Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
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Speaker 3: Garrison takes a puff of their clove cigarette as slow
Speaker 3: jazz plays in the background. These sites say what they
Speaker 3: used to be. I've been digging into liberal conspiracy theories.
Speaker 3: That is, they're all the rage where the sky is
Speaker 3: blue and the book is face. These libs think Old
Speaker 3: Donnie Jay's close call in Pennsylvania was a false flag,
Speaker 3: that the South African Musk stole the election, and that
Speaker 3: the Park Service has gone rogue, waging an insearchent information
Speaker 3: warfare against this corrupt administration, sending out coded messages on
Speaker 3: social media. It's called blue and on doll and it's
Speaker 3: been making me blue. This is it could happen here.
Speaker 3: I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mio Wong for our
Speaker 3: Blue On On episode.
Speaker 4: Finally, I never thought. I never thought I would be
Speaker 4: nostalgic for the days where I was arguing with Isis
Speaker 4: on Twitter. But increasingly increasingly I am looking back at
Speaker 4: that as the golden age the Internet. We were merely dealing. No,
Speaker 4: it's it's only gotten.
Speaker 3: More stupid right wing terrorist organization. It's it's only gonna
Speaker 3: get more stupid from here. Oh yeah, no, this is
Speaker 3: this is the least stupid it's going to be for
Speaker 3: at least fifty years. And this is the thing that
Speaker 3: I realized what doing my research for this blue On
Speaker 3: episode is that usually conspiracy research is kind of fun.
Speaker 3: I have a good time looking into conspiracy theories. I
Speaker 3: like going to conspiracy conventions. I get joy out of this,
Speaker 3: almost no joy. Looking into liberal conspiracy theories really boring
Speaker 3: and kind of sad.
Speaker 4: So that's the intro for this episode, Garrison, can I
Speaker 4: interest you in some of the bespoke shit? None of
Speaker 4: none of the none of this twenty twenty four elections stolen?
Speaker 4: Can I Can I interest you in some two thousand
Speaker 4: and four iowall vote total skill? Oh yeah, absolutely, We'll
Speaker 4: get to that so much better.
Speaker 3: We'll get to that in our last section, because yeah,
Speaker 3: there has been liberal election done out in the past,
Speaker 3: not at the same I think scale it exists at now,
Speaker 3: but yes, it certainly has existed before. And you know,
Speaker 3: for a while, conspiracy theories were like a bipartisan or
Speaker 3: at least like a by directional political pastime, like old
Speaker 3: conspiracy magazines were not as partisan as conspiracy theories have
Speaker 3: seemed today. Think of like, you know, JFK. Everyone gets
Speaker 3: to have fun with JFK except for me. I don't
Speaker 3: have any fun with that. And conspiracy culture used to
Speaker 3: like crossover between hippie environmentalism, anti semitism, anti corporatism, anti authoritarianism.
Speaker 3: All these things exist both on the far right and
Speaker 3: the far left. There was a lot of meshing between
Speaker 3: different different polarities of conspiracy theory, and I think politics
Speaker 3: on the fringe are slightly more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.
Speaker 3: And if if you spend any amount of time and like,
Speaker 3: you know, the communist left, you'll see that they have
Speaker 3: their fair share of conspiracy theories or even just a
Speaker 3: conspiratorial way of understanding the world.
Speaker 4: They all think that we work for the CIA.
Speaker 3: Yeah, stuff about the CIA and NATO all kinds of stuff,
Speaker 3: and though like anti vaccine and nine to eleven trutherism
Speaker 3: were initially more liberal aligned conspiracy theories, in the Obama years,
Speaker 3: conspiracy culture coalesced around the growing far right. Look at
Speaker 3: people like Glenn Beck and the slide of Alex Jones
Speaker 3: into the fascist right. Case in point Obama, Birtherism and
Speaker 3: all this stuff leads to Donald Trump and QAnon. As
Speaker 3: of late, liberals have had a conception that as the
Speaker 3: more rational of the two political alignments, they were almost
Speaker 3: naturally immune to conspiratorial thinking. Meanwhile, attacks on consensus, reality,
Speaker 3: fractured information streams, and any larger collective sense of what's
Speaker 3: real and what isn't started to slip away from everyone.
Speaker 4: Here, Yeah, your camera's flashing. They're trying to silence me.
Speaker 4: They're trying I'm getting too close to the truth. He
Speaker 4: legitimately looked like a fucking like you're being taken off
Speaker 4: the air in a cyberpunk thing, like you pirate radio
Speaker 4: is my cat started to unplug my camera. Really funny shit.
Speaker 3: Although my cat is named Theodore Katzinski and Kazinski was
Speaker 3: a CIA operative who got mk ultra, so you never know.
Speaker 3: The right wings trailblazing of political unreality allowed space for
Speaker 3: liberals to dip their toes into the conspiratorial mindset again,
Speaker 3: but maybe without even realizing that's what they were doing.
Speaker 3: Exaggerations of Russia Gate was one of the first Trump
Speaker 3: era liberal experiments with conspiracy theories, the idea that Russia
Speaker 3: not only engaged in hacking on a social media disformation
Speaker 3: campaign to influence the twenty sixteen election, but that Donald
Speaker 3: Trump himself colluded with Russia to get himself elected and
Speaker 3: might even be a Russian asset. And even though those
Speaker 3: allegations were investigated and not concretely proven, the conspiratorial churn continued,
Speaker 3: emboldened by the media environment that the right has created.
Speaker 3: As QAnon accelerated during the second half of Trump's first term,
Speaker 3: so did the decline of American consensus reality, culminating in
Speaker 3: the Stop the Steel movement in January sixth, which were
Speaker 3: explosive manifestations of Internet conspiracism which erupted in the physical world.
Speaker 3: A severe fracturing of reality took place. Any conception of
Speaker 3: a shared political reality seemed so far gone, and the
Speaker 3: effects of this loss aren't just contained to Republicans, but
Speaker 3: this also enables liberals and people on the left by
Speaker 3: opening up space for small reality tunnels to form regardless
Speaker 3: of political ideology. The siloing of information channels makes it
Speaker 3: almost impossible to actually form a consensus reality. As the
Speaker 3: United States has embraced its political cafe, as everything gets
Speaker 3: more absurd, what loses is political mundanity. Liberals and the
Speaker 3: left were almost destined to become more conspiratorial in this
Speaker 3: current moment. And you can even look at how newsome
Speaker 3: is like copying Trump's posting strategies, and even how people
Speaker 3: like me memify and replicate Trump phrases. Many such cases,
Speaker 3: we were all gonna be pulled into this at a
Speaker 3: certain point because it's just more interesting. I'm going to
Speaker 3: quote from one of MIA's favorite books, the CCRU quote
Speaker 3: God No. Conspiracy fictions are spun out of an all
Speaker 3: encompassing narrative that can't possibly be falsified, because they want
Speaker 3: you to believe in their non existence. To attempt to
Speaker 3: refute such narratives is to be drawn into a tedious
Speaker 3: double game. One either has to embrace an arbitrary and
Speaker 3: outrageous cosmic plot in which everything is being run by Jews, Masons,
Speaker 3: the Illuminati, the CIA, Microsoft or Satan, or alternatively advocate
Speaker 3: submission to the most mundane construction of quotidian reality, dismissing
Speaker 3: the hyperstitional chaos that operates behind the greens. This is
Speaker 3: why atheism is usually so boring. Both conspiracy and common
Speaker 3: sense the normal reality script depend on the dialectical side
Speaker 3: of the double game, on reflective twins belief and unbelief.
Speaker 3: But disbelief is merely the negative complement of belief.
Speaker 4: Unquote.
Speaker 3: Belief is so much stronger because disbelief is so much
Speaker 3: more boring. It only exists in comparison to belief in something.
Speaker 3: I think this is why everyone has this urge to
Speaker 3: get more conspiratorial and like Americans specifically, our country is
Speaker 3: based on conspiracy theory, like the Masons are such a
Speaker 3: core part of our national identity.
Speaker 4: I fucking went down that title. I went down the
Speaker 4: like if you ask me to start talking about politics
Speaker 4: in late nineteen seventies early nineteen eighties Italy, I could
Speaker 4: start talking about how Italy was run by a rogue
Speaker 4: Basonic lodge. So that actually is true. If you google
Speaker 4: propaganda due you will you will find out this was
Speaker 4: this was actually, this was all the front page of
Speaker 4: the New York Times. It was to be fair to
Speaker 4: the basis, this was a rogue Masonic launch. They had
Speaker 4: been expelled from the Masons for being assholes. But this
Speaker 4: is true. All conspiracies are true, but only about nineteen
Speaker 4: seventies Italy. But it's more interesting, right, like it it's
Speaker 4: so much more interesting. Yeah, it is more interesting. And
Speaker 4: it makes it really hard to disprove conspiracy theories when
Speaker 4: the act of disproving it makes it feel like you're
Speaker 4: submitting to some all controlling authority, and people people feel
Speaker 4: like they're losing, like they're they And that idea of
Speaker 4: submission is why people get so pulled into conspiracy theories,
Speaker 4: because they think that believing in conspiracy theories is itself
Speaker 4: almost a form of resistance against you know, quote unquote them, Yeah,
Speaker 4: which is which, which is very funny, because the actual
Speaker 4: operation of conspiracy is precisely the other way around. Like
Speaker 4: conspiracies had been encouraged by the government, by governments for ever,
Speaker 4: like the protocols are the Elders of Zion were like
Speaker 4: an op by the fucking czars, like like this is this,
Speaker 4: like this this, this is this was this was literally
Speaker 4: a Russian police operation. Right, but all of these people
Speaker 4: now believe that they're like, oh, I'm like the anti
Speaker 4: systemic person because I fell for this like anti Symitic
Speaker 4: police operation. But it's yeah, it's a really powerful force.
Speaker 3: The US government has intentionally stoked like UFO conspiracy theories
Speaker 3: for eighty years.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because it covers up the thing. You know, if
Speaker 4: you if you want to go conspiratory about it is
Speaker 4: because it covers up the thing they're actually doing, which
Speaker 4: is like mundane but horrifying weapons testing shit.
Speaker 3: Like Now, the CCRU proposes that quote unquote, unbelief might
Speaker 3: be the way out of this cycle by building a
Speaker 3: plane of potentiality where the annihilation of judgment converges with
Speaker 3: real cosmic indeterminacy. I myself tried to embrace an unbelief
Speaker 3: viewpoint for a lot of things, but I think that
Speaker 3: only gets you so far, and might also so encourage
Speaker 3: some of these same problems in a larger scale. Because
Speaker 3: America has now gotten to the point of unbelief, especially
Speaker 3: in regards to QAnon. We've outgrown the need for QAnon
Speaker 3: because everything is QAnon.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: Politics are about determining who is and isn't a pedophile
Speaker 3: immigrants are trafficking children. Donald Trump is on the Epstein list,
Speaker 3: which both doesn't exist and was invented by Democrats. Historical
Speaker 3: events are staged. Every election was now stolen by the
Speaker 3: side who won. DHS is posting coded messages on the Internet.
Speaker 3: The FBI and police are faking crime statistics. Everything Trump
Speaker 3: does is a distraction from whatever the previous thing Trump did,
Speaker 3: which itself was a distraction from whatever the previous thing
Speaker 3: Trump did.
Speaker 5: So on and so forth.
Speaker 4: This is just what American politics are now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and while Trump's numerous connections to Epstein are long
Speaker 3: documented and he appears in Epstein FBI investigation files, discussions
Speaker 3: around it can feel very the storm is coming. The
Speaker 3: pedu elite are always just about to be arrested and
Speaker 3: removed from office. I like to see old Donnie J
Speaker 3: wiggle his way out of this jam. The logic of
Speaker 3: QAnon has perforated almost every aspect of American politics. On
Speaker 3: Blue Sky, there is this conspiratorial mantra gaining traction among liberals. Quote,
Speaker 3: he wasn't shot, he didn't win, He's on the list.
Speaker 4: Don't like that.
Speaker 3: Oh no, that's what they believe. Do you know what
Speaker 3: isn't a conspiracy theory. Maya that advertisement is designed to
Speaker 3: drive consumer demand repledged capitalism by replacing your desires.
Speaker 4: Not a conspiracy theory. That's just the good old truth.
Speaker 3: Listen to these ads, all right, We're back as q
Speaker 3: andon itself became a uber conspiracy theory overtime liking together
Speaker 3: a large collection of historical and contemporary conspiracy theories into
Speaker 3: one overarching story. Bluinon does not just refer to a
Speaker 3: single conspiracy theory, but rather as a label that can
Speaker 3: be applied to a general assortment of theories or conspiratorial
Speaker 3: thinking held by contemporary liberals and Democratic voters. I myself
Speaker 3: used a version of this term all the way back
Speaker 3: in January of twenty twenty one for a since removed
Speaker 3: YouTube video due to threats of violence, in which I
Speaker 3: used the word blue QAnon to describe Portland liberals who
Speaker 3: believed that Russia was staging Antifa protests to make liberals
Speaker 3: look bad after Biden's election victory, and some of the
Speaker 3: banners used in this video apparently had threats to the
Speaker 3: President of the United States, so YouTube took down the video. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: even though the video was just outlining liberal conspiracy theories
Speaker 3: about this protest, thinking that Russia probably made this banner.
Speaker 4: The censorship regime continues apace.
Speaker 3: Around this time twenty twenty one, the term blew and
Speaker 3: on was mostly used to refer to Trump Russia conspiracy theories,
Speaker 3: but there were a whole bunch of other liberal conspiracy
Speaker 3: theories in this era, like how palettes of bricks were
Speaker 3: being mysteriously dropped off at protests. And though I will
Speaker 3: say this conspiracy theory was used by both people on
Speaker 3: the right as well as some centrist liberals.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think this is actually you know, you
Speaker 4: were talking about how there is this like QAnon, like
Speaker 4: this sort of moment of break with consensus reality. And
Speaker 4: I think the twenty twenty uprising was one of the
Speaker 4: most the single most important events in this entire process massively. So, yeah,
Speaker 4: because the twenty twenty Uprising was a systemic challenge to
Speaker 4: both the liberal and the Republican establishment right, because if
Speaker 4: its central premise is true that the United States is
Speaker 4: a structurally racist state, right that is based on the
Speaker 4: oppression of black people, then you can't continue to maintain
Speaker 4: the state. And also, simultaneously, the thing that was incredibly
Speaker 4: threatening was that people were actually willing to go out
Speaker 4: and fight the police over this. And on the right,
Speaker 4: this obviously causes massive reality fraction because they have to
Speaker 4: grapple with the fact that like most of the country
Speaker 4: was fine with burning a police station down or were
Speaker 4: they right? Yeah, this is like oh no, there was
Speaker 4: this was this was act. This whole thing was actually
Speaker 4: like a plan by like Antifa Democrats and like Pritzker's billionaire,
Speaker 4: like the Jewish billionaire sorrow Jewish billionaires.
Speaker 3: It was actually the Boogaloo boys who planned the whole
Speaker 3: thing and burned down the Third Precinct.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is this is a very very compon.
Speaker 4: This became the liberal main line on the burning of
Speaker 4: the Third Precinct was that it was a false flag
Speaker 4: by like the Boogloo Boy People don't remember the Boogloo right,
Speaker 4: Boogloo Boys. Yeah, it was like they're like this very
Speaker 4: very weird race.
Speaker 3: War fashion, trying to encourage a new civil.
Speaker 4: Lanness of a word weird fascist group. But like that
Speaker 4: became the liberal main line because they had to find
Speaker 4: a way to explain the fact that the people who
Speaker 4: were you know, like a lot of people who are
Speaker 4: norminally supposed to be their base, decided instead of doing
Speaker 4: their sort of just like vote for the presidents and
Speaker 4: like vote for the Democratic president and like non violently
Speaker 4: and passively do nothing, people went and fought the police
Speaker 4: for most of a year, and this caused this massive
Speaker 4: fracturing where people had to believe it instead of there
Speaker 4: just being construction sites and people taking bricks from construction sites,
Speaker 4: as people have been doing for literally since the first
Speaker 4: brick was made, people have been taking them and throwing
Speaker 4: them at enemy authorities, right, Like Stonewall was a false play, yeah, right,
Speaker 4: because the actual power of that uprising was so dangerous
Speaker 4: to the fundamental liberal conceptions of of reality in the world,
Speaker 4: and that like the marginalized and oppressed people who they
Speaker 4: who they sort of planned to represent, would take take
Speaker 4: it into their own hands. The idea that, yeah, the
Speaker 4: state is structurally racism, so it has to be resisted.
Speaker 4: That caused people to just have to create these like
Speaker 4: just pure reality tunnels of like, oh no, actually, any
Speaker 4: attempt to fight the police is a false flag that
Speaker 4: the police want to do. Or the burning of the
Speaker 4: Third Precinct was actually like the fascist attempting to provoke people,
Speaker 4: and that the state actually wants you to fight it,
Speaker 4: because if you fight the state, then the state wins.
Speaker 4: And like this is one of the er reality tunnels
Speaker 4: that creates this sort of conspiratorial mindset. We're like the
Speaker 4: Booglue boys at the third precinc That's not just a
Speaker 4: thing from like you know, online posters that became the
Speaker 4: main line of the Democratic Party because they also had
Speaker 4: to contain the uprising and from there and once that's
Speaker 4: the accepted narrative of like the Democrats, then this pure
Speaker 4: reality tunnel conspiracy shit is now just baked in to
Speaker 4: the very core of liberalism as it attempts to recuperate
Speaker 4: and defeat the energies that were unleashed by twenty twenty
Speaker 4: And that's how we're here. That's a large part of it.
Speaker 3: Flash Forwarding a few years during the first half of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five, especially in and around Biden's disastrous debate performance,
Speaker 3: the blue and on term begun being used to refer
Speaker 3: to a collection of theories that a secret cabal of
Speaker 3: deep state elites, the news media, high ranking Democrats, and
Speaker 3: Republicans were targeting Biden to sabotage his presidency to make
Speaker 3: him lose the election.
Speaker 4: There's no such thing as getting old. There is simply
Speaker 4: being sabotaged by q cards and camera lighting positions.
Speaker 3: Now, the blue On term here is sort of a
Speaker 3: misnomer because like at this point, like Russia Gate, and
Speaker 3: QAnon had very little in common. Like one viewed Trump
Speaker 3: as the Messiah, the other viewed him as basically, you know,
Speaker 3: an anti Christ slash Russian asset. In the wake of
Speaker 3: the Trump assassination, Philip Bump penned a Washington Post article declaring,
Speaker 3: quote QAnon and blue and on rhyme, the similarities end there.
Speaker 3: And I have sympathies for this viewpoint, especially in the
Speaker 3: wake of like January sixth. Right, Blunon doesn't have Satanic
Speaker 3: wayfair child trafficking, but maybe it doesn't need to. No,
Speaker 3: In conspiracy theories, it's not just about the substance of
Speaker 3: the beliefs held, but the function and methodology of the beliefs.
Speaker 3: And in the past year, Blunon's function and methodology have
Speaker 3: started to parallel q Andon's more and more, which leads
Speaker 3: us to the event that really opened up operating space
Speaker 3: for the mainstreaming of the liberal conspiracy theories, the attempted
Speaker 3: assassination of one Donald Trump. Americans are particularly susceptible to
Speaker 3: assassination conspiracy theories. It has kind of been woven into
Speaker 3: our national identity now. Of course, Republicans, including elected representatives,
Speaker 3: developed their own fair share of theories about the attempted
Speaker 3: assassination of Donald Trump. But that's a another episode. Here's
Speaker 3: a viral Facebook video. Remember Facebook, it's not that bad taken.
Speaker 4: Look what happened? Fake ass shit man.
Speaker 6: Stage, fake ass shit bro Ain't no bullets flying and network.
Speaker 4: You know what I'm saying. If you know anything about
Speaker 4: the shootout.
Speaker 6: Soon a shootout, you will see bullets, class stuff getting
Speaker 6: piled off. Oh, ain't netting going on, never getting hit,
Speaker 6: nothing getting piled off.
Speaker 4: He definitely didn't get hit.
Speaker 5: He faked it all.
Speaker 6: The whole dang is fake stage and Grid Broles how
Speaker 6: didn't play y'all. They gonna make y'all vote on now
Speaker 6: off the dump?
Speaker 4: You feel me?
Speaker 7: Oh, y'all?
Speaker 1: Oh he oh, he been shot at.
Speaker 4: Y'all all gonna on a vote on goat some fucking clowns.
Speaker 6: Bu.
Speaker 3: The word staged spiked in use by almost four thousand
Speaker 3: percent on Twitter, according to the misinformation tracker NewsGuard appearing
Speaker 3: three hundred thousand times the day of and after the shooting.
Speaker 3: The term inside job also rose on social media, up
Speaker 3: by over three thousand percent, with bots and inauthentic accounts
Speaker 3: adding to this chaos and Israeli dsinfo tech firm Cybra
Speaker 3: found that forty five percent of accounts using hashtags like
Speaker 3: fake assassination and staged shooting were inauthentic. Within a day,
Speaker 3: a post on x questioning the authenticity of the event
Speaker 3: gained over fifty thousand likes. Quote great camera angle, great quality,
Speaker 3: no secret service agent in front of his head covering
Speaker 3: the wound, conveniently placed US flag unquote. Another got nearly
Speaker 3: fifty thousand likes, asking users to quote raise your hand
Speaker 3: and repost if you think this was staged.
Speaker 4: There was a flood of posts.
Speaker 3: Earning thousands of likes and millions of alleged views, which
Speaker 3: questioned why Trump was able to or allowed to stand
Speaker 3: above the crowd after being shot, yelling fight, fight fight,
Speaker 3: risking getting shot again, and while it could have been
Speaker 3: possible that there was a second shooter, Trump was only
Speaker 3: able to stand back up after it was confirmed that
Speaker 3: Crooks was killed. You can hear it in the video
Speaker 3: shoot her down shoot her down. Secret Service was already
Speaker 3: aware of Crook's position prior to the shooting and had
Speaker 3: not located any other possible shooters. But reality does not
Speaker 3: matter here. Yeah, I'm going to play a short clip
Speaker 3: from a YouTube video which was uploaded just a month
Speaker 3: ago with over eighty five thousand views, explaining why someone
Speaker 3: feels it really easy to believe in this conspiracy.
Speaker 8: Now, ladies and gentlemen, I normally don't go down conspiracy hos.
Speaker 5: I don't, but we know MAGA does.
Speaker 8: Maga has gone down so many conspiracy holes and brought
Speaker 8: it to science that we've got people not giving their
Speaker 8: kids vaccine. We've seen easels rising in Texas. We had
Speaker 8: people not wanting to get into COVID. We had quarterbacks
Speaker 8: telling people to take ivermectin. We had people saying take
Speaker 8: fucking horse trank oralizers to get rid of COVID. And
Speaker 8: so now I think I've earned opportunity to go down
Speaker 8: a rabbit hole. This video was someone who was right
Speaker 8: there at the Trump rally, and they're contending that this
Speaker 8: whole thing is made of which a lot of us
Speaker 8: felt like it was anyway, because we do know that Trump,
Speaker 8: he's not afraid to fool around and shall we say
Speaker 8: reality or entertainment TV. We know he's not afraid to
Speaker 8: do that, and I'll show you an example of that
Speaker 8: in a minute.
Speaker 4: What example do you think he's going to show a
Speaker 4: WWE thing? It is a WWE thing. I remember there
Speaker 4: was so much WWE like tieing shit with this. Well
Speaker 4: we'll get to that in this second.
Speaker 3: But I find this explanation of why this person feels
Speaker 3: almost allowed to believe the conspiracy theory is now super interesting.
Speaker 3: It is specifically because the right has been so willing
Speaker 3: to embrace conspiracism that now it feels like it's fair
Speaker 3: game for liberals to do it as well. And this
Speaker 3: guy is just almost almost acknowledging this fact. He's kind
Speaker 3: of like working his way to my entire thesis here,
Speaker 3: maybe without realizing it.
Speaker 4: Also, this guy sponsored by an AI company, just just
Speaker 4: to make this absolutely perfect great stuff, great stuff happening
Speaker 4: in this in the sphere of our political discourse. We
Speaker 4: love to see it.
Speaker 3: But yes, based on the blood severed across Trump's face
Speaker 3: after he went on the ground, people postulated that Trump
Speaker 3: was hiding a razor blade in his sleeve WWE style
Speaker 3: to purposefully cut his face to make it look like
Speaker 3: he was shot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Donald Trump bladed himself. What are we doing here?
Speaker 8: So should we believe that faking getting shot is beyond boom?
Speaker 8: Why would we believe that when this is steal Trump
Speaker 8: that once was trained by the WW whatn't those some
Speaker 8: convincing ass right hands he just gave vincement Man, No, those.
Speaker 4: Were the least convincing right hands I've ever seen, and
Speaker 4: I have watched pul Colgan threw a poton not for me.
Speaker 3: You know what, I think we've saved this whole assassination
Speaker 3: thing right here. Like this stuff doesn't even warrant debunking.
Speaker 3: Debunking is useless, right, Yeah. All of these conspiracy theories
Speaker 3: rest on the fact that rally attendees were hospitalized with
Speaker 3: gunshot wounds and two people died as a sacrifice to
Speaker 3: sell this event, and that the Biden era Secret Service
Speaker 3: helped facilitate this whole operation. I watched YouTube videos explaining
Speaker 3: that even if bullets were fired and people at the
Speaker 3: rally were hitting killed though just not Trump, the actual
Speaker 3: footage of the shooting is actually ai because as the
Speaker 3: number of targets hit don't match the number of shots
Speaker 3: heard in the video, and people in the crowd suddenly
Speaker 3: disappear once shots are fired, as in people get down
Speaker 3: low on the ground to avoid getting hit. As for
Speaker 3: the number of shots hit versus shots fired, these videos
Speaker 3: seem to not realize that bullets travel through objects like
Speaker 3: say Donald Trump's ear the.
Speaker 4: Point of a bullet.
Speaker 3: Also, this was actually Trump loyalist police firing into the
Speaker 3: crowd as a part of this stage operation, not not
Speaker 3: Thomas Crooks. After the shooting, a political advisor to Democratic
Speaker 3: donor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman named Dimitri Melhorn sent
Speaker 3: an email proposing that the shooting may have been quote
Speaker 3: encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the
Speaker 3: photos and benefit from the backlash unquote. The next day,
Speaker 3: Melhorn regretted and apologized for sending the email. And think
Speaker 3: about it. While one person was lined up perfectly to
Speaker 3: get the now historic photo, think of how many other
Speaker 3: professional photographers at the rally weren't so lucky. There's not
Speaker 3: just one photographer at the event, there's lots, And yeah,
Speaker 3: one person got a really compelling shot.
Speaker 4: It's a campaign event. There's paid photographers there. This is
Speaker 4: what a campaign event is Oh my god, there was
Speaker 4: a flag that was stayed because it was a campaign
Speaker 4: event going insane.
Speaker 3: According to a poll from Morning Consult, roughly one in
Speaker 3: five voters said that they found it credible that the
Speaker 3: shooting was staged and not intended to kill Trump, including
Speaker 3: one third of at the time Biden supporters, thirty three
Speaker 3: percent of Biden supporters, and twelve percent of those who
Speaker 3: backed Trump, which is really funny to me.
Speaker 4: That's actually really funny. It was an inside job.
Speaker 9: Good job, guys, good job the mega Trump assassination truthers
Speaker 9: the majority of voters, though sixty two percent, said that
Speaker 9: the unsubstantiated notion is not credible.
Speaker 3: A statement I've seen from both the conspiratorial left and
Speaker 3: the right is that we know all about say Luigi
Speaker 3: Mangioni or this latest school shooter, but still know nothing
Speaker 3: about the Trump assassination. And this just isn't true. We
Speaker 3: actually know a lot about Thomas Crooks. Now, just because
Speaker 3: you haven't read about it doesn't mean that we don't know.
Speaker 3: I'll link to a recent New York Times article looking
Speaker 3: into his online footprint. We know a lot about this guy.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 3: But based on the conception that this failed assassination attempt
Speaker 3: would in the end help Trump get elected. Some people
Speaker 3: chose to just reject the event entirely, and yeah, it
Speaker 3: was surreal, a warped manifestation of millions of people's dream
Speaker 3: And when things happen that challenge expectations or are just
Speaker 3: plain weird, some people reject that reality and substitute to
Speaker 3: their own alternate realities which make more sense to them.
Speaker 3: If a near mis event like this would help Trump,
Speaker 3: then it must be Trump's doing. Do you know what
Speaker 3: Trump has no control over?
Speaker 4: It's so not true that he doesn't have control of
Speaker 4: these products and services. We have good report I got
Speaker 4: is his Increasingly.
Speaker 3: The tariffs aren't real, be a. I won't believe the
Speaker 3: tariffs until I see them with my own two eyes.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna I'm going to walk you to the port
Speaker 4: of LA. Are gonna go look at the tariffs together?
Speaker 5: Why inside?
Speaker 4: So here's the ads. All right, we're back.
Speaker 3: You can't talk about liberal conspiracy theories without the most
Speaker 3: blatant example of some libs taking a page right out
Speaker 3: of the megaplaybook twenty twenty four Election denial God another
Speaker 3: instance of Trump and you and on trailblazing something that
Speaker 3: used to be on the political fringe and normalizing it
Speaker 3: as acceptable political discourse. Early on, after Trump was declared
Speaker 3: the projected winner, liberals questioned why there were seemingly twenty
Speaker 3: million missing Democratic votes from the expected twenty twenty four totals,
Speaker 3: pointing to the higher numbers in twenty twenty seemingly forgetting
Speaker 3: that vote. Totals were still being counted, and in the end,
Speaker 3: there were only three million fewer votes this election, which
Speaker 3: is extremely reasonable for an election, according to NewsGuard. By
Speaker 3: Wednesday morning after the election, Trump cheated was trending on
Speaker 3: Twitter with nearly one hundred thousand mentions since midnight. I'll
Speaker 3: read a few of these viral tweets quote. I hold
Speaker 3: a master's degree in political science. I don't yet understand
Speaker 3: these results, and I don't pretend to. I'm not into conspiracy,
Speaker 3: but I'd like to know millions across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan
Speaker 3: really split their vote? Did millions of Democratic voters really
Speaker 3: stay home?
Speaker 4: And the answer is yes, yes, yes they did. That
Speaker 4: is what happened. You figured it out.
Speaker 3: People did split their vote, and yeah, lots of people
Speaker 3: were not compelled to vote for Harris and stayed home.
Speaker 3: Congratulations you you stumbled across the reality.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: Another person remarked, quote, I hold a master's again. I
Speaker 3: love all these people prefacing this by saying that they
Speaker 3: have degrees.
Speaker 4: And I want to say two things about the degree thing.
Speaker 4: One eight each of the time when someone starts doing
Speaker 4: what are these things? You can go back and find
Speaker 4: different degrees they pretended have two. I have been around
Speaker 4: people who get master's degrees in political science. We are
Speaker 4: not talking about the cream of the intellectual crop here, Like,
Speaker 4: this is a discipline that is like economics for people
Speaker 4: who like or even worship the chain rule than economists. Like,
Speaker 4: what are we doing here?
Speaker 3: Quote I hold a masters in political science with a
Speaker 3: minor in statistics, and I can't make sense of this.
Speaker 3: Human nature had to completely upend itself for this to happen.
Speaker 3: Swing states voting straight blue down the ballot except for
Speaker 3: the top. Nah, that's not what people do, and yet
Speaker 3: it is what happened. A frige political science analysis.
Speaker 4: This is hinged for them so very quickly.
Speaker 3: Liberals demanded recounts and court challenges, begging that Kamala Harris
Speaker 3: take this to court with misinformation spreading that she was
Speaker 3: planning said court challenges. Others alleged that Elon Musk hacked
Speaker 3: voting machines. According to a report from the University of Washington,
Speaker 3: over a five day period, there were hundreds of thousands
Speaker 3: of tweets and retweets about how Elon Musk, working with
Speaker 3: Trump and sometimes with Putin, used Starlink satellites to steal
Speaker 3: the election, perhaps by intercepting than changing totals through the Internet,
Speaker 3: despite most voting machines not being connected to the Internet.
Speaker 4: No, and the actual thing that he did was like
Speaker 4: going to places and saying, I'll give you a million
Speaker 4: dollars if you vote for this election, one of you
Speaker 4: will win. Like that's like the actual thing that he did,
Speaker 4: which is so blatantly obvious and.
Speaker 3: Like basic like ground game targeting and swing states, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: they mobilized a shit ton of money. Quote, I'm hearing
Speaker 3: today that Elon's software Starship is the software that handled
Speaker 3: all the swing state ballots. If indeed this is true,
Speaker 3: this is clearly a conflict of interest and another reason
Speaker 3: why swing states need investigations. Well, good news, this isn't
Speaker 3: indeed true.
Speaker 4: You made this up. This is fake.
Speaker 3: It's not just Twitter, though on Meta's Twitter alternative threads,
Speaker 3: there was a hotbed of election denile, with posts like
Speaker 3: this spreading on the platform and beyond to places like Reddit.
Speaker 3: Quote Trump cheats at everything in life. Putin interfered in
Speaker 3: the past three elections. Musk and Trump talked to putin
Speaker 3: a lot. Musk's Starlink uploaded votes in swing states. Swing
Speaker 3: state voters went Dem down ballot, but Trump at the top.
Speaker 3: Unlikely Starlink satellites exploding, destroying evidence unquote. This is referencing
Speaker 3: a conspiracy theory from the time that based on an
Speaker 3: event on November tenth where a Starlink satellite re entered
Speaker 3: orbit and blew up, as elon Musk's technology is known
Speaker 3: to do. This was its self proof that he was
Speaker 3: blowing up his satellites on purpose to conceal evidence that
Speaker 3: Starlink was used to alter election results. SpaceX regularly retires
Speaker 3: satellites which then slowly fall to Earth and blow up.
Speaker 4: This is ordinary practice.
Speaker 3: This particular satellite, which exploded on November tenth, was decommissioned
Speaker 3: back in August. This has nothing to do with the election. Still,
Speaker 3: there were viral tweets calling for a quote unquote, forensic
Speaker 3: investigation and accounts like your n on News, an account
Speaker 3: pretending to be affiliated with the hacker group Anonymous, which
Speaker 3: is a real vector point of left wing conspiratorial thinking.
Speaker 4: I'm going to put a note here. Viz says that
Speaker 4: the history of relationship if your n on News is
Speaker 4: very complicated. This is not a this is not a
Speaker 4: definitive statement on it. Please don't get mad at us.
Speaker 4: It's a it's a fucking mess. It's a fucking mess.
Speaker 4: That's That's what I'm gonna say about it. That guy
Speaker 4: sucks shit.
Speaker 3: They've been spreading a lot of election misinformation news, especially
Speaker 3: in November.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: Some strange statements from Trump and Elon have fueled doubts
Speaker 3: about election integrity. You can just change one line of code,
Speaker 3: Elon stated about the code on electronic voting machines. I
Speaker 3: don't need more votes. I already have votes, Trump stated repeatedly,
Speaker 3: So why not take a look unquote. This alleged quote
Speaker 3: from Elon cannot be sourced at all. The full version
Speaker 3: of it is quote. If you want to steal an election,
Speaker 3: all you have to do is change one line of
Speaker 3: code unquote. I have tried so hard to find the
Speaker 3: original source for this quote. I cannot. It is just
Speaker 3: liberals saying Elon said this. It may have been something
Speaker 3: he said, I cannot find it. Even if it is
Speaker 3: something he said, it's not evidence that he stole the election,
Speaker 3: no at all.
Speaker 4: He does this like there's a whole conspiracy on the
Speaker 4: left that thinks that Elon Musk was behind the coup
Speaker 4: in Bolivia, which was like something I was accepted by
Speaker 4: EVO back when he was in the NIS, like in
Speaker 4: Bolivia because it was like politically convenient for everyone involved
Speaker 4: to believe that, like Elon Musk did this coup in
Speaker 4: Bolivia over like lithium prices, when the actual reality was
Speaker 4: it was done by a bunch of Bolivia agrobarons. But
Speaker 4: people just believe this shit and and Elon will just
Speaker 4: play into it, like because I don't he probably didn't
Speaker 4: say that. But like even if he, like he did
Speaker 4: say the ship that he did the coup in Bolivia,
Speaker 4: but like he didn't, he objectively didn't lollxd like I okay,
Speaker 4: I'm not I'm not. I'm not going to get into
Speaker 4: the price history of of lithium here and how there
Speaker 4: was a fucking market glut at that point, which is
Speaker 4: the exact opposite thing you would want there to be
Speaker 4: if you're trying to steal with you like, it's nonsense.
Speaker 4: So people just believe this shit because it fits, it
Speaker 4: fits their version of reality. And the right is really
Speaker 4: happy to sort of play into this because they just
Speaker 4: play around with conspiracies.
Speaker 3: And this line from Trump is just breaking about having
Speaker 3: a lot of projective votes already.
Speaker 4: That's all it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the day before inauguration day, people alleged that Trump
Speaker 3: may have accidentally admitted to stealing the election in one
Speaker 3: of his speeches.
Speaker 4: Oh my fucking god, let's take a look.
Speaker 5: Trump just told on himself.
Speaker 7: He just credited Elon Musk's knowledge of how voting machines
Speaker 7: work for his victory in Pennsylvania. He said this during
Speaker 7: his victory rally in Washington, d C. The night before
Speaker 7: alleged inauguration. Let's listen to the audio.
Speaker 10: And then he journeyed to Pennsylvania, where he spent like
Speaker 10: a month and a.
Speaker 11: Half campaigning for me in Pennsylvania. And he's a popular guy,
Speaker 11: and he was very effective. And he knows those computers
Speaker 11: better than anybody, all those computers, those vote counting computers,
Speaker 11: and we ended up winning Pennsylvania like.
Speaker 8: In a landslide.
Speaker 5: So that was pretty good.
Speaker 1: It was pretty good, So thank you to Elon.
Speaker 3: That is from a very popular TikToker. This particular video
Speaker 3: has twenty thousand likes. I can't even find how many
Speaker 3: views it has, but there's hundreds of comments talking about
Speaker 3: how the election was stolen. The same video was spread
Speaker 3: by people like a friend of the pod Brooklyn Dad defiant.
Speaker 4: Oh god, fucking okay, I need to spend five seconds. No,
Speaker 4: we don't have time. He's literally paid by a Democratic party.
Speaker 4: He used to be Yeah, he used to be bluterally
Speaker 4: paid a Democratic party. He was a fucking oil guy.
Speaker 4: God damn it.
Speaker 3: Sorry, okay, but he said quote. Is that a fucking confession?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 4: Twenty three thousand likes?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 3: Which, Now this line from Trump gets referenced a lot
Speaker 3: in liberal stolen election theories. Trump is not saying he
Speaker 3: won because Elon knows vote counting computers. Those two statements
Speaker 3: can be separate statements that are just right next to
Speaker 3: each other. More, it could be easily interpreted as saying
Speaker 3: that Elon Musk's computer knowledge helped prevent fraud, ensuring that
Speaker 3: if Dems tried to steal the election again, Elon would
Speaker 3: have caught them. As twenty twenty, Republican election denial focused
Speaker 3: heavily on voting machines. In terms of numbers on how
Speaker 3: many Democrats don't think the election was legitimate, we do
Speaker 3: have some statistics. In twenty twenty, eighty eight percent of
Speaker 3: Democrats thought the election was legitimate and accurate. In twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four, it was only sixty three percent, with nine
Speaker 3: percent saying it was the result of illegal voting or
Speaker 3: election rigging, and twenty nine percent saying they don't know
Speaker 3: if it was legitimate or accurate. Of course, the Republicans
Speaker 3: found this election was extremely legitimate as compared to the
Speaker 3: last one, in which a majority of Republicans thought it
Speaker 3: was the result of illegal voting or election rigging. But
Speaker 3: still twenty nine percent of Democrats in twenty twenty four
Speaker 3: not knowing if the election is accurate pretty pretty damaging,
Speaker 3: and obviously a lack of trust in election systems is
Speaker 3: an extremely damaging thing to the functioning of democracy. The
Speaker 3: reason why I decided to finally do this episode after
Speaker 3: pulling little research bits over the course of the past year,
Speaker 3: is a tweet from August twentieth quote. Two whistleblowers have
Speaker 3: now confirmed that the NSSA conducted an election audit and
Speaker 3: Harris was the winner. Don't fucking ignore this. One hundred
Speaker 3: and forty six thousand likes, almost thirty thousand retweets, five
Speaker 3: point five million quote unquote views. This went super viral.
Speaker 3: One of the biggest instances I've seen in recent election denial.
Speaker 3: This viral tweet links to a substack with over fifty
Speaker 3: one thousand subscribers and three million views. The focus of
Speaker 3: the blog is showing how Kamala Harris really won the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four election. The recent posts cover how a
Speaker 3: former CIA operative has confirmed that, based on an NSA
Speaker 3: audit of the twenty twenty four election, Kamala actually won.
Speaker 3: This was a quote covert compartmentalized forensic audit unquote.
Speaker 4: It's literally just stop the steal. They did this the
Speaker 4: same thing.
Speaker 3: It was completed in December twenty twenty four, and based
Speaker 3: on the findings, the NSSA and CIA recommended a hand recount,
Speaker 3: but the recount was unable to take place before the
Speaker 3: January sixth election certification, and since then, the findings of
Speaker 3: the audit proving a Kamala victory have been covered up
Speaker 3: by Tulci Gabbard and the Trump administration. This blog claims
Speaker 3: the election was stolen by hijacking voting machines and quote
Speaker 3: illegally copied software, decades of vulnerabilities, and the installation of
Speaker 3: a back door through a last minute change order right
Speaker 3: before the election unquote. Now, there's a few problems with
Speaker 3: this theory, the first at which being that the NSA
Speaker 3: doesn't audit elections.
Speaker 12: No what.
Speaker 3: This substacker also operates a still growing TikTok account to
Speaker 3: prevent being suppressed for misinformation. The user toksin coded phrases
Speaker 3: calling elections baking contests. State election results are either red
Speaker 3: cakes or blue cakes.
Speaker 4: Votes are ingredients.
Speaker 3: Rist In her most popular video with about seventy five
Speaker 3: thousand views, she claims that Trump isn't giving red swing
Speaker 3: states FEMA AID because he knows that these states actually
Speaker 3: voted for Kamala Harris, and so Trump is punishing them
Speaker 3: by withholding aid. This is her second most popular video,
Speaker 3: with fifty thousand views, talking about North Carolina and how
Speaker 3: Elon Musk and Peter Thiel worked together to alter election results.
Speaker 1: Hey y'all.
Speaker 13: Quick update on the baking contest in North Kakilaki and
Speaker 13: the cake is in fact who we were able to
Speaker 13: identify about one hundred and ninety seven thousand ingredients that
Speaker 13: were swapped out by the space Baker, So he and
Speaker 13: his friend whose name rhymes with seal have been up
Speaker 13: to some interesting things.
Speaker 1: When it comes to these baking contests.
Speaker 13: So the surveillance Seal and the Space Baker doing some
Speaker 13: doing some interesting baking. So we need you to let
Speaker 13: your media friends know and let all your let all
Speaker 13: the people know. We're going to do an email campaign
Speaker 13: next week because that seems to be how we get
Speaker 13: this done. We do have avenues to undo this unholy.
Speaker 1: Mess, and just hold on to your hope.
Speaker 13: Run over to my friends at the coorse Ate and
Speaker 13: of course the Common Coalition. Check out the report. We
Speaker 13: have more to report on all of the baking contests
Speaker 13: that we're working on. We're still digging, We got more
Speaker 13: to go and blue Skies ahead, y'all.
Speaker 4: There's something specifically uniquely horrifying about the way that like
Speaker 4: just the sort of TikTok language of sewer side or
Speaker 4: whatever like that people say, like that kind of shit
Speaker 4: this stuff just makes me really sad. No, it's it's
Speaker 4: so like I can't have fun with this anymore. Oh God,
Speaker 4: damn it.
Speaker 3: The same thing when I was watching some of the
Speaker 3: trum assassination videos when I realized this is just from
Speaker 3: people who are unwell, and I can't even have fun
Speaker 3: with this. And that is also the case with a
Speaker 3: lot of Q and on stuff. You should be really
Speaker 3: careful about how much joy you take in the suffering
Speaker 3: of people and people displaying their suffering on the Internet
Speaker 3: by engaging in this stuff. But yeah, this stuff's just
Speaker 3: really sad. Like in other videos, she's with her followers
Speaker 3: to contact their state governors to convince them to change
Speaker 3: all the voting machines because they've been compromised. And I'll
Speaker 3: play one more video before we close the episode, I
Speaker 3: says over thirty two thousand views. She talks about Trump
Speaker 3: using tariffs as leverage to get countries to sign deals
Speaker 3: with Elon Musk's Starlink satellites, which will then be used
Speaker 3: to control elections worldwide, and the only way to stop
Speaker 3: this is to impeach Trump and put Kamala in the
Speaker 3: White House since she is the rightful winner of the
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: Election, they take from their constituents.
Speaker 13: Now to address the Space Cadet, and how look at
Speaker 13: what he launched last year in record time ten months,
Speaker 13: this low orbit DTC constellation. And look at what they're
Speaker 13: doing with the countries around the world. To get your
Speaker 13: tariffs removed, you have to sign a contract with the
Speaker 13: Space Cadet. Hello, this is not about any kind of
Speaker 13: like you know, internet in the rural areas, blah blah blah.
Speaker 13: Nothing about this is to be nice. No, it is
Speaker 13: to control future contests. The US was not the endgame.
Speaker 13: It was the litmus test. So we can get out
Speaker 13: of this. We have constitutional avenues to get out of
Speaker 13: this situation, but we need Congress to act, and Congress
Speaker 13: won't act until the American people know what happened. And
Speaker 13: they're not going to know what happened until our influencers
Speaker 13: and our media handle the situation. So Rachel Matto, please,
Speaker 13: Lawrence Midas touched. For heaven's sake, Midas touched you guys,
Speaker 13: four million people, you could be blasting this out and
Speaker 13: letting the American people know what happened. Do your jobs, please,
Speaker 13: so we can get the rightful people in the.
Speaker 1: House that they belong in, the big white one.
Speaker 4: I think one of the things that makes me so
Speaker 4: insane about these is that like if you're actually, I
Speaker 4: guess Garrison, you weren't around for this. But like I've
Speaker 4: legitimately have lived through two attempts to steal an election, right,
Speaker 4: Like there was two thousand which the Republicans just stole
Speaker 4: and then yeah, Donald Trump did try to steal the
Speaker 4: election in twenty twenty, but he did it by having
Speaker 4: people try to form mobs outside of polling places and
Speaker 4: then like his supporters did January sixth That's a real thing.
Speaker 4: But the thing about these conspiracies is like they devour reality,
Speaker 4: They consume it and strip it for his constituent parts.
Speaker 4: Which is why you see so many like you know,
Speaker 4: used to see so many conspiracies that would you know,
Speaker 4: if you look at their giant conspiracy charts. They're talking
Speaker 4: about like the structure of the World Bank and the
Speaker 4: IMF and like that's where the Builderberg group stuff comes
Speaker 4: out of, Right, they love charts. The Builder Group stuff
Speaker 4: is them taking the real structure of the International Monetary
Speaker 4: Fund and the World Bank and then you know, devouring
Speaker 4: that structure and spinning back out conspiracy and that that's
Speaker 4: what these things do. They take they take real things
Speaker 4: that happen in the world and just devour them and
Speaker 4: turn them into just nothing. And it makes it harder
Speaker 4: to act because like, yeah, we do live in a
Speaker 4: world where the Republican Party has like attempted to or
Speaker 4: successfully did steal two elections, but not this one.
Speaker 3: And if this is your mode of resistance, of hashtag
Speaker 3: resistance against Trump, that's useless. It's completely useless. It's not
Speaker 3: actually managing any of the effects of Trump on people,
Speaker 3: like ice, like attacks on career people. It's this fully contained,
Speaker 3: non non form of fighting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like like you see you see this, You
Speaker 4: see this too on the left of CIA stuff, where
Speaker 4: it's like everyone is convinced that like the person they're
Speaker 4: arguing with on Twitter like is the CIA, and that
Speaker 4: the way that you combat CIA influences by like spreading
Speaker 4: I don't know, post and pro asage shit. And it's
Speaker 4: like that's not not actually substantively combating the influence of
Speaker 4: the CIA. It just feels like it is. And that
Speaker 4: structure of feeling is so powerful that it prevents you
Speaker 4: from doing actual action.
Speaker 3: There has been this new conspiracy theory getting traction on
Speaker 3: Blue Sky a lot that the masked people engaged in
Speaker 3: Immigration enforcement ICE aren't actually ICE agents. They're secretly quote
Speaker 3: J sixers, bounty hunters or thugs, oathkeepers, proud boys. It's
Speaker 3: a big assumption to even say they're federal agents. They're
Speaker 3: not identified. We have no idea who they are. Could
Speaker 3: be proud boys, or oath keepers or three percenters unquote.
Speaker 3: This is trying to push the blame away from the
Speaker 3: US government, who is engaging in this action ICE, onto
Speaker 3: these non state actors, which people in their mind think
Speaker 3: are easier targets. And it's just a completely misunderstanding of power,
Speaker 3: and it's a misunderstanding of their current political situation, and
Speaker 3: it gives you no ability to actually stop the bad
Speaker 3: things ICE are doing. I've seen this theory gain a
Speaker 3: lot of traction online. And in the same way that
Speaker 3: QAnon is a product of the cognitive dissonance of Trump
Speaker 3: supporters having to grapple the fact that the trumpet that
Speaker 3: their god king is in power and their lives still suck,
Speaker 3: this is this specific one is a product of the
Speaker 3: cognitive dissonance of like the fact that these people all
Speaker 3: supported ICE when Biden was Biden was the run, running
Speaker 3: it when like Biden fucking did his executive order to
Speaker 3: shut the border down, right, but kumboom Biden was like
Speaker 3: doing consration camps in the desert. They were all pro ICE,
Speaker 3: and then they suddenly have to deal with the world
Speaker 3: where ICE is doing an ethnic cleansing and they can't
Speaker 3: process that. And so the way that they attempt to
Speaker 3: cope with it is being like, well, that's actually not
Speaker 3: the real Ice. That's like j six proud boys. It's
Speaker 3: a groper occupied government. They're sending out coded messages on Twitter. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's the same thing me and you did the episode
Speaker 3: about a few weeks ago in our dog Whistle Politics
Speaker 3: and the Hunt for Coded Nazi Messaging episode. But yeah,
Speaker 3: And though some Democratic voters are engaging in election denial,
Speaker 3: I think one key difference from twenty twenty Republican election
Speaker 3: denial is that liberal election officials have as of yet
Speaker 3: not been willing to participate in this rhetoric openly or
Speaker 3: pursue these baseless fraud accusations. This is still one difference.
Speaker 3: But I think it's a ticking clock. I think it's
Speaker 3: only a matter of time, especially once we see the
Speaker 3: midterms that people running for office, that Democrats might start
Speaker 3: embracing some kind of wing nutty stuff the same way
Speaker 3: Marjor Taylor Green Trojanhorst wing nutty politics into Congress, and
Speaker 3: now we see a whole bunch of other representatives being
Speaker 3: able to engage in conspiratorial thought on the right. There's
Speaker 3: going to be a few instances of this, I think
Speaker 3: in the next midterm election for Democrats. It's something to
Speaker 3: keep an eye out for, because I think it's only
Speaker 3: a matter of time. Like what I mentioned in that
Speaker 3: CCR you quote, mundane reality is going to lose because
Speaker 3: this stuff is just more interesting. People are going to
Speaker 3: try to buy it, and it requires constant pushback. It
Speaker 3: for part one, But there's gonna be another episode tomorrow
Speaker 3: where I talk with Jack of the Alt watcher Blue
Speaker 3: Sky account to discuss the latest evolution of blue and
Speaker 3: On and possibly the most qan Oni extension of Blue
Speaker 3: and On we've seen yet, the Alt National Park Service
Speaker 3: and their coded messages being sent out on Blue Sky
Speaker 3: and Facebook. So stay tuned for that tomorrow, and remember
Speaker 3: you are not immune to propaganda. Seventeen two nineteen, two
Speaker 3: hundred twenty seven general public. Please disregard as this podcast
Speaker 3: as fighting battles on multiple fronts. This podcast is it
Speaker 3: could happen here, and I'm Garrison Davis. Last episode, I
Speaker 3: talked with Miowong about the trajectory of liberal conspiracy theories,
Speaker 3: specifically throughout the last ten years, from Russia Gate to
Speaker 3: Trump's staged assassination and twenty twenty four election denial. This
Speaker 3: resurgence of liberal conspiracism has been dubbed blue and On.
Speaker 3: If you want more background on that, go listen to
Speaker 3: our previous episode. But this episode is about a new
Speaker 3: evolution of Blue and On and possibly the most Qanani
Speaker 3: iteration we've seen yet. The Alt National Park Service a
Speaker 3: social media engagement farming account that gained traction on Blue
Speaker 3: Sky and Facebook last February. In March admidst cuts to
Speaker 3: the Park Service from the Trump administration. This account gained
Speaker 3: followers by posing as a group of anti Trump dissidents
Speaker 3: from within the Park Service, and soon enough it inspired
Speaker 3: a collection of other Alt government accounts like Alt CDC,
Speaker 3: Alt Nih, Alt Yellowstone, and Alt Noah. The original Alt
Speaker 3: National Park Service account basically never talks about the park
Speaker 3: Service itself, but during the first few months of Trump's
Speaker 3: second term, the account started going viral by posting sequences
Speaker 3: of random numbers as ostensibly coded messages to other hashtag
Speaker 3: resistance fighters, though the account has since experimented with, altered
Speaker 3: and refined their engagement strategies. To hear more about that
Speaker 3: and how Alt National Park Service fits into this trend
Speaker 3: of liberal conspiracy theories, I talked with someone who has
Speaker 3: spent the past few months documenting and writing about this account.
Speaker 3: The person who runs the alt watcher account on Blue
Speaker 3: Sky and writes about their search on the blog Dispatches
Speaker 3: from the Online Void. So here's that interview.
Speaker 5: My name's Jack.
Speaker 14: I'm the user behind the account alt Watcher on Blue Sky,
Speaker 14: and I've been following the Alt National Park Service for
Speaker 14: about six months, just documenting what they do and how
Speaker 14: they steal from journalists and how they're driving a lot
Speaker 14: of people insane, including me.
Speaker 3: What is the Alt National Park Service or first, what
Speaker 3: does the Alt National Park Service claim to be?
Speaker 14: Yeah, that's an important difference. The All National Park Service
Speaker 14: claims to be a loose affiliation of anonymous former parks
Speaker 14: employees that are either still employed by the park service
Speaker 14: and kind of working behind the scenes, or who were
Speaker 14: fired or laid off by the Trump administration and are
Speaker 14: now part of a nationwide coalition to resist the government.
Speaker 14: That's what they claim to be. What they really are
Speaker 14: is just a Facebook shit posting account. We're not sure
Speaker 14: if it's one person behind it or if it's a group.
Speaker 14: It's remarkably hard to find out anything about the person
Speaker 14: who is behind the account, who they are, where they are,
Speaker 14: and how they started this. But what they do most
Speaker 14: of the time is repost the work of journalists directly
Speaker 14: plagiariyes from news outlets, and post these vaguely conspiratorial things
Speaker 14: online to try to whip up engagement from their followers.
Speaker 3: I first became aware of this back in probably March
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty five, specifically when on Blue Sky they
Speaker 3: just started posting a lot of numbers. Yes, I was
Speaker 3: aware that this account was created, like in the aftermath
Speaker 3: of some like Doge related cuts to the Park Service,
Speaker 3: or like anti Dei, anti woke stuff, and then this
Speaker 3: account popped up claiming to be you know, like resistance
Speaker 3: from inside to people who watch politics like seriously for
Speaker 3: their jobs.
Speaker 4: Was very clear that this was.
Speaker 3: Not a legitimate organization, and then they just started posting
Speaker 3: numbers sequences of numbers along with other cryptic messages, and
Speaker 3: this like immediately starts hitting like the q and on bells.
Speaker 3: Back in July of twenty twenty four, there's a Washington
Speaker 3: Post article about the Trump assassination conspiracy theories, but specifically
Speaker 3: it was it was a I think it was an
Speaker 3: opinion piece critical of terming liberal conspiracy theories as as
Speaker 3: quote unquote blewing on. They said, quote the main similarity
Speaker 3: of q and on and bluing on is that they rhyme.
Speaker 3: And for a while I kind of understood this criticism
Speaker 3: and agree with parts of it, because there was there
Speaker 3: was structural differences between some of how you know, liberals
Speaker 3: or like quote unquote the left engage in conspiratorial thinking,
Speaker 3: and like the function of q and on the numbers
Speaker 3: think started to I'll mess with that analysis because then
Speaker 3: you started to see the actual methodology and like the
Speaker 3: ideological function of QAnon start to get replicated in what
Speaker 3: is most likely just like engagement farming. But for the
Speaker 3: people who are following this account and engaging with it
Speaker 3: and like it becomes like an important part of their
Speaker 3: life and their perception of like hashtag resistance. And I
Speaker 3: think that's where bluing on actually proved itself as a term,
Speaker 3: was in March of twenty five, I guess, let's talk
Speaker 3: about the numbers.
Speaker 14: You know what, I would love I would love to
Speaker 14: talk about the numbers. The numbers are also what stood
Speaker 14: out to me, and that is why I ended up
Speaker 14: making my account and diving into all this. During the pandemic,
Speaker 14: I got obsessed with qana, you know, as as just
Speaker 14: what is this? A lot of people did a lot
Speaker 14: of people did, you know, Look, pandemic did a lot
Speaker 14: of crazy things to us. Some people learned to knit,
Speaker 14: some people got good at baking. I got really into
Speaker 14: learning about q and on and I am. I'm a
Speaker 14: huge fan of the QAA podcast. I listened to that constantly.
Speaker 14: And as soon as I saw altonps post one of
Speaker 14: the numbers, I realized, I'm reading this.
Speaker 5: In their c voice.
Speaker 14: Yeah, their their voice modulated voice that sounds like this
Speaker 14: whenever they would post. And I started reading all the
Speaker 14: numbers post that way, and just like you said, something
Speaker 14: clicked and I went, oh, this is oh, I see
Speaker 14: what they're doing here. Yeah, and they've posted numbers many times.
Speaker 14: I've got my giant spreadsheet pulled up here, and I
Speaker 14: think they've posted something like thirty numbers. It's been a
Speaker 14: while since they've done it. But the thing that really
Speaker 14: gave the game away from me was during one of
Speaker 14: these numbers posts, they posted some random number and then
Speaker 14: replied to themselves and said, for discussion, what do you
Speaker 14: think these numbers mean? And I said, oh, I see
Speaker 14: what's happening.
Speaker 4: Here, kind of giving away the game there, hell at exactly.
Speaker 14: Yeah, this is not a group of government insiders communicating
Speaker 14: with their coalition. This is the user behind a Facebook
Speaker 14: account realizing in real time that they've stumbled on like
Speaker 14: a gold mine for engagement. Yeah, oh, we can just
Speaker 14: do this and people will do the work for us,
Speaker 14: and we're just going to say that out.
Speaker 4: Loud and throughout.
Speaker 3: Like March and April, their count just like rocketed in popularity. Yes,
Speaker 3: I've not actually looked on their Facebook account. Besides, like
Speaker 3: the post that you've shared, I've only seen them on
Speaker 3: Blue Sky. Is what is the difference of their presence
Speaker 3: on Facebook versus like blue Sky Blue Sky.
Speaker 14: I think they're at something like nine hundred k on Facebook.
Speaker 14: The last time I checked it was about four point
Speaker 14: three million.
Speaker 4: Geez.
Speaker 14: Yeah, they are a massive presence on Facebook and they've
Speaker 14: been monetizing their posts. Recently, they have been sponsored content
Speaker 14: on Facebook leading to their page.
Speaker 3: This is where I think one of the different from
Speaker 3: like how Q and nonfunctioned and all National Park Service,
Speaker 3: because you know, Q was not monetizing posts on the chance.
Speaker 5: That's like I would have loved to see him try.
Speaker 5: That would be really funny.
Speaker 3: I do not see like this account existing as like
Speaker 3: as a sort of operation to influence the political trajectory
Speaker 3: of the United States the same way that the qan
Speaker 3: on account at least evolved in that capacity. Even if
Speaker 3: it started off as like a shit posting thing exactly,
Speaker 3: it certainly evolved with with more of a malicious intent
Speaker 3: the people behind you know, Q posting.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I think that's a big difference between them, is
Speaker 14: that this is straightforwardly an engagement far.
Speaker 3: Yeah, using some of those tactics, especially like early on,
Speaker 3: but for a very simple reason, and that's that's making
Speaker 3: money on the Internet, like everybody is trying to do.
Speaker 3: It's it's it's just like internet hustle culture stuff with
Speaker 3: with no grappling with like the consequences that has for
Speaker 3: like the psyche of of people who who engage with
Speaker 3: your content.
Speaker 14: Exactly, and the psyche of people who engage with this
Speaker 14: content is really what keeps me coming back to this project,
Speaker 14: because that is the real harm I see here. Look
Speaker 14: the online drifters or a diamond doesn't you know people
Speaker 14: who sell stuff online. It's everywhere, it's inescapable. What's unique
Speaker 14: about alt NPS is that they are trying to make
Speaker 14: money on convincing people that this is real. You know,
Speaker 14: they're not just selling hashtag resist shirts or whatever. They're
Speaker 14: trying to get money out of people by convincing them
Speaker 14: that they really are part of a shadow resistance against
Speaker 14: against Trump, and that you can buy their shirts or
Speaker 14: you can straightforwardly just send them money for things like
Speaker 14: their all Junior Ranger program that they've said they're starting,
Speaker 14: and if you send them a dollar, you're helping fund
Speaker 14: that program. And it's totally real. And the fact that
Speaker 14: they didn't mention it for seven straight months after initially
Speaker 14: announcing it is something you definitely shouldn't worry about. Do
Speaker 14: you know what else you definitely shouldn't worry about? This
Speaker 14: short at break.
Speaker 3: So they have face pushback for their numbers posting, but
Speaker 3: they have found a way to justify it publicly, to
Speaker 3: talk about like how they've framed the posting of just
Speaker 3: like four numbers, two numbers, and like the sort of
Speaker 3: like defense of the account that it plays.
Speaker 14: Yeah, that was this maybe says something about me, But
Speaker 14: that was maybe the post that made me the angriest
Speaker 14: of anything they've done, because I have a deep seated
Speaker 14: reaction to feeling like someone who thinks I'm stupid, And
Speaker 14: all I could think is, do you think I'm an idiot?
Speaker 14: When I saw their reaction to this, Because we are
Speaker 14: often criticized for the numbers we post online.
Speaker 5: We can't tell you everything.
Speaker 14: Sorry, And then they went on this big half explanation
Speaker 14: about stingrays and cell site simulator.
Speaker 4: Cell site simulators.
Speaker 14: Yeah, but they didn't explain what those actually do. They
Speaker 14: did not explicitly claim they were being surveilled by one,
Speaker 14: and they didn't explain why the existence of stingrays and
Speaker 14: cell site simulators means that they should.
Speaker 3: Do all this on Facebook instead posting numbers does not
Speaker 3: bypass the security concerns posed by the presence of a
Speaker 3: cell site simulator. No, because you're still posting publicly on
Speaker 3: the Internet. That doesn't matter at all. Yeah, you're pulling
Speaker 3: something out of your asse that sounds technical, that's going
Speaker 3: to trick your you know, average boomer and maybe you
Speaker 3: know three out of five gen X people who are
Speaker 3: scrolling Facebook slash Blue Sky and like that's that's all
Speaker 3: they need to do. But for anyone who knows what
Speaker 3: a cell site simulator is or how like internet communications works,
Speaker 3: it's very very clear that this is just like completely bullshit.
Speaker 14: It's completely bullshit because you're right that this is all
Speaker 14: they need to do. They just need to deflect. And
Speaker 14: I think that's what stood out to me about this
Speaker 14: post in particular, is that it showed me that the
Speaker 14: person or people behind all the time ps have a
Speaker 14: genuine level of pr skill. You know, they have a
Speaker 14: certain level of what I think is a real skill
Speaker 14: at deflection public relations and being able to spin what
Speaker 14: they're saying. You know, that's a genuine skill. It's a
Speaker 14: shame that it's being applied to this instead of, I mean,
Speaker 14: anything else, but that is a skill that they have
Speaker 14: that they're able to deploy in defense of their conspiratorial posting.
Speaker 3: The other thing that they post in relation to the numbers.
Speaker 3: Is there one time forward catchphrase general public can disregard.
Speaker 4: Don want to talk about the context of those posts.
Speaker 14: Yes, those were replies that they would make to the
Speaker 14: numbers posts, usually to the numbers posts, but occasionally to.
Speaker 5: Some other cryptic thing they would post.
Speaker 14: They would post their numbers, say forty four, and then
Speaker 14: they would reply to themselves saying general public can disregard,
Speaker 14: or they'd say please disregard if you are a member
Speaker 14: of the general public. And there were a lot of
Speaker 14: people online who saw that and thought, oh, that must
Speaker 14: mean it's a code.
Speaker 5: It has to be real.
Speaker 3: They're engaged in some sort of like secret agent spy work,
Speaker 3: and this is very really important.
Speaker 14: Yeah, yeah, And I would see a lot of people
Speaker 14: push back on any criticism that the account would get
Speaker 14: for this by saying things like, it's code for a reason.
Speaker 14: You know, guys, they're speaking in code. Don't try to
Speaker 14: crack the code. It's not for us, you know, this
Speaker 14: is for the coalition. And whenever anybody would say I
Speaker 14: don't think this is real or like any of the
Speaker 14: things we've talked about about, why does this make sense,
Speaker 14: they would instantly be accused of being a right wing
Speaker 14: infiltrator or a troll or a MAGA spy or something
Speaker 14: like that. You know, there can be no actual criticism
Speaker 14: of the account. There can only be infiltration.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that does have more like Q overlap, I
Speaker 4: suppose absolutely. I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's odd because like throughout through writing about all this
Speaker 3: like bluing on stuff. As much as this stuff is
Speaker 3: a legitimate problem, like which it is, it's just a
Speaker 3: symptom of a larger political problem in America, and the
Speaker 3: people engaged with it, if anything, are kind of victims
Speaker 3: as well as like perpetrators. And like this was the
Speaker 3: same thing with like Q and on, where like your
Speaker 3: average person engaged with it as bad as it is
Speaker 3: and some of the stuff that they might like say
Speaker 3: or do, I also just feel bad for the people involved.
Speaker 4: And it's this same thing with this.
Speaker 3: As annoying as this kind of like lib slop can be,
Speaker 3: the people who have to have to believe in something
Speaker 3: like this in order to like keep going that it's
Speaker 3: kind of like a tragedy in a way, and this
Speaker 3: is obviously is serving some important psychological function for them.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I totally agree, And I think that's that sadness.
Speaker 14: I think is what keeps me wanting to engage with this.
Speaker 14: You know, when I look at this and I see
Speaker 14: alt Enps trying to get people to buy their T
Speaker 14: shirts or just farm engagement, that's not remarkable to me.
Speaker 14: That's normal that happens on the internet all the time.
Speaker 14: What keeps me coming back to wanting to fight this
Speaker 14: and wanting to document all this is the people I
Speaker 14: see in the replies. Yeah, the people who say that
Speaker 14: alt Enps brings them so much hope. It's what's keeping
Speaker 14: them from falling into despair. And it's not that I
Speaker 14: want to take that away from them, it's that I
Speaker 14: don't like that their need for that is being used.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like a predatory mode of trying to
Speaker 3: capitalize on that.
Speaker 14: Absolutely. Yeah, the account is trying to capitalize on people's
Speaker 14: need for hope. You know, they need to believe that
Speaker 14: there is someone fighting for them because in a lot
Speaker 14: of ways, it doesn't feel like anyone is. You know,
Speaker 14: it feels like our politicians are ineffectual, our institutions are crumbling.
Speaker 14: We need someone be there. We need ironically, we need
Speaker 14: patriots to be in control. Yeah, we need to trust
Speaker 14: the plant. There is an appeal to that, and I
Speaker 14: do understand that. I understand that these people are looking
Speaker 14: for a light in the darkness, and I really can't
Speaker 14: pretend that I'm not doing the same thing totally through
Speaker 14: my writing on this. I need something to cling to,
Speaker 14: and I can't blame anybody for feeling that way too.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's why I feel like your project, though,
Speaker 3: it comes from a much better and healthier place, because
Speaker 3: you're looking at this like decline in nationwide American sanity
Speaker 3: and trying to do something about it, even if that's
Speaker 3: just a documentation, and then writing about it and trying
Speaker 3: to explain to people and like help help people understand
Speaker 3: where the psyche of the country is. And I think
Speaker 3: part of what makes me so interested in your project
Speaker 3: is that, like it reminds me a little bit of
Speaker 3: people who started studying QAnon, you know, back in like
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, back when.
Speaker 3: It's just this little, cute, small thing, and then you
Speaker 3: fast forward years later they realize they've actually done some
Speaker 3: extremely important like work documenting a phenomenon that is shaping
Speaker 3: the trajectory of our country.
Speaker 4: And I don't know if.
Speaker 3: Alt National Park Service is going to evolve in the
Speaker 3: same way. But I think the slow embrace of this
Speaker 3: sort of conspiratoral thinking among decently sized like chunks of
Speaker 3: the democratic base, I think is very notable and work.
Speaker 3: Like what you're doing, I think actually has a really
Speaker 3: important place in trying to like map where our country
Speaker 3: might might be headed. And yeah, in a few years
Speaker 3: it might somehow it might turn out to be super
Speaker 3: important when the Libs finally do their own JA six.
Speaker 14: So yeah, I mean, I to be honest, I would
Speaker 14: be very happy if this whole thing petered out.
Speaker 5: Sure, you know, I would be very happy if.
Speaker 14: One day the account just stops posting and there is
Speaker 14: no years long continuation with this like there was was
Speaker 14: something like you or not, you know. But I do
Speaker 14: think Altenps is a part of a broader ecosystem of
Speaker 14: this blue and on world. And you know, I do
Speaker 14: agree with what you said earlier that bluanon is a
Speaker 14: phrase that I think does get overused, that there are
Speaker 14: some things that are just normal people, you know, expressing
Speaker 14: their political opinions that kind of gets derided as oh,
Speaker 14: blue and not, but it really is just people being
Speaker 14: normal or people being extremely online. But Altenps is a
Speaker 14: part of a bigger world of this sort of vaguely
Speaker 14: left wing conspiracism. You know, I'm seeing a lot of
Speaker 14: crossover between people who post in reply to al t
Speaker 14: enps and people who have this sort of mantra about
Speaker 14: Trump that he wasn't shot, he didn't win, he's on
Speaker 14: the list. And you see that exact phrase, you know,
Speaker 14: post it over and over.
Speaker 5: And over again.
Speaker 14: It's in pictures, it's in memes, it's in people's posts.
Speaker 14: And I think all t NPS is a part of that.
Speaker 14: I think they're emblematic of that. Yeah, that you are
Speaker 14: not immune to conspiratorial think.
Speaker 3: We are not better than that now, and they're facilitating
Speaker 3: I think that mindset. I think liberals became so susceptible
Speaker 3: to it because they had this conception that they're immune
Speaker 3: to it, that conspiracy thinking is something that only exists
Speaker 3: on the political right.
Speaker 5: Yes, that's for other people, And this is part.
Speaker 3: Of what I'm going to write about it, like in general,
Speaker 3: but like the way that consensus reality was like sheared
Speaker 3: down so heavily during the first Rump administration and like
Speaker 3: parts of the Body administration by people on the right
Speaker 3: that like weakened this notion we have of Consettu's reality
Speaker 3: that then liberals kind of got blindsided by when events
Speaker 3: happened that were hard to understand or felt so surreal
Speaker 3: or like bombastic, that it allowed a split that was
Speaker 3: already there to grow into a pretty wide opening where
Speaker 3: you now believe that major historical events are fake and staged,
Speaker 3: that an election is stolen.
Speaker 4: And you're like, what, what does this remind you of?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 3: Yes, one of the things you're saying remind you of.
Speaker 3: Isn't this part of why you're against the Trump movement
Speaker 3: in the first place.
Speaker 14: Yeah, And I think God help you if you ever
Speaker 14: try and point that out. Yeah, you know, to a
Speaker 14: lot of the people in these replies, it's just like, hey, guys,
Speaker 14: doesn't a lot of this smell a lot like you
Speaker 14: or not? You know, doesn't this sound a lot like
Speaker 14: the way people talked about the twenty twenty election? You know,
Speaker 14: doesn't this smell the same way? And that is when
Speaker 14: people in especially in al t NPS's replies, will go nuclear,
Speaker 14: you know. There, I've seen some incredible dog piles in
Speaker 14: response to people bringing this up, even if it's if
Speaker 14: it's anodyne, you know, even if it is just hey guys,
Speaker 14: just a reminder, I think this is something that we
Speaker 14: should you know, maybe I'll take with a grain of salt.
Speaker 14: People go nuts, you know. They they need to believe
Speaker 14: it needs to be real and it needs to be unquestioned,
Speaker 14: and that there can be no good faith questioning of
Speaker 14: this idea.
Speaker 3: Do you know what else is an unquestioned truth that
Speaker 3: we have to go on one more ad break before
Speaker 3: we return to conclude our discussion on the Alt National
Speaker 3: Park Service. It's easy to see how they reached just
Speaker 3: a certain like ceiling on how much they can just
Speaker 3: numbers post and have that be a reliable method of
Speaker 3: engagement that they've started to like experiment with with with
Speaker 3: different types of posting to see what makes people stick,
Speaker 3: who can help with engagement over a long period of
Speaker 3: time instead of just like rocketing to like virality first
Speaker 3: but then having a stable audience. And now they're basically
Speaker 3: a news aggregator account but deceptively framing where they are
Speaker 3: getting their their news from.
Speaker 14: Yeah, they are a news aggregator account with massive caveats.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, well, I mean I think most news aggregator
Speaker 3: accounts are actually bad. Yeah, I'd agree this is something
Speaker 3: we saw in twenty twenty was how unreliable news aggregator
Speaker 3: accounts were and how much of a harm that they caused.
Speaker 3: And I see the current version of all National Park
Speaker 3: Service as kind of an extension of that taken to
Speaker 3: a slightly higher level.
Speaker 4: I suppose I'm.
Speaker 14: Obsessed with this, you know, I've said that a few times,
Speaker 14: but I've documented what I think is most of the
Speaker 14: time that they have posted a news article without attribution
Speaker 14: and either just described something where they could have or
Speaker 14: should have posted a link to an actual article, or
Speaker 14: more often just copy pasting sections of an article and
Speaker 14: reposting it as though they wrote it. You know, those
Speaker 14: are the ones that really get me. Those are the
Speaker 14: aspects of their news aggregation where you say this is
Speaker 14: just plagiarism. You know, this is just you stealing verbatim
Speaker 14: from an article and acting as though you wrote it
Speaker 14: because you want your audience to think that you are
Speaker 14: a government insider with all this inside information, and that
Speaker 14: information like that is coming first to you, not to
Speaker 14: the New York Times, not to CNN.
Speaker 4: Even though you're just posting sections of the New York
Speaker 4: Times and CNN.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I mean, they took the first, I think three
Speaker 14: paragraphs of an article from Wired, and did it word
Speaker 14: for word, didn't link to Wired, didn't say where it
Speaker 14: came from, and implied that the information was being sent
Speaker 14: to the rangers of the all National Park Service instead
Speaker 14: of two journalists at Wired. This happens constantly, you know,
Speaker 14: and every time I think, well, they've been posting more
Speaker 14: link slately, they've been linking directly to actual sources of information.
Speaker 14: Every time I start thinking that, they do it again.
Speaker 14: You know, they steal another thing again, or they've started
Speaker 14: posting to court watcher or directly to government documents in
Speaker 14: what I'm thinking as an attempt to dodge accusations like
Speaker 14: the one I make. Somebody in my comments described it
Speaker 14: as the don't cite Wikipedia, cite Wikipedia's reference page problem.
Speaker 14: They're reading an article from NPR, and rather than just saying, hey,
Speaker 14: we've heard this in NPR, they're going to NPR's citation
Speaker 14: of the Department of Justice and linking directly to that
Speaker 14: instead to make it look like they're diligently watching government
Speaker 14: court records and posting them for our benefit the moment
Speaker 14: they come out, instead of just we saw this in
Speaker 14: the Washington.
Speaker 3: Post and they've been engaging this for like a few
Speaker 3: months now with this sort of behavior.
Speaker 14: Oh yeah, they've been doing that since January February. Yeah,
Speaker 14: they've also started claiming for a while, and then they
Speaker 14: stopped that. One of their sources they would list at
Speaker 14: the end of their posts was an unnamed official in
Speaker 14: whatever relevant government agency they were talking about. Our services
Speaker 14: include this newspaper, this website, and an unnamed Department of
Speaker 14: Justice official, an unnamed Department of Education official. They suddenly
Speaker 14: stopped doing that as soon as they started. There was
Speaker 14: about a week or two where that was behind about
Speaker 14: every post.
Speaker 3: Anything else you want to add about either the existence
Speaker 3: of these alt accounts or like any other aspect of
Speaker 3: this world you want to mention before we before we
Speaker 3: close up.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I do have two quick ones, and the first
Speaker 14: is that among the alt accounts that you see online,
Speaker 14: the Alt National Park Service is overwhelmingly the most malicious
Speaker 14: and the most harmful. You know, there are may be
Speaker 14: a couple others that get a little wild, that are
Speaker 14: maybe a little conspiratorial. I think Alt Noah has been
Speaker 14: kind of in the spotlight for that lately, but a
Speaker 14: lot of them, like Alt CDC, the Alt Forest Service.
Speaker 14: All these random little alt government agency accounts are pretty harmless,
Speaker 14: you know. They really are just posting links to news
Speaker 14: articles or given updates on their relevant agency.
Speaker 5: ALT.
Speaker 14: Forest Service mostly talks about the Forest Service. ALT CDC
Speaker 14: mostly talks about the CDC. ALT NPS basically never talks
Speaker 14: about the National Park Service. I think I can cut
Speaker 14: on one hand the times that they have said anything
Speaker 14: about the parks. There was a point when I think
Speaker 14: it was in the big beautiful budget bill where there
Speaker 14: were these massive cuts being proposed to the National Park Service,
Speaker 14: and they talked about the bill as a whole and
Speaker 14: didn't mention anything about the cuts of the Park Service.
Speaker 3: Well, you never know who's watching the communication channels.
Speaker 4: You got to be careful. There's cell site simulators out there.
Speaker 14: There's cell site simulators out there. And then the second
Speaker 14: thing is that I'm always very careful in my writing
Speaker 14: and in my posts to emphasize that the people who
Speaker 14: followed this account are not the problem the account itself is.
Speaker 14: You know, I always want to make sure to have
Speaker 14: a lot of empathy for people who follow this account,
Speaker 14: because I understand why they did, I understand the hope
Speaker 14: they're looking for, and I never want to do what
Speaker 14: I see some people do in the replies to Altenps's posts,
Speaker 14: which is dunking on their followers. You know, how do
Speaker 14: you rubes believe this? Do you idiots still think this
Speaker 14: is real? I never want to do that because that
Speaker 14: doesn't help anyone. What that does is make them dig in,
Speaker 14: It makes them double down. So I always want to
Speaker 14: make sure to treat the followers of these accounts with respect,
Speaker 14: you know, treat them with empathy, talk to them like
Speaker 14: a person. Yeah, And that's how I've managed to get
Speaker 14: a few people to get out. I've managed to have
Speaker 14: people tell me that it was through my writing and
Speaker 14: other people's work on this topic that they were able
Speaker 14: to get out, they were able to disengage from this.
Speaker 5: World of fake spies and code numbers. And I think
Speaker 5: that matters.
Speaker 14: I think that that helps with every little bit we do,
Speaker 14: and it starts by just being nice to people, just
Speaker 14: being kind to people who are looking for hope in
Speaker 14: the world we live in.
Speaker 3: Where can people find your work both on social media
Speaker 3: and then also you're writing.
Speaker 14: You can find me on blue Sky at altwatcher dot
Speaker 14: bsky dot social and I am unfortunately still on substack
Speaker 14: at my name, it's Jajoyce Lynch dot substack dot com.
Speaker 14: And also look for dispatches from the Online Void is
Speaker 14: the name of the blog.
Speaker 3: There should absolutely be more people reading your Dispatches from
Speaker 3: the Online Void, some very very solid work just straightly
Speaker 3: documenting the phenomenon that we've been talking about this episode
Speaker 3: and specifically the old National Park Service.
Speaker 5: Well, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's fantastic, very like, non editorialized, just showing you
Speaker 3: what's happening, extremely well put together.
Speaker 5: Well, thanks, thanks, and nice for you to say thanks.
Speaker 3: Again to Jack for talking with me about alt National
Speaker 3: Park Service. I strongly recommend people seek out his research,
Speaker 3: both on Dispatches from the Online Void and Blue Sky.
Speaker 3: Before I close this episode, I want to remind everybody
Speaker 3: that you two are not immune to propaganda. This past weekend,
Speaker 3: the internet has been a buzz with rumors and speculation
Speaker 3: that Trump died over the weekend or was actively dying,
Speaker 3: and there's been attempts to cover it up, when in
Speaker 3: fact he just went on a brief Labor Day weekend holiday.
Speaker 3: People were sharing ai altered images to make Trump look
Speaker 3: more sickly and were speculating about road closures around Walter
Speaker 3: Reed Medical Center, sharing a map with roads blocked off,
Speaker 3: but in fact there were no irregular road closures, and
Speaker 3: this map of supposed closures that was spreading online just
Speaker 3: showed old security gates. People concocted elaborate theories that Putin
Speaker 3: poisoned Trump during their last meeting, and that when the
Speaker 3: quote unquote President was supposed to give an announcement on
Speaker 3: Tuesday afternoon, it would be Trump resigning for health reasons,
Speaker 3: or Vance would come out and announced Trump died and
Speaker 3: he is now the president. And sure enough, come Tuesday afternoon,
Speaker 3: Trump appeared perfectly normal for a press conference. Even in
Speaker 3: the lead up to the press conference, I saw people
Speaker 3: continuing these conspiracy theories with sometimes a tat of irony.
Speaker 3: But as the press conference got delayed an hour, there
Speaker 3: was more and more speculation about Trump's declining health and yeah,
Speaker 3: he is an old man, but he's not going to
Speaker 3: drop dead this weekend.
Speaker 4: This isn't true.
Speaker 3: This is a copium strategy, and the way people have
Speaker 3: been talking about it is very similar to the liberal
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories that I've been reading about these past few weeks.
Speaker 3: And as fun as it can be, to speculate about
Speaker 3: a president's health, as many people did last time we
Speaker 3: had a geriatric president?
Speaker 5: When was that?
Speaker 3: Oh last year? But as much fun as it is,
Speaker 3: things can quickly spiral out of your conspiratorial control, even
Speaker 3: when your percipasion is from the safety of ironic detachment.
Speaker 3: I'll talk a little bit more about Trump's imminent death
Speaker 3: theories on this week's episode of Executive Disorder, but until then,
Speaker 3: just remember you are not immune to propaganda.
Speaker 4: Welcome to it could happen here a podcast where by
Speaker 4: my longtime home city of Chicago is preparing for a
Speaker 4: federal occupation. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with
Speaker 4: me to talk about what the fuck is going on
Speaker 4: about a thing that, at the end of last year,
Speaker 4: as bad as we thought this was going to be,
Speaker 4: was basically unimaginable. With you talked about. This is Raven,
Speaker 4: who's a journalist from the independent outlet Unraveled in Chicago,
Speaker 4: which does a lot of really really excellent work on
Speaker 4: the ground reporting on social movements in the city. You're
Speaker 4: putting on the government does a bunch of incredible works
Speaker 4: and some really good stuff on shot Spotter. Yeah, Raven,
Speaker 4: welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you for such a beautiful intro.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks, thanks for doing this. I don't know, like
Speaker 4: I'm a really big fan of Unraveled. I think most
Speaker 4: of the newspapers in Chicago it's just like just weird
Speaker 4: right wing rags, and getting actual good news out if
Speaker 4: the city is kind of difficult because it's like, yeah,
Speaker 4: we we have a good number.
Speaker 15: Now, like digital indie outlets in the city, but once
Speaker 15: you get outside of Cook County, especially, you know, the
Speaker 15: Chicago metro area is huge and like, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's all like pink slime garbage, like everything's been brought out.
Speaker 15: They don't have like real reporters anymore, so it can
Speaker 15: be a huge challenge to cover things like just in
Speaker 15: the collar counties, which is coincidentally also where a lot
Speaker 15: of this ice activity might be happening in the next yep,
Speaker 15: forty five days, thirty days, however.
Speaker 1: Long it lasts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so let's I guess from the jump before we
Speaker 4: get into sort of the kind of long arc of
Speaker 4: ice and the FEDS in in Chicago for the last year,
Speaker 4: let's talk about Trump's thing to send in the National
Speaker 4: Guard and so off the pep in the city. I'm
Speaker 4: really concerned about.
Speaker 15: Yeah, well, you know, there's kind of two things happening simultaneously.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 15: Trump is threatening the National Guard, which has been a
Speaker 15: thing like threatening the National Guard in Chicago has been
Speaker 15: a thing with him for like a while, and it
Speaker 15: can be very difficult to tease out like what what
Speaker 15: level of it is propaganda.
Speaker 1: And what level of it is like really happening.
Speaker 15: Right. But the other more important part here is we
Speaker 15: do know now like conclusively that DHS is planning a
Speaker 15: large operation in like Los Angeles style. So everything that's
Speaker 15: been happening around Lay for the last few months is
Speaker 15: moving into Chicago. This is what the chief of Border
Speaker 15: Patrol has said. You know, he just put out like
Speaker 15: a social media video that was saying they're trading palm
Speaker 15: trees for skyscrapers and bringing a few hundred guys with
Speaker 15: DHS ice border patrol to Chicago.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty wild.
Speaker 15: I don't think I've ever seen border patrol in numbers
Speaker 15: on the ground here in the Great Lakes.
Speaker 1: We've always known it's like this thing.
Speaker 15: That cooking seembly happen because we're technically like a border city.
Speaker 1: But you know, to be staring at in the face
Speaker 1: now like it's real, like it's actually happening.
Speaker 15: It's obviously feels like a real emergency for our communities.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think that's the interesting thing like talking
Speaker 4: to you and then talking to other people on the ground,
Speaker 4: is that like the National Guard deployment is what's getting
Speaker 4: all of the press, right, and people really aren't that
Speaker 4: worried about it. It's worth pointing out. So we're recording
Speaker 4: this on the morning of like Wednesday, September third, yea,
Speaker 4: So it's possible that stuff has changed by the time
Speaker 4: this episode goes out like tonight, because the situation is
Speaker 4: shifting really rapidly, right, But you know that there's this
Speaker 4: whole fight over whether the Texas National Guard is being
Speaker 4: deployed here on a federal deployment. But people don't really
Speaker 4: seem to be worried about the National Guard, and I
Speaker 4: think kind of for good reason. They didn't really. I mean,
Speaker 4: they did some stuff, I guess, but like they mostly
Speaker 4: kind of are there to make it look like there's
Speaker 4: troops in the street, right, while Ice in DHS does
Speaker 4: like the most horrific shit, right.
Speaker 15: That's been sort of the the understanding of what's happened
Speaker 15: in Los Angeles and then in DC it's gone a
Speaker 15: little bit differently just because they have so many FEDS already,
Speaker 15: so they've been able to do a lot of traffic
Speaker 15: stops in these little FED tactical teams. So you'll have
Speaker 15: like some FBI guys, some DA guys, maybe like an
Speaker 15: HSI guy I just read and woppole the other day,
Speaker 15: they've crashed like six cars in DC.
Speaker 1: I mean, like it's really dangerous that kinds of stops.
Speaker 15: These guys are executing their jumpouts, right, It's not like
Speaker 15: opficer friends and like pulling you over a license and
Speaker 15: registration please.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like really violent and they're in on
Speaker 1: mark cars and they're like trying to suffice people.
Speaker 15: So that is you know, also what we're expecting to
Speaker 15: see alongside like the ice ups is these FED teams
Speaker 15: crawling through the city.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know when they're going to be
Speaker 1: doing what where, but like.
Speaker 15: I said, the Chicago Land area, you know, the suburb
Speaker 15: everything around, it's very big. Yeah, you know, there's every
Speaker 15: indication this isn't going to be centralized just to like
Speaker 15: Downhoume chicag.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And like I think there's something that's kind of
Speaker 4: hard to understand if you're not from Chicago, but like
Speaker 4: even just the city proper is massive. Yeah, right, Like
Speaker 4: it takes like I mean, I haven't driven it in
Speaker 4: a long time, but like I think, I think if
Speaker 4: you're trying to go from like the top of like
Speaker 4: the North Side to like the bottom of the South Side,
Speaker 4: that's like hour and a half two hour drive, right,
Speaker 4: It's massive, right, And this.
Speaker 15: Naval station where they're basing operations isn't even in the city.
Speaker 15: It's two hours north than in in County. Yeah, so
Speaker 15: there are a lot of questions right now. I don't
Speaker 15: have the answers. Nobody's going to know until it starts,
Speaker 15: but you know, there are a lot of questions now
Speaker 15: just kind of like how far into the city are
Speaker 15: there even going to go? You know, it's obviously, you
Speaker 15: know what we've seen out in Los Angeles with these
Speaker 15: like larger like workplace raids like car washes and home
Speaker 15: depot and stuff. It's really difficult to imagine them executing
Speaker 15: something like that in the city. I'm not going to
Speaker 15: say they couldn't try, but they would obviously need a
Speaker 15: lot of backup from border patrol. Yeah, to try something
Speaker 15: like that even in the suburbs, which is what we
Speaker 15: saw in La.
Speaker 1: You know, that's who.
Speaker 15: Showed up those first few days when they were like
Speaker 15: tear gassing the fuck out of everybody, and it was
Speaker 15: just like crazy.
Speaker 1: You know, that was border patrol. So what our eyes
Speaker 1: are on is something like that.
Speaker 15: And to your point about the National Guard and the press,
Speaker 15: you know, it's part of the issue is like the politicians,
Speaker 15: the electeds, like they can't say no to the fence,
Speaker 15: they can't say no to ice, like Ice is coming,
Speaker 15: DHS is coming, no matter.
Speaker 13: What they do.
Speaker 1: The Guard is a little more of like.
Speaker 15: A political football for them, and and Pritsker can can
Speaker 15: push back, and there's like you know, the arguments about
Speaker 15: sending one states troops into another, and so there's more
Speaker 15: legal option, you know, all this stuff, right, But the
Speaker 15: FBI already has a field office here, I already has
Speaker 15: field offices here. You know, Like there's there's just I
Speaker 15: think also just a disconnect there because of like the
Speaker 15: way the news reporting works is like, well, we're reporting
Speaker 15: on what the public officials are saying. Governor Pritsker did
Speaker 15: say pretty clearly actually like well, DHS is coming, you know,
Speaker 15: ICE is going to do these operations and we don't
Speaker 15: improve it, but we can't stop it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think before we get more into that,
Speaker 4: I want to pivot to talk about what the presence
Speaker 4: of ICE has been in Chicago already, and I want
Speaker 4: to kind of like roll the clock back to right before,
Speaker 4: kind of like I think, like the literally the weekend
Speaker 4: before the big confrontations in LA started, there was a
Speaker 4: pretty big raid at a check in and a bunch
Speaker 4: of stuff happened with that. I was wondering if you
Speaker 4: could talk about that a bit.
Speaker 15: Yeah, it was around the time when things popped off,
Speaker 15: and earlier I don't remembers precisely, but around then.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think it was like right before.
Speaker 15: Yeah. You know, they have these stuck in sights where
Speaker 15: people have to go and some of them are on
Speaker 15: like electronic monitoring and some no, and they check in
Speaker 15: with ICE, and so it was like an ambush, right
Speaker 15: Like people showed up and then they were like, oh,
Speaker 15: we're actually like kidnapping you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was very very ugly of course, you know,
Speaker 1: like agents ripping people away from their families and friends.
Speaker 16: And we had some local electeds like trying to get
Speaker 16: in the way of the van, and Chicago police of
Speaker 16: course showed up, and then there was this whole back
Speaker 16: and forth over whether the police really assisted.
Speaker 1: ICE or not. And I mean they were there and
Speaker 1: they did crib control.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they definitely did.
Speaker 15: Like you know, it's it's very interesting what's happening with
Speaker 15: CPD and ICE right now, because like, at the end
Speaker 15: of the day, cops are lazy above all else too write,
Speaker 15: you know, and so there's this kind of tension of like, well,
Speaker 15: we support what ICE is doing, and ideologically, like of
Speaker 15: course the pops are aligned with ICE, but they also
Speaker 15: like don't want to get out of their cars, you know.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of any any excuse they have not
Speaker 1: to do something they will take. So it's not that
Speaker 1: we've seen them assisting with like.
Speaker 15: Enforcement removal operations, but of course if there's a protest,
Speaker 15: they're going to show up and police that.
Speaker 1: And then also, like data sharing is a huge issue there.
Speaker 15: I mean, like with fusion centers and with like block
Speaker 15: license plate data visas and everything, there's just the information
Speaker 15: is so porous between local cops and the Feds that
Speaker 15: it's just kind of absurd on a space to even
Speaker 15: think that they're like not sharing information.
Speaker 1: Some of these cops are on task forces and they
Speaker 1: have like group.
Speaker 15: Chats together, you know, with DA and FBI agents, right,
Speaker 15: so it's all it's all connected, it's all porous. They're
Speaker 15: already working with the Feds, you know, it's just they
Speaker 15: can't visibly be seen assisting with immigration enforcing.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that was a really traumtizing day for community.
Speaker 15: Like an organizer here who was well known was taken
Speaker 15: and she was a grandmother, so she had a family
Speaker 15: here too, you know, so it was brutal. And then
Speaker 15: around that time that that was happening, also, I started
Speaker 15: escalating rusts at the immigration court downtown, which went on
Speaker 15: for a while and ultimately was stopped by protesters continuing
Speaker 15: to show up and just have a presence there. You know,
Speaker 15: these guys are terrified of being docks terrified. I mean,
Speaker 15: they just they really don't want to be filmed. And
Speaker 15: it's been a very different situation here in our courthouse
Speaker 15: versus New York's because I've seen so much photography out
Speaker 15: of the New York Immigration Court. For whatever reason, they
Speaker 15: allowed photos there, but they don't inside of ours. But
Speaker 15: you know, protesters started showing up there. I mean, we
Speaker 15: had been their documentary what was going on. Slowly people
Speaker 15: started trickling in, showing up and protesting, and eventually people
Speaker 15: started then ta making it to like actually blocking the
Speaker 15: driveway that they were using a private parking garage belonging
Speaker 15: to the building, and so they were.
Speaker 1: Like going underground and then like waiting and then using
Speaker 1: the great elevator. It was like the whole operation.
Speaker 15: Yeah, but ultimately the building put their click on and
Speaker 15: ban them. You know, they got a lot of complaints
Speaker 15: from tenants. People didn't like that the protests were going
Speaker 15: on shore, but people also were like in the building,
Speaker 15: people were ICE using our crad Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, we used the power of the use of
Speaker 4: against them, deploy every weapon exactly.
Speaker 1: Exactly exactly it was.
Speaker 15: It's kind of like a you know, diversity of tactics
Speaker 15: thing there where it's like the people who owned property
Speaker 15: in this building aren't super aligned with the like people
Speaker 15: trying to block ICE spans. But but at that moment
Speaker 15: they joined yea, and you know, so so that that
Speaker 15: was happening, and like while all of this is happening,
Speaker 15: of course ICE is still doing more dispersed traffic stops
Speaker 15: arresting people at their homes.
Speaker 1: It's been happening. It's happening all.
Speaker 15: Over out in Elgin, out in Waukegan, which is up
Speaker 15: by the Base of operations, you know, where they're setting
Speaker 15: up all of these operations for what's coming this week.
Speaker 1: Waukegan, North Chicago and that area of Lake County.
Speaker 15: There are a ton of imfants and they're not surrounded
Speaker 15: by necessarily like super progressive, super friendly people.
Speaker 1: Some can be.
Speaker 15: I mean the politics in the North Shore, it's very
Speaker 15: like purple like it's weird. It's like you can have
Speaker 15: super progressive people, but then also like it can be
Speaker 15: out in the Boonie somewhere you'll see like Trump science.
Speaker 15: So it's it's not as sympathetic as being in Enoughtown
Speaker 15: Chicago for sure. Yeah, And so there's a lot of
Speaker 15: concern from people up around the base about what's going
Speaker 15: to happen in those communities because there's much less coverage,
Speaker 15: too much less eyes on them.
Speaker 4: Yep. I want to I want to talk more about
Speaker 4: sort of what enforcement has been looking like in outlying
Speaker 4: areas and what it's going to look like. The first
Speaker 4: we need to go to ads and we are back,
Speaker 4: So I want to I kind of I want to
Speaker 4: follow the train that you've been on about the stuff
Speaker 4: in the center of the city versus the stuff in
Speaker 4: the outlying areas and across Chicagoland in general, which is
Speaker 4: also just massive, unbelievably large geographic area. It has unbelievably
Speaker 4: large numbers of people, and also the concentrations get way
Speaker 4: smaller really quickly. And I think, I don't know, it
Speaker 4: seems like the resistance inside of the city proper had
Speaker 4: been pretty effective in a lot of ways, just in
Speaker 4: the sense of like shutting down the courthouse raids for
Speaker 4: the most part. But what have things looked like up
Speaker 4: near like Wakegan and like, yeah, in the sort of
Speaker 4: outlying areas in terms of like resistance and in terms
Speaker 4: of cooperation.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I mean I've seen videos out of those places,
Speaker 15: you know, really harrowing scenes like traffic stops where they're
Speaker 15: separating people from their families, showing up at people's homes.
Speaker 1: Usually what's happening is we're not hearing you got it
Speaker 1: until after the facts.
Speaker 15: And in the city there are like good response groups
Speaker 15: going by different neighborhoods. But I think in general, sometimes
Speaker 15: it just doesn't feel very rapid because it's people are
Speaker 15: are vetting, they're verifying.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of false alarms, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot going on. So that's what I've.
Speaker 15: Seen that's happened out in the burbs. You know, it's
Speaker 15: kind of, like I said, kind of a black hole
Speaker 15: for news out there too. It's not always easy to
Speaker 15: get information, you know. We also had a case of
Speaker 15: like an ICE agent.
Speaker 1: Detaining a woman with her child at like a well,
Speaker 1: it wasn't.
Speaker 15: An agent, it was a contractor, contractor working for ICE
Speaker 15: detaining an arrest tee out at an hotel.
Speaker 1: By Ohare Airport.
Speaker 15: That's something that that people are concerned about in a
Speaker 15: more general sense too, right now, because we actually literally
Speaker 15: just this morning, we're looking at a letter from the
Speaker 15: mayor of broad View, Illinois, which is where our processing
Speaker 15: center is, outlining how they're going to be operational seven
Speaker 15: days a week for the next forty five days, which
Speaker 15: to me implies like thousands of arrests potentially happening, and
Speaker 15: that facility is not set up.
Speaker 1: It's not a long term detention center. Yeah, overnight detention
Speaker 1: is banned.
Speaker 15: In Illinois, so people have been kept there longer than
Speaker 15: they technically are allowed.
Speaker 1: To even with like without some huge surge happening.
Speaker 15: So it kind of thinking about what's potentially coming and
Speaker 15: then using that center, it kind of follows that, Yeah,
Speaker 15: there could be more contractors keeping people in hotels like
Speaker 15: dispersed around, like there's just not enough space at that
Speaker 15: facility to keep up with that. And so because there
Speaker 15: are also backups in the like ice logistics chain, because
Speaker 15: like people have to be they can't be kept here
Speaker 15: long term, so they have to go to Gary Airport
Speaker 15: to fly out somewhere, or detention center in Indiana or
Speaker 15: Wisconsin or Michigan.
Speaker 4: So I guess there's a couple of things kinds of
Speaker 4: sort of resistant stuff I want to ask about. I remember,
Speaker 4: like got back in like twenty eighteen. I remember there
Speaker 4: was a bunch of efforts to like block deportation flights
Speaker 4: out of the airport. Has up been still going no,
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 15: There was a protest at Gary Airport very early on
Speaker 15: in the year. Actually it was like right after Trump
Speaker 15: was inaugurated. I think I know a photographer who was
Speaker 15: arrested some protesters.
Speaker 1: It was really random.
Speaker 15: It was like towards the end of the protest, Gary
Speaker 15: police just decided to like grab and arrest a few people,
Speaker 15: and since then, I have not heard of any more
Speaker 15: protests or a time or attempts at intervention at Gary Airport.
Speaker 15: I mean, obviously it's not Chicago, it's Gary, so you know,
Speaker 15: there's a smaller community there people would have to travel to.
Speaker 15: I don't know if deportation, if any deportation flights are
Speaker 15: leaving from O'Hare.
Speaker 1: I don't believe so, but don't quote me on that.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's still like I feel like O'Hare is
Speaker 4: kind of a soft target for that in the sense of, like,
Speaker 4: I mean, it's annoying to get there, but like there
Speaker 4: is just a rail line that runs it directly into O'Hare,
Speaker 4: and you can flood it with a bunch of people
Speaker 4: pretty easily, like what happened to like the beginning of
Speaker 4: Trump one.
Speaker 1: Right, we haven't seen anything like that yet.
Speaker 17: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But it's also like I wonder if they're still
Speaker 4: thinking about that in terms of like the flight logistics,
Speaker 4: in terms of like wearing stuff primarily through Gary.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, yeah, that might be why.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The other thing I'm wondering about is like, Okay, so
Speaker 4: I guess it looks like right now with the information
Speaker 4: we have that there planning to run their operations out
Speaker 4: of the military base. But everything that I've seen has
Speaker 4: been talking about like the National Guard operating out of
Speaker 4: that base, but do we know where the FEDS are
Speaker 4: Its supposed to be operating out of.
Speaker 15: The Feds are operating out of the base. The National
Speaker 15: Guard will will potentially operate out of the base if
Speaker 15: they come.
Speaker 1: But we don't have a lot of details on like
Speaker 1: a National Guard deployment.
Speaker 15: And the other thing to keep in mind is like
Speaker 15: the National Guard are all younger people. Typically is a
Speaker 15: lot of young people, and they have like families and things.
Speaker 15: So that kind of information like a deployment right of
Speaker 15: like platoon or several platoons whatever the worst of National Guard.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna stay secret for very long, right like,
Speaker 1: because we would know.
Speaker 15: So I have not seen anything yet as a twelve
Speaker 15: thirty noon on Wednesday indicating that the National Guard specifically
Speaker 15: has rolled into that base.
Speaker 1: That could change at any point, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: know what's.
Speaker 15: Happened in the last hour to check the news, But
Speaker 15: what we do know is that the DHS Operation Customs
Speaker 15: and Border protection the FEDS that are coming.
Speaker 1: They are setting up a base.
Speaker 15: Of operations at that naval station, and the Navy said
Speaker 15: that they denied them lodging and that they have to
Speaker 15: stay elsewhere like hotel. Wise, I don't know how that
Speaker 15: will work because that's like several hundred people. I guess
Speaker 15: they're gonna have to disperse a lot around the suburbs
Speaker 15: in order to do that. And I don't know the
Speaker 15: reason for the denial for the lodging. It could simply
Speaker 15: be they literally don't have space. You know, people are
Speaker 15: actually like training there, like military and Navy and stuff.
Speaker 15: It's not like it's just empty, so they might not
Speaker 15: have had capacity for that. But supposedly they're gonna be
Speaker 15: doing office space there. I think the letter also mentioned
Speaker 15: they can do laundry, their emails like stuff like that.
Speaker 15: But yeah, I mean that's that's like something that of
Speaker 15: course people have eyes on, because if you can locate
Speaker 15: a hotel, that's how where people are saying, you know,
Speaker 15: that's like a pressure point.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I think I think that's an interesting point that
Speaker 4: comes back to something you were saying earlier, which is
Speaker 4: like it really looks like this is a lot of
Speaker 4: this is going to be targeted on the places close
Speaker 4: to the base, just because like if they're really like
Speaker 4: two hours out from the city, it's like pretty difficult
Speaker 4: to do raids further right into the city, just on
Speaker 4: the logistical level, and just like I don't know, just
Speaker 4: just in terms of like dealing with Chicago traffic.
Speaker 12: It's like.
Speaker 1: I don't want to exclude it as a possibility.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's definitely possible, but it's.
Speaker 15: Like I just think when we look at inner city
Speaker 15: or urban policing, there are certain tactics that like local
Speaker 15: police use that we see the FEDS also using, right,
Speaker 15: like these unmarked cars, more covert operations, trying to move
Speaker 15: really quickly and get in and out because they know
Speaker 15: so that it's such a denser area and if rapid
Speaker 15: response shows up, people start showing up, then can get
Speaker 15: unsafe you know, for them as cops.
Speaker 1: And so we just we do know that those tactics work.
Speaker 1: We know that this is how they've been doing operations
Speaker 1: so far.
Speaker 15: With more DHS agents and more customs and border production backup,
Speaker 15: could they try for something bigger in the city, I
Speaker 15: mean yes, Like we don't want to rule that out,
Speaker 15: trust me, Like it definitely could happen. But I think
Speaker 15: given the numbers that they are trying to reach at
Speaker 15: this point, what we have to prepare for is being.
Speaker 18: Really dispersed and just kind of everywhere, you know, like
Speaker 18: and like that traffic like you mentioned, you know, it's yeah,
Speaker 18: it's like obviously if they're driving like three in the
Speaker 18: morning or something, they're not going to face as much
Speaker 18: traffic up.
Speaker 1: Nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 15: But like, yeah, there's also the like covertness of it too,
Speaker 15: Like you can't just drive a bunch of military vehicles
Speaker 15: down the highway for an hour and a half and
Speaker 15: not be sighted or spotted right like, so then you'd
Speaker 15: be giving like you're giving people more opportunities potentially intervene.
Speaker 15: So I don't know, I mean, I think like we'll
Speaker 15: see them in the city for sure. We'll see them
Speaker 15: in the burbs for sure. Whether or not we're going
Speaker 15: to see like teams of like border patrol, you know,
Speaker 15: in like full riot kit marching through like Pilsen that,
Speaker 15: I don't know. I think it's something that probably they
Speaker 15: want to do. I'm sure those dudes would be amped
Speaker 15: as fuck to like, you know, be in downtown Chicago,
Speaker 15: like harassing people, you know, beating up people, but from
Speaker 15: an operational security standpoint, like for them.
Speaker 1: It is like so dangerous.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I just I don't know. So so, speaking
Speaker 4: speaking of dangers, we're going to go to these ads
Speaker 4: and then we're going to come back and talk about
Speaker 4: Oh god, is rumors the right word to describe something
Speaker 4: that the governor is saying about the target getting to
Speaker 4: the Mexican Independence State Parade?
Speaker 1: But maybe not rumor? Maybe maybe just statement.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I will, we'll figure we'll figure out the verbiage
Speaker 4: when we returned. Yeah, we are back. So one of
Speaker 4: the things that Governor Pritzker has said is that Stephen Miller,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna I'm gonna read this quote. This is an NBC.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna read this quote, just that Pritzker said at
Speaker 4: a conference, we have reason to believe that Stephen Miller
Speaker 4: chose the month of September to come to Chicago because
Speaker 4: celebrations around Mexican Independence Day that happened here every year.
Speaker 4: And yeah, you know. He further said, it breaks my
Speaker 4: heart to report that we have been told ICE will
Speaker 4: try and disrupt community picnics and peaceful parades. He said,
Speaker 4: let's be clear, the terror and cruelty is the point,
Speaker 4: not the safety of anyone living here. So yeah, I
Speaker 4: guess I want to start by talking a little bit
Speaker 4: about these parades themselves, because they are a absolutely massive
Speaker 4: event in Chicago. There's like a big one in Pilsen,
Speaker 4: but also like I'm just all over the city. There's
Speaker 4: just a bunch of people driving around with Mexican flags rocks.
Speaker 4: There's people celebrating. It's really cool.
Speaker 15: Yeah, it turns into more of like a like a
Speaker 15: widespread like car caravan thing. Ye, there'll be a lot
Speaker 15: of yeah, you know, and like here's the thing. I know,
Speaker 15: traffic jams are annoying to like anybody, but when it's
Speaker 15: in celebration of something.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, its pick the train that day, it's great.
Speaker 15: I mean, I understand the arguments for like, well, ambulances
Speaker 15: need to get through things like that, but I think
Speaker 15: there's a lot of power in people taking the streets
Speaker 15: and like, you know, the cars are just the easiest.
Speaker 1: Way to get massive amounts of people around.
Speaker 15: And then there's a lot of like there's a street
Speaker 15: culture here around like street takeovers too, and and this
Speaker 15: happens outside of like Mexican Independence Day, where like some
Speaker 15: some people will take over an intersection and do donuts
Speaker 15: and and set off.
Speaker 1: Fireworks and like yeah, yell at the cops and whatever.
Speaker 4: Right, it's fun, it's cool. It's it's good.
Speaker 1: That happens in cities.
Speaker 15: And I think when it comes to living in a city,
Speaker 15: it's like, yeah, you you're trading certain things for other things,
Speaker 15: and and and stuff like that happens.
Speaker 1: And so with Mexican Independence Day, it's like we we
Speaker 1: we can have like.
Speaker 15: Sustained nights where that is just going on and on,
Speaker 15: like the loop will be jammed up, like everyone will
Speaker 15: be jammed up.
Speaker 1: And of course there's like the public safety people who
Speaker 1: like whine about it.
Speaker 4: And and you know, yeah, this is also like a
Speaker 4: big like like white people of the city get really
Speaker 4: fucking pissed about this like every year. First like oh no, no, no, no,
Speaker 4: look at the Mexicans, Like it's just like and like
Speaker 4: like the most racist shit you've ever heard in your
Speaker 4: entire life. And there's the people sort of below that
Speaker 4: who will couch it and like, oh uh public safety, right,
Speaker 4: and I'm going to be really fucking mean to these people,
Speaker 4: which is like if you're if you're pissed off at
Speaker 4: a bunch of people like basically doing their own parade.
Speaker 4: You are not fit to live in a city, Like
Speaker 4: get the fuck out of here, Like, fuck off, go
Speaker 4: back to the suburbs, you dip shits. You're fucking losers.
Speaker 4: You're not fit for urban life, like elight dick, the
Speaker 4: shit rules.
Speaker 19: Yeah, it's Yeah, the reaction to it is like so
Speaker 19: so over the top, And it's the kind of thing
Speaker 19: where like when when Trump is like talking about the
Speaker 19: National Guard and responding to crime in Chicago or disorder,
Speaker 19: you know, that's the kind of thing I could see
Speaker 19: him like ordering them into.
Speaker 15: Respond to, you know, especially if there's like there's like
Speaker 15: a shooting or something that happens towards the tail end
Speaker 15: of one of these celebrations, which again, you know, it's
Speaker 15: like that that's a risk.
Speaker 1: Anytime large months and people gather anywhere.
Speaker 15: Interpersonal violence freaking out right, like again, is a thing
Speaker 15: that happens, and the.
Speaker 1: Direct cause of it is never like people partying. The
Speaker 1: direct cause of.
Speaker 15: It is usually like somebody's got a beat with somebody,
Speaker 15: or somebody drank too much and lost in pulse control,
Speaker 15: you know, whatever the reason might be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I think that is, Like I think that's
Speaker 1: what Pritzker is alluding to.
Speaker 15: It's kind of like the car caravan and stuff when
Speaker 15: he says, like Steven Miller is bringing ice to interrupt
Speaker 15: family picnics, Like I don't I don't know where he's
Speaker 15: getting that information, Like I don't know that that is
Speaker 15: like specifically going to happen. You know, I think given
Speaker 15: what we've seen out in LA, unless I've missed anything,
Speaker 15: it doesn't seem like they've attacked any like festivals or
Speaker 15: like like public gatherings like that, like in a direct way.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 15: I think like logistically it's just maybe not as easy
Speaker 15: to necessarily like grab people with questionable immigration status at
Speaker 15: that kind of stuff. And if you go to like
Speaker 15: a place where you know, like the car wash wherever
Speaker 15: they have intel that it's like undocumented people are working here.
Speaker 1: It makes more sense.
Speaker 15: So I don't want to rule out that something like
Speaker 15: that could happen, but I think I think there's a
Speaker 15: whether it happens or not. It's like part of it
Speaker 15: is also the intention is to have this chilling effect,
Speaker 15: like to make people afraid to celebrate or come out,
Speaker 15: to cause that terror, you know, It's kind of like
Speaker 15: we had a situation a couple months ago where some
Speaker 15: FEDS who claimed they were with like a financial crimes
Speaker 15: task force. It wasn't even Ice, but I don't know
Speaker 15: what they were doing, and they were meeting up at
Speaker 15: a boathouse parking lot in Humboldt Park like a week
Speaker 15: before all these cultural celebrations in the area, and people
Speaker 15: got really freaked out because it.
Speaker 1: Was just like, what the fuck are you guys doing?
Speaker 15: And they like went into the museum and were like
Speaker 15: questioning workers and asking you the bathroom and I mean,
Speaker 15: just being assholes, it sounds like. And then they laughed,
Speaker 15: and then there were like all these questions swirling like
Speaker 15: well what was this, Like were they seeking intel before
Speaker 15: these fests? And you know, people made sure to like
Speaker 15: we wanted we wanted to still have these fasts, but
Speaker 15: we want people to show up in even bigger numbers,
Speaker 15: like powering numbers.
Speaker 1: Everybody show up, and that's what happens.
Speaker 15: And you know, they didn't attack the fest, And you know,
Speaker 15: that was a really weird situation because it wasn't Ice
Speaker 15: and we didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 4: But I think.
Speaker 15: Ultimately, like yeah, giving in and like staying home and
Speaker 15: refusing to show up obviously just plays right into their hands.
Speaker 4: And I wanted to kind of pivot a little bit
Speaker 4: from this into the way that Pritzker has sort of
Speaker 4: been framing this, where he's talking about how if anyone
Speaker 4: throws a sandwich at the guard, this is going to
Speaker 4: be used as like the excuse to do a crackdown,
Speaker 4: and like I think, yeah, they're gonna they're gonna do
Speaker 4: the crackdown anyways, Like I don't think that's like.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the central kind of point of conflict.
Speaker 15: I think in like a lot of movement space to
Speaker 15: discussions right now too, especially among kind of.
Speaker 1: Like older liberals and like the younger generation.
Speaker 15: And part of it is is like, yeah, there's this
Speaker 15: insistence that, well, he's looking for a reason to send
Speaker 15: in the National Guards, so don't give him more.
Speaker 1: But it's like border patrol is the reason. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: like they're going to show up, and I don't know
Speaker 1: how it's.
Speaker 15: Going to go down, if it's going to be walking again,
Speaker 15: if it's going to be in Chicago, whatever is going
Speaker 15: to happen.
Speaker 1: But if somebody throws a water bottle at those DHS agents,
Speaker 1: that's enough of a reason, you know for them to
Speaker 1: say there's there's unrest, like and who triggered that, the cops?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like it's CPD, Like I have I have
Speaker 4: watched CPD do this shape to people where nothing happened, right,
Speaker 4: Like it was just people standing there and.
Speaker 15: You know, right, our Attorney General said the same thing
Speaker 15: in a statement last night, like make sure you protest
Speaker 15: peacefully within the law. The Cook County Board President Tony
Speaker 15: Pukwinkle said the.
Speaker 4: Same big money still around you.
Speaker 15: No, I mean how all the like you know Illinois
Speaker 15: Democratic god big dog people, like they're all, yeah, all
Speaker 15: the machine mother fucking the same thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, like honestly, Mayrev.
Speaker 15: Johnson kind of was a little more fiery in his rhetoric,
Speaker 15: but he's still only going to go so far.
Speaker 1: You know, like they're politician. Yeah, they can't.
Speaker 15: They're not going to come out and say like, oh,
Speaker 15: that's physically crisis ice. I think we always yeah, but
Speaker 15: it is like it is a very dangerous way to
Speaker 15: frame resistance, like to say, yeah, well, don't provoke him.
Speaker 15: You know, it's kind of like living with an abuser
Speaker 15: or a bully and then blaming somebody for fighting back.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think there's also there's really it creates
Speaker 4: really dangerous and hammocks on the ground. I mean, like
Speaker 4: I still remember like one of the things I'm sort
Speaker 4: of haunted by from this Durm twenty twenty was in
Speaker 4: Atlanta or someone like the person who burned the Wendy's down. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like a whole there was like a whole thing where
Speaker 4: people were like, this is a federal infiltrator, and they
Speaker 4: turned them over to the FEDS, which doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 4: by the way, Like if your logic is this person
Speaker 4: is a FED and we turn them over to the Feds, nonsensical,
Speaker 4: But like this this is the thing you see a
Speaker 4: lot in these kinds of protests, Like people will just
Speaker 4: like hand people over to the Feds. And then it
Speaker 4: turned out that that she was the girlfriend of a
Speaker 4: fucking guy the police had shot. Yeah, and that shit
Speaker 4: just like happens. Yeah, And I don't know, like that's
Speaker 4: like that's like the consequence of this this kind of
Speaker 4: stuff is like these people, the peace of police people
Speaker 4: feel like they are in power to hand people over
Speaker 4: to the actual police. And I just want to sort
Speaker 4: of like take a second to talk to like directly
Speaker 4: to people who are listening to this who agree with
Speaker 4: this stuff, which is okay if you are facing a
Speaker 4: fascist regime, right, regardless of whether you agree with what
Speaker 4: someone is doing or not, do you think it's a
Speaker 4: good idea to hand them over to the to the
Speaker 4: legal executors of that regime, Like would you hand someone
Speaker 4: over to the SS because they resisted the SS and
Speaker 4: know what you didn't approve of?
Speaker 14: No?
Speaker 4: What are we doing here?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 4: I don't know? And I think this ties back to
Speaker 4: something from what we're talking about the beginning of the
Speaker 4: week of like the extent to which people have become
Speaker 4: convinced that like the ICE agents are all like proud
Speaker 4: boys or something because they can't imagine the institutions that
Speaker 4: they had supported for so long, right, suddenly being fascist
Speaker 4: And it's like no, actually, like these organizations have always
Speaker 4: bent this way, and they're they're organs of the state,
Speaker 4: which means they're going to be subverted to enforcing the
Speaker 4: regime of fascism, right.
Speaker 15: And you know, I think I think a lot of
Speaker 15: people who kind of and I'm not talking about the politicians,
Speaker 15: but like regular people who kind of share in this
Speaker 15: sentiment of like they're scared.
Speaker 1: They don't want to provoke or like make things worse.
Speaker 15: You know, I think their their hearts are in the
Speaker 15: right place, Like they're coming from a place of like, well,
Speaker 15: we just don't want people to get arrested.
Speaker 1: We want people to be safe. Like I think, by
Speaker 1: and large, that's the motivation.
Speaker 15: But yeah, it's just kind of like a very shallow
Speaker 15: understanding of how resistance actually looks and works.
Speaker 1: In real life. There's also just like a worry for
Speaker 1: a lot.
Speaker 15: Of people that like, well, that kind of stuff might
Speaker 15: endanger others want to show up with kids or families,
Speaker 15: and I think there just needs to be like a
Speaker 15: separation in space.
Speaker 1: Obviously, not every protest or every resistance is for everyone,
Speaker 1: but at the end of the day, like some of these.
Speaker 15: Discussions kind of just fall to the wayside once things
Speaker 15: get to a certain point, because like, yeah, if border
Speaker 15: patrol rolls through your.
Speaker 1: Town, you're you're not gonna be able to control how
Speaker 1: everyone responds to that.
Speaker 15: Yeah, like that that's a point at which you can
Speaker 15: see a more spontaneous response. And and so like this
Speaker 15: sort of like top down movement organizer level like control
Speaker 15: of like the protests and how it's going to go
Speaker 15: kind of falls apart anyway, because by that point, like
Speaker 15: no one's in control of any.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a it's a it's a bunch of it's
Speaker 4: a bunch of people running out of our houses being
Speaker 4: like fuck, fuck the fucking like the immigration authorities right right,
Speaker 4: you know, And I don't know. That's the thing that
Speaker 4: gives me hope in the situation, is that, like I'm
Speaker 4: going to retreat to the metaphysical level for a second,
Speaker 4: where like one of the things I don't know almost
Speaker 4: spiritually that I believe in is cities. That cities are
Speaker 4: more than sort of some of their parts. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: obviously like they're they're broken down into all of these things,
Speaker 4: and you know, like like they're like there's something there
Speaker 4: right in Chicago. Is something that I believe in, and
Speaker 4: I believe in the people there, and I believe in
Speaker 4: their capacity to resist this and to drive these people
Speaker 4: out because they can be driven out. And you know,
Speaker 4: with with enough organization and enough spontaneity and enough cost
Speaker 4: and on their logistical operations, they can be ran out
Speaker 4: of a city. Yeah, I think the power of a city.
Speaker 4: It's not something that's clear until it's manifested and you
Speaker 4: never know when it's going to manifest, but when it does.
Speaker 4: If you look at the entire federal deployment, even if
Speaker 4: they bringing the National Guard, like we're talking about less
Speaker 4: than three thousand people, there are millions of people in
Speaker 4: the city. This is a fucking flea in an ocean,
Speaker 4: and the flea is relying on the waves, staying calm
Speaker 4: so it doesn't get drowned. And this is the thing
Speaker 4: that can happen. These people can be ran out of cities,
Speaker 4: they can be chased out, their operations can be made impossible,
Speaker 4: they can be rendered impotent, and they can be made
Speaker 4: to retreat. And you know, that's just something I'll say,
Speaker 4: is just like the experience of watching these people break
Speaker 4: and run, because they will break and run. They can
Speaker 4: and they will, and you can do it is the
Speaker 4: most amazing feeling in the entire world, because you know,
Speaker 4: however powerful they look, they are beatable and they know it.
Speaker 4: And that's why they operate with this sort of you know,
Speaker 4: these like fear shock tactics, because they know that if
Speaker 4: you're not afraid of them, they can be defeated.
Speaker 1: There have always been more of us than there are
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 15: Yeah, like that's always been true, and they do rule
Speaker 15: by fear, and Chicago will fight back. And there's so
Speaker 15: much knowledge and history here of our urban black and
Speaker 15: brown communities resisting the police.
Speaker 1: Even to this day.
Speaker 15: I see on TikTok every night videos of crowds hassling
Speaker 15: the cops or pushing.
Speaker 1: Them out of their hood. I mean, like, this is
Speaker 1: it's amazing happening right now. There are communities who do
Speaker 1: this work right now. The schallenge, of course, remains building
Speaker 1: solidarity across the borders of the neighborhoods.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I don't think this is an insurmountable thing.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 4: I have never been in a place where where people
Speaker 4: fly the flag of their fucking city that you like,
Speaker 4: it's not real.
Speaker 1: We're basically a small nation state at this point. So
Speaker 1: this is going to get really weird really fast.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's like, I don't know, like the US's
Speaker 4: record of military occupations is not good and we can
Speaker 4: hand them another l.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, Raven, is there anything else that you want to say?
Speaker 4: And also where can people find your work?
Speaker 1: Nothing else to say?
Speaker 15: Our work is who've mostly even posting on Blue Sky honestly.
Speaker 1: Which I always like kind of cringe, but we just
Speaker 1: do a lot of live reporting. It's the only functional
Speaker 1: way to do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's really good. By the way, this is like,
Speaker 4: it's it's a kind of coverage that I think is
Speaker 4: becoming more and more important as things go on, and
Speaker 4: it's really the only way right now to get good
Speaker 4: on the ground coverage of people of how these actions
Speaker 4: are actually unfolding.
Speaker 5: And it rocks.
Speaker 4: I've I mean, we've been there together at events at
Speaker 4: protests before, and like I could, I could, I could
Speaker 4: personally vouch for the coverage being good, and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: And it's also like, I mean, we have a lot
Speaker 4: of people on this show, but like it really matters
Speaker 4: when the people who are covering a social movement are
Speaker 4: people who actually are in them and understand how they
Speaker 4: work and like have been in these places, and so yeah,
Speaker 4: I think it's I think it's really really important work.
Speaker 4: And I think people should go support y'all because it's
Speaker 4: it's great and it's going to be more and more
Speaker 4: necessary as the occupation unfolds.
Speaker 15: As the occupation unfolds, what a bleak, what a what
Speaker 15: a terrible world.
Speaker 1: But another world is possible. That's the most important.
Speaker 4: Yeah, remember, Yeah, and the only way to do it
Speaker 4: is by build it, and you can do that right now.
Speaker 15: I also do think a lot about how like the
Speaker 15: first well not the first police uprising, but like kind
Speaker 15: of the the opening of.
Speaker 1: This like era of what's going on was the George.
Speaker 20: Floyd Uprising, which didn't happen in Great Lakes in the Midwest,
Speaker 20: in the Mideamo West. Yeah, I think there is there's
Speaker 20: something about this leads in specifically We're generally not like
Speaker 20: the first to pop off, just because don't have as
Speaker 20: many people as in New York or Los Angeles.
Speaker 15: But there's such a rich history of like resistance to
Speaker 15: the police here. I mean you get Ferguson and Missouri,
Speaker 15: which is like kind of Midwest, kind of South, but
Speaker 15: like these communities have such a strong history of noringm
Speaker 15: what it's like to live as like some downtowns too,
Speaker 15: and some of them still are with these like majority
Speaker 15: white police departments.
Speaker 1: So it's it'll be something to watch how things unfold
Speaker 1: here specifically.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the uprising in Chicago was like one of
Speaker 4: the motion times anywhere in the country, Like they ran
Speaker 4: the cops out of the center of the city, like
Speaker 4: they they lost control for days of like the giant
Speaker 4: shopping district in the middle of the city. That is
Speaker 4: like the thing that like the Chicago business glitzy self
Speaker 4: image is like based off of they just lost it
Speaker 4: fully because people ran them out. And you know we
Speaker 4: did to them once, we could do it again.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Well, and I think public opinion against ICE is much
Speaker 15: worse than like CPD. I mean, like not that public
Speaker 15: opinion against CPD is great, but obviously things with ICE
Speaker 15: are reaching like a fever pitch right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, people hate them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know you're not. I don't know if
Speaker 1: there's ever been an occupying army that people didn't hate.
Speaker 15: But like, it's just not going to go well for
Speaker 15: you when the locals hate you, Like, it's just not
Speaker 15: it's not going.
Speaker 11: To go well.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And I think you know, the history, as said
Speaker 4: this before, the history of American occupations is littered with defeats.
Speaker 4: Fucking hand them another one.
Speaker 3: Oh mom, no inappropriate joke Robert to start this episode. Wow,
Speaker 3: I feel so clean, you know.
Speaker 2: I guess you could say I have some executive dysfunction today.
Speaker 4: This is it could happen here.
Speaker 3: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 3: White House, the crumbling world what it means for you.
Speaker 3: I'm Garrison Davis today. I'm joined by Mia Wong, Robert Evans,
Speaker 3: and possibly Sophie Lichterman, our producer. This episode, we are
Speaker 3: covering the week of August twenty eighth to September third.
Speaker 3: Happy Fake Labor Day to everybody, and some breaking news
Speaker 3: from this past weekend. Trump maybe died.
Speaker 21: Yeah, let's check out on that.
Speaker 2: Garrison, as our official, is the president a lie of correspondent?
Speaker 4: Let me do a click at Google search here. Oh no, no,
Speaker 4: he's still He's still around.
Speaker 21: Did everyone get checked again?
Speaker 4: He's still okay.
Speaker 22: The conspiracy theories this week were really fun.
Speaker 23: And then there was that thing that video that went
Speaker 23: viral of like them like opening a White House window
Speaker 23: and throwing out a couple black trash bags.
Speaker 21: That really was really funny.
Speaker 4: That was really funny.
Speaker 23: I was like, there's way worse things going on in
Speaker 23: the world. I don't have time to care about this,
Speaker 23: But we never got information about that. That was just
Speaker 23: some weird shit.
Speaker 4: Not yet, not yet, Sophie sensational.
Speaker 21: I don't think we know what it was.
Speaker 2: I mean, it could just be that's them fucking cleaning shit,
Speaker 2: but I wouldn't be surprised if they were destroying evidence.
Speaker 23: I wasn't aware those windows could open. I thought they
Speaker 23: were like bulletproof and and like weren't.
Speaker 4: Supposed to open.
Speaker 2: I'm sure they both bulletproof, but have to be possible
Speaker 2: to open so that the Secret Service has more paths
Speaker 2: of egress in the event that some crazy disaster of
Speaker 2: a fall the White House. You need to watch the
Speaker 2: documentary White House Down, Sophie. This spells all of that out.
Speaker 3: So Trump went a few days without a major public appearance.
Speaker 21: The man is just trying to take some time off.
Speaker 3: Though he wasn't seen golfing between Saturday and Monday. But
Speaker 3: there's nothing on Trump's public schedule for three days during
Speaker 3: Labor Day weekend, where he essentially took a brief golfing holiday,
Speaker 3: and this fueled speculation that he was in a rapid
Speaker 3: health decline, spawning a whole bunch of gnsper theories about
Speaker 3: him being in the hospital, Vance imminently taking over, and
Speaker 3: some comments from JD. Vance during a USA Today interview
Speaker 3: released last Thursday fueled some of this speculation. Over the weekend,
Speaker 3: Vance said, quote, I feel very confident the President of
Speaker 3: the United States is in good shape, is going to
Speaker 3: serve out the remainder of his term and do great
Speaker 3: things for the American people. And if God forbid there's
Speaker 3: a terrible tragedy, I can't think of better on the
Speaker 3: job training than what I've gotten over the last two
Speaker 3: hundred days unquote.
Speaker 4: It sounds like he's ready to take the reins right now.
Speaker 21: Sure, man, Yeah, you're trained up now.
Speaker 3: Over the weekend, people spread AI altered images of Trump's
Speaker 3: face looking more swollen and sickly than it actually was,
Speaker 3: and rumors circulated that roads to Walter Reed Medical Center
Speaker 3: were closed yeah, when in fact there were no irregular closures,
Speaker 3: and screenshots of maps supposedly showing these quote unquote closures
Speaker 3: were actually just showing old security gates because yeah, you
Speaker 3: can't just like walk or drive up to the front
Speaker 3: door of Walter Reed Medical Center. Yeah, it's in a
Speaker 3: military base.
Speaker 2: This is the ocent of idiots, right, which is people
Speaker 2: seeing something that is described as being one thing in
Speaker 2: this like little clip that they get of it in
Speaker 2: social media, and they don't actually do any further check
Speaker 2: up It's the same thing with like the pent Gone
Speaker 2: pizza totally orders that people are like, oh when when
Speaker 2: pizza orders peeked the Pentagon where about the US is
Speaker 2: about to go to war, and it's like no, sometimes
Speaker 2: people just order pizza near the Pentagon because the Pentagon
Speaker 2: is surrounded by a city, right, there's like there's people.
Speaker 3: The Pentagon pizza tracker was part of these weekend conspiracy
Speaker 3: theories that yes, you were like trying to decide how
Speaker 3: to handle Trump's declining health, and.
Speaker 2: Yes, people just like pizza guys, Like it's one of
Speaker 2: those things. I'm certainly not saying there's no way you
Speaker 2: will wake up tomorrow to hear that Trump has died,
Speaker 2: because you know what, He's seventy nine. It wouldn't be
Speaker 2: weird if his health took a sudden turn in the
Speaker 2: next day. Just statistically, it wouldn't be weird because he's
Speaker 2: seventy nine. But like the people pointing outs the simile
Speaker 2: they were doing with Biden pointing out like oh, like
Speaker 2: the marks on his hand, and it's like, yeah, that
Speaker 2: isn't it for both of them. This is evidence that
Speaker 2: they are older than you should be to be president.
Speaker 2: But like my grandpa had shit like that, Because my
Speaker 2: grandpa lived with us for the last like ten years
Speaker 2: of his life. His hands looked a lot like that
Speaker 2: for like a decade. Like, so people live for a
Speaker 2: long time. After it becomes clear they're very sick and old.
Speaker 2: It's not a sign that they're about.
Speaker 21: To kick off this weekend.
Speaker 3: That guy in Congress who looks like a turtle has
Speaker 3: had weird bruises on his body for as long as
Speaker 3: I can remember, Toddel, Yeah, but no, like accounts were
Speaker 3: basically theorizing that like Putin poisoned Trump during their last meeting,
Speaker 3: and this is why he's in a rapid health decline.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, Why.
Speaker 21: Why would he need to do that? Why would that
Speaker 21: benefit him?
Speaker 4: So baffling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when people noticed looking at the White House schedule,
Speaker 3: which they'd realized just existed a few days ago. But
Speaker 3: when looking on the schedule, they saw that quote unquote,
Speaker 3: the President was to give an announcement on Tuesday afternoon.
Speaker 3: Because of this, rumor spread that it would be Trump
Speaker 3: resigning for health reasons, or Vance would come out and
Speaker 3: announce Trump died and he was the president now, like
Speaker 3: some like really bad.
Speaker 4: Aaron Sorkin movie.
Speaker 21: That's how it works.
Speaker 4: Also, I just I just want to also put this
Speaker 4: out there. Yeah, that White House leaks like a fucking sieve.
Speaker 4: There is no way you could cover up the president
Speaker 4: dying without it being out immediately, Like come on, no.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, like you, they couldn't keep it hidden when
Speaker 2: he got sick. You think they're gonna keep the fact
Speaker 2: that they're gonna weaken it Bernie's head ridiculous.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 3: When this press conference got delayed an hour on Tuesday,
Speaker 3: this too was used as the evidence of Trump's declining health.
Speaker 3: But sure enough, right before three pm, Trump came out
Speaker 3: with a huge gaggle of people, which is probably why
Speaker 3: it was delayed, because he had like twenty guys with
Speaker 3: him who, like multiple people spoke to announce that they
Speaker 3: were moving Space Command. And Trump seemed normal. He seemed
Speaker 3: like normal Trump, like he is an old guy. But no,
Speaker 3: this was just normal Trump.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 21: Does he seem older than he did in twenty sixteen?
Speaker 4: For sure, Man, it's like more wrinkled, but like, no, he's.
Speaker 23: Older exactly like he did before these conspiracy theories starts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean he looks old, Like he looks older
Speaker 2: than he did ten years ago. Yeah, I'm just saying, oh.
Speaker 4: She's so much less coherent than then. But like, yeah,
Speaker 4: he's not like, yeah, dying.
Speaker 2: I don't have any particular reason to expect he's about
Speaker 2: to drop dead, like as opposed to like three months
Speaker 2: ago or six months ago, you know, yeah, Like does
Speaker 2: it appear as if time is continuing to march on
Speaker 2: his face?
Speaker 3: Yes, of course, you know exactly. During said press conference,
Speaker 3: Trump himself was asked about his alleged imminent demise and responded,
Speaker 3: like this a.
Speaker 4: Really different but about a big viral social media trend
Speaker 4: over the weekend.
Speaker 5: How did you find out over the weekend that you
Speaker 5: were dead?
Speaker 4: You see that people.
Speaker 5: Didn't see it for a couple of days.
Speaker 2: One point three million user engagements as of Saturday morning
Speaker 2: about your demise?
Speaker 10: Really, you know, I have heard it's sort of crazy.
Speaker 10: But last week I did numerous news conferences, all successful,
Speaker 10: they went very well, like this is going very well,
Speaker 10: and then I didn't do any for two days, and
Speaker 10: they said there must be something wrong with him. Biden
Speaker 10: wouldn't do him for months, you wouldn't see him, and
Speaker 10: nobody ever said there was ever anything wrong with him.
Speaker 15: And we know he wasn't in the.
Speaker 5: Greatest of shape.
Speaker 4: No, I heard that. I get reports, now you knew.
Speaker 10: I did an interview that lasted for about an hour
Speaker 10: and a half with somebody and everybody. So that was
Speaker 10: on one of your competitors.
Speaker 4: That's a remarkably coherent Trump by Trump's standards.
Speaker 3: Like no, and he's talking about how he was sending
Speaker 3: out very pointiant truths.
Speaker 4: Over the weekend on truth So okay, that's for current.
Speaker 17: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he just took a nice little golfing golfing holiday
Speaker 3: and like it is, Drue. He is the oldest elected
Speaker 3: president and the White House recently announced he was diagnosed
Speaker 3: with chronic venus and sufficiency a few months ago to
Speaker 3: explain his ankle swelling and the bruises on his right
Speaker 3: hand have become more noticeable, which the White House is
Speaker 3: attributed to frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin.
Speaker 4: That is really funny.
Speaker 21: Yeah, he shook too many hands.
Speaker 4: He just can't stop shaking hands.
Speaker 1: That's actually hilarious.
Speaker 3: But the aspirin thing is is real and people of
Speaker 3: his age, frequent aspirin use can lead to hand bruising. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but I just finished up my blue and on research,
Speaker 3: and then this whole weekend as I was like literally
Speaker 3: finishing those episodes, this this whole, this whole giant wave
Speaker 3: of these like Trump health conspiracies just just completely took over,
Speaker 3: and I felt like I was like losing it. Like
Speaker 3: everyone around me, everyone around me was indulging this, and
Speaker 3: like usually from this place of like half.
Speaker 4: Joking but not really joking.
Speaker 3: Like when yeah, when that line gets blurry between are
Speaker 3: you indulging in this like ironically because it's fun, or
Speaker 3: does it is it actually kind of altering your brain?
Speaker 4: Like is it actually slowly making you convinced of this stuff?
Speaker 2: In like a small way, this gets to what is
Speaker 2: at the root of all conspiracy culture, regardless of like
Speaker 2: the political ideology, which is the need, the emotional need
Speaker 2: to believe that you are the possessor of secret knowledge. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: like that that is so much a part of this
Speaker 2: that like no, no, no, I am privy to secrets
Speaker 2: about the world that the average person is not, and
Speaker 2: the degree to which that's like comforting and also emotionally
Speaker 2: necessary for quite a few people. And that's part of
Speaker 2: the problem with humoring this is that the instant you
Speaker 2: let it into your life, it starts taking more and
Speaker 2: more power because it becomes part of your ego, It
Speaker 2: becomes part of your coping mechanisms. It becomes like yeah, something,
Speaker 2: but you become dependent upon it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think it's also word noting. Like, you know,
Speaker 4: people are confused all the time about how does the
Speaker 4: right come to believe all of these things? How does
Speaker 4: the right sort of you know, like, how how does
Speaker 4: like vaccine conspiracism spread? How does like QAnon spread? It's
Speaker 4: like it spreads like this, Uh right, this is what
Speaker 4: it looks like. And you're also not immune to it
Speaker 4: just because your politics are better. It's still really really
Speaker 4: easy to fall down those pathways because they're addictive and fun,
Speaker 4: and that's spreading so much unhinged shit.
Speaker 21: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The root of a lot of madness comes with thinking
Speaker 2: that you're better than other people and you're not.
Speaker 3: Cognitively, I can play around with this stuff without it
Speaker 3: affecting me the way to fix other people mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or just because this is because the politics of
Speaker 2: this counter factual belief system are better than their counterfactual
Speaker 2: belief system. This is not a counterfactual belief system totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like when we see this with the way
Speaker 3: some people talk about like Russia, and like, I've faced
Speaker 3: a little teeny bit of pushback on some of the
Speaker 3: ways that I was framing like Russia Gate in the
Speaker 3: Blue and on episodes, and like, there is a difference
Speaker 3: between a social media disinformation campaign to influence elections, which
Speaker 3: Russia does, Like we.
Speaker 2: Know this absolutely, that's not in question whatsoever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a difference between that and like straightforwardly stealing, yeah,
Speaker 3: an election in such a manner that the election results
Speaker 3: are themselves illegitimate, right.
Speaker 2: And this is the big question always if you're saying, like, no,
Speaker 2: they literally did steal this election in the twenty sixteen
Speaker 2: election the like, but they just like fucked up for
Speaker 2: twenty twenty. They just like couldn't get their shit together
Speaker 2: and time for that one, Like what or is it
Speaker 2: that they have influence campaigns like everyone else and they're influence,
Speaker 2: Like that doesn't mean saying that they're not problems, but
Speaker 2: it doesn't it doesn't mean pretending that's the only.
Speaker 21: Reason shit broke their way, you know.
Speaker 2: In part A big reason why things worked the way
Speaker 2: that they have and have worked the way that they
Speaker 2: have is that the disinfo campaigns that Russia, that the
Speaker 2: Russian government was engaged and were complementary to campaigns of
Speaker 2: disinformation that have existed for decades in the US.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, look at the way they were funding right
Speaker 3: wing content creators through Tenet Media.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: And like, you know, same thing with Trump, Like publicly
Speaker 3: encouraging Russia is not the same thing as actual collusion.
Speaker 3: And there is no clear indication that the twenty sixteen
Speaker 3: Russian influenced operations or even like their acts sing of
Speaker 3: voter registration actually made a meaningful impact on the results
Speaker 3: of the election. And this is the same thing with
Speaker 3: you know, like the rights legal methods of voter disenfranchisement,
Speaker 3: voter suppression or changing mail in voting rules. Right, there's
Speaker 3: that versus talking about like hacking voting machines. Right, the
Speaker 3: former doesn't mean that the election was quote unquote stolen.
Speaker 3: Now just because they do voter suppression, right, the results
Speaker 3: still need to be accepted. Like, that's not illegal election interference.
Speaker 3: It's not good, we should we should oppose it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but it's not a legal election interference. And like this
Speaker 3: is kind of just like a coping method that passes
Speaker 3: the buck to avoid accepting that Republicans were better at
Speaker 3: winning these elections, and it may be emotionally easier to
Speaker 3: like blame Russia than to actually like reflect on ourselves.
Speaker 3: And I've seen the same thing when people talking about
Speaker 3: how for the twenty twenty four election on election day
Speaker 3: there were bomb threats to swing state polling places that
Speaker 3: were traced back to Russia, and like, while this is
Speaker 3: nominally true, this did not influence the result of that election.
Speaker 3: And then this can very quickly devolve into like just
Speaker 3: like basically like just asking questions right, like you can't
Speaker 3: prove a negative, and this just turns into like a
Speaker 3: very cartoon version of understanding reality, like with like people
Speaker 3: in ski masks fixing elections or changing votes, or like
Speaker 3: hackers compromising election like voting machines, instead of just accepting
Speaker 3: that a lot of people voted for Trump and he
Speaker 3: won well.
Speaker 2: And it's the part of the other problem is that
Speaker 2: I think when you lose yourself in patterns of thinking
Speaker 2: like this, it also leads to a failure to accurately
Speaker 2: gauge the strengths and the capacities of the enemy, Like
Speaker 2: if you're unwilling to see where they've made smart decisions
Speaker 2: and where they've made good investments that have paid off
Speaker 2: for them. Then you are unable to follow and properly
Speaker 2: counter those kinds of things. And I think part of
Speaker 2: why this is so difficult is that so many people,
Speaker 2: so many liberals and people on the left.
Speaker 21: I don't think.
Speaker 2: I think think both sides have differences in how they
Speaker 2: do it, but I don't think there's a massive difference
Speaker 2: in the degree to which either side does it. But
Speaker 2: you find on both ends of the political spectrum this
Speaker 2: emotional need to be like, these people are idiots, And
Speaker 2: the corelating factor with that is that like, and I'm
Speaker 2: not right, Like I'm smarter because I'm not one of
Speaker 2: these people, because I'm not one of these like fools
Speaker 2: who buys into this right wing propaganda. And you're if
Speaker 2: you're more obsessed with that than you are with seeing
Speaker 2: where your enemy has made smart decisions, then you're going
Speaker 2: to continue getting dunked on by them endlessly. You get blindside.
Speaker 2: And that's that's where we are right now. People are
Speaker 2: getting dunked on repeatedly because they refuse to see the
Speaker 2: things that Trump does that are based in actual intelligence,
Speaker 2: and the things that the far right has done, the
Speaker 2: things the Republican Party is of the architects of this
Speaker 2: movement have done that have been successful. You know who
Speaker 2: else is successful? Genius the products that support this podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's right, and we are bad.
Speaker 3: So. On Tuesday, the mayor of DC ordered that the
Speaker 3: city will continue cooperating with federal law enforcement past the
Speaker 3: expiration date of Trump's Crime Emergency Declaration, which is set
Speaker 3: for September tenth. She has established the quote Safe and
Speaker 3: Beautiful Emergency Operations Center. She's for DC to indefinitely coordinate
Speaker 3: with Trump's Safe and Beautiful Task Force. This is like
Speaker 3: a caving and like an acquiescence to prevent some kind
Speaker 3: of larger legal fight over Trump's ability to exert power
Speaker 3: over DC. It's giving him a little bit of what
Speaker 3: he wants while trying to maintain a degree of sovereignty,
Speaker 3: but in doing so you kind of just play into
Speaker 3: what he actually wants.
Speaker 15: In the end.
Speaker 3: This Operations Center will work on quote centralized communications, formulate
Speaker 3: post emergency planning and operations, and ensure coordination with federal
Speaker 3: law enforcement to the maximum extent allowable by law within
Speaker 3: the district. Later in her order, she quote unquote requests
Speaker 3: that federal partners adhere to effective community policing practices to
Speaker 3: maintain community confidence in law enforcements, such as by not
Speaker 3: wearing masks, clearly identifying their agency, and providing identification during
Speaker 3: arrests and encounters with the public.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 3: The Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center will continue to
Speaker 3: prioritize DC National Guard for typical mission focused activities unquote.
Speaker 3: So they are requesting that federal partners not wear masks.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of the strongest amount of pushback the
Speaker 3: mayor is allowing in regards to Trump's federal control of
Speaker 3: over law enforcement in DC.
Speaker 21: Great, that'll solve it.
Speaker 4: In a wild band. I said that like, one of
Speaker 4: the most important sources of support that the Trump administration
Speaker 4: has is a bunch of the democratic mayors and governors,
Speaker 4: and oh boy, is this one of them.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Uh. However, it's worth noting that this has not been
Speaker 4: the response of all of the democratic governors. And I
Speaker 4: think we're going to turn here towards the impending occupation
Speaker 4: of Chicago. So Trump has said that he is going
Speaker 4: to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, ostensibly also because
Speaker 4: of crime. As of two thirty two Pacific time on Wednesday,
Speaker 4: the third, we don't have a timeline for the National
Speaker 4: Guard deployment that could change. The situation is evolving rapidly.
Speaker 4: We will get you more on a second. We also
Speaker 4: have conflicting reports where Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has
Speaker 4: said that the Texas National Guard is being staged to
Speaker 4: sort of participate in the sort of occupation of Chicago.
Speaker 4: It has denied this. We sort of don't know what
Speaker 4: exactly is going on with that, but it is worth
Speaker 4: noting that both Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson
Speaker 4: have been very very clear that they do not want
Speaker 4: a federal deployment in Chicago. They have said go home.
Speaker 4: There isn't really because this is a federal deployment, There
Speaker 4: isn't really much they can do about it outside of
Speaker 4: legal stuff. And the Trump administration has been a lot
Speaker 4: more careful about this, and they were in la in
Speaker 4: terms of how they're doing the deployments legally. So we'll
Speaker 4: see what happens with the National Guard deployments. However, and
Speaker 4: this is something that I think is getting very very
Speaker 4: little coverage, which is that the actual threat model on
Speaker 4: the ground in Chicago and the day this is going up.
Speaker 4: We will have run in an interview the day before
Speaker 4: with Raven who's a journalist from the Chicago based outlet
Speaker 4: Unraveled about what the respect bonds in Chicago has been
Speaker 4: to all of this, and how people are repairing in
Speaker 4: what the threat model is. The actual thing people are
Speaker 4: worried about in Chicago is not the National Guard so much.
Speaker 4: It is the deployment of federal agents from Homeland Security,
Speaker 4: including ICE in the border patrol. Very very specifically. Their
Speaker 4: is significant concern about border patrol because while there has
Speaker 4: been ICE operation in the city and it's obviously very bad,
Speaker 4: as we sort of talk about, there really hasn't been
Speaker 4: any significant border patrol deployments and that seems like it's
Speaker 4: about to start as an indication of how fast the
Speaker 4: situation is moving. So that interview was recorded Wednesday morning,
Speaker 4: September third, Yeah, September third. In the time between that
Speaker 4: recording and now, which was maybe three hours, we got
Speaker 4: more information about the federal deployment. So the Sun Times
Speaker 4: is reporting, based on reports from government officials, that two
Speaker 4: hundred and thirty agents, including border patrol, are being sent
Speaker 4: from LA to Chicago. Thirty agents are already here. They've
Speaker 4: been doing training in anti riot stuff with flash bangs.
Speaker 4: They've also apparently moved one hundred and forty unmarked vans
Speaker 4: to this naval base not really in Chicago. We'll get
Speaker 4: to that in a second, but they've moved one hundred
Speaker 4: and forty un marked vans to do these kind of raids.
Speaker 4: This very much suggests that they're going to do the
Speaker 4: kind of smashing grab raids we've been seeing in LA.
Speaker 4: That's the thing people are very worried about. And we've
Speaker 4: seen you know, tiktoks from the senior leadership with the
Speaker 4: Border Patrol talking about how their talks.
Speaker 21: I know it's it's bleak.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, literally, it's like it's it's tick talks of
Speaker 4: him going like we're trading our palm trees for skyscrapers. Jeez,
Speaker 4: it's really bad. It seems like they're going to be
Speaker 4: deploying the kind of smashing grab raids they did in LA.
Speaker 4: But comment there's one final thing I want to get to.
Speaker 4: This naval base is not really in Chicago. It is
Speaker 4: really far north of Evanstone, which is like a thing
Speaker 4: that's like not Chicago's like this naval base that they're
Speaker 4: deploying from is closer to Kenosha than it is like Noosha, Wisconsin,
Speaker 4: than it is to like even the north side of Chicago.
Speaker 4: It's like really really far north again, like even getting
Speaker 4: to I mean neighborhoods that are pretty far north, it's
Speaker 4: like an hour out right. It is mult a multiple
Speaker 4: hour drive into the center of the city, so it's
Speaker 4: going to be kind of difficult for them to deploy
Speaker 4: in the middle of the city. This is something I
Speaker 4: talked about with Raven. It looks like they're trying to
Speaker 4: hit the more outlining areas more with raids because those
Speaker 4: areas are less well defended and there's not as much
Speaker 4: sort of rapid reaction stuff there. That's sort of what
Speaker 4: this looks like. People are preparing because I guess there's
Speaker 4: one more important thing, which at the naval base is
Speaker 4: where they're running their operations out of. But the naval
Speaker 4: base has declined the request to house them, so they're
Speaker 4: probably gonna be in hell seop We're going to target those,
Speaker 4: but yeah, that's that's where things are at as of Wednesday.
Speaker 4: They're staging in this weird naval base that is really
Speaker 4: not close to the city.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the real focus on this anti crime
Speaker 3: crackdown is also a way to like trojan horse slightly
Speaker 3: obscured ICE operations. And when Nacheler talking about like National
Speaker 3: Guard deployments to cities nationwide, the actual main mode that
Speaker 3: National Guard will be operating in is logistical and like
Speaker 3: like PaperWorks support for ICE operations. Yep, at least for
Speaker 3: these like broader nationwide deployments. With these specific deployment in
Speaker 3: DC and in Chicago, there's there's more preparation for like
Speaker 3: carrying out ordinary law enforcement actions. But those actions also
Speaker 3: exist in coordination with immigration crackdowns, and like that's a
Speaker 3: lot of what these like more militarized occupations are going
Speaker 3: to be focused on. Yeah, and it's worth noting, like
Speaker 3: just logistically, like they're not going to be sending the
Speaker 3: Guard into the parts of Chicago where they're like aret
Speaker 3: is crime sometimes, although again it's worth noting crime rates
Speaker 3: that waged fuck down. Yeah, But also like every story
Speaker 3: about this is like, oh, there were shootings over the weekend,
Speaker 3: and it's like, yeah, it's not good, but like the
Speaker 3: National Guard is not going to be deployed to stop shootings.
Speaker 3: They literally can't get there. Again, It's like no, three
Speaker 3: hours out.
Speaker 2: No, they can't get to the north side of Chicago.
Speaker 2: And as as we all know from the song Bad
Speaker 2: Bad Lee broy Brown, the south side of Chicago.
Speaker 21: Is the baddest part of town.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: I'm just gonna ignore that.
Speaker 21: Uh huh, yeah, you should just ignore that.
Speaker 4: There are places in Norset that they could deploy. But
Speaker 4: if you're trying to get to the actual south side,
Speaker 4: it is at least a three hour drive. And that's
Speaker 4: like assuming that, like the traffic isn't bad, Like it's
Speaker 4: at least three hours. It's possibly larger than that. I
Speaker 4: I didn't even bother checking it because I looked at
Speaker 4: where this was and I was like, this is basically
Speaker 4: in Wisconsin, what are we doing here? So like this
Speaker 4: is you know, this is this is Gys Garson say,
Speaker 4: this is a this is a giant show force thing,
Speaker 4: and it's but it's mostly just this is the sort
Speaker 4: of shock and all thing to frame this as crime
Speaker 4: so that people aren't focusing on and obviously like it's
Speaker 4: bad having just like troops in the streets, but like
Speaker 4: the ice enforcement and the border patrol deployment is what
Speaker 4: the actual threat is here?
Speaker 3: And yeah, and like, Yeah, Depentagon and the Trump badmen
Speaker 3: are planning a lot of different scenarios that they would
Speaker 3: like to enact. But Trump's actual comments on like a larger,
Speaker 3: like military style deployment to Chicago had been a little
Speaker 3: bit flip floppy. I think they're still trying to reach
Speaker 3: some kind of deal to like work with the local
Speaker 3: government and state governments in a way that is less
Speaker 3: bombastic than like a like a completely like adversarial deployment
Speaker 3: would be.
Speaker 17: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Even that that press conference where the shambling corpse of
Speaker 3: Trump made an appearance, his comments about the possibility of
Speaker 3: the plot of to Chicago is seemed still pretty explorer
Speaker 3: to There's still there's still like conversations being had about
Speaker 3: how to actually do this. They are not as as
Speaker 3: brazen as what they were in LA, and they don't
Speaker 3: have as much justification to do what they did in
Speaker 3: DC to a city like Chicago. So they're still trying
Speaker 3: to work out some kind of deal with like the
Speaker 3: local governments.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's really unclear to me that they're going
Speaker 4: to be able to reach a deal with Brendon Johnson
Speaker 4: and with Pritzker, who's leading it.
Speaker 3: It seems that Brandon Johnson's less willing to work with
Speaker 3: Trump on this than the mayor of d C, so
Speaker 3: props to him for that, I guess.
Speaker 21: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's just also a thing where Brandon Johnson
Speaker 4: is like very deeply unpopular in Chicago. However, comma actual
Speaker 4: federal deployment there is so unpopular that you have you
Speaker 4: have the fact that The Sun Times is pointing out
Speaker 4: in their reporting of this that crime reach are down,
Speaker 4: which they have never done, like ever, That's not a
Speaker 4: thing they ever talk about. It's so unpopular that there
Speaker 4: is really really significant pressure on both Pritzker and Johnson
Speaker 4: not do this, and you know, maybe they cave. I
Speaker 4: have I have a kind of low opinion of them
Speaker 4: from like my like time in the city doing politics there.
Speaker 4: But I don't think they're going to cave on this, No,
Speaker 4: And I think what that means is that it's mostly
Speaker 4: going to be the homeland security like ice border patrol deployments.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because Chicago does fall into our very loose definition
Speaker 3: of like a border.
Speaker 21: Town, h yes, which most towns are.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 21: Speaking of JB.
Speaker 2: Pritzker, I mean he has a lot of corporate interests.
Speaker 2: He may have stock in one of the companies advertising
Speaker 2: on our show. They have no way of knowing.
Speaker 21: We'll back.
Speaker 4: I just got a text from JB.
Speaker 3: Pritzker was recruiting for the private People's Militia to defend
Speaker 3: the free municipality of Chicago.
Speaker 2: So he's recruiting horse archer for thees.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've got to be able to loose twelve arrows
Speaker 2: a minute from the back of a war pony in
Speaker 2: order to in order to make the make the cut.
Speaker 4: Protesters did shoot arrows at the cops at Hong Kong,
Speaker 4: so it's not it's not without precedent.
Speaker 21: Yes they did. Yes, they did at the university. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and you know, if if Florida National Guard deploys
Speaker 3: to Illinois, they may be able to use biological warfare
Speaker 3: because the Florida Surgeon General has just vowed to end
Speaker 3: all of the state's vaccine mandates, equitting them with slavery
Speaker 3: amazing stuff, not just the COVID mandates, all vaccine mandates
Speaker 3: across this state. After he announced this, he got like
Speaker 3: over thirty seconds of applause, like NonStop. I will play
Speaker 3: a little bit of the end of this announcement.
Speaker 21: M hmm.
Speaker 12: Every last one of them is wrong and drips with
Speaker 12: disdain and and slavery. Okay, who am I as a
Speaker 12: government or anyone else? Or who am I is a
Speaker 12: man standing here now to tell you what you should
Speaker 12: put in your body? Who am I to tell you
Speaker 12: what your child should put in your body?
Speaker 4: I don't have that right. Your body, your.
Speaker 5: Body is a gift from God.
Speaker 4: You really wanted to say, your body, your choice, what
Speaker 4: you put into your body is because of your relationship.
Speaker 12: With your body and your God.
Speaker 4: I don't have that right. Oh really, oh really? Oh wow,
Speaker 4: unless it's trans healthcare, which case you simply cannot a
Speaker 4: little on the nose there, God, Yeah, it's frankly wild.
Speaker 22: Yeah, motherfucker. It's like it's like that commercial.
Speaker 4: That was I don't know, you might be too young
Speaker 4: for this.
Speaker 22: Guess there's this commercial with this this old man with
Speaker 22: like a dollar on a fishing.
Speaker 4: Rod going almost got it. It's literally that.
Speaker 3: It's literally that no, very close into walking into a
Speaker 3: full body autonomy argument there, even though you know, for
Speaker 3: reproductive healthcare that is unrelated to general public health, which
Speaker 3: is why these mandates exist, which can affect people besides you.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 3: Ron Santas announced and during the same press conference the
Speaker 3: creation of Florida's own Make America Healthy Again Commission, which
Speaker 3: will enforce Robert F. Kennedy's policies to the fullest extent
Speaker 3: in their state.
Speaker 23: Grand he was the least charismatic person we saw speak
Speaker 23: at the RNC last year, just saying yeah, Desantas, Yeah,
Speaker 23: in my opinion.
Speaker 4: No, no, who was worse? Jd Vance? Vance was there
Speaker 4: that that lady did fall asleep.
Speaker 2: Man, and people people were outwardly contemptuous of Vans at
Speaker 2: the RNC, like like Republicans were contemptuous.
Speaker 3: But remember the women for trouble, the woman who fell
Speaker 3: asleep next to us, the advanced speech.
Speaker 22: And then mold he's so dry.
Speaker 21: Yeah, yeah, that was really good.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 22: But I would say DeSantis is a solid number two.
Speaker 22: Maybe abbot three.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Maybe they should have got a vaccine to boost their
Speaker 3: charismas dats that's right.
Speaker 21: That's how that works.
Speaker 4: Yeah, lax Aura, So.
Speaker 3: This is really dangerous. This is going to put a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of kids in harm's way. Yeah, worrying trend.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm going to talk a little bit about Ukraine. Ukraine
Speaker 2: specifically kind of the present situation of the war in Ukraine.
Speaker 2: Just kind of another little update, because people catch little
Speaker 2: bits here and there on the news about what's happening,
Speaker 2: and I think felt like we should probably update people
Speaker 2: as to like what's been going on. Kind of the
Speaker 2: most recent news you've probably heard is that Russian forces
Speaker 2: have been advancing in the Dnetsk Oblast and recently broke
Speaker 2: into an eighth region of Ukraine and started taking villages
Speaker 2: in the d naipro Petrovsk region, which is like a
Speaker 2: major industrial center that's next to the Denet region, where
Speaker 2: Russian soldiers had not been recently. At this point, gains
Speaker 2: in this new region by Russia have been seemed to
Speaker 2: be fairly minimal. They've entered two villages in the eastern
Speaker 2: part of the region. The Russian Defense Ministry claims that
Speaker 2: they captured both of the villages. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry
Speaker 2: has said, well, they're in the area and they're basically
Speaker 2: contesting them, but they haven't entrenched or built fortifications, like
Speaker 2: fighting is ongoing. I'm sure neither country is giving out
Speaker 2: perfectly accurate data, but it seems certainly fair to say
Speaker 2: and verifiable to say that Russia has made an incursion
Speaker 2: into this region, and the fighting is ongoing, however solid
Speaker 2: their gains may or may not be. This is not
Speaker 2: the entirety of what's going on in the conflict overall.
Speaker 2: The basically the whole line of contact with Russia, which
Speaker 2: is about one thousand miles long, is in play at
Speaker 2: the moment, but there have not been like massive gains
Speaker 2: over the last couple of months, And in fact, as
Speaker 2: of August of twenty twenty five, Russian forces occupied about
Speaker 2: nineteen percent of Ukrainian territory. They first hit nineteen percent
Speaker 2: back in October of twenty twenty two, right before Ukrainian
Speaker 2: forces liberated a large chunk of the Kersan Oblast. So
Speaker 2: basically what we're seeing here is Russian forces reached this
Speaker 2: peak like three years ago, a Ukrainian counter offensive pushed
Speaker 2: them back, and over the last three years Russian forces
Speaker 2: have kind of clawed their way back to where they
Speaker 2: were near the end of twenty twenty two. Right if
Speaker 2: you're looking for like what is the overall progress of
Speaker 2: this war over the last three years, So that's obviously
Speaker 2: not going well for Ukraine, but it's also not This
Speaker 2: is not a situation where Ukrainian forces are in any
Speaker 2: kind of collapse like you're looking at. It took Russia
Speaker 2: three years to get back to where they were three
Speaker 2: years ago, So this is I mean, this continues to
Speaker 2: be a grinding and hideous conflict, but it does not
Speaker 2: look like one at which the end is in any
Speaker 2: way in sight. Still, even with the kind of pulling
Speaker 2: of support from the US of Ukraine, with the reduction
Speaker 2: in arm shipments and whatnot from the United States to Ukraine,
Speaker 2: there's not any signs of like a generalized collapse, And
Speaker 2: in fact, over the last couple of years, there's been
Speaker 2: a fairly minimal increase in occupied territory. Right now, the
Speaker 2: pace of Russia's advance in Ukraine, per a recent AP article,
Speaker 2: has slowed by eighteen percent just over the month of August.
Speaker 2: So Russian forces took about four hundred and sixty kilometers
Speaker 2: of territory in August and had been seizing more like
Speaker 2: five six hundred square kilometers of territory a month in
Speaker 2: the couple of months prior to that. So that's kind
Speaker 2: of what you're looking at in terms of the overall
Speaker 2: pace of the conflict. One of the major changes that
Speaker 2: we've seen over the last like really specifically like a
Speaker 2: couple of quarters in the conflict is Ukraine has been
Speaker 2: increasing their capacity to hit Russian strategic targets behind the line,
Speaker 2: like well, behind the line, we're talking fuel and we're
Speaker 2: talking power infrastructure, which has been extremely successful. One of
Speaker 2: the things that's allowed Ukraine to hit these further back
Speaker 2: targets has been they've they've started producing an indigenous style
Speaker 2: of cruise missile code named the Flamingo, which has an
Speaker 2: eleven hundred almost twelve hundred kilogram warhead and a three
Speaker 2: thousand kilometer range, which puts it about one thousand kilometers
Speaker 2: past kind of the maximum range the one way attack
Speaker 2: drones like these one way suicide UAVs, which had been
Speaker 2: Ukraine's furthest in way to strike Russian territory, those only
Speaker 2: reached in about two thousand kilometers, So this puts a
Speaker 2: significant amount of like Russia's infrastructure, within Ukraine's ability to target.
Speaker 2: They're currently producing I think that they're hoping to get
Speaker 2: up to by the end of the year, seven missiles
Speaker 2: a day by October. Now, these new cruise missiles are
Speaker 2: fairly easy to shoot down with like modern air defenses,
Speaker 2: but modern air defenses are in short supply. So it's
Speaker 2: a matter of if you're able to produce an increasing
Speaker 2: number of these and you're fleeing as many of them
Speaker 2: as you can out every day, the Russians will have
Speaker 2: to make choices in terms of what infrastructure are we
Speaker 2: actually going to devote anti missile assets towards, and you
Speaker 2: know that's that's always going to be less than the
Speaker 2: total number of targets there are to hit. And the
Speaker 2: in terms of like evidence that these strikes have been successful,
Speaker 2: there has been increasing limitations on personal fuel use inside
Speaker 2: the Russian Federation and increasing power outages, like all of
Speaker 2: that has gotten more common over even just like the
Speaker 2: last several months in particular, So kind of overall, what
Speaker 2: we see if we're looking at this conflict is a grinding,
Speaker 2: high casualty endeavor where the Russians are slowly pushing back
Speaker 2: Ukrainian lines at the cost of a pretty nightmarish number
Speaker 2: of casualties. Right like, this is still a meat grinder
Speaker 2: conflict and that dimension on the ground for the Russians
Speaker 2: hasn't changed. The main thing that has changed is Ukraine
Speaker 2: has gotten better at striking behind the line, which has
Speaker 2: been met by a significant acceleration in Russian strikes, particularly
Speaker 2: even on like civilian assets in Ukraine, Like there have
Speaker 2: been more missile campaigns, more drone bombardment campaigns on the
Speaker 2: capitol and civilian targets than previously. Like some of the
Speaker 2: largest raids just took place like three or four days ago.
Speaker 2: You know, that's kind of a broad update as to
Speaker 2: what's going on. It continues to be a very ugly war.
Speaker 2: One of the main things that we've learned about what
Speaker 2: modern warfare is going to look like is that it
Speaker 2: is almost impossible for infantry forces without air supremacy to
Speaker 2: break and make large advances and then hold that territory
Speaker 2: if they do not have air supremacy. When you're looking
Speaker 2: at two peer combatants, that's almost impossible to do. And
Speaker 2: so a significant amount of the fighting devolves into who
Speaker 2: can fling drones and missiles behind the lines and hit
Speaker 2: different sort of strategic assets with more efficacy. And that's
Speaker 2: what the war has bogged down to at this stage.
Speaker 3: Speaking of aerial strikes, do we want to at least
Speaker 3: reference the attack on the Venezuelan alleged drugs smuggling vessel
Speaker 3: that was announced during Trump's death press conference.
Speaker 21: Yeah, we blew up a boat.
Speaker 2: We did a boat in international waters that was claimed
Speaker 2: to be at trinda Agua, which is a Venezuelan kind
Speaker 2: of analogous to a cartel organized criminal organization.
Speaker 4: One of the biggest boogeymans of the second Trump term.
Speaker 2: Yes they're primary like Latin American boogeyman, and yeah, we
Speaker 2: blew them up. The administration is claiming it was filled
Speaker 2: with fentanyl or whatever. I don't believe there's as of
Speaker 2: yet any independent evidence that this boat was in any
Speaker 2: way affiliated with Trindagua or carrying drugs or headed to
Speaker 2: the United States. We simply don't know a lot of times,
Speaker 2: like just the way that trinda Agua works, this is
Speaker 2: not like the Sinaloa cartel. This is not a cartel
Speaker 2: that has a massive degree of international capacity that extends
Speaker 2: to the United States. Like there's even significant debate as
Speaker 2: to how much they are extended into other parts of
Speaker 2: Latin America. They've had like really limited success expanding into
Speaker 2: Colombia because different insurgent groups like the FARC and the
Speaker 2: ELN have provided a significant counter veiling force to them.
Speaker 2: And I wanted to note because one of my sources
Speaker 2: is an article on Trindagua by America's Quarterly and in
Speaker 2: talking about their kind of troubled expansion into Colombia, this
Speaker 2: article notes tellingly, even in these spaces, TDA Operative subcontract
Speaker 2: smaller local gangs and authorize them to use their name
Speaker 2: to generate fear in compliance with their victims. And this
Speaker 2: is a really common thing with Trindaugua where when you're seeing,
Speaker 2: oh this is you know, TDA affiliated or whatnot, these
Speaker 2: guys may have no actual communication or very much to
Speaker 2: do at all with the centralized group. They're just kind
Speaker 2: of using the name for branding purposes because it scares
Speaker 2: off other gangs because it allows them to like act
Speaker 2: as if they're connected to this larger organization, but they
Speaker 2: really are not in a very meaningful way. In the
Speaker 2: same way, a lot of you'll see a lot of
Speaker 2: articles that will be talking about like these are trinda
Speaker 2: Agua tattoos, Like none of them are actual like tattoos
Speaker 2: affiliated with the group. This is like largely nonsense because
Speaker 2: Trindagwa doesn't have a tattoo tradition. Per the people who
Speaker 2: are actually experts on Trindogwa. There's a lot of good articles,
Speaker 2: particularly in Insight Crime Jeremy McDermott being one of the
Speaker 2: authors that have tried to bust a lot of these
Speaker 2: myths about TDA. We'll be doing more coverage on them
Speaker 2: in the future, but like, yeah, that's kind of the situation.
Speaker 4: Speaking of international shipments.
Speaker 17: Oh boy, sorry, locking jazz, locking jazz bog Sorry locking jazz.
Speaker 8: B locking jazz bog.
Speaker 21: Ah, that's good stuff.
Speaker 4: Jesus Christ. Okay, So nobody being murdered in cold blood
Speaker 4: to post a video on x dot com. The everything
Speaker 4: app in this one, but probably there's its own fair
Speaker 4: share of harm. Yeah. So, at the end of last week,
Speaker 4: the official end of the deminimus exemption for packages under
Speaker 4: eight hundred dollars finally fully went into effect. We're going
Speaker 4: to talk about this more next week when it's more
Speaker 4: clear what the large scale ramifications of this are. We
Speaker 4: have been talking about this for a very very long time.
Speaker 4: The other really big news this week, and this is
Speaker 4: I think most of what's been going on here has
Speaker 4: been the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal
Speaker 4: Circuit ruled that most of the tariffs that are in
Speaker 4: effect are illegal now. The court also basically put in
Speaker 4: a thing saying that this ruling doesn't go into effect
Speaker 4: until October fourteenth, so that Trump can have time to appeal.
Speaker 4: This is a Supreme Court. He's already appealing to the
Speaker 4: Supreme Court, trying to he wants a quote expedited ruling
Speaker 4: from the Supreme Court. He started ranting about how if
Speaker 4: the tariffs go back into effect, are not allowed to
Speaker 4: be in effect, the US will quote turn into a
Speaker 4: third world country or may turn into a third world country. No, yeah,
Speaker 4: so not a third world country.
Speaker 3: Oh god, the American Century of humiliation continues to chug on. Yeah, so, okay,
Speaker 3: it actually is worth talking about this case a little
Speaker 3: bit because it goes to the core of what's been
Speaker 3: happening with these terrorists, which is that yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 4: So in the Constitution, if you read it, it says
Speaker 4: that the power of taxes and tariffs led with Congress.
Speaker 4: It really explicitly says this. I'm gonna I'm gonna read
Speaker 4: a thing from the ruling is this is a quote
Speaker 4: from the ruling. Quote. The Constitution grants Congress the power
Speaker 4: to quote lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises,
Speaker 4: and to quote regulate commerce with foreign nations. This is
Speaker 4: the constitutioned Article one, Action eight. I'm going to stop
Speaker 4: here to note that everything that's in the Bill of
Speaker 4: Rights was not in the original draft of the Constitution
Speaker 4: that got tacked on later. So like freedom of speech,
Speaker 4: and like freedom of assembly, and like freedom of religion
Speaker 4: were considered less important by the people writing this than
Speaker 4: Congress or the other people who could do taxes. I'm
Speaker 4: going to keep reading from this ruling. Tariffs are a tax,
Speaker 4: and the framers of the Constitution expressly contemplated the exclusive
Speaker 4: granting of taxing power to the legislative branch. When Patrick
Speaker 4: Henry expressed concern that the president quote may easily become
Speaker 4: king debates in several state conventions, Jonathan Elliott eighteen thirty six,
Speaker 4: James Manison replied this would not occur because quote, the
Speaker 4: purse is in the hand of the representatives of the people.
Speaker 3: So I cannot believe that we have a president doing
Speaker 3: a t tax in terrists. I know, I know where's
Speaker 3: Boston when you need it.
Speaker 4: Robert, do the voice.
Speaker 21: No, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not your fucking monk.
Speaker 3: To see this is the only way to have to
Speaker 3: stop Robert from doing the voice is to try to
Speaker 3: get him into place because of oppositional defiance.
Speaker 21: Yeah, that's that's what that's what rules may.
Speaker 4: Okay, speaking of what rules are, so Trump has been
Speaker 4: using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and he like
Speaker 4: declared a state of emergency over like drug trafficking in
Speaker 4: order to do this. This is nonsense, gibberish. And this
Speaker 4: is actually where I think this is a very very
Speaker 4: significant part of this case here, which is like, Okay,
Speaker 4: what power does Trump actually have? Like can he continue
Speaker 4: to just sort of rule the United States? Many people
Speaker 4: are asking me questions And I'm gonna read this this
Speaker 4: this line from CNN, which is quoting the court draft quote. Notably,
Speaker 4: when drafting the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Congress did
Speaker 4: not use the term tariff or any of its synonyms
Speaker 4: like duty or tax. The Court said in its majority ruling,
Speaker 4: the absence of any such teriff language in the Act
Speaker 4: contrasts with statutes where Congress has affirmatively granted such powers
Speaker 4: and including clear limit on that power. So this law
Speaker 4: does not say that he could do this. He has
Speaker 4: simply been doing this the whole time, with using a
Speaker 4: law that it literally explicitly does not say the word
Speaker 4: tariff in it. So the Court is extremely unhappy about this.
Speaker 4: Ladies and gentlemen, we got them, it really is. I
Speaker 4: think this is genuinely just on a basic constitutional level,
Speaker 4: this is one of the most staggering ones of these
Speaker 4: I've ever in terms of just like does the Constitution
Speaker 4: still exist? The answer is eh, Like, this is article
Speaker 4: one of the Constitution. It's article one. This is the
Speaker 4: first shit they wrote. This was like literally the whole
Speaker 4: point of the American Revolution was that the king can't
Speaker 4: levy taxes. It has to be the parliamentary representatives of
Speaker 4: the people. That's like the whole thing. It was that
Speaker 4: the slogan was no tsxactination without representation. Yes, yeah, and
Speaker 4: like and like obviously that's the stated goal of it.
Speaker 4: You could obviously go into your right, there's like a
Speaker 4: million other things. You can go into your territorial expansion,
Speaker 4: you can go into your slavery blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: But like, this is what it was supposed to be about.
Speaker 4: And has just claimed this power from himself, And we're
Speaker 4: going to get a real test in the Supreme Court.
Speaker 4: So the Supreme Court costs back from their recess in
Speaker 4: like a month, So we're gonna probably get a real
Speaker 4: test on how far the Supreme Court is willing to
Speaker 4: let Trump just straight up rule by executive fiat. But
Speaker 4: in the meantime, all these terrors are still in effect.
Speaker 4: And yeah, this has been tariff talk. We have talked
Speaker 4: about the tariffs.
Speaker 21: Excellent.
Speaker 3: Well, I believe that does it for us. Yeah, you're
Speaker 3: at It could happen here, all.
Speaker 2: Right, everybody until next time. You know, Well, just if
Speaker 2: anyone tells you the precedence is dead, assume they're telling
Speaker 2: the truth and go live your life.
Speaker 4: We reported the news.
Speaker 5: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.