
Speaker 5: gamer because this is a relatively new medium, which is
Speaker 5: why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like
Speaker 5: treated like movies or some shit, or they want it
Speaker 5: to be sports because those are sort of cultural things
Speaker 5: with enormous amounts of money, and then that are taken
Speaker 5: like quote unquote more seriously. Yeah. Yeah, And so the
Speaker 5: effect of this is that the cultural affect of being
Speaker 5: a gamer is extremely important to these people. And this
Speaker 5: is true actually really both on the left as much
Speaker 5: as it is on their right. There are a lot
Speaker 5: of like sort of political figures. I don't know, you're
Speaker 5: sort of like online people who come out of gaming,
Speaker 5: like like h Bomber guy. I guess this is an
Speaker 5: example like Hassan. To some extent, there's just like a
Speaker 5: lot of people who are like gamers and then by
Speaker 5: sort of like become political. But on the other hand,
Speaker 5: gaming has always been like a not always but has
Speaker 5: traditionally been an extremely right wing space. Oh god, Garrison,
Speaker 5: I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit
Speaker 5: this is. Have I told you this story about Kabab
Speaker 5: the German now? Oh boy? Okay, so back in the
Speaker 5: dawn of Time I played a lot of Heartstone as
Speaker 5: a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like good.
Speaker 4: Is that like a resource management type game for like
Speaker 4: gay autistic people?
Speaker 5: No, this is this is the world of Warcraft card game.
Speaker 4: Okay, that's that's even more embarrassing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, really bad, really bad. I think I think I
Speaker 5: peaked at like two k Legend North America, which like
Speaker 5: technically speaking is like top like half a percent of
Speaker 5: players in the world's digital collectible card video game. Come on,
Speaker 5: oh yeah yeah, but two k legend DNA is like
Speaker 5: fucking shitter ranks. It's bad. I was never like good,
Speaker 5: good at it. I was just like okay, kind of.
Speaker 5: But you know, this is like a thing that I
Speaker 5: did growing up, and something I remember is like all
Speaker 5: of the fucking Heardstone streamers and these are like really
Speaker 5: big streamers would play music from this guy they called
Speaker 5: Kobob the German and it turns out that his actual
Speaker 5: name was removed Kobob because he was a fucking German
Speaker 5: neo Nazi. Well many such cases, yeah, for people who
Speaker 5: like are not aware of of like mid twenty tens
Speaker 5: German fascism. Remove Kebab is like a slogan calling for
Speaker 5: the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany.
Speaker 5: So great stuff, great stuff. This is just was just
Speaker 5: sort of like the water you were swimming in if
Speaker 5: you were a gamer in like the twenty tens. Now,
Speaker 5: this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed
Speaker 5: kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these
Speaker 5: tech CEOs like who want to be thought of as gamers.
Speaker 5: And so the two examples we're gonna look at are
Speaker 5: Sam bank and Freed's And this is really technically on
Speaker 5: both sides of the political spectrum, Right, We're gonna look
Speaker 5: at Sam Banker Freed, and we're gonna look at Elon
Speaker 5: musk are new Overlord. I guess. So we're gonna start
Speaker 5: with Sam bankin Freed, and you know, as we go
Speaker 5: through what's happening here, we're gonna sort of unravel why
Speaker 5: it's so important to them to be seen as gamers.
Speaker 5: And I, I guess it is important to know like
Speaker 5: Sam Bakman Fried like is I guess like he is
Speaker 5: a gamer in the sense that like he's like addicted
Speaker 5: to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he looks the part too, no offense. Yeah, yeah, before
Speaker 5: before he was put in prison for twenty five years
Speaker 5: for fraud.
Speaker 4: Well probably not anymore. He's probably gonna get part of God.
Speaker 5: Maybe we'll see, we'll see. I don't know.
Speaker 4: Crypto vote, it's the most valuable voting block. Now, all
Speaker 4: young Americans are too poor to open bank accounts, so
Speaker 4: they put all their money in crypto. So now they're
Speaker 4: gonna vote for whoever makes line go up.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna become the joker. So okay, then think about
Speaker 5: Sam Megan Frieda for people who have forgotten who SBF is.
Speaker 5: He is the guy who was the founder of FTX,
Speaker 5: which was like a crypto change that was actually effectively
Speaker 5: a giant scam where he took everyone's money and betted
Speaker 5: on the stock market and lost it. And you know,
Speaker 5: Robert did a behind the bassards on him. And one
Speaker 5: of the things that happens constantly is he's just like
Speaker 5: always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dogshit
Speaker 5: game called Story Big or Algy Meetings. He is a
Speaker 5: League of Legends addict, which is like as as any
Speaker 5: gamer will know a person who plays the League of
Speaker 5: Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories
Speaker 5: people who's ever existed. And one of the things that
Speaker 5: that SBF did as as a sort of pr thing
Speaker 5: right was let the author Michael Lewis of the Big Shorts,
Speaker 5: We're Gonna get the moneyball in a second, blindside other books.
Speaker 4: Reparatable financial advice books, is what I'm hearing.
Speaker 5: But you know, like a very very powerful, influential and
Speaker 5: wealthy American journalist just let him sort of tag along
Speaker 5: and and Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him.
Speaker 5: But this is something that like ICBF was like you know,
Speaker 5: was like projecting right in order for this to be
Speaker 5: the image of him, was him as like the gamer.
Speaker 5: And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis right,
Speaker 5: because he just like doesn't understand someone who just has
Speaker 5: ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't
Speaker 5: give a shit. So he plays meetings like no one
Speaker 5: has ever been like this. I have no idea what
Speaker 5: you mean. I actually don't play video game stream meetings
Speaker 5: because it is too obvious. But I play.
Speaker 4: I play video games a once a week. That's that's
Speaker 4: that's kind of my Oh.
Speaker 5: God, this is the one part about sam Bakmon Free
Speaker 5: that's relatable to me. I play so many video games.
Speaker 5: It is my like antidepression strategy, basically, like when I
Speaker 5: need to not think for a while, there's just MEO playing.
Speaker 5: Actually Path of Faxyle too, one of the games that
Speaker 5: we're gonna be talking about today, something that I play
Speaker 5: a lot of. I've done so much fucking gaming, Like god,
Speaker 5: I used to play this game called Smite, which is
Speaker 5: like a it's like a mob but like League of
Speaker 5: Legends but like third person and I played so much
Speaker 5: Smite that they were pro showing my casual games. When
Speaker 5: when the Zoomer Revolution comes and they execute the gamers
Speaker 5: and they execute b I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: that's reasonable. Like I can't argue with that.
Speaker 4: I'll inform the council't our next folks council meeting. I'll
Speaker 4: bring it to the table.
Speaker 5: That's reasonable. But you know, so so what what what
Speaker 5: what happens with this sort of thing is that is
Speaker 5: that Michael Lewis's image of SF becomes as this gamer
Speaker 5: who's doing these completely incomprehensible things. He's mind must be
Speaker 5: so unbelievably brilliant. Yeah, totally, because he's just like playing
Speaker 5: fucking video games all the time. And and this gets
Speaker 5: to one of the aspects of why these people do this,
Speaker 5: this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing
Speaker 5: and and like and like SBF like is a gamer, right,
Speaker 5: but like why why they make us part of their
Speaker 5: cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional
Speaker 5: media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry. It's
Speaker 5: it's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful. It doesn't
Speaker 5: have the same kind of critical culture around. It doesn't
Speaker 5: exist that you would see or something like movies or like.
Speaker 4: Respectability in some way, except in like the reversed Sam
Speaker 4: Bankman freedway, where like the schlubbiness is part of what
Speaker 4: makes him like an extential genius, right, like like like
Speaker 4: that era of like Silicon Valley guy. Yeah, that's like
Speaker 4: he's he's so different, right, Like he's he's he's not
Speaker 4: like put together, and this like shows how he's like
Speaker 4: a new and innovative thing. So it's kind of like
Speaker 4: it's kind of like a double edged sword in like
Speaker 4: that specific way.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, this is all a feedback loop, right, because
Speaker 5: like part of it not being respectable is that someone
Speaker 5: like Michael Lewis, right, who was like as establishment of
Speaker 5: a journalist as there's ever been. These people don't play
Speaker 5: video games. They're one of the figures people who just
Speaker 5: like don't game. Are these like traditional mainstream sort of
Speaker 5: access journalists, right, And so they run into this shit
Speaker 5: and they have no fucking idea what the hell is
Speaker 5: going on, And it's just really really easily just sort
Speaker 5: of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any
Speaker 5: gamer like, you know you, like, you show a gamer
Speaker 5: like a League of Legends addicts, and they will instantly
Speaker 5: be able to just like read this person like a
Speaker 5: fucking book. Also, by the way, gaming addiction like is
Speaker 5: like kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here,
Speaker 5: but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person.
Speaker 5: It simply does. You just get mad all the time.
Speaker 5: I've known too many League Legis players of my goddamn life.
Speaker 5: Holy shit, terrible game.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but arcane though, right, all right, didn't Oh god, Okay.
Speaker 5: We're gonna take an ad break, and then when I
Speaker 5: come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked,
Speaker 5: which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis.
Speaker 4: Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about
Speaker 4: unique incompetence.
Speaker 5: So we are back now, Okay, Obviously, part of the
Speaker 5: reason this works too is, you know, as I've been
Speaker 5: talking about, right, like these these really out of touch
Speaker 5: sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an
Speaker 5: enormous market. Right, But Lewis is in some sense kind
Speaker 5: of a special case because he is really truly an
Speaker 5: unbelievably global dumbass. And to get an understanding of this,
Speaker 5: I'm going to go into something that Lewis in theory
Speaker 5: understands a lot better, which is sports.
Speaker 2: So Lewis has.
Speaker 5: Written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right.
Speaker 5: He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're gonna
Speaker 5: be talking about, which I'll get to you in a second.
Speaker 5: And he wrote The Blindside, which is another book that
Speaker 5: they talk about on Behind the Bassarge and go listen
Speaker 5: to that, But I want to go going on money Bomb.
Speaker 5: Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this
Speaker 5: underdog an athletics team invented like baseball metrics and they
Speaker 5: use sabermetrics to like like build this roster out of
Speaker 5: nothing that like went to the playoffs and did really well.
Speaker 5: And like I'm not going to get into the extent
Speaker 5: to which this was kind of a mirage about that
Speaker 5: Oakland A's team, Like whatever, I'm not gonna argue about
Speaker 5: baseball statistics. What I will argue about is that one
Speaker 5: of the characters in this fucking book, right, who's one
Speaker 5: of the sort of like underdog geniuses and like Michael
Speaker 5: Lewis loves to find, right, is this guy named Paul Pedesta?
Speaker 5: Can he is? He is like one of the main
Speaker 5: figures in this book. He's like, he's kind of like
Speaker 5: an assistant coach. Basically, what baseball team is this? Oh?
Speaker 5: This is the Oakland Athletics are now the last Vegas
Speaker 5: Athletics or some shit. I don't know that they moved
Speaker 5: to Vegas.
Speaker 4: I don't know what they're called the athletics now.
Speaker 5: No, No, they are originally called the Athletics. I don't
Speaker 5: know what they're called now. They've always been the except
Speaker 5: just calls them the Oakland A's. They've been the A's forever.
Speaker 5: But yeah, they've they've they've also been stolen. Las Vegas
Speaker 5: has now stolen both the football team and the baseball
Speaker 5: team oft.
Speaker 4: Oh see, I was thinking of the football team, yeah,
Speaker 4: because I was like, wait a minute, didn't didn't Las
Speaker 4: Vegasts go there too?
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, they stole both of them.
Speaker 4: That's what I was thinking. And I am more of
Speaker 4: a baseball head than a football head.
Speaker 5: But yeah, so okay, unfortunately we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 5: football here. So this guy, right, Paul Padesta's like one
Speaker 5: of these sort of geniuses. She later goes on to
Speaker 5: be It's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing
Speaker 5: in the organization, but he is hired by the just
Speaker 5: absolutely wretched the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns. Now to
Speaker 5: get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are.
Speaker 5: My opening savment for him on the Browns is it
Speaker 5: is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the
Speaker 5: Browns over the course of two seasons, going one in
Speaker 5: thirty one, which is a feat of like just absolutely
Speaker 5: sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports.
Speaker 5: I think until the fucking moon crashes into the Earth,
Speaker 5: no one is going to fucking go one in thirty
Speaker 5: one into cruss two seasons football again. So again that
Speaker 5: is a one in fifteen season, followed by an owen
Speaker 5: sixteen season. It's the second oh to sixteen season. Ever,
Speaker 5: unclear how responsible for this he is, but what he
Speaker 5: is responsible for is the Shawn Watson trade. Okay, it's
Speaker 5: like mea, why the fuck you're talking about?
Speaker 1: This?
Speaker 5: Part of this is also like these people are just evil.
Speaker 5: Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get
Speaker 5: an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists
Speaker 5: mostly have accused him of sexual assault. He is like
Speaker 5: one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which
Speaker 5: is a league of a lot of people who absolutely
Speaker 5: fucking suck shit. So so that that's the first thing
Speaker 5: you have to understand about Watson's that he is just
Speaker 5: really fucking like morally reprehensible, right. He is like a
Speaker 5: bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended
Speaker 5: him for a season. And Paul Podesta, who again is
Speaker 5: the guy whom Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting,
Speaker 5: is like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is
Speaker 5: going to set up this deal for his team to
Speaker 5: trade for Deshaun Watson, who've been on the Texans, And again,
Speaker 5: like Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be
Speaker 5: for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds.
Speaker 4: Nia, do you expect me to know anything about the
Speaker 4: Houston Texans.
Speaker 5: It is a team from Houston, Texas. That's all you
Speaker 5: need to know about this. And they traded this guy.
Speaker 4: Hey, at least it's not Austin. No offense to our
Speaker 4: Austin listeners.
Speaker 5: They fucking traded this guy, right, and Popadesa orchestrates this
Speaker 5: trade that is three is it is the worst trade
Speaker 5: in the history of football. It is three first round picks,
Speaker 5: two thirds, two third round picks, and a fourth round pick.
Speaker 5: And they hand this guy who, again I kind of
Speaker 5: emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right, they
Speaker 5: hand him two hundred and thirty million guaranteed dollars, the
Speaker 5: largest guaranteed salary the history of the NFL. So, okay, So,
Speaker 5: how does Deshaun Watson, like again, this guy who's being
Speaker 5: held up by the guy who like is now laundering
Speaker 5: being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort
Speaker 5: of like cultural like being a rogue outsider. Right, how
Speaker 5: does Deshaun Watson his like greatest fucking project to do
Speaker 5: on the field. So in his first season, he basically
Speaker 5: got injured immediately. It is second season in weeks one
Speaker 5: through five out of out of seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 5: nine quarterbacks. Since the year two thousand, to start weeks
Speaker 5: one through five out of again seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 5: nine quarterbacks, he ranks seven hundred and fifty three out
Speaker 5: of seven hundred and fifty nine EPA for dropback seven
Speaker 5: hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine.
Speaker 5: They traded three first round picks for this guy. He
Speaker 5: has a mind boggling an EPA of negative point three,
Speaker 5: which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back
Speaker 5: to make a pass, they are expected to get point
Speaker 5: three less points than an average team would.
Speaker 4: How did you trick me into being on a sports episode?
Speaker 4: I only agreed to this because I thought it was
Speaker 4: video game.
Speaker 5: Don't worry. We're we're we're we're almost We're almost done
Speaker 5: with the sports part of it. But there, I promise
Speaker 5: there is actually a reason why I'm doing this, which
Speaker 5: is which is the argument, that's that that sports and
Speaker 5: the sport and gaming actually serve very very similar cultural
Speaker 5: roles for the right. Yeah, of course, yes, I understand that.
Speaker 5: I can I can see that. Yes. Also, I've always
Speaker 5: wanted to fuck you complained about this on area and
Speaker 5: this is this is the best fucky chance I've ever
Speaker 5: gonna get, So Jesus fucking because it's like what I
Speaker 5: talk about, like movies or something. Is this, yes, yes,
Speaker 5: this is what it feels like. Is this what they
Speaker 5: sound like? Yes? It is it is absolutely what you
Speaker 5: sound like. So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback,
Speaker 5: they sign away basically the entire future of this team
Speaker 5: hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator two
Speaker 5: hundred and thirty million dollars. And this is the guy
Speaker 5: that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like
Speaker 5: a fucking analytics genius. And this all comes back to again, like,
Speaker 5: you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of
Speaker 5: the nerd is that they're like picked on, like by
Speaker 5: the jock or whatever. Right, That's like that's like the
Speaker 5: fundamental base of their mythology that there's are like oppressed
Speaker 5: by this. But like it's just like the same masculinity
Speaker 5: bullshit all the way down. And you can watch like
Speaker 5: just like the worst people in fucking history just trick
Speaker 5: literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking
Speaker 5: geniuses by using both of these fucking affects. So I
Speaker 5: want to read something, you know, in looking at the
Speaker 5: way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions,
Speaker 5: like specifically in the culture, and you know why these
Speaker 5: people choose to use gaming as like, you know, as
Speaker 5: as this sort of affect they're trying to project into
Speaker 5: the world. I want to read something by a friend
Speaker 5: of the show Vicky Osterweil, and a piece called game Boys.
Speaker 5: Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates
Speaker 5: an increasingly administered life in which alienation and isolation feel
Speaker 5: like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice is a
Speaker 5: form of control. An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety
Speaker 5: to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that
Speaker 5: one was master to live under current economic conditions. Games
Speaker 5: rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of
Speaker 5: producing not only forms of violence directed towards non normative groups,
Speaker 5: but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play that point
Speaker 5: towards the horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games provide different
Speaker 5: compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy.
Speaker 5: They give white men aggrandizing power, inventions fantasies that modulate
Speaker 5: their sense of self importance under conditions that disempower them,
Speaker 5: but they are also capable of giving everyone else the
Speaker 5: fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. This
Speaker 5: has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and
Speaker 5: fans have found space in and around games despite the
Speaker 5: organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread
Speaker 5: critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by
Speaker 5: CIS men. So I think the important thing here, and
Speaker 5: this is something important to remember both for Samba Been
Speaker 5: Freed and also for the construction of right wing gaming
Speaker 5: movements in general, and for what we're going to talk
Speaker 5: about with Elon Musk, is that gaming is contested ground. Right.
Speaker 5: As much as we think of as like right wingers, right,
Speaker 5: there are a lot of what you would call it
Speaker 5: to like traditionally sort of leftlooming demographics that play video
Speaker 5: games and have made spaces here because as much as
Speaker 5: they are in some ways like this force of discipline
Speaker 5: that like is something that you learn, the kinds of
Speaker 5: like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like
Speaker 5: that that you know you use for fucking work, they're
Speaker 5: also a thing that people use to like escape the
Speaker 5: fucking hell world totally. And like, I mean I know
Speaker 5: this right, Like I am fucking like I'm a Chinese
Speaker 5: chance of better, he's better at video games, and both
Speaker 5: the people have been to be fucking talking about in
Speaker 5: this story, right, Like, well, I heard, I heard his Path.
Speaker 4: Of Exile character was actually quite advanced.
Speaker 5: But we're gonna we're gonna talk about the Path of
Speaker 5: Exile character fucking next, you know. But but I mean,
Speaker 5: it's it's worth mentioning, like speed running, right, which is
Speaker 5: a very very trans genre.
Speaker 4: Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it depends. It depends a lot on the genre.
Speaker 5: But again, like competitive fighting games like yeah, Melee, I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna brief mentioned Sonic Fox, who is a black,
Speaker 5: non binary furry who's like one of the greatest fighting
Speaker 5: game players of all time, incredibly beloved, the only person
Speaker 5: in history ever to beat someone thirteen to zero in
Speaker 5: a first to eleven absolute legends, right, But you know,
Speaker 5: these are the people that these sort of like fascist
Speaker 5: adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can
Speaker 5: use gaming as like as a sort of cultural force.
Speaker 5: And this functions both in gaming and also fuck it
Speaker 5: in real life. Right now that these people are in power,
Speaker 5: and you know who else is in power, it's a
Speaker 5: product and services to support this podcast, All Hail, we
Speaker 5: are back now. Obviously, the other part of this. You know,
Speaker 5: we've talked about we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics,
Speaker 5: but there's there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming.
Speaker 5: And you know, the thing about gaming, right is that
Speaker 5: it is to some extent a tool that people use
Speaker 5: to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the
Speaker 5: violence of the gender system. And like I am also
Speaker 5: doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy
Speaker 5: nazi like gamer dip shit.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, that's why I ooed up f F seven
Speaker 4: remake Hysteric Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm
Speaker 4: feeling sad.
Speaker 5: But you know what the problem with what's happening here, right,
Speaker 5: is that, like the right, like that we're experiencing violence
Speaker 5: in different ways, but it's like the systemic violence from
Speaker 5: the gender system that is the same system, but these
Speaker 5: people's solution to is to blame it on women, right,
Speaker 5: And this is you know, I had a conversation with
Speaker 5: Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is
Speaker 5: sort of drawn from and like I would compare it
Speaker 5: to like, you know, lots and lots of people deal
Speaker 5: with social isolation, right and and deal with this violence.
Speaker 5: But like you know, on the other hand, most of
Speaker 5: us don't become mass shooters most most Yeah, I would
Speaker 5: say that's that's true. Yeah, right, and so and so
Speaker 5: we can look at the structural forces that produces people
Speaker 5: and also just go like fuck them, like eat shit,
Speaker 5: like I'm sorry, you've you've become Nazis, like fuck off.
Speaker 4: Skillish you in some ways among other environmental factors.
Speaker 5: But yeah, yeah, but but also a lot of times
Speaker 5: these people aren't fucking like they're not dealing with shit
Speaker 5: at all, mostly, right, I mean like yeah, like okay,
Speaker 5: like Elon Musk's weird insecurity is to some extent because
Speaker 5: of the gender system, right, but like, also he is
Speaker 5: the richest man in the world, He's the most powerful
Speaker 5: man live, He's one of the most powerful people who
Speaker 5: has ever lived. And he still has the same sense
Speaker 5: of like aggrievement that powers all these people. And this
Speaker 5: is like one of the key things of like the
Speaker 5: gamer mythos, right, is that these people constantly believe that
Speaker 5: they're being oppressed by like jocks or whatever. And now
Speaker 5: it's it's been shifted into this not anymore. Yeah, Now
Speaker 5: now they believe that they're that they're being oppressed by
Speaker 5: like fucking women in minorities, right.
Speaker 4: And and it's actually the people who actually doing the
Speaker 4: oppression is now all of the doge nerds at.
Speaker 5: The top of the system.
Speaker 4: Now it's it's been we have we've had we've had
Speaker 4: a we've had a full Uno reverso.
Speaker 5: But the thing is, these people have always been at
Speaker 5: the top of the fucking system, right and like, But
Speaker 5: but it's this a fetny whis it's this it's this
Speaker 5: feeling they have of them being the ones who are
Speaker 5: oppressed that like you know, made them into the shock
Speaker 5: troopers that we saw with Gamergate. If you're gonna read
Speaker 5: one viciosc wral thing, and I'm signing her a lot
Speaker 5: because I think she's done a lot of the best
Speaker 5: critical reporting on video games, which is a field that
Speaker 5: I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with. Like,
Speaker 5: I mean, there's been lots of stuff about working conditions
Speaker 5: in the games industry which are fucking terrible, and it's good,
Speaker 5: but like, as a medium, there hasn't been anywhere near
Speaker 5: as much critical engagement with it as there's been with
Speaker 5: like film or music. But if you're gonna read one
Speaker 5: thing from her, read a piece called goon Squad, which
Speaker 5: is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the
Speaker 5: really broken state of Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven when it
Speaker 5: came out. And one of the arguments that she makes
Speaker 5: is that these gamers are being i mean literally being
Speaker 5: used is like scabs and pinkertons against people who make
Speaker 5: video games, and you know, and this expands out to
Speaker 5: like workers more broadly, they're literally being used to silence
Speaker 5: anyone who talks about the problems with like this game
Speaker 5: that like when Cyberpink twenty seventy seven came out, it
Speaker 5: was literally giving people seizures because it was it had
Speaker 5: just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit anthe they didn't
Speaker 5: want any one about because it was a broken, shitty game.
Speaker 5: And you know, they're also used for just like anti
Speaker 5: queer and like anti feminist rasping campaigns, and that's that's
Speaker 5: how they're sort of mobilized in real life too, And
Speaker 5: and that gives you an insight into why these people
Speaker 5: sort of like do this signaling, right, is that they're
Speaker 5: also like signaling to their base that like I am
Speaker 5: one of you, et cetera, et cetera, Like you should
Speaker 5: fucking support me for this shit now. Pivoting a little bit.
Speaker 5: So when I was first talking about this episode, I
Speaker 5: kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman as that of Sam
Speaker 5: Bankman freed because like man.
Speaker 4: They said, yeah, many such cases.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like the last the last fucking white boy scammer
Speaker 5: named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white
Speaker 5: boy scammer named Sam. And it turns out though I
Speaker 5: looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing
Speaker 5: this like gamer stick thing, like specifically in interviews with
Speaker 5: Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now. And
Speaker 5: this brings us to the man who has spent the
Speaker 5: most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which
Speaker 5: is Elon Musk. Elon Musk is like not really a gamer.
Speaker 5: I would say, like he sort of plays video games.
Speaker 4: He's a Kenemine user. He's a Twitter power user. He
Speaker 4: is the shadow President.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the regis man of the World's ridges man who
Speaker 5: has ever lived.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Also, he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he
Speaker 5: is like a he's an elite video game player in
Speaker 5: like multiple games. He's obsessed with this.
Speaker 4: He's also I believe the term is a meme. Lord
Speaker 4: h if I'm reading this right.
Speaker 5: Oh god, what one of his path of xtyle two
Speaker 5: characters I didn't put in the script because it's actually
Speaker 5: not the one we're gonna talk about, but one of
Speaker 5: his characters in that game was named Kekius Maximus, So like,
Speaker 5: this is the level of mind.
Speaker 4: That uh, that is one of his favorite names. In
Speaker 4: his White House office, he has a he has a
Speaker 4: Kechius Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk. There's an AI
Speaker 4: generated image of like pet bite the Frog and like
Speaker 4: and like Roman, like like Caesar at higher I hate everything. So, yeah,
Speaker 4: this is the guy who reads the country now.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oops.
Speaker 5: So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at
Speaker 5: video games, and the preface to everything we're going to
Speaker 5: get to you is that he has. Actually he's like
Speaker 5: for a long time been doing a like I'm a
Speaker 5: gamer thing. So his his kind of problems, and I
Speaker 5: think really the origin of the weird paying people to
Speaker 5: make him look like he's good at video games thing
Speaker 5: that we're gonna get you in a second. This is
Speaker 5: something that that Blue Sky user gay Dog reminded me
Speaker 5: of because I'd forgot he has so many gaming scandals
Speaker 5: i'd forgotten about this one, which is that he at
Speaker 5: one point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring,
Speaker 5: which is very difficult game, and he had two different
Speaker 5: shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's like over encumbered,
Speaker 5: Like it's okay, like the best expianation I've tried to
Speaker 5: I figured out for Like how bad at this game
Speaker 5: he is? Is that posting this build on Twitter is
Speaker 5: the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at
Speaker 5: my fucking sports car. It's stepping into like the shittiest
Speaker 5: call you've ever seen, and then like slamming the accelerator
Speaker 5: with the working break on.
Speaker 4: Hey, I love the masdamiata.
Speaker 5: Like that's that's like the gaming of criminals. And everyone
Speaker 5: who looked at it immediately was like, this is the
Speaker 5: dumbest man who has ever lived. This man has no
Speaker 5: idea what the fuck he's doing. He is just like
Speaker 5: like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game,
Speaker 5: like just baffling incomprehensible bullshit. And this was like kind
Speaker 5: of a scandal for him. It wasn't like a huge one,
Speaker 5: but like especially like this is one that sort of
Speaker 5: broke on to the left a lot, and people were
Speaker 5: giving him shit about it. So the next time he
Speaker 5: wanted to brag about having been good at video games,
Speaker 5: he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish
Speaker 5: some stuff in this game called Yelbo four. I'm not
Speaker 5: gonna talk about Dielbow stuff much because I'm a Path
Speaker 5: of Exile player and not diebol player. The dialbum and
Speaker 5: Path of x ale like Fairy much the same kind
Speaker 5: of game, basically, like you click somewhere and your character
Speaker 5: goes there and you click other things that it does attacks.
Speaker 5: But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one
Speaker 5: of like the best Path of Exile two players in
Speaker 5: the world, and he was doing this on his alt account,
Speaker 5: which is has to handle. It's Cybergamer for twenty, but
Speaker 5: the all the e's are threes, So with's CYB three
Speaker 5: r g A M three R four twenty.
Speaker 4: Wait wait wait, wait, say say that again.
Speaker 5: It's at CYB three r GA M three R four twenty.
Speaker 4: So I think I found something. I think the four
Speaker 4: to twenty at the end is actually a reference to
Speaker 4: Hitler's birthday April twenty God damn it.
Speaker 5: So okay, he like claims to have one of the
Speaker 5: like the best characters in hardcore, which is in mode
Speaker 5: of Path of Exile where if he die once you
Speaker 5: get kicked out of it. So it's very hard to
Speaker 5: like prove that he actually did this. He like does
Speaker 5: a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile,
Speaker 5: like on a Twitter live stream, and it is immediately
Speaker 5: obvious that, like he has no idea what he's doing.
Speaker 5: Like it's not just obviously people who play the game.
Speaker 5: I hadn't played Path of XL to at this point, right,
Speaker 5: I had only played the original one like a decade ago,
Speaker 5: like a little bit of it, and I took one
Speaker 5: look at what he was doing and immediately was like,
Speaker 5: this guy has never played this game before, like has
Speaker 5: no idea what he's fucking doing. Like it was so
Speaker 5: unbelievably obvious, Like he like walked past one of those
Speaker 5: valuable currencies in the game, just like walk past it,
Speaker 5: didn't notice it. It's like staggeringly obvious anyone who plays
Speaker 5: video games, This guy has no idea what the fuck
Speaker 5: he's doing. And this actually explodes on him and eventually
Speaker 5: he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level
Speaker 5: of his Path of Exil to account, and then he
Speaker 5: claims that he never claims that it was his path
Speaker 5: of xel to account, and this Jenny Weinley has been
Speaker 5: a real problem for him because it pissed off like
Speaker 5: the entire gaming scene. So you have videos with like
Speaker 5: millions of views from guys like Asthmagold, who was like
Speaker 5: a he's a very famous right wing streamer who like
Speaker 5: sucks ass, like is like a turbo right winger, like
Speaker 5: spends his time screaming about how like black people in
Speaker 5: video games is dei and woke and how it's destroying
Speaker 5: the video game industry and fucking asthma Goold is watching
Speaker 5: this video and being like this guy is a lying
Speaker 5: piece of shit, what the fuck? And like everyone fucking
Speaker 5: reacts like this. It's genuinely wild. I've never actually seen
Speaker 5: people like react to this, to like to elon like
Speaker 5: this and like like again, like this is his allies
Speaker 5: on the right taking one look at this and being like, wait,
Speaker 5: this guy's just like lying. Now. What's interesting about about
Speaker 5: this to some extent is that, like, again, his whole
Speaker 5: thing here is he's trying to like pretend that he's
Speaker 5: like a pro gamer or whatever, but his affect is
Speaker 5: still largely targeted towards non gamers in the sense that
Speaker 5: like there's no way, I mean, okay, I guess it
Speaker 5: is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he
Speaker 5: believed that he could just pretend to be a top
Speaker 5: of Little Pets of Path of Exile player on a
Speaker 5: stream using someone else's account, but like, there's no way
Speaker 5: anyone who plays video games could fall for that. And
Speaker 5: and a lot of people he talks to about the stuff,
Speaker 5: for people like Joe Rogan who aren't like gamer TM people, right,
Speaker 5: it's like a lot of it's a lot of people
Speaker 5: who aren't gamers. And he's like sort of hyping up
Speaker 5: his reputation with and so he's weirdly on the one hand, yeah,
Speaker 5: he is signaling to his sort of fascist bass, but
Speaker 5: on the other hand, he's trying to use the sort
Speaker 5: of like cultural cachet of of gaming as like the
Speaker 5: sort of renegade right wing phenomena to like launder his reputation.
Speaker 5: Except he fucked up because he, you know, spent all
Speaker 5: of this time trying to like pretend to be a gamer.
Speaker 5: But the thing about gamers is that like there is
Speaker 5: literally an entire genre of video like on YouTube that
Speaker 5: is very, very popular. That is just like people exposing
Speaker 5: people who cheat in video games and cheated records of
Speaker 5: video games. And Elon has walked just like directly into
Speaker 5: this bear trap, right.
Speaker 4: And that means we got him, folks, mission accomplished. Wrap
Speaker 4: it up, We beat Elon him.
Speaker 5: It's over.
Speaker 4: He's he's been cast out of civil society for the
Speaker 4: high crime of pretending to play a video game. He's
Speaker 4: lost all respect among among the farthest reaches of the right.
Speaker 5: So what's next? We have what he has? He has
Speaker 5: one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.
Speaker 4: Is this about the one video game he hasn't played?
Speaker 4: Which is the funniest Elon musk gamer story in my opinion.
Speaker 5: Which which are you?
Speaker 8: Which?
Speaker 5: What are you talking about?
Speaker 4: That's the one that that that he he had to
Speaker 4: publicly announce that he he does not play GTA five.
Speaker 5: Oh, that was funny. I forgot about that.
Speaker 4: Because he doesn't like quote unquote doing crime and g
Speaker 4: t A five quote require shooting police officers in the
Speaker 4: opening scene. Just couldn't do it unquote.
Speaker 5: Oh, I really forgot about that.
Speaker 4: So that proofs that at least he has some integrity God. Now,
Speaker 4: some some gamers might be sick individuals acting out you know,
Speaker 4: violence power fantasies, but at least Musk has someone in
Speaker 4: tegrity to not harm police officers in GDA five. That
Speaker 4: really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all
Speaker 4: of this, you know, at times strange behavior.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's also like, that's also him signaling to like
Speaker 5: a different like the weird Christian part of the bass.
Speaker 5: That's like, oh, violence and video games is bad because
Speaker 5: he's trying to single to all of his groups simultaneously,
Speaker 5: and all of them are like, this guy is a
Speaker 5: fucking loser who sucks ass and we hate him.
Speaker 4: It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy
Speaker 4: because again he is the most powerful man in the world. No,
Speaker 4: but it is mildly amusing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But so that there is a sort of serious
Speaker 5: note to this, which is that like the pushback he
Speaker 5: is getting here is like I think actually kind of
Speaker 5: is significant. So the last thing I want to talk
Speaker 5: about it is him pretending to have been like a
Speaker 5: quake pro which the thing that he did, and there's
Speaker 5: a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Carl Jobs,
Speaker 5: who is like his thing is like people who fake
Speaker 5: who like fake things in video games basically, and he
Speaker 5: is like not a leftist. He's like like a center
Speaker 5: right guy basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly how
Speaker 5: far right he is. But he did a video about
Speaker 5: about Elon claiming to be a quack player and what
Speaker 5: he found so is Elon like apparently did actually play
Speaker 5: in an early quake tournament, but none of the good
Speaker 5: players were there, and he he came his team came
Speaker 5: in second, but they came in second because they had
Speaker 5: better WiFi than everyone else and so they had less latency,
Speaker 5: which made them invincible until they ran into a team
Speaker 5: that also had good WiFi, and then he got destroyed,
Speaker 5: which I just I just think it's funny, right. That's
Speaker 5: like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he he
Speaker 5: has this theme claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend,
Speaker 5: but it's actually because he had more money than everyone
Speaker 5: else until he ran some much who had the same
Speaker 5: amount of money that he did and just got destroyed.
Speaker 5: But the reason I bring this up is that, like
Speaker 5: at the end of this video, Jobst is like goes
Speaker 5: on this whole thing about how and this is this
Speaker 5: is like a stronger statement against Elon mustin I have
Speaker 5: seen from anything in the mainstream press where he literally
Speaker 5: goes on a thing where he says, Yeah, every single
Speaker 5: thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie.
Speaker 5: And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass,
Speaker 5: but literally everything in a field that I know, this
Speaker 5: means that I literally can't trust him when he says
Speaker 5: anything about any other fucking field that I don't know.
Speaker 5: And this is a real shift, right, I have never
Speaker 5: seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon Musk is just
Speaker 5: clearly a liar about this, and so you should not
Speaker 5: be able to trust anything else he fucking says. This
Speaker 5: is a larger degree of pushback than anything else ever
Speaker 5: fucking seen outside of like the left about what Elon
Speaker 5: Musk is doing, and like just the willingness to just
Speaker 5: be like, this guy is a fucking just just a
Speaker 5: serial liar, Like everything says is a lie. He literally
Speaker 5: calls him a con like, says that his activity is
Speaker 5: like a con man. He says the things that he's
Speaker 5: saying are like either liars or delusional. There is a
Speaker 5: kind of like shift happening right now where people like
Speaker 5: really are turning on him. There's a day to happen
Speaker 5: literally today where Ubisoft. You know, ubi Soft is a
Speaker 5: famously like not a leftist company, right, Like they've done
Speaker 5: a lot of horrible, fucked up sexual assault stuff. So
Speaker 5: Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games as
Speaker 5: a black guy as like a character in it, and
Speaker 5: literally the official Assassin's Create accounts replied to one of
Speaker 5: his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing your
Speaker 5: Path of Axile two account told you? And like replied
Speaker 5: and replied to a thing about Hassan, Like, we are
Speaker 5: genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right this thing
Speaker 5: that had been like a really really consistent base of
Speaker 5: support with people like Elon is kind of fracturing against
Speaker 5: him and is sort of being polarized against him by
Speaker 5: just like the fact that he's just is so obviously
Speaker 5: cynically pandering to them, and how unbelievably transparent it is,
Speaker 5: and like obviously, like I don't think like the gamers
Speaker 5: are going to like fucking rise up or whatever. But
Speaker 5: the actual serious point to all of this, other than
Speaker 5: like looking at the ways of fascism, like why these
Speaker 5: people do this and like gamers is like a demographic
Speaker 5: that's important to these people is that, like, the way
Speaker 5: that you destroy a coalition by this isn't necessarily by
Speaker 5: flipping everyone over to your side, right, that doesn't happen
Speaker 5: that often. But one of the ways you can do this,
Speaker 5: and this is this is, you know, to take a
Speaker 5: really really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won
Speaker 5: the October Revolution. They got their opponents to allies to
Speaker 5: stay home and that was enough enough people just staying
Speaker 5: on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks like came for
Speaker 5: Cureanzi's government was enough for them to take power. And
Speaker 5: I think like the actual, like the actual serious points
Speaker 5: of this is that the only way that we get
Speaker 5: out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away
Speaker 5: these people's coalitions so that when the confrontation with these
Speaker 5: people comes, there are enough people who would be their
Speaker 5: supporters who just fucking stay home that they can they
Speaker 5: can be stopped.
Speaker 4: So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the
Speaker 4: start of gamer Gate two.
Speaker 5: Gamer Gate two is already happening, damn it. This is
Speaker 5: gamer Gate three.
Speaker 4: This is an open call to begin gamer Gate two
Speaker 4: point five right now on behalf of me along. Make
Speaker 4: sure you at Mia oh no, and then hopefully and
Speaker 4: I'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik revolution after we
Speaker 4: get enough gamers just to stay home or even better
Speaker 4: rise up right, we can we can make some kind
Speaker 4: of graphic with like a fist holding a controller or
Speaker 4: a keyboard.
Speaker 5: If you're a nerd about it. Gamers are the cosacks.
Speaker 5: We've got to get them to knock back the regime.
Speaker 5: That's actually the February Revolution where theytood down. But you know,
Speaker 5: same point, same point. Come on ya, geez fuck I
Speaker 5: am one of the biggest things of Like, people need
Speaker 5: to remember that that Lenin did not overthrow the czar.
Speaker 5: He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist e
Speaker 5: guy who was run the provisional government in between the
Speaker 5: first Okay, we're done, we're done here, we're done here,
Speaker 5: we're working out, we're leaving.
Speaker 4: What games are you playing?
Speaker 5: What games am I playing? Pathaxtyle to don't play Rotato
Speaker 5: it will consume your life. Okay, play robo quest. Robo
Speaker 5: Quest is great. Roboquest dares to ask the question what if,
Speaker 5: Like the art style of Borderland was used for a
Speaker 5: game about rehabilitative Justice. But also you're doing the roguelike
Speaker 5: with like Doom's combat.
Speaker 4: That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that.
Speaker 4: Then I do Hell Divers too, nearly every Monday. Armored
Speaker 4: Corps six.
Speaker 5: Course six Rules. Love that game. Love that game.
Speaker 4: Sonic X Shadow Generations, Final Fantasy, Sevin, and I'm waiting
Speaker 4: for Mecca Break to come out for like their their
Speaker 4: official release now that the beta's closed. Unfortunately, the character
Speaker 4: selection is very gooner.
Speaker 5: Coded, many many such cases, so I made sure to.
Speaker 4: Make the smallest the smallest chest size available on my
Speaker 4: on my model. But the gameplay is fun.
Speaker 5: This has been it could happen here. I good lords,
Speaker 5: they pay me for this. I had to. I had
Speaker 5: to watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking
Speaker 5: clips of of of Elon Musk playing video games for this.
Speaker 5: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder our weekly.
Speaker 4: Newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 4: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today
Speaker 4: I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans. You are
Speaker 4: This week, we are covering the week of March twenty
Speaker 4: to March twenty six.
Speaker 3: Short week because we did a late recording last week.
Speaker 4: Yep, we did, so it's minus one day if my
Speaker 4: math is correct. It's been a hard week for many
Speaker 4: of us because we all really care about group chats,
Speaker 4: and group chat security is super important. Oh yeah, to
Speaker 4: kind of have anyone involved in politics, and whenever we
Speaker 4: see a breach of this magnitude, it's really a warning
Speaker 4: and like a threat to all of us. So it
Speaker 4: has it has been. It has been a tough week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like a threat to one is a threat to all. So,
Speaker 2: like the way I see it, any group chat that
Speaker 2: gets compromised, first.
Speaker 5: They came for hoothypc's ball group. Yeah, that's xt. Next
Speaker 5: they're gonna come.
Speaker 2: Be any of us could be any of us. Jeffrey
Speaker 2: Goldberg could be lurking in your small group. That's you
Speaker 2: and your girlfriend talking about what kind of pizza to order.
Speaker 2: He could be there reporting for The Atlantic. You wouldn't
Speaker 2: know unless you like looked at who was in there
Speaker 2: and saw his name, then you would know, which is
Speaker 2: true of all of the people in the hoothy PC
Speaker 2: small group.
Speaker 5: I guess it is actually pretty easy.
Speaker 3: You don't know, maybe maybe different Goldbudge signal name is
Speaker 3: like like CIA Superspy or something, and everyone's assumed along there.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna start at the beginning, because I do assume
Speaker 2: that actually, like as impossible as it sounds to those
Speaker 2: of us who like wake up and imbibe fucking social
Speaker 2: media morning, like an addict takes their first hit of
Speaker 2: crack cocaine, but in a way that's less healthy for
Speaker 2: both our hearts and our brains. A decent number of
Speaker 2: people who listen to this podcast have just kind of
Speaker 2: like heard vaguely like some bits about this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're wondering, what the fuck we're talking about?
Speaker 2: What are you doing? What are you guys doing this?
Speaker 2: So we're gonna talk about this group chat. So first off,
Speaker 2: couple of basics. So, Signal is an app that is
Speaker 2: end to end encrypted. That means that if you have
Speaker 2: Signal and your buddy has Signal and you're messaging each other,
Speaker 2: it's encrypted, and it is very hard at this point
Speaker 2: unless one of your phones is directly compromised by a
Speaker 2: non state actor or an X who's really good with
Speaker 2: the computers, no one else can see what you're messaging
Speaker 2: each other. So if you and a friend are like
Speaker 2: planning what to order on fucking grub Hub tonight when
Speaker 2: you go play Super Smash Brothers or whatever, you can
Speaker 2: keep that secret. Or if you and a friend are
Speaker 2: planning what substances to buy that the government might not
Speaker 2: want you buying, you can keep that secret. Or if
Speaker 2: you and your friend simply don't want various media companies
Speaker 2: taking every detail and phone carriers taking every detail of
Speaker 2: your life's conversations and turning that into analytics data, you
Speaker 2: can stop them from doing that. And if maybe one
Speaker 2: day you might be engaged in speech that the government
Speaker 2: might not like, you can continue to engage in that
Speaker 2: speech privately without danger.
Speaker 5: Or with less danger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or with with as little danger as it is
Speaker 2: possible to do.
Speaker 4: Especially if your messages automatically explode after anywhere between five
Speaker 4: seconds to a week, right, which is a feature Signal has.
Speaker 2: Yes, you can automatically set it to delete stuff over
Speaker 2: a period of time you want to. If you're going
Speaker 2: to use it, turn off the thing where it like
Speaker 2: pushes messages so that you can like see visible notifications.
Speaker 2: So yeah, not if you turn them off, because that's
Speaker 2: a that'll function.
Speaker 4: Up because then your operating system can read the messages
Speaker 4: without the encryption. Similarly, never open a QR code. This
Speaker 4: is the yes, really the only way that signal can
Speaker 4: can get compromised on like scale right now beyond like
Speaker 4: physical infiltration, right like what accidentally happened with who the
Speaker 4: PC smell Group.
Speaker 5: But the main other way.
Speaker 4: That signal kanka compromised is through malicious QR codes and
Speaker 4: unknown links. So really be careful about links as always
Speaker 4: on the Internet, and especially be skeptical of QR codes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a there's a quote from Herman Garring. I
Speaker 2: think it was from Herman Gehring. When I hear the
Speaker 2: word culture, I reach for my revolver, and I have
Speaker 2: adapted that gearing quote to the modern era. When I
Speaker 2: hear QR code, I reach for Mike clock nineteen.
Speaker 3: That's right, do not do not use koorotes. Yeah, the
Speaker 3: work of Satan. Let's explain what who the PC small
Speaker 3: Group is for the people. I'm getting to it.
Speaker 2: So you've got you've got this app which is normally
Speaker 2: used by and has been used for a long time
Speaker 2: by like protesters and dissidents and journalists to communicate with sources.
Speaker 2: Because it's very secure the Trump administration takes office. One
Speaker 2: thing that they are annoyed about is that when you
Speaker 2: are government employees, even if you're doing top secret shit,
Speaker 2: especially if you're doing top secret shit, the kind of
Speaker 2: meetings about national security planning for like military actions that
Speaker 2: you are supposed to only have in something called a skiff,
Speaker 2: and a skiff is basically a room in you know,
Speaker 2: the West Wing, I think, or the Pentagon, right, I'm
Speaker 2: not one hundred percent sure where all the skiffs are,
Speaker 2: but it's like a room that is incredibly secure, and
Speaker 2: it is the only place that you are supposed to
Speaker 2: have certain kinds of conversations. And in fact, if you
Speaker 2: are having one of those kinds of conversations in a skiff,
Speaker 2: no one, not even the president or the vice president,
Speaker 2: is allowed to have a phone in there. It is
Speaker 2: a very strict rule. You don't take phones into the
Speaker 2: skiff because none of them are fucking secure. Now, the
Speaker 2: problem is all these communications, all of this stuff is
Speaker 2: documented and potentially foilable. Maybe not immediately because there's always
Speaker 2: security concerns. They have the ability to redact.
Speaker 5: Stuff, but in twenty years perhaps, but at some.
Speaker 3: Point, yeah, it might be archived. Even if it's not flable.
Speaker 2: People who are in charge of our military now didn't
Speaker 2: like that and were like, hey, what if we all
Speaker 2: just did it through a single group, And they did
Speaker 2: to plan for an attack that started March fifteenth against
Speaker 2: the Hoothies. Now you will remember the Hoothies from the
Speaker 2: episode James and I did, I mean from other stuff too,
Speaker 2: because they're all over the.
Speaker 5: News, you know, the the hoothy stuff.
Speaker 2: James and I did an episode recently about a regular
Speaker 2: naval warfare, and you check it out. That's all still
Speaker 2: pretty relevant.
Speaker 5: Better known for their other work, yeah.
Speaker 2: Better known for their other work. The Biden administration was like,
Speaker 2: we can probably take care of these guys with air strikes,
Speaker 2: and it didn't really work. And the Trump administration was like,
Speaker 2: we can do a better job of taking these guys
Speaker 2: out with air strikes. And at this point it's too
Speaker 2: early to say if it worked or not, but I'm
Speaker 2: gonna guess probably didn't.
Speaker 5: Probably not, just generally given the history.
Speaker 2: Maybe they say they killed a lot more high value
Speaker 2: targets and top missile guys.
Speaker 3: The main missile guy quote, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm not privy to the information. They're
Speaker 2: working off of or how much it matters at this point. Right,
Speaker 2: So we'll see you in that signal chat. Rob, I'm
Speaker 2: not in that signal chat. They have not accidental.
Speaker 4: I I'm in too many signal chats, frankly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, I could be, and I might not know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we all are in too many.
Speaker 3: I might be in several government ones would be totally
Speaker 3: unaware of it because there's too many notifications on that.
Speaker 5: Shit's mute and I'm not seeing that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So they decide we're gonna plan an attack on
Speaker 2: some hoothies. We're gonna be hitting them with stuff, and
Speaker 2: we should probably all get We need to get all
Speaker 2: of these different kind of people from different chunks of
Speaker 2: the uh, you know, the government together. So we got
Speaker 2: to have JD. Vance and his representative because usually Vance
Speaker 2: is too busy to respond. And we got to have
Speaker 2: the Defense Secretary Pete he Zeth and his representative. We've
Speaker 2: got to have the d n I Toulci Gabbard her representative.
Speaker 2: We've got to have the head of the CIA his
Speaker 2: represent you know that kind of thing. There's a few
Speaker 2: more people in there. Mark Rubio, Mark Rubio, right Sex State,
Speaker 2: you know, and his representative, Raevin Miller, Stephen Miller. I
Speaker 2: don't know that Miller had a representative. He feels like
Speaker 2: he handles a lot of this stuff on his own.
Speaker 2: But yeah, on his phone too much, Steven Miller.
Speaker 4: Yeah, chronically online Steven Miller.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you have the head of I think Syncom
Speaker 2: was in there. Anyway. You got all these people in there,
Speaker 2: and while they're setting this up, all the invites are
Speaker 2: going out. Because the way you do it with Signal
Speaker 2: is you click a button that says, like start a
Speaker 2: new group. You name the new group. In this case,
Speaker 2: they named the group hoo, the PC small group, right,
Speaker 2: and uh shit, what does PC stand for?
Speaker 4: In this politically correct? Which, honestly I thought that we
Speaker 4: were over.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you'd think so, huh don't Sandy slur's in the
Speaker 3: group chat? That says what it's just a reminder.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no slurs in the small group chat.
Speaker 3: Planning committee, I'm guessing, yeah.
Speaker 2: Planning committee. Who they planning committee? Small group? Sorry, I
Speaker 2: had that written down somewhere. So they make this group
Speaker 2: chat and they invite a bunch of people. And here's
Speaker 2: the way. One of the ways Signal works is that like,
Speaker 2: if you're just importing your contacts in the signal, it'll
Speaker 2: find the guys who have signal, and it'll just like
Speaker 2: show you, based on whatever your name you have for
Speaker 2: them in their phone right that they're on signal, and
Speaker 2: you can just invite them. Otherwise, you can set what
Speaker 2: your signal name is going to be, and so when
Speaker 2: people type in your phone number or whatever, they'll see that,
Speaker 2: or if you send them an invite, that's the name
Speaker 2: they'll see. And this brings us. I got to take
Speaker 2: an aside to talk about a guy who is not
Speaker 2: a member of the Trump administration and who is not
Speaker 2: a member of government, a man named Jeffrey Goldberg born
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty five. He is currently the co editor
Speaker 2: of the Atlantic. Prior to this, he had what some
Speaker 2: people would call an illustrious career. He grew up in
Speaker 2: Malvern and Long Eye and I'm Maulvin. Yeah, what I'm
Speaker 2: looking at his wiki here, which just has the line
Speaker 2: that his neighborhood was mainly Catholic and he described it
Speaker 2: as a wasteland of Irish pagramists.
Speaker 3: Oh I, he had a fun childhood, So okay, interesting,
Speaker 3: interesting Jeffrey.
Speaker 2: Fascinating stuff there.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: So after college or kind of while he's in college,
Speaker 2: he leaves and he goes to Israel because he wants
Speaker 2: to serve in the IDF during the Intifada, the first
Speaker 2: one as a prison guard Jesus Christ, which is where
Speaker 2: Palestinian participants in the Intefhub were being held. And yeah,
Speaker 2: he he had like an interesting conversation with this PLO
Speaker 2: leader who is also like a math teacher, who I
Speaker 2: guess they were able to like discuss their Zionism or
Speaker 2: whatever in some way that he found useful. Anyway, weird guy,
Speaker 2: not a I bring this up to be like, not
Speaker 2: a left wing radical.
Speaker 4: Like not one of quote unquote to our guys.
Speaker 2: Not one of our guys. Not a guy who's probably
Speaker 2: broadly opposed to most of and in fact to most
Speaker 2: of what the Trump administration is.
Speaker 5: Doing, especially the air strikes.
Speaker 2: Frankly, yes, now he has pissed off It's fair to
Speaker 2: say he has really pissed off Trump a number of times,
Speaker 2: right because he wrote some articles. He wrote that twenty
Speaker 2: twenty article in the Atlantic about when Trump said got
Speaker 2: caught saying that Americans who died in wars are losers
Speaker 2: and suckers. Yes, which is you know based on sourcing
Speaker 2: that he had, so he's also attracted their ire. But
Speaker 2: he's again generally I would say, like more on the
Speaker 2: bootleoker east side of things, Like he's just kind of
Speaker 2: like a NATSEK cheerleader, Right, that would be a fair
Speaker 2: way to describe Jeffrey totally. I don't know that he
Speaker 2: would entirely disagree with that description of himself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like a neobe guy.
Speaker 2: That said, he's not so much of one that he's
Speaker 2: unwilling to report critical stuff, which is what happens here.
Speaker 2: So he gets an invite on his phone that it
Speaker 2: just takes him into this PC houthy small group and
Speaker 2: people have done the work. There's another guy in the
Speaker 2: Trump administration whose initials are.
Speaker 5: JC John Greenbrier I believe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it was John Greenbrier and the person
Speaker 2: who because there was some debate initially about like who
Speaker 2: invited him, because after this came out, there were allegations
Speaker 2: that he snuck his way in or whatever. We now
Speaker 2: know based on the evidence that he was inadvertently invited
Speaker 2: by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, right.
Speaker 4: As evidenced by the signal screen shot.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, there's lots of screenshots. Jeffrey did his
Speaker 2: you know, the job of document eventually, yes, well he
Speaker 2: documented it right away.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: So now here's the thing. From the beginning here, Jeffrey
Speaker 2: is having the natural reaction. I will say this role, Mike,
Speaker 2: you're of him. He has the reaction I think any
Speaker 2: minimally competent journalists would have. Someone's fucking with me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, this is like something to get me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you don't get invited into a chat with the
Speaker 2: sect deaf and the head of the CIA planning a
Speaker 2: military strike.
Speaker 4: Right like this.
Speaker 3: That doesn't happen. I had a bit of journalist for
Speaker 3: a while. That's not occurred to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not does not really go down. So he's
Speaker 2: like trying to figure out what the fuck's going on.
Speaker 2: I'm like, what's happening, And he's like he's making a note,
Speaker 2: he's documenting stuff is there, and they're talking about like
Speaker 2: weapons packages, like these are the kind of weapons. This
Speaker 2: is where they're striking. And then as the strike's going
Speaker 2: they're being like this guy headed into his girlfriend's house,
Speaker 2: we're hitting it. The house blew up, he's dead.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: Particular exchange was very funny because the way he phrased,
Speaker 3: it was like it completely baffled jd Vance. Yes, let
Speaker 3: me pull this up because it was it was pretty funny.
Speaker 2: No please please?
Speaker 3: Uh. Michael Waltz VP full Stop building collapsed, full Stop
Speaker 3: had multiple positive id full Stop, Pete Carilla the ic
Speaker 3: amazing job. Jd Vance replies, what Michael Waltz typing too fast?
Speaker 3: Full stop? The first target, M Dash that top missile guy,
Speaker 3: M Dash. We have positive idea of him walking into
Speaker 3: his girlfriend's building and now it's collapsed. And then jad
Speaker 3: Ebbonds replies, excellent. At this point, Michael Waltz responds with
Speaker 3: the fifth emoji American flag emoji, flame emoji.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's great. And once it becomes very clear
Speaker 2: what's happening number one, rather than stay in the group,
Speaker 2: see if maybe he could get invited to other groups,
Speaker 2: just kind of like keep track of what was going
Speaker 2: on again being a guy who's like primary concern and
Speaker 2: I really do think Goldberg's primary concern here was the
Speaker 2: security of US soldiers, like.
Speaker 5: The national security of the United States.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, as opposed to like is any
Speaker 2: of this legal? Are they like what like his is
Speaker 2: just like these people are not being secure like with
Speaker 2: I mean like this this could if the wrong person
Speaker 2: got invited in to a group like this, it could
Speaker 2: potentially endanger the lives of airmen and stuff. That's on
Speaker 2: my point concerned with all this, right, but that is
Speaker 2: his you know. And so he hops out of the group.
Speaker 2: He leaves, and he puts out this article and he
Speaker 2: redacts most other than the what's happened, which is a
Speaker 2: story in and of itself. He like goes out of
Speaker 2: his way, like there's people who are like in intelligence
Speaker 2: that are in this that he has their names, and
Speaker 2: he's like, I am not naming them because they're serving
Speaker 2: intelligence officers, and that's a no no. He doesn't like
Speaker 2: specifically give up other than that this is happening anything
Speaker 2: that's like particularly dangerous, right, But this is the kind
Speaker 2: of thing as soon as it comes out, obviously it's
Speaker 2: it's a fewer and it's unlike most of the time
Speaker 2: when everybody gets like pissed, it seems to like it
Speaker 2: might have some legs because it's just such a what
Speaker 2: the bach moment, right.
Speaker 4: And it's so contrary to like so much of the
Speaker 4: messaging coming from from the Trump administration regarding you know,
Speaker 4: like digital security. Hillary's emails prosecuting individual soldiers for any
Speaker 4: like like you know, losing a night vision goggle, right,
Speaker 4: and it's kind of a leaking information. How this administration
Speaker 4: is gonna going to crack down and all informations, you
Speaker 4: know that sort of stuff.
Speaker 3: At one point, Excess says we are clear for op SEC,
Speaker 3: which I thought was pretty funny.
Speaker 4: The funniest message in this signal group is that we're
Speaker 4: all good on OPSEC. Yeah, that he says in a
Speaker 4: group chat with Internal Life.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's super funny. Everything that's happening here is very funny.
Speaker 2: I basically want to move on to, like what's what's
Speaker 2: going to happen next, which is they are going to
Speaker 2: try to nuke Jeffrey Goldberg, Like they're going to try
Speaker 2: to send him to a prison, if not a literal
Speaker 2: like El Salvadorian work camp, right, like that that is
Speaker 2: going to be their next goal here.
Speaker 3: He embarrassed these people, like yes to an extent that
Speaker 3: it's I mean, anyone in uniform would have been cult
Speaker 3: martialed for this kind of security fuck up.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean in times of war in
Speaker 2: the past, if like the version of this had happened
Speaker 2: in World War Two. They would have just executed whatever
Speaker 2: soldier did this, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't have to be a spy if you're
Speaker 3: incompetent enough to just bumble into shiit, it's the same result.
Speaker 3: I did want to address really quickly, like a couple
Speaker 3: of things. One, I saw this USA Today article that
Speaker 3: was like, oh, it's so relatable that they made this
Speaker 3: mistake of adding someone to the group chat. That was
Speaker 3: not the mistake. The mistake was coordinating things that should
Speaker 3: be classified. Things it should be quote unquote high side
Speaker 3: on personal devices using signal as opposed to a state
Speaker 3: department or government issued device which doesn't have your personal
Speaker 3: contacts to avoid all this, like a device which is
Speaker 3: not hackable advice which has not been exposed to QR codes,
Speaker 3: for example.
Speaker 4: Yeah, to make sure that in your context, there's not
Speaker 4: two guys named JG.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you might add the wrong JG to your
Speaker 4: Yemen bombing chat.
Speaker 2: Haven't we all added the wrong person to a group chat?
Speaker 2: And it's like, I mean, yeah, but I've never like
Speaker 2: bombed Yemen.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's not the same thing. It's
Speaker 3: not the same thing as a birthday party.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like I have two friends named John and I
Speaker 2: added the wrong one to a group about like planning
Speaker 2: a mutual friend birthday party. But like again minimal damage.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, no no service. People's lives are put at risk.
Speaker 2: I did also want to point out this.
Speaker 3: At one point, Waltz says on Michael Walls, who's a
Speaker 3: national security advisor. Yeah not not not the other one. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that would be pretty funny. They had him as well.
Speaker 2: He was just in there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it seems the ground you'd like to shoot parent
Speaker 4: friends with JD Vans wouldn't be so.
Speaker 3: One of the things Wolf says which is bizarre is
Speaker 3: that like European navies are incapable of defeating Hoothy weapons systems.
Speaker 5: It just isn't true.
Speaker 3: Like there was a coalition of twenty different states running
Speaker 3: operations in the rest he last year.
Speaker 2: And against like France has a navy, like they've gotten
Speaker 2: a nuclear submarines they could in the world.
Speaker 3: Just like one example, HMS Diamond, which is a British ship,
Speaker 3: shot down a Hoothy missile last year. The UK also
Speaker 3: struck Houthy targets last year. Yeah, I've watched the UK
Speaker 3: carry out air strike. I've like they're very capable. Look
Speaker 3: what the rane what the Houthies have is Iranian three
Speaker 3: fifty eight to just get really nerdy for a second, right,
Speaker 3: which are not really a threat to mode fighter aircraft.
Speaker 3: It is like a loitering munition. Maybe a drone, yeah,
Speaker 3: but no no aircraft, not a manned or personed aircraft.
Speaker 2: The primary point of like how the Hoothies are conducting
Speaker 2: their strikes is not We're going to knock all of
Speaker 2: these ships out of the sea. It's it will It
Speaker 2: will create an unsustainable insurance situation for a lot of merchants.
Speaker 2: If there's just always kind of missiles. Even if we
Speaker 2: never really or almost never hit anybody, that doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2: You got to deal with the insurance thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're going to make that much more expensive and
Speaker 3: that that particular part of global trade much more difficult
Speaker 3: to conduct. So far, the Trump administration has doubled down
Speaker 3: in its response. This is pretty funny. Karen Levitt on
Speaker 3: Twitter X, I guess called Goldberg.
Speaker 5: She's the White House Press secretary. I believe press. That's correct?
Speaker 3: Yeah, what has press? Sex actually called Goldberg a quote
Speaker 3: Trump hater and also claimed the story was a quote
Speaker 3: hoax and a quote sensationalist spin. They are also right
Speaker 3: now claiming that quote war plans and quote attack plans
Speaker 3: are different things. The information they leaked to was too
Speaker 3: specific to constitute a war plan. Both of these things
Speaker 3: are kind of ludicrous claims, right, Very clearly, this is
Speaker 3: stuff that should be classified, very clearly. It's stuff that
Speaker 3: put those people's lives at risk in the event that
Speaker 3: the whoth He's had any means to respond to like
Speaker 3: F eighteen's, which I don't think they do really now.
Speaker 3: But you know, Iran, who absolutely is a state backer
Speaker 3: of the who he's, does have the ability, at least
Speaker 3: in theory. They they kind of haven't. They've kind of
Speaker 3: shown their ass a bit in the last year or
Speaker 3: two with Israeli strikes in a run.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not the ability to like easily interdict these
Speaker 2: kinds of strikes, but certainly the ability to and more
Speaker 2: importantly kind of the ability to survive them, to like
Speaker 2: mitigate the damage that they can do.
Speaker 3: Sure, sure to go underground or go somewhere else, and
Speaker 3: like those planes are vulnerable when at like certain points
Speaker 3: in their trajectory, I think, so, you know, Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: Germany very poor to broad to broadcast exactly what you're doing, when,
Speaker 3: where and how.
Speaker 2: It's kind of just a basic of like military stuff
Speaker 2: that you really don't want people to know exactly when
Speaker 2: you're sending dudes in to do what.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a very funny meme going around which
Speaker 3: basically had like imagined if the same discussion had been
Speaker 3: had about D Day in nineteen forty four, and yeah,
Speaker 3: that wouldn't have gone so well.
Speaker 2: They had brought a lot of great posts. I'm looking
Speaker 2: at one by Katie and Autopolis on Twitter right now.
Speaker 2: Having read through the full hoothy PC small group logs,
Speaker 2: I've come to the sad realization that I'm the Jdvans
Speaker 2: of my group chats, overly emotional, slightly unprofessional, confused by
Speaker 2: what everyone else is saying because I won't scroll up,
Speaker 2: continually derails plans with later rejections.
Speaker 5: So good, it's still good.
Speaker 2: It is that is really funny.
Speaker 5: That is brutal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is interesting to see their dynamics. It's interesting
Speaker 3: to see of Stephen Miller seemed to have the decisive
Speaker 3: word on like let's go ahead with Alice Miller. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: speaking directly for the president.
Speaker 2: That's what's interesting because no one ever says the president
Speaker 2: has approved this, the president has said do this, Like
Speaker 2: Miller says something along the lines of like, we're going
Speaker 2: forward with this, or I've been told we're going forward
Speaker 2: with this, which is again not in terms of like
Speaker 2: it's a very Hitler way of doing things, right, yea, right,
Speaker 2: Like there's this I talk about this in the show.
Speaker 2: There's this decades long debate about like Hitler literally order
Speaker 2: the Holocaust or did he just kind of like keep
Speaker 2: making it clear to people that if they kept moving
Speaker 2: in a more holocausty direction that would.
Speaker 3: Like endear them to him.
Speaker 2: Aspects of both are true, but like, yeah, this is
Speaker 2: definitely kind of example of that ladder thing where Trump
Speaker 2: is probably like, yeah, somebody should probably fuck up those hoothies,
Speaker 2: and then Steven Miller goes like, yeah, Trump said, you know,
Speaker 2: we're good, keep moving forward. But he's also Miller's not dumb.
Speaker 2: He's not going to say Trump he's been doing this.
Speaker 2: He's gonna say he's.
Speaker 4: Been delegating so much more than his first term, to
Speaker 4: the point where his presidency is just rejecting a certain
Speaker 4: vibe that then other people have to carry out all
Speaker 4: of the details for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is very similar to the hit the regimes.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there is a term for this at the time,
Speaker 2: in the third Reck, it's called working towards the fuery Okay, right,
Speaker 2: where you're not going to get direct guidelines, you're supposed
Speaker 2: to figure out what he wants and move closer to it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no exactly. Yeah, No, that's kind of been his
Speaker 4: new governing style. It's a lot smarter in terms of
Speaker 4: like just like you know, getting documents to sign and
Speaker 4: then projects certain certain like slogans or vibes that then
Speaker 4: everyone who works under him, which is at this point
Speaker 4: it's maybe like roughly twoted people tops have to all
Speaker 4: like figure out to like how to enact this thing
Speaker 4: that they think he wants.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like gave it to the extent that he himself
Speaker 3: was saying he didn't sign the evocation of the Alien
Speaker 3: Enemies at that Rubio did. Yeah, his signatures on it
Speaker 3: in the federal record. But clearly it's kind of a
Speaker 3: Rubio or it seems from that that it's a Rubio
Speaker 3: concoction that he just greenlit. Just a quote from Miller
Speaker 3: in case you know, it's want of exactly what he said,
Speaker 3: as I heard it. The presume was clear colon green light,
Speaker 3: but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what
Speaker 3: we expect in return. So yeah, it's he never he
Speaker 3: never specifically says the President has okayed this. But yeah,
Speaker 3: that's obviously people in Europe really pissed. I've seen some
Speaker 3: statements from government ministers in the United Kingdom like the
Speaker 3: sort of maligning of Europe and its military powers is
Speaker 3: obviously going to piss those people off. Talking of pissing
Speaker 3: people off, should we pivot to advertisements?
Speaker 4: We should, which does not piss me off. It makes
Speaker 4: me really happy to consume.
Speaker 3: Garrison personally consumes all the products and services that support
Speaker 3: this show.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's definitely not true.
Speaker 2: It's the only thing that Garrison concerns, which is why
Speaker 2: they have poleegra.
Speaker 4: I don't know what that is, but sure, here's here's
Speaker 4: the ads, all right, we are so that.
Speaker 2: H Yeah, what's rending my additions?
Speaker 3: James, Yeah, okay, I'll just start so very amusingly is
Speaker 3: that's probably concerningly for him. Judge Boseberg, the same person
Speaker 3: who issued attentive restraining order against the Trump administration for
Speaker 3: the rendition of people to Venezuela has also been assigned
Speaker 3: signal lawsuit American Obsit versus HeiG Seth. So that guy
Speaker 3: that the one who Trump already called for his impeachment
Speaker 3: right has another crucial case in front of him. What
Speaker 3: the Trump administration has done in the court case pertaining
Speaker 3: to the rendition of people to El Salvador is invoked
Speaker 3: the state secrets privilege in court. Very ironic or very
Speaker 3: very ironic. They're talking about state secrets now, having just
Speaker 3: added Jeff Goldberg to the group chat. But that's what
Speaker 3: they have done. You can go back last week to
Speaker 3: understand sort of a bit more about where that's coming from.
Speaker 3: If you didn't listen to last week.
Speaker 5: Yeah we did.
Speaker 4: We did a whole episode on it last week.
Speaker 3: It's also continuing to claim that it didn't quote unquote
Speaker 3: remove migrants after the tentative restraining order was issued because
Speaker 3: they'd already been removed. The removal happened when they were
Speaker 3: loaded onto the plane. Is this argument concurrectly with this
Speaker 3: as a panel hearing? So that's a panel of three
Speaker 3: judges right which the government is appealing the attentive restraining order.
Speaker 3: During this hearing, quote Judge Patricia Millet said, quote the
Speaker 3: Nazis received better treatment under their Alien Enemies Act than
Speaker 3: these Venezuelan migrants, which is true. The Nazis had hearings
Speaker 3: in the nineteen thirties and they didn't just get loaded
Speaker 3: onto plane in the central work camp. Not a great reflection.
Speaker 3: And where we're at. The Trump administration is trying to
Speaker 3: challenge the jurisdiction of Bosberg, saying that they should have
Speaker 3: filed the same claim in Texas. Meanwhile, then, as whalen
Speaker 3: governments are filing a colegal claim in El Salvador to
Speaker 3: deliberate their citizens from SECOD. It's worth noting, of course,
Speaker 3: that these people, some of them, have been tortured by
Speaker 3: the Venezuelan government right and chose to flee at no
Speaker 3: small risk to their lives. Like if people have an
Speaker 3: listen to some of our older stuff, like I've been
Speaker 3: to the Darien Gap, which is the way that the
Speaker 3: vast majority of Venezuelan migrants come. You can listen to
Speaker 3: my episodes about that if you will know more about
Speaker 3: why people are leaving Venezuela. We have a little more
Speaker 3: information on some of the people detained. One of them
Speaker 3: is a makeup artist. He's a gay man who was
Speaker 3: beaten by guards as a US photojournalist. Watch another one
Speaker 3: that Miami Herald is reporting had been granted legal refugee status,
Speaker 3: So it seems that they sort of randomly grabbed tattooed Venezuelan's.
Speaker 3: Some of these people have been through background checks already,
Speaker 3: right at which they will have disclosed their tattoos. That's
Speaker 3: one of the things that they'll be asked about, and
Speaker 3: they would have disclosed those. So whether they control eft
Speaker 3: IT or quite how they came across these people, it's
Speaker 3: still a little bit unclear. A couple of other things
Speaker 3: regarding to immigration enforcement this week that have come across
Speaker 3: my radar but probably don't marrit a whole episode. It's
Speaker 3: been reported that the IRS is close to an agreement
Speaker 3: to hand over the tax records of undocumented people it's
Speaker 3: claimed for decades. If it won't do this, this is
Speaker 3: why most undocumented people pay taxes, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which is something that the conservatives just like you
Speaker 4: don't believe, Yes, the like all these undocumented immigrants are
Speaker 4: aren't paying taxes like the rest of us, Like, no,
Speaker 4: actually they are.
Speaker 3: What they're not doing is receiving benefits from those taxes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and yes, and this is a great way to
Speaker 4: have people want to pay less taxes if they're gonna
Speaker 4: get their information sent over to like the Gestapo, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The whole point was to not provide a distance. This
Speaker 3: is similar to why California gives driver's licenses to undocumented
Speaker 3: people and allows it to ensure vehicles, right, because you
Speaker 3: don't want to provide a disincentive to have a driver's license,
Speaker 3: you don't want to provide a disincentive to have insurance.
Speaker 3: We have now provided a disincentive to pay your taxes
Speaker 3: for undocumented people. So yeah, that will have consequences, and
Speaker 3: it will have consequences, especially in industries right like agriculture
Speaker 3: and construction and my large numbers of people tend to
Speaker 3: be undocumented. Talking of undocumented migration, the COMMA secretary Howard
Speaker 3: Lutnik reports it. He said it on the All In podcast.
Speaker 3: He has claimed to have already sold one thousand gold cards.
Speaker 3: So gold cards. If you didn't listen to our previous
Speaker 3: appoint that is Oh.
Speaker 5: I feel like I thought I'm getting dizzy.
Speaker 4: I'm just like, yeah, I am a ill.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. There is no process for applying for receiving a
Speaker 3: gold card yet, so it's extremely unclear what this means
Speaker 3: in immigration law terms.
Speaker 4: So he just got like a thousand texts from millionaires
Speaker 4: being like, yeah, I'll buy one maybe, Like yeah.
Speaker 3: Well multimillionaires five million each, right, Like so yeah, apparently
Speaker 3: not quite clear, Like and like he claims he sold them,
Speaker 3: Like is he going around shopping these around? Is this
Speaker 3: how they're going to replace a tax revenue from undocumented people? Like,
Speaker 3: oh my god, no one knows, no, no one knows
Speaker 3: what this means. Who do you pay? Like very unclear.
Speaker 3: So yeah, that's great. Uh, that that is that it's
Speaker 3: the current situation with immigration. I also wanted to add
Speaker 3: at least three people who were aware of died in
Speaker 3: San Diego count on the fourteenth of March in a
Speaker 3: storm while crossing the border. One young woman who survived
Speaker 3: was found next to the remains of her father, who
Speaker 3: died of exposure in a winter storm out here. So yeah,
Speaker 3: the border continues to be doing violence to some of
Speaker 3: the most marginalized people alive, which is great.
Speaker 2: We should pop in here. A story just dropped Michael Waltz,
Speaker 2: the National Security advisor who invited Jeffrey to that group
Speaker 2: chat journalists have found his public Venmo.
Speaker 5: Every time with the away Venmo.
Speaker 2: Quote unquote, it's full of journalists. I'm just gonna read
Speaker 2: a quote from an article on Prospect dot org.
Speaker 5: Yeah please.
Speaker 2: Unsurprisingly, Fox News holds the highest headcount for reporters in
Speaker 2: Mike Waltz's phone. Griff Jenkins, who's Fox dot com bio
Speaker 2: listen as a Washington based national correspondent for Fox, is
Speaker 2: joined on the list by Brian Kilmead, co host of
Speaker 2: Fox and Friends. Porter Berry, president and editor of Fox Digital,
Speaker 2: also made the gut But what right wing reporters are
Speaker 2: not the only ones represented in Waltz's Benmo list, which
Speaker 2: appears to be less than clean on obsec as Secretary
Speaker 2: of Defense. Hegseth roat Leland Vittert, a national correspondent for
Speaker 2: News Nation, is also listed on the digital account, as
Speaker 2: is Breonna Keeler, an American journalist who currently serves as
Speaker 2: co anchor of the afternoon edition of CNN News Central.
Speaker 2: Lauren Pikeoff, an executive producer at MSNBC, is also in
Speaker 2: Walls's contacts. Earlier this year, Trump tweeted about the network Wow.
Speaker 2: Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She'll be off the air soon.
Speaker 2: But amidst the broadcasters, producers, and talking heads, one name
Speaker 2: stands out from the crowd. Judith Miller, who was summarily
Speaker 2: fired from The New York Times after it was revealed
Speaker 2: that her reporting on the Iraq war was categorically false
Speaker 2: and obtained almost verbatim from Vice President Dick Cheney. Her
Speaker 2: dismissal was the price paid for cozying up too close
Speaker 2: to an administration set on war. It's just like, Okay,
Speaker 2: we don't check any of this, we haven't locked anything down.
Speaker 4: Good having your public venmo itself is crazy.
Speaker 5: The fact that.
Speaker 4: He's like the fact that he's like getting like dinner
Speaker 4: with journalists to be like I'll send you, I'll send
Speaker 4: you a venmo requests for this, for this sushi.
Speaker 3: Oh man, they've downloaded his entire friends list and you
Speaker 3: can just scroll.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know you can see everybody.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, He's had to get like a fifteen
Speaker 4: dollars venmo requests from Bryan killmead for getting drinks in
Speaker 4: a bar, like what are we doing?
Speaker 3: Oh? What are we doing?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Also, yeah, how well these people make.
Speaker 3: Hundreds of thousands if not millions two dollars.
Speaker 5: You make so much money bucks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the bat it's just one drink.
Speaker 4: In DC's so funny. Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Now I think it's time, folks, that we take a
Speaker 2: little bit of a detour and talk about tariffs.
Speaker 5: Rocky Jaspar.
Speaker 3: Lock Locking.
Speaker 2: Cking Jasp, Oh my god, I love playing that song.
Speaker 2: I love playing that song. We don't actually have anything
Speaker 2: to say about tariffs. MIA's not here. I will note
Speaker 2: there's a graph going around about the potential cost of
Speaker 2: Guinness under Trump's tax plan, which is usually around seven
Speaker 2: dollars per pint in the US and will now be
Speaker 2: twenty two to twenty seven dollars after Trump's you know,
Speaker 2: new tariffs for imported alcohol.
Speaker 3: That reflects its true value because it's also.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, absolutely, anyway, We're done. That's all I have
Speaker 2: to say on tariffs.
Speaker 4: As long as the twisted tea pricing doesn't get affected,
Speaker 4: I'll be fine. Then that's good.
Speaker 3: Good huh I comment.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: In some more upsetting news, another student at Columbia has
Speaker 4: been forced into hiding as Ice targets her for deportation.
Speaker 4: Unsouchung is a twenty one year old permanent resident who
Speaker 4: immigrated to the United States from Korea with her family
Speaker 4: when she was seven. On March ninth, she'd received a
Speaker 4: text message from Homeland Security Investigations, reading, Hyensau, this is
Speaker 4: Audrey from the police. My job is to reach out
Speaker 4: to you and see if you have any questions about
Speaker 4: your recent arrest and the process going forward.
Speaker 5: What are you available for a phone call?
Speaker 4: So this message was allegedly in reference to being arrested,
Speaker 4: among others at a recent sit in protest at Bernard
Speaker 4: College at Columbia. She was charged and then released with
Speaker 4: misdemeanor obstruction. So after receiving that like sketchy text, right,
Speaker 4: something that you should never never respond to, You should
Speaker 4: immediately send your lawyer. But after receiving this text, Chung
Speaker 4: got an email from Columbia Public Safety reading quote, the
Speaker 4: US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York
Speaker 4: has asked us to inform you that Homeland Security Investigation
Speaker 4: agents are seeking to make contact with you in connection
Speaker 4: with an administrative warrant for your arrest. Consistent with university's practice,
Speaker 4: we wanted to share this information and their request with you.
Speaker 4: If you are represented by counsel, it may make sense
Speaker 4: for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS now. That
Speaker 4: same day, ICE agents showed up at the home of
Speaker 4: Chunk's parents, and Chung's lawyer called quote unquote Audrey from
Speaker 4: the police, who revealed she was actually an ICE agent
Speaker 4: and stated that there was an administrative warrant for her
Speaker 4: arrest and that the State Department can revoke Miss Chung's
Speaker 4: residency status. We're going to talk more about what's happened
Speaker 4: with miss Chung after this at break.
Speaker 5: All right, we're back.
Speaker 4: So when ICE failed to locate this Columbia University student,
Speaker 4: they started to enlist the help of federal prosecutors. I'm
Speaker 4: going to quote from the New York Times who broke
Speaker 4: this story.
Speaker 5: Quote.
Speaker 4: On March tenth, Perry Carbone, a high ranking lawyer in
Speaker 4: the Federal Prosecutor's office, told miss Ahmad, miss Chung's attorney,
Speaker 4: that the Secretary of State Mark Rubio had revoked Miss
Speaker 4: Chung's visa. Miss Ahmad responded that Miss Chung was not
Speaker 4: in the country on a visa and was a permanent resident,
Speaker 4: according to the lawsuit. Miss car Bone responded that mister
Speaker 4: Rubio had quote revoked that as well unquote. So this
Speaker 4: similar to like a mamou Khali like demonstrats that like
Speaker 4: they have no idea of the of the actual residency
Speaker 4: status of the people that they are going after. They
Speaker 4: are just going after non citizens and may eventually start
Speaker 4: going after citizens too. Like they're just going after people
Speaker 4: that they assume have like the least amount of protections,
Speaker 4: whether that's a green card holder, whether that's someone on
Speaker 4: a student visa or a work visa. They don't really
Speaker 4: know going in. They're they're they're just going after people. Then,
Speaker 4: on March thirteenth, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants,
Speaker 4: citing a statute for harboring non citizens. The Trump administration
Speaker 4: is arguing that Chung's presence in the United States hinders
Speaker 4: the administration's foreign policy agenda. One twenty one year old
Speaker 4: student who was the Vale Victorian at her eigh school
Speaker 4: is hindering their foreign policy agenda for attending a sit
Speaker 4: in protest. Her lawyers note that Chung was not, by
Speaker 4: any means like a movement leader. She was simply one
Speaker 4: of hundreds of students who joined in in nationwide protests
Speaker 4: against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyer's right quote, Miss
Speaker 4: Chung has not made any public statements to the press
Speaker 4: or otherwise assumed a high profile role in these protests.
Speaker 4: She was rather one of a large group of college
Speaker 4: students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns. Chung herself had
Speaker 4: previously faced a university disciplinary process, which found that Chung
Speaker 4: was not in violation of any university policy. So in
Speaker 4: response to the actions of ICE and Homeland Security to
Speaker 4: try to locate and deport her, Chung went into hiding.
Speaker 4: Her whereabouts are still unknown as the time of recording,
Speaker 4: and her lawyers fouled a lawsuit to prevent her deportation,
Speaker 4: claiming that ICE actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional.
Speaker 4: The lawsuit reads, quote officials that the highest echalons the
Speaker 4: government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon
Speaker 4: to suppress speech that they dislike, including Miss Chung's speech.
Speaker 4: ICE's shocking actions against Miss Chung form part of a
Speaker 4: larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected
Speaker 4: protest activity and other forms of speech.
Speaker 5: Unquote.
Speaker 4: Now, this past Tuesday, a federal judge granted a temporary
Speaker 4: restraining order halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung.
Speaker 4: The judge said that there is quote nothing in the
Speaker 4: record indicating that Chung is a danger to the community
Speaker 4: or a quote unquote foreign policy risk, or that she
Speaker 4: is communicated with terrorist organizations. The judge said that there
Speaker 4: would be quote no trips to Louisiana here, referring to
Speaker 4: the movement of Khalil to ICE attention in Louisiana. A
Speaker 4: DHS statement said that ICE is going to quote investigate
Speaker 4: individuals engage in activities in support of hamas a foreign
Speaker 4: terrorist organization unquote. The statement also claimed that Chung would
Speaker 4: have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge,
Speaker 4: which is like contrary to incidence of ICE just deporting
Speaker 4: people before they're legally required hearings, even like in defiance
Speaker 4: of like extra court orders mandating those hearings. Like ICE
Speaker 4: is just lying here, and I think it's worth pointing out,
Speaker 4: like what types of people they are going after right now.
Speaker 4: One type of person that ICE is going after is
Speaker 4: like non citizens who were arrested at protests, regardless of
Speaker 4: what they actually did. Right This can be anything from
Speaker 4: from standing in the street to doing a sit in
Speaker 4: protest to just like being arrested on campus and removed
Speaker 4: by campus police or NYPD. Right, just just any arrest
Speaker 4: like on record that shows you at one of these
Speaker 4: protests the other in the cases like Khalil, like he
Speaker 4: was never arrested. He was the subject of a mass
Speaker 4: doxing campaign by other students at Columbia, professors and other
Speaker 4: you know, quote unquote anti Semitism organizations which target high
Speaker 4: profile activists to create like public pressure against them, and
Speaker 4: those same lists are now being used by the Trump
Speaker 4: administration to target students.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Gita had one, right, Beta. They ultra Zionist people
Speaker 3: who are going around like attempting to fucking present people
Speaker 3: with pages. I think they were one of the groups
Speaker 3: that had created like a quote unquote deportation list. So
Speaker 3: we should just mention that a tough student, Romesa oz Tuk,
Speaker 3: was essentially abducted on her way to university.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: There's video which will link in the show notes here.
Speaker 4: Very very frightening video of her just standing on the
Speaker 4: sidewalk as first one man approaches her in like a
Speaker 4: in like a like a navy hoodie, put mask on
Speaker 4: his face, approaches her, stops her, and then as soon
Speaker 4: as they start engaging in conversation, she gets surrounded by
Speaker 4: like five other people, all wearing like what I would
Speaker 4: describe as like a gray man block essentially that they
Speaker 4: then like pull out badges and they like detain her.
Speaker 4: And it's interesting like as they approach, most of these
Speaker 4: people are unmasked, and then as soon as people realize
Speaker 4: what's happening, like like people in the neighborhood it realize
Speaker 4: what's happening, they all start pulling up like a like
Speaker 4: half faced mask like gaters gators.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they looked to me more like than anything
Speaker 2: the way prowd boys dressed a lot, and like Jorany
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty twenty. Yeah, it's yeah, like.
Speaker 3: Like it's extremely concerning, like yes, when you start seeing
Speaker 3: at these people mass people snatching people off the street, right,
Speaker 3: She asks if she asked if she can call the cops,
Speaker 3: and they say, we are the police. It looks like
Speaker 3: her phone falls out of her hand at some point
Speaker 3: they take her bag. We know this because it seems
Speaker 3: like somebody was filming from a building just above and
Speaker 3: you can hear that people say like why are you
Speaker 3: covering your person?
Speaker 5: Saying why are you wearing masks?
Speaker 3: Why are you covering your faces.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, the guy, the guy filming is like doing
Speaker 2: about what he can, given the fact that you have
Speaker 2: to assume he had no real idea what was happening
Speaker 2: initially other than like something visibly fucked up. Like I'm
Speaker 2: glad he said the things that he said.
Speaker 4: But yeah, yeah, she's a Turkish citizen who is in
Speaker 4: the States on a student visa in Boston, Massachusetts or
Speaker 4: outside Boston, Massachusetts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's on a F one visa. So just a
Speaker 3: couple of dates. A few days before she was seized,
Speaker 3: she was like her name was published by Canary Mission right.
Speaker 3: Canary Mission is a Zionist group that has been doxing
Speaker 3: for Palestine or anti genocide people for several years now.
Speaker 3: She had co edited an op ed in the Tought
Speaker 3: Daily last year. It seems to be how they were
Speaker 3: able to identify her. But as Garrison said, right like,
Speaker 3: in terms of how they're picking their targets right now,
Speaker 3: it seems to be heavily tied to these vigilanti zionists,
Speaker 3: far right groups. I did see that a judge has
Speaker 3: already ruled that she shouldn't be left, she shouldn't be
Speaker 3: removed from Massachusetts without further consultation with that judge.
Speaker 2: And we don't know if she has been or not already.
Speaker 4: But this is this is continuing to happen, right, we
Speaker 4: talked about it this last week. I'm going to do
Speaker 4: a whole episode next week about this, about this issue.
Speaker 3: She is in Louisiana. Sorry, update, she has already been
Speaker 3: moved to Louisiana. Yeah, so I'm just reading a truth
Speaker 3: out piece here. Officials initially did not specify wells have
Speaker 3: been taken and Canabi it's her lawyer was unable to
Speaker 3: reach her. Later on Wednesday, Hanabe's said in a motion
Speaker 3: that she was informed by a senator's office that the
Speaker 3: student was already transferred to Louisiana.
Speaker 4: It's like in a matter of hours they worked to
Speaker 4: get her like outside of her home state, or she
Speaker 4: probably has more legal protections.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not something that's super uncommon. I've seen them
Speaker 3: do this with what they called lateral transfers under Title
Speaker 3: forty two, where they would move people. Under Title forty two,
Speaker 3: they can immediately return people to Mexico, right, And what
Speaker 3: they would do is is laterally transfer them along the
Speaker 3: border and return them to another location in Mexico, which
Speaker 3: obviously led to them being completely dislocated when they were
Speaker 3: dropped in Mexico.
Speaker 4: Something else that I want to note is the use
Speaker 4: of this harboring non citizens warrant. Like, one problem that
Speaker 4: ICE can run into often is that people can choose
Speaker 4: just to not answer the door. I usually likes to
Speaker 4: rely on people that have already been arrested or already
Speaker 4: detained by like police, Right, that makes it much easier
Speaker 4: for immigration officials to find people without that locating people
Speaker 4: can be a little bit harder with the use of
Speaker 4: this like harboring non citizens warrant, that shows like there's
Speaker 4: trying to create this precedent for being able to actually
Speaker 4: break into more people's homes even though you know she
Speaker 4: had a permanent resident status. This is just like in
Speaker 4: terms of the tactics being used, similar to like you
Speaker 4: know this all these like gray man block people approaching
Speaker 4: you on the street one by one. That's like a
Speaker 4: tactic to take note of. The use of this type
Speaker 4: of warrant is also something to take note of. We
Speaker 4: are already at that point where people are like are
Speaker 4: like going into hiding, right, This is like very very
Speaker 4: like dystopian ya coded stuff where you're like, you are
Speaker 4: literally as like as a twenty one year old like
Speaker 4: junior being forced to go into hiding because federal agents
Speaker 4: are after you because you sat down. Yeah, you sat
Speaker 4: down in front of a building in protest of a genocide.
Speaker 4: You're not even a movement leader, and this this type
Speaker 4: of thing shouldn't even happen to quote unquote movement leaders.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, if the very First Amendment protects your right
Speaker 3: to do that exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But like, regardless of whether or not you're involved in
Speaker 4: the planning the organization, whether or not you're making statements depressed,
Speaker 4: whether or not you're you're you're giving speeches, if you
Speaker 4: just attend these sorts of things, you are you are
Speaker 4: a target by what is like very obviously a modern
Speaker 4: version of like gestopo like actions.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think it's also quite revealing that she's somewhat successfully
Speaker 3: gone into hiding, right, Like it suggests that, yeah, their
Speaker 3: intelligent operation is not so advioleance that they were able
Speaker 3: to immediately find her.
Speaker 2: Well, no, because again, the resources to do stuff like
Speaker 2: trace somebody down by their shoes from like surveillance camera
Speaker 2: footage exists. We saw it used on those lawyers who
Speaker 2: let a police vehicle fire at twenty twenty. But like,
Speaker 2: there's not really much in the way a crime's going
Speaker 2: on here, and there also had there's so many of
Speaker 2: these people, Like the idea that you would you would
Speaker 2: pull all of the footage that you would need to
Speaker 2: track every one of these, it's just it's just not feasible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think they're just go after someone else,
Speaker 3: right to get the headline. But I'll be following this
Speaker 3: one with interest because it's sort of it's sort of
Speaker 3: an alternative outcome to the other ones that we've seen
Speaker 3: so far, So it'll just be revelatory to see how
Speaker 3: it goes. Yeah, So if you want to contact us
Speaker 3: about any of this, maybe if you're seeing things happening
Speaker 3: on your campus, if you have anything you'd like to share,
Speaker 3: or the things that you think we've missed, you can
Speaker 3: do so. The email address is cool Zone tips at
Speaker 3: proton dot me. Proton Mail is an encrypted email service.
Speaker 3: It's only end to end encrypted like signal. If you
Speaker 3: send it from a proton mail address, don't copy any
Speaker 3: Atlantic journalists on your email, and you should be good
Speaker 3: to go.
Speaker 4: Thank you to everyone who's been sending those messages. It
Speaker 4: does take time for us to go through all of them.
Speaker 4: Not all of them will have a response, but we
Speaker 4: are reading them.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 4: I am still working on a piece in the Lavender scare.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of stuff happening regarding you know, suppres
Speaker 4: and going after trans people in the military. This takes time,
Speaker 4: but we are working on that, slowly but surely, as
Speaker 4: well as stuff regarding ice, targeting students and what's going
Speaker 4: on in Colombia. So we appreciate that. The last thing
Speaker 4: I want to talk about is this past Monday, the
Speaker 4: IDF killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza in separate air strikes.
Speaker 4: Mohammed Mansour, who works for Palestine Today, was killed quote
Speaker 4: in his house in southern Gaza, alongside his wife and
Speaker 4: his son without any prior warning, according to Al Jazeira.
Speaker 4: Later that day, the IDF killed a twenty three year
Speaker 4: old a Palestinian journalist, Hassam Shabbat, in a targeted airstrike
Speaker 4: while he was driving his car in northern Gaza. I
Speaker 4: want to read this statement from Hassam quote. If you're
Speaker 4: reading this, it means I have been killed, most likely
Speaker 4: targeted by the Israeli occupation forces. When all this began,
Speaker 4: I was only twenty one years old, a college student
Speaker 4: with dreams like anyone else. For the past eighteen months,
Speaker 4: I've dedicated every moment of my life to my peak.
Speaker 4: I documented the horrors in northern Gaza, minute by minute,
Speaker 4: determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.
Speaker 4: I slept on pavements, in schools, intense anywhere I could.
Speaker 4: Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger
Speaker 4: for months, yet I never left my people's side. By God,
Speaker 4: I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything
Speaker 4: to report the truth, and now I am finally at rest,
Speaker 4: something I haven't known in the past eighteen months. I
Speaker 4: did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause.
Speaker 4: I believe this land is ours, and it has been
Speaker 4: the highest honor of my life to die defending it
Speaker 4: and serving its people. I ask you now, do not
Speaker 4: stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away,
Speaker 4: keep fighting, keep telling our stories until Palestine is free.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 5: It could happen.
Speaker 9: Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 9: podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website zon media
Speaker 9: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 9: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 9: now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly
Speaker 9: in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.