Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Speaker 4: Everyone, welcome to the podcast. It's me James today and
Speaker 4: I'm very fortunate to be joined by Francis, whose husband
Speaker 4: Amos is facing a date in immigration court this week.
Speaker 4: We wanted to bring you a first time perspective of
Speaker 4: what it's like going through immigration court right now. So Francis,
Speaker 4: thank you for joining us.
Speaker 5: Thank you, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, of course, we're very glad you're here. So to
Speaker 4: start with, like, would you like to explain your families
Speaker 4: and it's a lengthy topic, family's immigration story.
Speaker 5: Yes, I met my husband Amos in the Hollywood. We
Speaker 5: were both living in Hollywood and we dated a couple
Speaker 5: of years there and then ended up moving to his
Speaker 5: home country of Tunisia because he had a big family
Speaker 5: there and I don't have much family here and we
Speaker 5: wanted to have children. It's much better cost of living there,
Speaker 5: and at the time the government there was doing pretty well.
Speaker 5: There had been an Arab Spring, which my husband was
Speaker 5: very much involved with on this over here in the States,
Speaker 5: like helping with that, and so he's an activist, and
Speaker 5: at the time the government there was pretty good. So
Speaker 5: we lived there for eight years, had our children there,
Speaker 5: and a new presidency came in while we were living there,
Speaker 5: the current president Caius said, and things started to change.
Speaker 5: So my husband was doing a lot of organizing grassroots
Speaker 5: movement through local farmers' unions and monitoring elections, doing pro
Speaker 5: democracy activities for anti corruption and he's really an activist
Speaker 5: for free speech and things like that. So he started
Speaker 5: getting harassed. He was arrested, he was beaten up by
Speaker 5: the police and things like that. So it started getting
Speaker 5: very uncomfortable. Also, I was getting harassed. I would get
Speaker 5: pulled over a lot by the police. They would impound
Speaker 5: our car, they would take us out. Yeah, the police
Speaker 5: there carry big guns, you know, as in most Arab countries,
Speaker 5: and so it was very frightening for me. Yeah, they
Speaker 5: carry big guns. They're either on their backs or even
Speaker 5: in their hands, and they would have me and the
Speaker 5: kids get out of the car, and it was very frightening. So, yeah,
Speaker 5: the children and I, well, we were all planning on
Speaker 5: coming back to the States. I hadn't been home in
Speaker 5: a while, and so the children and I went ahead
Speaker 5: and came, assuming that my husband would be able to
Speaker 5: get at least a visa to you know, see us.
Speaker 5: And while once we were here, he was not able
Speaker 5: to get a visa. He tried and tried and tried,
Speaker 5: and I was begging the embassy to allow him to
Speaker 5: see us here, and they just would not. So we
Speaker 5: were separated for nine months. So him being away from
Speaker 5: our children they were about four and six at the time,
Speaker 5: or maybe five and seven. It was devastating for all
Speaker 5: of us. So he ended up taking a very treacherous
Speaker 5: journey across South America and made his way through many
Speaker 5: countries and presented himself for asylum at the border, because
Speaker 5: again we did not feel safe living in Tunia anymore.
Speaker 5: So he presented himself for asylum at the border and
Speaker 5: they allowed him into this country with a court date.
Speaker 5: And at the time Biden was president, so things are,
Speaker 5: you know, have changed a lot since then. You know,
Speaker 5: the immigration system is broken. Everybody knows that. It takes
Speaker 5: years and years and years, tons and tons of money
Speaker 5: for an immigrant to you know, go through the process.
Speaker 5: You know people who say, oh, just do it the
Speaker 5: right way. It's not that simple. It takes a lot
Speaker 5: of money and a lot of time, and it's very complicated.
Speaker 5: And when you're fleeing a country or a situation where
Speaker 5: you're in danger, there is no other option, you know,
Speaker 5: there's nowhere to go back. So that's what we're kind
Speaker 5: of facing now. So he had a court date. We've
Speaker 5: had five master hearings, and we've gone through a few
Speaker 5: different lawyers because we have found, for one thing, it's
Speaker 5: extremely difficult to find a lawyer these days because they're
Speaker 5: very overbooked. Most of them are not taking new cases.
Speaker 5: People tell us, oh, just get a pro bono lawyer.
Speaker 5: It is almost impossible to get a pro bono lawyer anymore.
Speaker 5: And you know, who has thousands and thousands of extra
Speaker 5: dollars to pay for legal help with the situation. We
Speaker 5: do have a lawyer now, thinks to some fundraising that
Speaker 5: we've done so since he's been here, we've had to
Speaker 5: check in at the ICE office, Like it was on
Speaker 5: sort of a basis of after you have a court
Speaker 5: hearing the next day or within a couple of days,
Speaker 5: you must go check in it ICE. And it's been
Speaker 5: very fine, like the there's a very nice officer there
Speaker 5: who knows us and help tries to help answer our questions.
Speaker 5: So it was pretty calm when Biden was president. And
Speaker 5: then now that Trump's administration has taken over, we knew
Speaker 5: that there would be a lot of changes and we
Speaker 5: were very frightened. So we went for a hearing earlier
Speaker 5: this year. You know, we're just a lot more nervous.
Speaker 5: And the hearing went fine, just kind of as normal.
Speaker 5: We went to the ICE check in. I think our
Speaker 5: guard was kind of down because we thought, since the
Speaker 5: hearing went fine, this will go fine. Yeah, and the
Speaker 5: nice officer told us, you know, well this is going
Speaker 5: to sound a little scary, but we need you to
Speaker 5: go check in at a different place this time. And
Speaker 5: so they sent us to a comp called ICE app.
Speaker 5: They own i think migrant detention centers. So we went
Speaker 5: to this place and he was there the whole day.
Speaker 5: They were interviewing him. They put an app in his phone,
Speaker 5: so that now he has to do these weekly check
Speaker 5: ins where his phone makes this loud alarm sound. He
Speaker 5: must stop everything and take a picture of himself. There's
Speaker 5: a monthly home visit where they come to our house
Speaker 5: and take his picture and ask him questions. There's we
Speaker 5: have to go check in at their office, and also
Speaker 5: he does virtual check in, so it's just a lot
Speaker 5: more and everything was kind of going as planned. We
Speaker 5: are last hearing in July. That was really stressful because
Speaker 5: we didn't have a lawyer leading up to it, and
Speaker 5: at the last second we were able to get a lawyer.
Speaker 5: And the reason it's so important to have a lawyer
Speaker 5: is because if you don't, you must appear in person,
Speaker 5: and that's very stressful and frightening. Again, we have small children.
Speaker 5: We don't even do babysitters, like we're always just together
Speaker 5: that we're a very tight family unit, and so we
Speaker 5: go to these things together. And we really wanted this
Speaker 5: last one in July to be virtual because if it's virtual,
Speaker 5: you know, it just feels a lot safer. We're in
Speaker 5: the comfort of our own home and we've been hearing
Speaker 5: in the news, you know, how they're picking up people
Speaker 5: outside of their court hearings. So we got the attorney,
Speaker 5: we got a virtual hearing. It was a very short hearing.
Speaker 5: It was great because she just gave us the next
Speaker 5: hearing date was September of twenty twenty eight, and the
Speaker 5: judge said, Okay, see you in twenty twenty eight, and
Speaker 5: we breathed a sigh of relief, cross our fingers, did
Speaker 5: our necessary check ins, and we were just you know,
Speaker 5: hoping that everything would be fine. Well just here at
Speaker 5: the end of August beginning of September, we get out
Speaker 5: of the blue a new notice. It was very interesting too,
Speaker 5: because this iceapp company calls us and says, good news,
Speaker 5: We're gonna lessen the amount of check ins you have
Speaker 5: to do. It's going to be a lot less now. So,
Speaker 5: you know, it was interesting because she's like, this is
Speaker 5: great news for you. She like once a month, you'll
Speaker 5: still do the weekly ones, and then it's just going
Speaker 5: to be once a month, okay. But then she says,
Speaker 5: and then we'll see you after your hearing in September,
Speaker 5: meaning this September. And we thought it was a mistake
Speaker 5: because we knew we had one in twenty twenty eight. Yeah,
Speaker 5: like no no, you got a new hearing notice. So
Speaker 5: that's how we found out. They didn't send it to us.
Speaker 5: Even our lawyer didn't know. So we find out that
Speaker 5: we have a new hearing out of the blue. There
Speaker 5: was a mix up about the dates, but anyway, it
Speaker 5: was September eleventh or fifteenth, and then our attorney asked
Speaker 5: for an extension right and the most they could give
Speaker 5: us was nine days. So now our hearing is this
Speaker 5: coming Wednesday, September twenty fourth and on. This has never
Speaker 5: happened before, but when again, when you have an attorney,
Speaker 5: you can appear virtually, and on this hearing notice it
Speaker 5: said that the attorney can appear virtually, but the respondent
Speaker 5: must appear in person, and that is highly unusual. It's
Speaker 5: in bold at the top. So our attorney agrees with
Speaker 5: us that it's pretty clear. The plan is. What they've
Speaker 5: been doing now is when you go to court, they
Speaker 5: drop your case. So now it's dismissed, and therefore you
Speaker 5: are just here without due process, and like now you
Speaker 5: don't have a right to do process. It's done, so
Speaker 5: you're just here illegally, and then they are sometimes waiting
Speaker 5: for you in the hallway or outside the building to
Speaker 5: take you to iced attention. So obviously, since we found
Speaker 5: this out, I mean, we've just been sleepless nights, full
Speaker 5: panic mode of figuring out like what to do, and
Speaker 5: then our attorney doesn't even have answers for us. She
Speaker 5: does not know what to do. She says, this is
Speaker 5: all new to her, it's new to all the lawyers.
Speaker 5: She doesn't even know what to do or who to ask.
Speaker 5: And that's frightening, because that's why we have an attorney,
Speaker 5: you know. It's we're hoping for some support or someone
Speaker 5: who's knowledgeable about the law and what our options, and
Speaker 5: it feels like we don't have any. We feel extremely helpless,
Speaker 5: and I've never thought I would see this in my country,
Speaker 5: my quote unquote free country that I have lived in
Speaker 5: most of my life and grew up in. Also, about
Speaker 5: two weeks ago, they changed the law where now we
Speaker 5: are not entitled to a bond hearing, so if he
Speaker 5: is taken into detention, we can't even get him out,
Speaker 5: because that was the first thing we thought was, well, well,
Speaker 5: let's just try to get some money together and we'll
Speaker 5: bail him out. Yeah, that's not even an option anymore.
Speaker 5: So again more fear. So we're dealing with all of
Speaker 5: this and wondering what to do as far as you know. Again,
Speaker 5: we have small children. They're now seven and nine years old.
Speaker 5: We're extremely happy where we're living. We live in a
Speaker 5: small community that does lean on the conservative side, so
Speaker 5: we do feel a little uncomfortable with some of our
Speaker 5: neighbors and their flags and everything. They're very bold, so,
Speaker 5: you know, and you can't high being brown, so it's awkward.
Speaker 5: And then our children because of the way that we
Speaker 5: left before. When we left Tunisia, it was pretty sudden.
Speaker 5: We kind of took them out of school and just
Speaker 5: came to America and left their dad behind. So they've
Speaker 5: been in therapy ever since. They each have a weekly
Speaker 5: therapist just to help with if they're you know, if
Speaker 5: they're going to have any symptoms of trauma coming up
Speaker 5: for them. And they're doing great. Actually, they're thriving here.
Speaker 5: They are so happy. They are in the best school.
Speaker 5: I actually work at their school, and my husband volunteers
Speaker 5: at the school and he's been their soccer coach for
Speaker 5: both of their teams, which was a lot to take on.
Speaker 5: He also volunteers in our community at a ranch, helping
Speaker 5: with horses and at a facility for senior citizens. And
Speaker 5: he does have a work permit. They granted him a
Speaker 5: work permit, which took a long time to get.
Speaker 4: That's good because I can take a long time.
Speaker 5: It took a long time, over a year, but he
Speaker 5: does have it now. So we got excited because he
Speaker 5: only got the work permit a couple months ago. So
Speaker 5: we're very excited. You know, he can work. And now
Speaker 5: it's just out of the blue, our world has turned
Speaker 5: upside down where there's a strong potential that he will
Speaker 5: be taken into ice custody. And listen, I understand if
Speaker 5: that's how they want to do things now, but if
Speaker 5: it was like a safer situation where maybe they.
Speaker 6: Just I don't know.
Speaker 5: It's just there's so many unknowns about where are they
Speaker 5: taking him. There's our lawyer does not think we will
Speaker 5: be informed about where they take him. That's one thing
Speaker 5: which means we probably won't be able to communicate with him.
Speaker 5: We don't know how long he'll be there. They could
Speaker 5: keep him there the entire three years until twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 5: They might just want to keep him in detention and wait,
Speaker 5: you know, for his next year. It doesn't make any
Speaker 5: sense to me because that costs money, and he's a
Speaker 5: tax payer. Wouldn't it pay more if he's home working.
Speaker 5: By the way, yes, he has no criminal record whatsoever.
Speaker 5: He has not broken any immigration laws at least when
Speaker 5: he came over the border. It was legal to present
Speaker 5: yourself for asylum when you are coming from a country
Speaker 5: like he was where he was, you know, being harassed,
Speaker 5: detained right and his entire family like we were being
Speaker 5: threatened and feeling very unsafe there.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's a textbook asylum place, right.
Speaker 5: Like, Yeah, we have a valid asylum claim. We've submitted
Speaker 5: hundreds of documents of evidence to the court. You know.
Speaker 5: The judge actually complimented us on how well we did
Speaker 5: because at the time we didn't have an attorney. We
Speaker 5: were just trying to do it on our own because
Speaker 5: we couldn't afford an attorney. We were both college graduates.
Speaker 5: So we put together a really organized, you know case.
Speaker 5: And so I have filed to sponsor him as well,
Speaker 5: you know, as my husband. We've been together twelve years,
Speaker 5: married ten two kids, and they don't care about that.
Speaker 5: It does not matter if he has an American family,
Speaker 5: it does not matter. They are taking anybody, and that
Speaker 5: also is very, very frustrating, and that's the reason that
Speaker 5: we should have due process. They should be looking at
Speaker 5: every single case individually and have a judge make a decision.
Speaker 5: That's the whole point of it. Obviously, if we had hindsight,
Speaker 5: if we had known that this could have happened, we
Speaker 5: had no idea that this could have happened in our country,
Speaker 5: we would have started this sponsorship process a long time ago.
Speaker 5: The reason we didn't is because he was married before,
Speaker 5: and he went through this process with USCIS to try
Speaker 5: to get sponsorship with his first wife, and it was
Speaker 5: extremely compli and frustrating and cost a lot of money,
Speaker 5: and he went through a bunch of lawyers and he
Speaker 5: was so traumatized by the experience that literally we had
Speaker 5: big legal files in our house that I had to
Speaker 5: hide because he couldn't even see them or he would
Speaker 5: get triggered. So he didn't want to put me through that.
Speaker 5: And we were living in Tunia anyway, and so we
Speaker 5: just figured we were just kind of kicking the can
Speaker 5: down the road, thinking, oh, we'll deal with it at
Speaker 5: some point. Unfortunately, we waited way too long and you know,
Speaker 5: didn't start dealing with it until he got here, and
Speaker 5: so USCIS, which is where we you know, file for
Speaker 5: this sponsorship.
Speaker 4: Yeah, US Customs Immigration Service people know familiar.
Speaker 5: Yes, thank you. After we filed that, they gave us
Speaker 5: a time period on when we would get the decision.
Speaker 5: It was fifteen months that we would have to wait.
Speaker 5: And we've been checking the site, checking the site, checking
Speaker 5: the site, has been counting down, counting down, and about
Speaker 5: a month ago we were down to a week oh well, okay,
Speaker 5: that we would be getting a decision. And after the
Speaker 5: week passed, it changed the message on the app now
Speaker 5: or the website now says and definitely you'll have to
Speaker 5: wait indefinitely for this decision. So we've been trying to
Speaker 5: ask our lawyer please push for this because if that
Speaker 5: gets you an answer, that would be great. But the
Speaker 5: answer could be no on that as well. They could
Speaker 5: just say no, come on in and they can take
Speaker 5: him straight from there as well. So the whole thing
Speaker 5: is so incredibly stressful and frightening the fact that my government,
Speaker 5: I'm in America, I'm an American citizen with two American kids,
Speaker 5: and my government is threatening to tear our family apart
Speaker 5: and take my husband away the father of my children
Speaker 5: and traumatize my children again to have their dad not
Speaker 5: with us, and Lord knows where they're going to send him.
Speaker 5: It is absolutely infuriating, and it feels like agony too,
Speaker 5: because like every day I wake up and I'm counting
Speaker 5: down the days to this hearing and we have no
Speaker 5: idea what's going to happen. Right, it feels very very
Speaker 5: threatening to our safety and our livelihood, and that it's
Speaker 5: coming from our government does not make me feel like
Speaker 5: this is a great country to live in and I
Speaker 5: do not feel safe living here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for sharing all that. That's a lot, yeah
Speaker 4: to have to put out there, so thank you for
Speaker 4: sharing it. I guess we should just explain for people,
Speaker 4: like there's a lot of stuff that maybe people who
Speaker 4: haven't been through this system might not not grasp within
Speaker 4: that right. So what the government has if I just
Speaker 4: break down, like the dismissal of cases as I understand
Speaker 4: that what the government has been doing has been dismissing
Speaker 4: people's asylum case right which they got under Title eight
Speaker 4: when they entered and added by the administration, and then
Speaker 4: placing them in expedited removal proceedings, Yes, which is a
Speaker 4: mandatory detention as you said, right, it's not a bailout situation.
Speaker 4: And then as you say, forcing them to fight from detention, right,
Speaker 4: which in this case would obviously stop your husband from working,
Speaker 4: stop your husband from paying taxes, and instead make him
Speaker 4: a burden on the American taxpayer while he's detained in
Speaker 4: conditions which can often be very poor. In that situation.
Speaker 4: You're only sort of claim is a credible fear of torture, right,
Speaker 4: which is something that in your case it sounds like
Speaker 4: would be very real. But nonetheless, that is a very
Speaker 4: high bar, and we've seen the United States do all
Speaker 4: kinds of things to get around that. We were put
Speaker 4: on that all the time, so I can understand that
Speaker 4: fear and where it comes from. I think people will
Speaker 4: be shocked, but they perhaps shouldn't be to hear that, Like, yes,
Speaker 4: you can be a US citizen married to a non
Speaker 4: US citizen. This can still happen to you. It can
Speaker 4: happen to anyone who is not a citizen in this
Speaker 4: country right now. I wonder like it must have been
Speaker 4: pretty heartbreaking to see the election, to see the rhetoric,
Speaker 4: like how does that line up with your lives in
Speaker 4: your community? Because I see this often even from really
Speaker 4: conservative people, right, Like I know people who voted for
Speaker 4: Trump who have also shown up to like cook for
Speaker 4: asylum seekers in the desert or to help refugees living
Speaker 4: in our community. Like it's a very strange thing. Have
Speaker 4: you felt alienated from your community since the beginning of
Speaker 4: this year, Like I'm interested in, like how your lives
Speaker 4: have changed because of that change in rhetoric.
Speaker 5: Yes, Like I said, we have neighbors on our streets.
Speaker 5: So there was a block party for Fourth of July,
Speaker 5: which I didn't even feel like celebrating, but we had
Speaker 5: just moved into this house, so we felt, you know,
Speaker 5: like we should go at least meet the neighbors. And
Speaker 5: there's a lot of Trump flags on our street, and
Speaker 5: it was very awkward. But my husband is very charming
Speaker 5: and charismatic and outgoing, and he just goes right up
Speaker 5: and introduces himself. And there was one gentleman wearing a
Speaker 5: T shirt that said they hate us because they ate us,
Speaker 5: and it's got a big old, you know, Trump face
Speaker 5: on it, and it was just so so awkward. So yeah,
Speaker 5: we feel uncomfortable. Also, like I said, it's a lean's
Speaker 5: conservative in this community. And our school. Even like, as
Speaker 5: we're doing this fundraiser, we were very careful not to
Speaker 5: share it with anyone that we live near, just in case,
Speaker 5: you know, because we have been hearing reports of people
Speaker 5: like neighbors calling ice on their neighbors to you know,
Speaker 5: report them and you know, go pick up this person.
Speaker 5: You know, he looks brown or I don't know what
Speaker 5: they're what they're doing or their logic, but you know, yeah,
Speaker 5: it feels very threatening. And even oh, my daughter even said,
Speaker 5: can't Data just cover up his skin? You know, like
Speaker 5: she was just thinking like, yeah, was he gonna wear
Speaker 5: her cup? Yeah?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 5: I mean, you can't really hide who you are, and
Speaker 5: you shouldn't have to.
Speaker 4: Right, And it's very hard for the kids to be
Speaker 4: saying that, yeah, the dad should be hiding.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And they've asked me, how can we make Trump just
Speaker 5: forget about Data, you know, and I said, well, he
Speaker 5: doesn't really know. They don't you know, he doesn't know
Speaker 5: exactly your dad. He's they're doing this to a lot
Speaker 5: of people. You know. We just happen to be in
Speaker 5: that group. But I will say we have some close
Speaker 5: friends that we really adore, and they are Trumpers, you know,
Speaker 5: we see it on their Facebook page, but then when
Speaker 5: we're in their presence, they don't bring it up, and
Speaker 5: it's just kind of an elephant in the room. And honestly,
Speaker 5: as our current data is getting closer, we plan on
Speaker 5: having them over to talk about it because it feels
Speaker 5: very awkward, and I just think they're there's the kindest people.
Speaker 5: They're extremely religious, which which we are not when we're
Speaker 5: on the spiritual side, But you know, I think they're
Speaker 5: just they're just on a team. They've chosen a team,
Speaker 5: and I don't think they're necessarily paying a lot of
Speaker 5: attention to what's actually happening to people. So we're hoping
Speaker 5: that just a conversation will just let them know. We
Speaker 5: want to be honest with the people that are close
Speaker 5: to us, and that mean a lot to us, you know,
Speaker 5: because we don't know what's about to happen. And even
Speaker 5: there's members of my family that I feel very awkward
Speaker 5: talking to as well, where I'm kind of distanced myself
Speaker 5: because people who are still supporting this regime at this
Speaker 5: point to me, are too far gone to even kind
Speaker 5: of get them to come around. I guess, I mean,
Speaker 5: I just don't understand I can't understand support of Trump
Speaker 5: from the first place. So again, if people are still
Speaker 5: on that boat, I really don't relate to them, and
Speaker 5: it's very awkward. Especially, Yeah, people in my family who
Speaker 5: supposedly love me and my children, you know, are still
Speaker 5: supporting that regime, and despite seeing all the things, maybe
Speaker 5: they don't see it. I mean, I know they if
Speaker 5: they are exclusively watching Fox News, then they are only
Speaker 5: receiving that information, which is not telling the whole story, right,
Speaker 5: and it's definitely completely skewed to make them look the
Speaker 5: good guys, and anyone on that's liberal is a bad guy.
Speaker 5: And they're very much targeting, you know, Democrats now as
Speaker 5: the enemy, the enemy of the state. They have even said.
Speaker 5: So it's I mean, it's so now I'm starting to
Speaker 5: feel even nonsafe for myself because I'm I'm not super
Speaker 5: active on Facebook, but I am outspoken because I can't resist.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's there is freedom of speech in this country,
Speaker 5: or at least there was, and there should be. And
Speaker 5: it's hard to be quiet at this time. And we
Speaker 5: would be a lot more outspoken if we weren't feeling unsafe.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you have that fear, yes.
Speaker 5: Yes, especially my husband, because he's always been an activist
Speaker 5: and a you know, fighter for free speech and equal rights,
Speaker 5: and so it's that's one of the things that's really
Speaker 5: crushing him and his soul and his spirit through all
Speaker 5: this is that he cannot even speak out. So, you know,
Speaker 5: for people like him. It's not even for himself, but
Speaker 5: just for people like him. I know he wants to help,
Speaker 5: you know, and it's really challenging.
Speaker 4: I know, it's so sad to see the whole point
Speaker 4: of the asylum system and like, at least the sort
Speaker 4: of stated purpose of American foreign policy, it's sort of
Speaker 4: spread democracy throughout the world and allow people that have
Speaker 4: stood up for democracy and been persecuted to come here
Speaker 4: and be safe. And evidently the United States doesn't even
Speaker 4: believe in saying that anymore, in so much as it
Speaker 4: said it didn't always do it in the past. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it is really sad to think that, like even that
Speaker 4: it's gone. Yeah, for so many people, I think the
Speaker 4: idea of migrants is like an abstract one, right for
Speaker 4: your Fox News viewer, Migrants are just like an abstract
Speaker 4: brownskin bad person. And I often think that if those
Speaker 4: people had known migrants in their community, they would either
Speaker 4: not vote that way, or they would at least not
Speaker 4: like that policy. There are other things they liked about Trump,
Speaker 4: which it goes that's not something I can find much
Speaker 4: understanding of. But yeah, people do exist. But it's just
Speaker 4: so sad to see like people turned against anyone who
Speaker 4: wasn't born in this country. Yeah, it's simply because they were,
Speaker 4: not because of any any other character trait.
Speaker 5: They have, particularly the brown skin though, because you have
Speaker 5: to admit the Canadians. I mean, even though there's been
Speaker 5: a little dungeon with the Canadians at first in this regime,
Speaker 5: you know, they're they're pretty much under the radar and
Speaker 5: anyone from Europe or anyone. He's even said, like send
Speaker 5: a Nordic people, that's fine, you know, I mean, he's
Speaker 5: he's very clear, right, Yeah, the South African refugees are welcome.
Speaker 5: Come on. It's just so blatant, you know. And and
Speaker 5: I remember when I was growing up, my mom in particular,
Speaker 5: would would complain when when we started to have to
Speaker 5: press one for English. I remember my mom complaining about
Speaker 5: that or thinking, you know, you know, if you're here,
Speaker 5: you should learn the language. Well, I got to say,
Speaker 5: I lived in Tunisia for eight years and I did
Speaker 5: not learn the language. I tried to teach myself. It's
Speaker 5: a dialect that you know, the time. They didn't have
Speaker 5: lessons that you could get on YouTube or duo lingo
Speaker 5: or anything. You know, if I learned French and Arabic,
Speaker 5: maybe I could piece something together. But I you know,
Speaker 5: it's not as easy as people say.
Speaker 4: And yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: And then just to speak of my mother, I guess
Speaker 5: I'll say she prides herself on making friends with people
Speaker 5: at the grocery store who are of another ethnicity, or
Speaker 5: like really you know, getting to know a doctor. Or
Speaker 5: she has a housekeeper who's been working for her for
Speaker 5: like thirty years, and so I know she doesn't think
Speaker 5: of that person as being someone that shouldn't be here, right,
Speaker 5: So you know, so I think even if you do
Speaker 5: know a family or two who's who's an immigrant, you
Speaker 5: might think, oh, well, not them. I don't mean them,
Speaker 5: I mean allo other ones. I mean all the bad guys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the bad ones.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And if Trump was serious about getting the bad
Speaker 5: ones go to the gang nameihoborhoods, like we do know
Speaker 5: where the dangerous gang neighborhoods are. But they're not sending
Speaker 5: the tanks there, They're sending them to MacArthur Park, you know, yeah,
Speaker 5: home depot. It's like, if you want to get the gangs,
Speaker 5: get the gangs. But I think they're too scared of
Speaker 5: that because these are really just regular people that they're
Speaker 5: hiring to do this work for them to pick up people.
Speaker 5: And that's why they're hiding their faces, because they are
Speaker 5: regular people who would like to probably have a normal
Speaker 5: life outside of this new job that they've been so
Speaker 5: well paid.
Speaker 4: For, right Yeah, and certainly they're they're recruiting a lot
Speaker 4: more people to do that right now, which is going
Speaker 4: to only see a step up in enforcement.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I wonder like in so much of anything has helped
Speaker 4: because people will want to help, right Like, I think
Speaker 4: people will listen, they will understand a situation, they will
Speaker 4: see the possibility of your family being torn apart and
Speaker 4: want to help. But it's hard to help right now.
Speaker 4: Runless you're an immigration lawyer, and every pro bono immigration
Speaker 4: lawyer I know is mental health damaging levels. Have overworked
Speaker 4: and stressed and traumatized. I think, so what can people
Speaker 4: do either for you or in their communities to show
Speaker 4: up for people who are in your situation.
Speaker 5: I would say donate. You can donate to the ACL,
Speaker 5: you donate to individual families like ours. I'm sure. I
Speaker 5: think there's a lot of gofundmes out there that people
Speaker 5: are trying to raise money for. That's the way, you know,
Speaker 5: everything is kind of done these days when people are
Speaker 5: desperate and speak out, and I think the most important
Speaker 5: thing is have conversations and get to know people and
Speaker 5: even like, yeah, sometimes I see, you know, a Hispanic
Speaker 5: person in a grocery store. I just wanted to tell them,
Speaker 5: thank you for being here. I'm glad you're here, because
Speaker 5: I think they must be feeling so scared right now
Speaker 5: and so unwanted and so unappreciated when they are doing
Speaker 5: some of the hardest jobs that nobody else wants to
Speaker 5: do for very little money. Yeah, these are essential workers
Speaker 5: that he should be paid the most. Everything is backwards,
Speaker 5: you know, the people who are doing the hardest, you know,
Speaker 5: cleaning the toilets and picking the fields, they should be
Speaker 5: paid the most. It doesn't make any sense. Regardless of
Speaker 5: where they're from, they're willing to do the work, and
Speaker 5: Lord knows their background of where they came from and
Speaker 5: how the struggles that they've been through to leave their
Speaker 5: home country. Nobody wants to leave their home country. You
Speaker 5: do that because it's so bad that you must, you know,
Speaker 5: especially if you have children. You're trying to make a
Speaker 5: better life for yourself. And we've been sold on this
Speaker 5: American dream prospect. You know that we've heard our whole
Speaker 5: lives and the whole world is hurt about So they
Speaker 5: come and now we're just punishing them brutally. It's not
Speaker 5: even like, oh, no, sorry, we're full. You know, we're
Speaker 5: gonna have to send you back. It's like, no, we're
Speaker 5: going to punish you. We're going to treat you like
Speaker 5: daw call you animals and vermin, and call you horrible things. Yeah,
Speaker 5: send you to places where you're unsafe and untaken care of,
Speaker 5: and maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get sent back to
Speaker 5: your home country, or you'll get sent to a random
Speaker 5: country or even a prison, like a horrible prison in
Speaker 5: another country where who knows what's good. It's just this
Speaker 5: is what frightens me. You know again, if he was
Speaker 5: sent to somewhere, to a place where I could you know,
Speaker 5: we could have visits or calls or you know, and
Speaker 5: he waits it out. I guess that would be more
Speaker 5: tolerable than the unknown of his his safety. He's not
Speaker 5: going to be well taken care of. That's a fact.
Speaker 5: They don't care about these people. And my husband, unfortunately,
Speaker 5: he's always been extremely strong, extremely brave, a fighter, and
Speaker 5: I feel like his fight is gone. He's physically and
Speaker 5: mentally at the end of his rope, and I'm extremely frightened.
Speaker 5: I mean, he just feels like he's tired of fighting.
Speaker 5: He's just exhausted from this, you know. Again, I mean
Speaker 5: we've been together twelve years, and again he was going
Speaker 5: through this process with his first wife, who he was
Speaker 5: with for eight years, and he never got an answer.
Speaker 5: He was never denied, but he just never got an answer,
Speaker 5: and that was enough for them for our case, just
Speaker 5: to you know, it's going to be really, really difficult
Speaker 5: to get a yes for a green card.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean it still happens. I've heard of
Speaker 4: it happening even in the last few months, but it
Speaker 4: is increasingly harder and less common, and that is brutal. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Like it's horrible and the way, of course, as you're saying,
Speaker 4: system is designed to make you feel hopeless and just
Speaker 4: to as they call it self, deport.
Speaker 5: Yes, and even our lawyer doesn't know what to do.
Speaker 5: And I feel the judge seems like a nice person,
Speaker 5: and I would imagine it must be very frustrating too
Speaker 5: to be a judge at this time where they have
Speaker 5: to be the ones that are just kind of their
Speaker 5: hands are tied. They will lose their job if they
Speaker 5: don't do what the regime wants them to do. So,
Speaker 5: you know, this is what happens in third world countries.
Speaker 5: This is why America has been great because we weren't
Speaker 5: like this before. With this, you know, cutting out free
Speaker 5: speech and things like that. It's it's changing rapidly and
Speaker 5: if people don't stand up more, and I'm sorry, but
Speaker 5: it's going to have to take more than these peaceful protests. Unfortunately,
Speaker 5: because they're not doing anything. We are being laughed at
Speaker 5: by the Maga Republicans. They do not care about our
Speaker 5: peaceful protests. They're just like, Okay, there's a protest on
Speaker 5: this day. Next day, They're just going to keep doing
Speaker 5: it harder, you know.
Speaker 4: Sure, Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 5: Changing anything, so something has to change. I'm hoping more
Speaker 5: celebrities come out and start speaking up. I think that
Speaker 5: would help, because people tend to back the celebrities that
Speaker 5: they love, and I'm kind of alarmed that more people
Speaker 5: like especially the most powerful celebrities like Oprah, for example,
Speaker 5: Why aren't they out there every day, you know, saying
Speaker 5: this is what I support and this is what I
Speaker 5: don't support. I think they're scared.
Speaker 4: I'm assuming I would imagine, So what a sad thought.
Speaker 5: I do think that the mega Republicans are outnumbered, and
Speaker 5: I think that they're continuously going to be outnumbered as
Speaker 5: things get more and more you know, shocking, as we're
Speaker 5: seeing our freedoms being stripped, the constitutional freedoms that we've
Speaker 5: always known being stripped. I think it's going to get worse,
Speaker 5: and I don't know how about it has to get
Speaker 5: before change happens.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think any of us do. I do
Speaker 4: think you're right. The more and more people are not
Speaker 4: happy with HAVS is happening, but there doesn't even seem
Speaker 4: to be a well among Democrats to oppose this in
Speaker 4: a meaningful way. Yeah, she's very.
Speaker 5: Sad and like, yeah, even the Democrats in power don't
Speaker 5: know what to do, I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and they seem to think that it's electoral suicide,
Speaker 4: just to be basically decent and say we need to
Speaker 4: be decent people and kind to people who come here
Speaker 4: asking us to help them. There seems to be something
Speaker 4: that is just inadmissible in lictoral politics, which is really sad.
Speaker 4: Right now, Yeah, so you guys have your court date.
Speaker 4: We will obviously continue covering this.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: We get We're going to continue updating people. We will
Speaker 4: continue talking about this and then covering this, and yeah,
Speaker 4: we'll try and get an update out. This is coming out.
Speaker 4: You'll be hearing this on Monday, and we will try
Speaker 4: and get an update out within a week or so,
Speaker 4: just to let everyone know how things have gone and
Speaker 4: what they can do to help. Is there anything else
Speaker 4: you'd like to say to people before we go?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so, as we found out, you know that there's
Speaker 5: a good possibility that he will be taken into iced
Speaker 5: attention on Wednesday. We ask our lawyer, Okay, so what
Speaker 5: are the next steps if that happens? What you know,
Speaker 5: he has a constitutional right to do process of law
Speaker 5: habeas corpus, and she doesn't know what to do. She's
Speaker 5: never done it before. So therefore we need to find
Speaker 5: a different lawyer that can help us with that. It's
Speaker 5: not in immigration court, it's federal court. So we have inquiries.
Speaker 5: We actually have a consult today with someone who maybe
Speaker 5: help us with that. We sent emails out last night
Speaker 5: kind of telling our story to another lawyer, hoping that
Speaker 5: we can get some support and on that front, because
Speaker 5: basically that's your next your next step. Once you're in detention,
Speaker 5: you raise your constitutional rights of due process of law,
Speaker 5: you know, but then again it's another fight and again
Speaker 5: it could be from detention, which is yeah, more money.
Speaker 5: I'm going to be at that point, a single mother,
Speaker 5: you know, trying to support bills here in California, which
Speaker 5: is already you know difficult, and you know, on my own,
Speaker 5: and also paying lawyers and trying to fight to either
Speaker 5: find my husband or get him out of there. You know,
Speaker 5: we we don't want to leave the country if we
Speaker 5: if we don't have to. We love it here. I
Speaker 5: don't know where else to go. We can't go to Tunisia.
Speaker 5: I'm American. Where are we supposed to go? Yeah, And
Speaker 5: that's what people don't understand too with immigrants, you know,
Speaker 5: if they can't return to their home country because of
Speaker 5: safety reasons, which is most of the cases. That's why
Speaker 5: we have the silent cases. Then what are they supposed
Speaker 5: to do? You know?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I don't think a lot of people seem
Speaker 4: to care, right, they think people just want people to
Speaker 4: go away somewhat, go figure it out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not our problem.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, which in this case it very much is
Speaker 4: and in every case, and like it is our problem
Speaker 4: that like we should take responsibility for one another as
Speaker 4: well being right, yes, as humans care about each other.
Speaker 5: Yeah, just have empathy at least that's the least we
Speaker 5: could do.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know a society that says it's not my problem,
Speaker 4: it's not one that any of us should want to
Speaker 4: live in.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And in our case, my husband's particularly worried because
Speaker 5: if he does get sent back to Tunisia, most definitely
Speaker 5: he would be in jail there as well, which is
Speaker 5: also not a pleasant experience yet to put it mouth
Speaker 5: and it would be yeah, where they torture people in jail.
Speaker 5: So yeah, again, we don't really know what to do
Speaker 5: or where to go. But these are the thoughts that
Speaker 5: we're having.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then not unreasonable.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if we do self deport when do we, like
Speaker 5: we're trying to push it as long as we can stay, stay, stay, stay, stay,
Speaker 5: stay stay, you know, and then when do we let
Speaker 5: them know? Okay, okay, I guess we'll self deport, like
Speaker 5: at the last second before they take them into detention, like,
Speaker 5: you know, I don't know the safe way to do that, right,
Speaker 5: And then if we do, can they give us time
Speaker 5: to get our affairs in order, Like leaving the country
Speaker 5: is no small task, and we don't even have money
Speaker 5: to do that. So you know, these are our options.
Speaker 5: These are literally our options. And again, small children second grade,
Speaker 5: fourth grade, you know, and they're thriving here, like they
Speaker 5: don't deserve this. And my husband even said, you know,
Speaker 5: he said this the other day, like our children don't
Speaker 5: deserve this, and I said, no, children deserve the horrors
Speaker 5: of this planet, you know that. I mean, we're actually
Speaker 5: a lot luckier than a lot of other children. So
Speaker 5: but at the same time, there are children, and this
Speaker 5: is the problem that we're dealing with, and unfortunately they
Speaker 5: have to deal with it too. You know, That's just
Speaker 5: what a family is. Yeah, our goal is to stay
Speaker 5: together no matter what. We want to keep my husband
Speaker 5: safe and we want to keep us together. That's our
Speaker 5: number one goal. So unfortunately, that may mean that we
Speaker 5: need to leave, and I will be very, very sad
Speaker 5: if that's the case, because I have always left this country.
Speaker 5: It's always stood for greatness, and ironically, the group that
Speaker 5: thinks they're going to make America great again is failing miserably.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's incredibly sad. And like you said,
Speaker 4: you've already up and left. Your children want, yes to
Speaker 4: come to a safe place, to be safe, and then
Speaker 4: to have to do it again from that safe place.
Speaker 4: I'm sure we'll be and the old they get more
Speaker 4: than they realized what's happening.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's only two years later, you know, the poor kids.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. Who. I'm so sorry you're going through this.
Speaker 5: Ye, thank you.
Speaker 4: This sucks. We will be thinking of you.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: And yeah, if you're if you're listening, I will try
Speaker 4: and keep you updated over the next few weeks.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much, James.
Speaker 4: All right, thank you, thank you for your time. I
Speaker 4: appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2: Oh, welcome back. It could happen here a podcast where
Speaker 2: I just got vaccinated and boy, howdie the ship this
Speaker 2: year hits like a fucking train.
Speaker 4: It does. I I go vaccinated it's it's it's a
Speaker 4: rough one this year.
Speaker 2: Oh man. Yeah, fucking RFK Junior was right.
Speaker 4: The vaccine injury today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I've received by vaccine injury. I'm complaining
Speaker 2: to the board. Oh man, I'm gonna nap after this.
Speaker 2: But first, how about we talk about fucking Trendy Aragua,
Speaker 2: the fucking narco criminal group that President Trump is currently
Speaker 2: justifying blowing up boats in the middle of international waters
Speaker 2: as a result.
Speaker 4: Of Yeah, it's great. It's a good thing that we
Speaker 4: are now killing civilians in countries where we are not
Speaker 4: at war with It's great.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This has been something Steven Miller had been talking
Speaker 2: about since the first Trump administration, you know, and had
Speaker 2: talked with like back when the military was willing to
Speaker 2: push back against Trump more. People would be like you,
Speaker 2: what the fuck are you talking about. We can't launch
Speaker 2: strikes at just like random boats, and Steve Miller be like,
Speaker 2: why not? And now they're doing it. Yeah, And this group,
Speaker 2: this criminal cartel out of Venezuela has been the current justification.
Speaker 2: As we'll talk about most of what is said about
Speaker 2: this Trendy Aragua by the administration about you know, their
Speaker 2: role in smuggling drugs in the United States is either
Speaker 2: just completely invented or massively exaggerated. It is a really
Speaker 2: interesting group. They have a fascinating like history. The literal
Speaker 2: meaning is train of arugua. Yeah, sorry, And it started
Speaker 2: out with like labor unions that were working on a
Speaker 2: railway project. It was going to be connecting central and
Speaker 2: western Venezuela together. And as has happened in history, what
Speaker 2: started as like labor union organizing wound up kind of
Speaker 2: morphing into a direct criminal activity. The guy who's generally
Speaker 2: credited as the founder, although that's kind of flattening things
Speaker 2: a little bit, is Hector Guerrero Flores, known as Nino Guerrero,
Speaker 2: and he he got put in for seventeen years for
Speaker 2: murder and drug trafficking at this prison called Tokron. Am
Speaker 2: I am I saying that right, James, how.
Speaker 4: Do we see Tocron? Yeah, Sarenaxin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a little accent over the second and oh
Speaker 2: as you go up and down, up, thank you James.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so this one of the things that's fun about
Speaker 2: this is that this prison where they start loading these
Speaker 2: guys up, becomes so heavily organized and it eventually turns
Speaker 2: from being like a prison in the traditional sense to
Speaker 2: more being like a tiny independent city that the gang
Speaker 2: is based out of and acted as their fortress. They
Speaker 2: established like night clubs in it, and you know, luxury facilities,
Speaker 2: and like leaders of the gang more or less Cayman
Speaker 2: went as they pleased, went back to their families, and
Speaker 2: it was not really what you'd think of as a
Speaker 2: prison in the traditional sense for a lot of these guys.
Speaker 2: For a while, a payment system was created in order
Speaker 2: to like basically you would inmates would pay for protection
Speaker 2: or for access to the nicer aspects of the prison,
Speaker 2: called the cause, and if you didn't pay, you know,
Speaker 2: they had various ways of physically abusing you. There's a
Speaker 2: good article in Small Wars Journal that talks about the
Speaker 2: org Jens and the impact of this group, and it
Speaker 2: quotes someone from inside. The person is saying, the first
Speaker 2: time you don't pay, they shoot your wrist, the second time,
Speaker 2: your ankle, the third time, and you face the death penalty.
Speaker 2: So like you're talking like pretty traditional criminal gang stuff, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: So the journey of this group from gang that's major
Speaker 2: in Venezuela to gang that's kind of operating in larger
Speaker 2: and larger chunks of South America. Followed a pretty natural
Speaker 2: path where they got involved in more kinds of smuggling
Speaker 2: and more kinds of trafficking. Over the years, started setting
Speaker 2: up operations in other parts of South America. But one
Speaker 2: of the things that the gang has sort of done
Speaker 2: is you've got this kind of process by which they
Speaker 2: have these local affiliates who are not directly associated with
Speaker 2: the gang in like the strict hierarchical sense, and that
Speaker 2: it's not literally the gang sending an official into another state.
Speaker 2: It's more like franchising is kind of the way things work,
Speaker 2: and you have different local groups, some of whom are
Speaker 2: not even connected in any way to the original organization,
Speaker 2: claiming a line of descent in order to basically draft
Speaker 2: off of that clout.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, which is kind of what you've seen increasingly,
Speaker 2: And this has led to a situation where there's enough
Speaker 2: claims of trend being involved in the United States and
Speaker 2: other countries that it looks a lot like a larger
Speaker 2: and more centralized criminal organization than it actually is in reality.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the state understands these things like mini states, right,
Speaker 4: like who like with a with a leader and a
Speaker 4: distinct authority structure and learn like a direct command chain.
Speaker 4: That is not how my understanding gainst it they operate, right,
Speaker 4: because they are not mini states there. They are a
Speaker 4: different entity to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what is your Because you've actually spent time
Speaker 2: reporting and in Venezuela, when did you first become aware
Speaker 2: of trend?
Speaker 4: I mean I became aware of like the fact that
Speaker 4: they were armed gangs at criminals. I mean I was
Speaker 4: robbed at gunpoint when I was in Venezuela, right, so
Speaker 4: that may be aware that that there were people who
Speaker 4: who did crime with weapons, But I wasn't aware really
Speaker 4: of trend that I were until like maybe the twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't report on organized crime, nor do
Speaker 4: I particularly follow it, right, But I take an interest
Speaker 4: in Venezuelan affairs and as much as I've spent time there,
Speaker 4: and I have an affinity with the people, and I
Speaker 4: understand that things are getting going from bad to worse
Speaker 4: for them under their government, So so I took an interest.
Speaker 4: I guess it was like, are you familiar with a
Speaker 4: Narco Sobrinos affair?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 4: Okay, Narco Sobrinos is like Narco nephews. I think they're
Speaker 4: actually step nephews of Maduro if I recall correctly, it
Speaker 4: doesn't hugely matter. They're like part of his family in
Speaker 4: a mediate and I believe they lived in his compound
Speaker 4: and they used, like I don't want to make statements
Speaker 4: that are incorrect, that I believe they use a presidential
Speaker 4: hangar or runway to fly a plane to Haiti, which
Speaker 4: the USDA alleges, and it is most likely true that
Speaker 4: that that plane was stuff full of cocaine.
Speaker 2: Sure, many such cases.
Speaker 4: Yeah, many such cases. They believe they have diplomatic immunity,
Speaker 4: which they did not, which I believe came as a
Speaker 4: surprise to them at the moment of their detention. And
Speaker 4: so at that point I was like, shit, we can
Speaker 4: get onto this. How the Trump administration has like basically
Speaker 4: alled to Venezuela as a narco dictatorship. Certainly there is
Speaker 4: overlap between organized crime and the state. Right, It's because
Speaker 4: the state is so poor and so corrupt that inevitably
Speaker 4: you will see like overlap between organized crime and the state.
Speaker 4: So I guess right, Whenever the knack of Sobrinos affair was,
Speaker 4: I thought was like, okay, I need I need to
Speaker 4: sort of be aware of this. And of course, in
Speaker 4: my like coverage of immigration, you hear of people mostly
Speaker 4: their talk is just not that their life has been
Speaker 4: made hard by organized crime, if I managed so much
Speaker 4: as their life has been made hard by the government
Speaker 4: completely failing to provide services and the complete collapse of
Speaker 4: the Venezuelan economy. I'm not going to ask about it explicitly,
Speaker 4: but if someone mentions it, I sort of take note
Speaker 4: of it as one of the reasons why people are leaving.
Speaker 2: Would you bring up as a really good point, which
Speaker 2: is that twenty fourteen is kind of when the most
Speaker 2: recent Venezuelan economic crisis really kicked off, and in fourteen
Speaker 2: to twenty eighteen was a major period of growth for
Speaker 2: trend Ye, and then twenty eighteen to twenty twenty two
Speaker 2: is when they really started pushing up into and involving
Speaker 2: themselves increasingly in Colombia and the United States as a
Speaker 2: result of like the increased flow of Venezuelans out of
Speaker 2: Venezuela and into other countries and eventually up to the
Speaker 2: US and to some extent, and it's been since twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two that the gang has really been pruned back,
Speaker 2: you know, both as a result of the Venezuelan government
Speaker 2: taking control of the prison again and like basically invading
Speaker 2: it with the military in order to deny them access
Speaker 2: to what had been like their primary centralized, like hub
Speaker 2: of control, and also due to the fact that, like
Speaker 2: after expansion into Colombia and Chile, both criminal organizations and
Speaker 2: the governments of those countries increasingly pushed back against the organization, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: one of the reasons why they're being targeted. But also
Speaker 2: one of the things that's like fundamentally bullshit about the
Speaker 2: administration's description of what's happening is that we're very much
Speaker 2: talking about a cartel that's on its back feet and
Speaker 2: been on its back feet for the last several years
Speaker 2: as the result of significant reversals in their business and
Speaker 2: in their political situation.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, Columbia has been near the Columbian Civil
Speaker 4: War is one of the longest running conflicts in the world.
Speaker 4: But things have changed their substantially right in the last
Speaker 4: five or seven years. You know, you have people from
Speaker 4: the fuck disarming, You have the fracture of what was
Speaker 4: previously their territory, and some of who were previously their
Speaker 4: militants into other groups, right, And so that has allowed
Speaker 4: the state there to continue its conflict against what remains
Speaker 4: of that and also to clamp down other groups.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: And evidently, like the flow of drugs, United States relies
Speaker 4: on the complicity or inability to stop it of many states.
Speaker 4: And yeah, we've seen like a concerted effort and also
Speaker 4: like the attempts of the United States to stop smuggling.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: So, I guess if people aren't familiar, we should just
Speaker 4: explain the US DHS, of which the United States Coast
Speaker 4: Guard is part. I think a lot of people aren't
Speaker 4: aware the Coast Guard is part of DHS claims a
Speaker 4: universal jurisdiction or jurisdiction at least in areas where drugs
Speaker 4: are being smuggled to the United States, Right, So the
Speaker 4: US Coast Guard had a role to play in this.
Speaker 4: In the I guess interdiction is the word they would
Speaker 4: use of drugs coming to the United States. I probably
Speaker 4: haven't got data on this in the last year or so,
Speaker 4: but it certainly was the case that most drugs entering
Speaker 4: the US entered through ports of entry as opposed to
Speaker 4: like between ports of entry, right, like through the desert,
Speaker 4: through the mountains and so like these these boats I
Speaker 4: guess are not just to be clear that they're not
Speaker 4: necessarily going to the United States, and most skates are
Speaker 4: not going to United States and mostly to going to
Speaker 4: Mexico and then moving to the United States through other methods.
Speaker 4: But like as the government both south of the United
Speaker 4: States and in the United States who adapted, it's become
Speaker 4: harder and harder for those people, right, And so it's
Speaker 4: become harder and hard for these criminal organizations to make
Speaker 4: money off these drugs.
Speaker 2: And that's led to, I mean a situation that one
Speaker 2: of the things that they've been accused of being by
Speaker 2: the Trump administration and internationally is essentially an agent of
Speaker 2: the Maduro regime, right. And this is something that certainly
Speaker 2: the Venezuelan government denies. This is not a thing where
Speaker 2: I can you know, entirely give you this is exactly
Speaker 2: what's happened. But it seems accurate to say that as
Speaker 2: an organization, as their actual like control and power have
Speaker 2: been eroded, they have been utilized increasingly as a way too,
Speaker 2: for example, deal with like dissidents who are hostile to
Speaker 2: the Maduro regime right, as a deniable asset. In particular,
Speaker 2: there's been cases that are reasonably well documented of dissidents
Speaker 2: against the Venezuelan regime in Chile and trendy Aragua being
Speaker 2: used as like assassins to to take out dissonance in
Speaker 2: foreign countries in a deniable manner. Right, Yeah, And I
Speaker 2: mean it looks to me like this has kind of
Speaker 2: increased as their actual ability to directly control things and
Speaker 2: directly contest the regime as a power center has been eroded.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's kind of a classic. Like I wouldn't say
Speaker 4: that like ideologically aligned, right, but sometimes their interests aligned, Yeah,
Speaker 4: to be clearly, Like trend Agua are one of the
Speaker 4: sort of armed organized crime institutions in Venezuela, but by
Speaker 4: far the only one, right you have, yeah, Trendliano for example.
Speaker 4: You have these other groups who have also been active
Speaker 4: in anti government protests, especially since the I'm going to
Speaker 4: use that quote unquote election here in July of last year, right,
Speaker 4: like where electoral fraud is widely alleged and I documented
Speaker 4: that in my Daddy and series if people want to
Speaker 4: listen to that. But it's not like these two are
Speaker 4: lot in lockstep. But yeah, like we can under stand
Speaker 4: that sometimes that they interest my aligne in those areas,
Speaker 4: it may be beneficial for the regime to, like you say,
Speaker 4: to use him as a deniable asset.
Speaker 2: Right, which does not. Like, one of the things that's
Speaker 2: kind of most frustrating is hearing them described as central
Speaker 2: to the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States. Which, like,
Speaker 2: even in kind of the most elaborate version of this
Speaker 2: group being utilized by the Venezuelan government is fanciful, right, Like,
Speaker 2: because Venezuela just doesn't have that much to do with
Speaker 2: the smuggling of fentinel into the United States. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 2: Venezuela and Venezuelan criminal organizations just aren't that involved in
Speaker 2: that process. That's not where it's coming from, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: And we'll talk some more about finnyl, But first, you
Speaker 2: know what's kind of like fentanyl advertising. We're back and
Speaker 2: we're talking about fentanyl. Well, we're talking about like these
Speaker 2: claims because that's the justification for why we need to
Speaker 2: airstrike these boats, the most recent of which we know
Speaker 2: was boarded by another government and had drugs on board
Speaker 2: it removed before it was struck.
Speaker 4: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And we simply have no idea, no way to verify.
Speaker 2: I have no way to verify what the administration is
Speaker 2: claiming about these boats. We're just seeing boats get blown up.
Speaker 4: But yeah, and everybody who was on that boat is
Speaker 4: no dead, so there's not many many people to contradict
Speaker 4: that story. Should we explain like the usual coast guard
Speaker 4: process for.
Speaker 2: Interdiction, Yeah, I think that's probably a good idea.
Speaker 4: So generally, right, what the US Coast Guard is going
Speaker 4: to do is they will have these large vessels from
Speaker 4: which they will launch smaller vessels and helicopters to intercept
Speaker 4: craft right, like the most kind of I guess like
Speaker 4: famous charismatic other like Colombian like they call them Narco subs.
Speaker 4: There's a semi submarines actually that that they're not like
Speaker 4: fully submersed, but they that much of the vessel is submerged.
Speaker 4: What the coast Guard would normally do, to my understanding,
Speaker 4: is to send a vessel to intercept them, be it
Speaker 4: a helicopter or a boat or probably both. In most
Speaker 4: cases I would imagine tell them to stop.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: If they don't stop, the coast Guard will have like
Speaker 4: a sniper who will shoot out the engine of the crafty.
Speaker 4: They will then board. They will entertain the people. They
Speaker 4: will obviously confiscate any drugs that they find, and then
Speaker 4: they will take those people back to their vessel where
Speaker 4: they're detained, and then they'll be tried in the US. Right,
Speaker 4: and then they would normally it's they can't kind of
Speaker 4: scoop up all these ships that they've intercepted or semi
Speaker 4: subs or whatever, so they will normally destroy those and
Speaker 4: scuttle them so they sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Speaker 4: I don't know how many cases they've done this in,
Speaker 4: but that would be the normal procedure for Coast Guard.
Speaker 4: It gets pre twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: It's got to be fun being a fish near one
Speaker 2: of those vessels, yeah, fish getting yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 2: know what they do with all the ca And sometimes
Speaker 2: they bring all the cocaine back for a photo op.
Speaker 4: You see that sometimes yeah yeah, yeah, that looks good.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, it's nicely packaged. It's cocaine or fentanyl on
Speaker 4: the side or whatever. That is my understanding of what
Speaker 4: was done previously. The strikes in the last month have
Speaker 4: been extremely different, right, Yeah, And we're looking at I
Speaker 4: think fourteen people killed so far that we've had confirmed.
Speaker 4: Although those numbers are certainly higher than the when you're
Speaker 4: hearing them, right, because we've just had another strike in
Speaker 4: the last day or so that I don't think we
Speaker 4: have exact numbers on how many people were involved. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they used, from what I understand, drones from Special Operations
Speaker 4: Command to do these strikes, right, which in itself is
Speaker 4: quite unusual. And then the strikes themselves consisted of did
Speaker 4: they say what I guess it looks like a hell
Speaker 4: fire missile.
Speaker 2: But I don't know if they've said that looked like
Speaker 2: health fires to me on the videos I've seen, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not exactly like high def video, but you see
Speaker 2: them striking like it looks kind of like a like
Speaker 2: a it's a speedboat, right, like it's a surface vessel.
Speaker 4: It's not a not a semi sub or a submarine.
Speaker 4: It's unclear like what has happened before, at least I
Speaker 4: haven't seen any reporting or what happened before, like whether
Speaker 4: they got in order to stop. I think in one
Speaker 4: case they had turned around right having noticed a drone
Speaker 4: and begun returning towards the coast, towards Venezuela, I guess,
Speaker 4: and they were still struck and it appears that in
Speaker 4: at least one case, the drone struck them again, like
Speaker 4: it hit them once and then returned for a second
Speaker 4: run to hit I guess the survivors.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And you know, there's a couple of facts that
Speaker 2: go alongside what we actually know in versus what the
Speaker 2: administration's claiming about. Eighty percent of people involved in the
Speaker 2: smuggling of illegal drugs into the United States are US citizens,
Speaker 2: and then of the remaining twenty ish percent, a chunk
Speaker 2: of those are resident legal aliens. In the chunk are
Speaker 2: a mix of undocum limitted people, non citizens, or people
Speaker 2: whose status is unknown or extra dieded aliens. Right like,
Speaker 2: this is based on the United States Sentencing Commissions data
Speaker 2: from twenty twenty four, and about eighty five percent of
Speaker 2: drugs that are brought into the United States are smuggled
Speaker 2: in at ports of entry. And this makes complete sense
Speaker 2: if you think about it, in part because it's pretty
Speaker 2: easy to track when you've just got like a boat
Speaker 2: trying to smuggle stuff into the country illicitly, and the
Speaker 2: people who are on that boat. If the art citizens
Speaker 2: have no right to enter the country inherently, as opposed
Speaker 2: to citizens who do have a right to enter and
Speaker 2: ports of entry where there's a shitload of you want
Speaker 2: to hideen plane sight with this stuff? Right? Like it
Speaker 2: just makes sense, like would you rather if you were
Speaker 2: smuggling a huge amount of illegal shit? Would you rather
Speaker 2: be on your own with a van or a vehicle
Speaker 2: full of very illegal drugs, or would you rather be
Speaker 2: like hiding amongst the billions of tons of shit that
Speaker 2: gets taken into this country every single year, right, Which
Speaker 2: is why just the reaction of the data is so
Speaker 2: completely different than the administration makes it out to be.
Speaker 2: And obviously, foreign criminal organizations are heavily involved in the
Speaker 2: smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly fentanyl in the United States,
Speaker 2: but we're talking primarily about like the Sinaloa cartel and
Speaker 2: then different criminal organizations involved in the smuggling of fentyel
Speaker 2: out of China, right, which is where a lot of
Speaker 2: fentanyl comes from. As opposed to again Venezuela, the government
Speaker 2: here is going for low hanging fruit. I think as
Speaker 2: the conclusion I'm driven to just every time I read
Speaker 2: about this is that, like there doesn't seem to be
Speaker 2: a better reason for focusing on this organization which really
Speaker 2: is just not that involved in crime in the United
Speaker 2: States nearly to the extent that groups like the Sinaloa
Speaker 2: Cartel are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it offers a chance to demonize Venezuelan people, right,
Speaker 4: and Venezuelan people made up a large number of the
Speaker 4: people who came to the United States just the asylum
Speaker 4: under Biden. Because like, if we do believe that these
Speaker 4: like the word in Spanish would be like a mega
Speaker 4: bandas like megagangs are a serious threat to the well
Speaker 4: being a people in the United States, imagine how much
Speaker 4: more of a threat they are to the well being
Speaker 4: a people in Venezuela.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: And that combined with a government which objectively sucks, which
Speaker 4: also uses extra judicial violence, right, including in its battle
Speaker 4: against these gangs, leads people to want to leave and
Speaker 4: when they come here, the United States, especially the Trump regime,
Speaker 4: has been engaged in this demonization of migrants. Right, This
Speaker 4: offers a very convenient narrative for that to say that
Speaker 4: these people are bringing crime here. The vast majority of
Speaker 4: them are doing the exact opposite. They are coming here
Speaker 4: because the state in Venezuela has extorted them, and slash
Speaker 4: or non state actors in Venezuela have extorted them. The
Speaker 4: vast bulk of the complaints I hear from Migran fro
Speaker 4: Venezuela about the state. They have no interest other than
Speaker 4: working hard and receiving a decent living wage. For that,
Speaker 4: every Venezuelan person I spoke to almost no When I
Speaker 4: ask what their American dream is, tell you that their
Speaker 4: American dream is to have a job that pays them
Speaker 4: enough to feed their family. Right, Like, we have next
Speaker 4: to no evidence of organized crime coming into the United
Speaker 4: States through the asylentists, and there are sure there will be,
Speaker 4: Like I would imagine a fraction of a single percent
Speaker 4: of cases, sure in which that is the case. But
Speaker 4: it's being used against all these Venezuelan people, right as
Speaker 4: we've seen. And I guess I should just clarify that,
Speaker 4: like one thing about these megabandas that they're not like maras, right,
Speaker 4: Like so like MS thirteen being a mara, right, like
Speaker 4: a gang in which members are identified by certain tattoos.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, yes, this is tattoos and emojis.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, yeah again, Like I understand that that is
Speaker 4: a thing that happens in some cases, but that is
Speaker 4: not a thing that is common to these gangs.
Speaker 2: No, it's it's certainly not common to trendy Aragua, right is,
Speaker 2: like the use of tattoos. There's not even widespread agreement
Speaker 2: among experts as to whether or not there's any sort
Speaker 2: of centralized US based hierarchy for the group, right right, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 4: The tattooing is just as it is in the United States,
Speaker 4: and that sort of places it around the world. A
Speaker 4: very common practice in Venezuela. The people do for as
Speaker 4: many reasons as there are people right to include because
Speaker 4: they love their mum, because they love their kids, because
Speaker 4: they're like a football team, because they are religious, et cetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera. That is why people get tattoos. It is
Speaker 4: not to indicate membership in any organization.
Speaker 2: No, and this is something that's verified. Again, Like one
Speaker 2: of the leading experts on trend is Jana Risquez, who
Speaker 2: wrote a book The trendy Aragua, The Gang that revolutionized
Speaker 2: organized crime in Latin America. She specifically told in O
Speaker 2: Tisis Telemundo during an interview, Venezuelan gangs are not identified
Speaker 2: by tattoos. To be a member of one of these
Speaker 2: Venezuelan organizations, you don't need a tattoo. You can have
Speaker 2: no tattoos and still be part of it. You can
Speaker 2: also have a tattoo that matches other members of the organization.
Speaker 2: So like again, there's groups and different sort of because
Speaker 2: this is a very bottom up sort of organization, which
Speaker 2: is often the case with criminal groups, where like they
Speaker 2: will you know, there will be money being passed in
Speaker 2: one direction or another, but there's not tight control being
Speaker 2: exercised in a top down manner. You can find groups
Speaker 2: that have tattoos in common, but it's not a centralized
Speaker 2: thing that the organization does.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like the Venezuelan state, to be clear, is
Speaker 4: extremely violent. They have like a special armed police which
Speaker 4: deals with gangs, an organized crime that kills hundreds of people.
Speaker 4: It would be unwise to be going about in the streets,
Speaker 4: whether like I am a member of a certain gang, right,
Speaker 4: tattoo right, And so unless you plan to live in
Speaker 4: some area where where you feel completely safe from the state,
Speaker 4: that would be a very unwise thing to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we'll talk some more about things that are unwise,
Speaker 2: but first it would be wise for you to buy
Speaker 2: these products. We're back, and I want to quote from
Speaker 2: a recent piece in The Guardian on the US law
Speaker 2: enforcement claiming that emoji's signal membership in this organization. And
Speaker 2: this is by Sam Levin and man Vy Singh from
Speaker 2: September a couple of days ago. The first reference to
Speaker 2: emojis in the records comes from a July twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four situational Awareness alert from the n WYPD, which was
Speaker 2: distributed to law enforcement across the country and warned of
Speaker 2: trendy araguav threats in New York City. N YPD Intelligence
Speaker 2: Encounter Terrorism Bureau has observed members of TDA in New
Speaker 2: York City using social media messaging platforms such as Instagram
Speaker 2: and TikTok to depict the allegiance to the gang. The
Speaker 2: alert said TDA members often utilize emojis such as trains, Ninja's,
Speaker 2: slot machines, double swords, shields, ogre, face mask, and crowns.
Speaker 2: Members also use South American slang in Arabic language terms
Speaker 2: to mask their identities on social media. They've cited the
Speaker 2: NYPD tattoos featuring Michael Jordan fucking Ninja emojis. You're told
Speaker 2: you that that's a TDA sybol. That's not just something
Speaker 2: people use.
Speaker 4: Yeah, man, this is like, I mean, there's a large
Speaker 4: Arab or population of Arab descent in Venezuela. That's where
Speaker 4: these slangs come from. Like, people use emojis particularly in
Speaker 4: this context because their education has not been the best right, Like,
Speaker 4: the access to literacy is less than it would be
Speaker 4: in other contexts. So like sometimes they use emoji, so
Speaker 4: they just use them because it's funny. But like the
Speaker 4: notion of like and yeah, people will use slang. People
Speaker 4: will spell shit the way they say it. Sometimes when
Speaker 4: I'm talking to Venezuelan people, you know, if I'm talking
Speaker 4: to a source and they as sometimes I have to
Speaker 4: really allowed to help me understand what they're saying. Yes,
Speaker 4: that is very common to people in Venezuela. There's nothing
Speaker 4: to do with being a member of a gang whatsoever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean there's a lot of that in
Speaker 2: terms of like the fact that the Chicago Bulls and
Speaker 2: Michael Jordan are popular among immigrants, right, Like that that's
Speaker 2: particularly Venezuelan immigrants, and a lot of it comes from, like, well,
Speaker 2: a lot of Venezuelan immigrants tend to like these things
Speaker 2: in media, tend to like these musicians and get tattoos
Speaker 2: that reference these things in popular culture or these things
Speaker 2: you know that that different Venezuelan artists have put out,
Speaker 2: and that's I mean, it's certainly not a sign that like,
Speaker 2: oh these things signal membership and this criminal organization and more.
Speaker 2: They're just targeting Venezuelans and these things are more common
Speaker 2: among Venezuelans, but not certainly not exclusive to that group.
Speaker 2: When you're when you're saying that like a Michael Jordan's
Speaker 2: shirt or tattoo is a symbol of membership in a criminal,
Speaker 2: criminal organization, well, I guess like a third of my
Speaker 2: high school were criminals. I mean they were, but not
Speaker 2: in this way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like these are very common, like the Jordan logo,
Speaker 4: I don't know what it's called at the jumping Jordan logo.
Speaker 4: Not a big sports where fan myself, but like, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's very common. It's because people buy fake designer power
Speaker 4: all the time. Like you will also see people tons
Speaker 4: of people with Louis Veton items. They're not real. It
Speaker 4: does not indicate membership in any gang. It's just kind
Speaker 4: of aspirational thing that you can buy any almost anywhere
Speaker 4: in Venezuela because no one's going down there to enforce
Speaker 4: copyright laws. Like it's not it it doesn't indicate any affiliation.
Speaker 4: Sometimes it indicates like an interest with the United States, right,
Speaker 4: like like that these are where these things come from,
Speaker 4: and this is a place where these people would like
Speaker 4: to go. I also saw a guy cross a Darien
Speaker 4: Glap in Nike Alpha flys like the the super Fast
Speaker 4: Marathon running shoes with the giant carbon plated spring. Like
Speaker 4: this is not like indication of anything other than that,
Speaker 4: Like this person thought those were cool and they purchased them. Yeah,
Speaker 4: are you familiar with this Cartel de lo Solis thing?
Speaker 8: No?
Speaker 4: Okay, So like the Cartel del Solis, the Cartel of
Speaker 4: the Sun of the Sun's I guess it's another organization
Speaker 4: which the US is alleging that Maduro is is like
Speaker 4: head of right that, like it's a vertically organized organization
Speaker 4: and that like Madudo is literally the chief of it.
Speaker 4: And I guess I just want to say, like the
Speaker 4: same shit applies. Right. There are gangs all over Karrakas
Speaker 4: as well as names we haven't mentioned. What you've got
Speaker 4: here is state failure. Right Like in Venezuela, the state
Speaker 4: has failed to provide people with services, and it does
Speaker 4: not always enjoy a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
Speaker 4: You also have massive corruption. So it is absolutely the
Speaker 4: case that people smuggling drugs through Venezuela will be able
Speaker 4: to buy off certain officials, right, particularly like military commanders
Speaker 4: and people who have control over transit and border areas.
Speaker 4: It doesn't imply like a vertical structure per se. To
Speaker 4: be clear, I don't think Madada should be in charge
Speaker 4: of Venezuela. I think that Madoro regime is bad for
Speaker 4: Venezuela and bad for the world. But like it's very
Speaker 4: oversimplified to see it like straight up as like a
Speaker 4: narco regime, right that there is more to it than
Speaker 4: that this is the country that hits on masses of oil.
Speaker 4: This is a country that has been incredibly corrupt from
Speaker 4: an incredibly long time now, and you're always going to
Speaker 4: see these organizations creeping into the government, right when the
Speaker 4: government can't even pay its own people will guarantee them
Speaker 4: a decent and dignified quality of life, Like that doesn't
Speaker 4: mean that it is okay to just kill like first
Speaker 4: and foremost, I would imagine that if we go with
Speaker 4: the government story that the boats that they struck were
Speaker 4: carrying drugs, right, it is unlikely that people who are
Speaker 4: carrying those drugs or anything other than poor desperate young
Speaker 4: men who wanted a chance at a better life and
Speaker 4: or were intimidated into doing this, right, and maybe some
Speaker 4: of them chose to do this because they thought this
Speaker 4: was the way they could get money and the progress
Speaker 4: in a place that does not for the many opportunities.
Speaker 4: These are not the people who are in any way
Speaker 4: like making the calls, making the decision right, and so
Speaker 4: killing them isn't going to do very much because there
Speaker 4: is a massive supply of poor desperate young men in Venezuela,
Speaker 4: and it's not going to change anything to kill fourteen
Speaker 4: fifteen of them, other than it will obviously it's a
Speaker 4: tragedy for those families, right, there's people who lose their
Speaker 4: children or whatever. Yeah, and so like, I don't know
Speaker 4: until we solve the situation that life is untenable for
Speaker 4: people in Venezuela. Yes, there will be crime there, and yes,
Speaker 4: people from there will want to come to the United States.
Speaker 4: Both of those things make sense. That does not mean
Speaker 4: that people coming to the United States are coming to
Speaker 4: the United States to do bad things. The vast majority
Speaker 4: of them are coming to the United States to escape
Speaker 4: bad things. That we've had so much discourse about Venezuelan
Speaker 4: people and crime. Even in the you know, this has begun,
Speaker 4: I think in Chicago in the Biden administration, I have
Speaker 4: not seen journalists of whatever political stripe talk to Venezuelan
Speaker 4: people about this. Like, with very few exceptions, it's very
Speaker 4: easy to find Venezuelan people, especially you know, if you
Speaker 4: if you work at the border and you do border reporting.
Speaker 4: But even still, you know, lots of these Venezuelan people
Speaker 4: went to Denver, some of them went to Chicago, some
Speaker 4: of them went to the Springs in Colorado, many of
Speaker 4: them went to Texas. They went to all kinds of
Speaker 4: places when they came to the United States. Right, if
Speaker 4: you speak Spanish, it's not hard to find these people
Speaker 4: and ask them what's it like in Venezuela, why did
Speaker 4: you come here? And then perhaps you can you know,
Speaker 4: establish a picture of yeah, it's pretty shit. Right, people
Speaker 4: work hard every day and don't make enough to feed
Speaker 4: their family, if their kid is sick, if their elderly
Speaker 4: parents can't work and need support, it's really hard to
Speaker 4: do that. That is why they want to come to
Speaker 4: the US. That is why often young men want to
Speaker 4: come to the US right because the world as it
Speaker 4: is gives them the highest level of economic opportunity, and
Speaker 4: so the family will send them to the US such
Speaker 4: as they can earn enough money and they hope one
Speaker 4: day to bring their families here. Sometimes you also see
Speaker 4: people bringing their very young children because they realize there's
Speaker 4: no future for their children in Venezuela, so they make
Speaker 4: the choice to try and come to somewhere which once
Speaker 4: promised a future for hardworking people and doesn't really anymore.
Speaker 4: But like it just it pains me so much to
Speaker 4: see this discussion of Venezuela without Venezuelan people, most of
Speaker 4: whom I found to be wonderful, Like I spent a
Speaker 4: good amount of time in Venezuela and even longer with
Speaker 4: Venezuelan people, and I have a great affection for them,
Speaker 4: like they've been nothing but kind to me. Even now,
Speaker 4: like a year after I was in the Darien Gap,
Speaker 4: I get text all the time from Venezuelan people, the
Speaker 4: majority of them not asking for help, just asking how
Speaker 4: I am asking? Do I know what happened to the
Speaker 4: Bolivian girl? Do I know what happened to Zimbabwean women?
Speaker 4: Like genuinely concerned even admits like a really shit situation
Speaker 4: for them, concerned for the well being of other people.
Speaker 4: And I just wish instead of talking about yeah, there
Speaker 4: are hundreds, maybe thousands of Venezuelan people who are involved
Speaker 4: in moving drugs United States, we could talk about the
Speaker 4: millions of people who just want to work hard and
Speaker 4: have a decent life and who are being denied a
Speaker 4: chance to do that home, and are now being denied
Speaker 4: a chance to do that here as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think that's about it for our episode today.
Speaker 2: Until next time, folks, I don't know.
Speaker 4: Best of luck out there.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Welcome to akap here, a podcast where your host wakes
Speaker 10: up every morning and rolls a d six to determine
Speaker 10: whether the government wants to exterminate her for being trans
Speaker 10: artistic or Chinese. This week, I am your host to
Speaker 10: be a Wong. We have rolled the dice. This week
Speaker 10: is autism Week, and by autism week, I mean anti
Speaker 10: autism week. The Trump administration or specifically orifica junior promise
Speaker 10: at the beginning is like April roughly that they were
Speaker 10: going to find the cause of autism by the end
Speaker 10: of the summer, and they are claiming that the cause
Speaker 10: of autism is taking tyle and all when you're pregnant,
Speaker 10: and that's not true. And to talk about how unbelievably
Speaker 10: vile and unhinged this is. Is Crystal, who's a unionized
Speaker 10: abortion care worker who is also Clozilla on Blue Sky
Speaker 10: and a friend of the show, Done many things. Welcome
Speaker 10: to the show.
Speaker 11: Yeah, thank you so much, Mea.
Speaker 12: It's always so wonderful to come and talk about horrifying
Speaker 12: things with you and be filled with existential dread together.
Speaker 6: It's so good.
Speaker 10: And by good, I mean the worst thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 12: I'm like, this is such a great time to be
Speaker 12: a trans, non binary abortion care worker. I just love
Speaker 12: I love like being hated in so many different ways.
Speaker 12: You just like a rich tapestry of hatred towards you.
Speaker 12: It's really great, so good.
Speaker 10: So okay. That's actually kind of where I want to
Speaker 10: start about this is that most of the media coverage
Speaker 10: of this has been purely focusing on the tail and
Speaker 10: all causing autism, well especifically that causing autism. And I
Speaker 10: want to point out because most of the news articles
Speaker 10: that cover this simply do not mention this. They are
Speaker 10: also claiming that taking tail and all if your pregnant
Speaker 10: causes ADHD, a thing which you think would be noteworthy
Speaker 10: to point out, but has just not. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 10: I don't know why people aren't reading the transcript. I
Speaker 10: don't know why, but they're not.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I actually hadn't seen that part.
Speaker 12: Like I was literally just reading and observing like just
Speaker 12: the pregnancy and what that means for you know, pregnant people,
Speaker 12: and I like didn't see any of the ADHD stuff,
Speaker 12: So that was new when you brought that up to me.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's it's just not being reported on. It's really baffling.
Speaker 10: So I want to before we sort of busy get
Speaker 10: into the wait, hold on, why the fuck are they
Speaker 10: doing this? What is happening here? Because and as Chris
Speaker 10: Oligo had to say, actually toile it all is safe
Speaker 10: for people who are pregnant, it's fine. But I want
Speaker 10: to go over a bit of like what's actually in
Speaker 10: this because it's a really really weird. We're gonna be
Speaker 10: getting more into the sort of like into the autism
Speaker 10: angle in another episode next week, but I want to
Speaker 10: talk a little bit about just like the actual stuff
Speaker 10: that was in this announcement where Trump is saying that
Speaker 10: a you shouldn't give talle all to pregnant people and
Speaker 10: also saying like you shouldn't give it to like young children,
Speaker 10: and is like, you know, it's like ranting about like
Speaker 10: mercury and aluminum in vaccines, which like, this shit isn't real,
Speaker 10: Like there hasn't even been anything like even remotely related
Speaker 10: to mercury vaccines for ages. It also never did anything,
Speaker 10: but this is all weird andiw Wakefield special shit. He
Speaker 10: also has this thing where he's talking about like how
Speaker 10: you should separate the MMR vaccines, which is a thing
Speaker 10: that if you have seen the h bomber Guy video
Speaker 10: you will know. The reason that that was an anti
Speaker 10: vax talking point was because Wakefield was selling separate vaccines,
Speaker 10: and so he was trying to convince parents that having
Speaker 10: all three of the vaccines that once to give their
Speaker 10: kids autism, but if you did it separately, it wouldn't
Speaker 10: through scientific things that don't make any sense, even according
Speaker 10: to his own incredibly made up bullshit. Wakefield, by the way,
Speaker 10: is the guy who sort of kicked off the modern
Speaker 10: anti vaccine movements by abusing a bunch of children and
Speaker 10: publishing an incredibly fake study and then getting it retracted,
Speaker 10: and then getting is midical license retracted because it was
Speaker 10: incredibly fake and abused children. So Trump is sort of
Speaker 10: just repeating the stuff that he's like vaguely remembers. There's
Speaker 10: there's a whole bunch of this sort of like stuffy
Speaker 10: vaguely remembers, like he's he's he goes on a random
Speaker 10: rant about like how Cuba doesn't have taile at all,
Speaker 10: so they don't have autism, and that homage people and
Speaker 10: this is the one that goes around loss like, oh,
Speaker 10: seople don't have autism because they don't take drugs, and
Speaker 10: it's like, oh my god. I also just I want
Speaker 10: to read a quote from RFK Junior about this, which,
Speaker 10: again and I want to point this out, the actual
Speaker 10: point of this thing is announcing that the FDA is
Speaker 10: not going to recommend that you take a set of
Speaker 10: metaphine or tiland all if you're pregnant. I'm just going
Speaker 10: to read this and I'm gonna ask if you can
Speaker 10: figure out what the link between this and tail and
Speaker 10: all is. This is from RFK Junior quote. President Trump
Speaker 10: believes that we should be listening to these mothers instead
Speaker 10: of gas lighting and marginalizing them, marginalizing them like prior administrations,
Speaker 10: some of our friends like to say we should believe
Speaker 10: all women. Some of these same people have been silencing
Speaker 10: and demonizing these mothers for three decades because research on
Speaker 10: the potential link between autism and vaccines has been suppressed
Speaker 10: in the past.
Speaker 12: So is this basically talking about kind of like the
Speaker 12: celebrity anti vax people and like the grifters.
Speaker 10: And yeah, yeah, it's like I can't believe that. Oh,
Speaker 10: I mean I can believe but like a the fact
Speaker 10: that RFK Junior noted repeat did Lee accused of sexual
Speaker 10: assault and whose response, when asked to about it was quote,
Speaker 10: I have a lot of skeletons in my closet. Is
Speaker 10: doing believe all women? But about vaccines causing autism?
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean it's only just like a talking point
Speaker 12: that they can use in their favor, he is, it's
Speaker 12: never actually about you know it?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 10: Oh god? And like that, like this is just like
Speaker 10: the average thing in this speech that isn't barely even
Speaker 10: getting neuse coverage.
Speaker 11: I mean there's also what Trump said as well, which
Speaker 11: oh yeah.
Speaker 12: Because I've seen a lot of that too, And it's
Speaker 12: like between what Trump said, and what RFK Junior said,
Speaker 12: it's like what where do you even like, where does
Speaker 12: the media focus? Like, how do you explain this to
Speaker 12: the American audience?
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's it's ridiculous. And then they also brought in
Speaker 10: Marty mcerray, who's the Commissioner of the FDA, who has
Speaker 10: the giant rants about how, like I learned in medical school,
Speaker 10: just treat fevers, low grade fevers with the seed of metaphine.
Speaker 10: Why what are we doing a study out of hop
Speaker 10: it's actually showed treating a fever can prolong the duration
Speaker 10: of illness in a young child. Maybe that's because fever
Speaker 10: is a body's natural way of ridding an infection.
Speaker 11: Yeah, well that's absolutely not true.
Speaker 12: I mean there's like we know that like fevers are
Speaker 12: dangerous for young children and pregnant people.
Speaker 11: It's yeah, I don't, I don't know. It's just it's
Speaker 11: just total made up bullshit.
Speaker 10: Like it's just eugenics, right, Like they're they're like, oh, no,
Speaker 10: you shouldn't actually do anything to treat the illnesses because
Speaker 10: if the child is strong, then like they'll go through
Speaker 10: it naturally and they'll become stronger. And it's like, no,
Speaker 10: that's eugenics.
Speaker 12: Yeah, this goes for the pregnancy of it all too,
Speaker 12: because it's about being able to suffer and enduring. And
Speaker 12: it's it's the same case, the same kind of like
Speaker 12: puritanical survival of the fittest eugenics shit, whether you're talking
Speaker 12: about pregnancy or you're talking about like literally young.
Speaker 11: Children who have fevers, same same like approach.
Speaker 10: Yeah. This also links directly back to what they're trying
Speaker 10: to do here, right, because the thing that they're trying
Speaker 10: to do is get rid of autistic people.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like they.
Speaker 10: Don't want there to be children born with autism. Yeah,
Speaker 10: And in order to do this, they are willing to
Speaker 10: not take vaccines. They are willing to well, I mean,
Speaker 10: I guess I guess, I guess I should say not
Speaker 10: letting pregnant people take tail and all is really truly
Speaker 10: the most some of you must die. But that's sacrifice
Speaker 10: I'm willing to make. Thing that I've ever seen. But
Speaker 10: it's you know, it's absolutely hideous. There's like, yeah, these
Speaker 10: people they don't want autistic kids to be born, you know.
Speaker 10: And that's also just straight up part of the eugenics
Speaker 10: thing that the project that they're doing, right, there's on
Speaker 10: the one hand, the sort of pure survival of the fittest,
Speaker 10: fuck them kids, let them just die of fevers, and
Speaker 10: then on the other hand there's the just active like, oh,
Speaker 10: we're just gonna do all this stuff that we think
Speaker 10: will just make auld there not be autistic kids.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and they definitely care more about their being less
Speaker 12: autistic children than there are about actually, like you know,
Speaker 12: addressing infant mortality. Yeah, and it's definitely it's treating autism
Speaker 12: as in something that can be prevented by the choice
Speaker 12: of the parents, as opposed to it just being something
Speaker 12: that some people are born that way. Also, you know,
Speaker 12: same with being queer and trans and all these things.
Speaker 12: It's this idea that you can like choose it, that
Speaker 12: you can, like, if the parents are strong enough and
Speaker 12: they can endure enough pain and they can suffer enough,
Speaker 12: and if they you know, make the right choices, then
Speaker 12: they can avoid having a child with autism. And it's
Speaker 12: not really that dissimilar than like, oh, what to do
Speaker 12: if you like have a queer child, a trans child.
Speaker 12: It's this idea that like that is something that can
Speaker 12: be controlled and eliminated, which is eugenics, which is you know,
Speaker 12: as you've been saying, so.
Speaker 10: Definitely, Uh, do you know what isn't eugenics?
Speaker 12: The products and services? I would really hope, so fucking hope.
Speaker 10: I really I don't know. I cannot. I don't know
Speaker 10: what these ads are going to be if they are eugenics,
Speaker 10: let us know at I right, okay on Twitter in
Speaker 10: blue Sky. Actually I don't know if you still on Twitter,
Speaker 10: I have no idea, but on their in ages? Who
Speaker 10: these ads? We are back? So let's talk about specifically
Speaker 10: the don't use Thailand all of it all. Can you
Speaker 10: talk a bit about just like the importance of tailan
Speaker 10: al and pain management for pregnant people.
Speaker 12: Yeah, And I bet like there's definitely probably people out
Speaker 12: there who are like, why tiland All, Why did they
Speaker 12: choose this?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 11: Where did this come from? Is it because Trump can't
Speaker 11: say a sentimentophen?
Speaker 12: You know a lot of people have been, you know, speculating,
Speaker 12: And first off, I do want to say that autism
Speaker 12: predates tilan all, Like, oh, like Thailand all like came
Speaker 12: to be in like the nineteen fifties, and you know,
Speaker 12: autism existed before that and has probably already always been
Speaker 12: around to some degree, which we don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 12: It's it's a very complex and we're still you know,
Speaker 12: there's been so much stigma around it for so long
Speaker 12: that it's difficult to talk about. But thilanol is basically
Speaker 12: one of the only pain medications that pregnant people can take,
Speaker 12: and that's why it's tail and all. I think that
Speaker 12: that is the way of looking at this, where it's like,
Speaker 12: why did they single out this medication, and it's because
Speaker 12: it's the only pain medication that a pregnant person can take,
Speaker 12: because as we know, there's other pain medications like the
Speaker 12: N SAIDs, like hyboprofen and aproxen, and then of course
Speaker 12: there's opioids, which is obviously not good during pregnancy. They
Speaker 12: of course, talk to your doctor, because I'm not a doctor,
Speaker 12: and you should always get this from doctors. Talk to
Speaker 12: your obgian. But N SAIDs are typically not recommended in
Speaker 12: the last three months of pregnancy because they can cause
Speaker 12: issues with amniotic fluid and baby's kidneys and things like that.
Speaker 12: So it is typically recomoned that you avoid byboprofen and
Speaker 12: other things like that, and you take tile and all
Speaker 12: to reduce fevers, to reduce pain. Obviously, there is a
Speaker 12: lot to be sick with when you're pregnant. There's a
Speaker 12: lot of source of pain. You know, Fever and headaches
Speaker 12: are definitely something that pregnant people experience. But pretty much
Speaker 12: like because it is the only pain medication that pregnant
Speaker 12: people can take, then it's really easy to be like, oh, well,
Speaker 12: what are they taking? This is what they're taking, and
Speaker 12: then you can go from there. And this is very
Speaker 12: much coming from It feels so weird saying this coming
Speaker 12: from like a biblical sense of like Eve eat the apple.
Speaker 12: Eve is the original sinner. I think, I don't know, like,
Speaker 12: you know, Eve did the bad thing. So Eve needs
Speaker 12: to suffer during pregnancy. All women need to suffer during pregnancy.
Speaker 12: That's very much like a very biblical take on this.
Speaker 12: And I think that is kind of why why tile
Speaker 12: and all, because it's what pregnant people are taking to
Speaker 12: reduce pain and to address fevers.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I want to read a quote from the
Speaker 10: Commissioner of the FDA that he gave while he was
Speaker 10: speaking about this, where he says, quote, when my wife
Speaker 10: was pregnant and delivered our son a few months ago,
Speaker 10: they pushed her to take a seat of metaphine for
Speaker 10: a low grade fever. She said no, and then they
Speaker 10: looked at me and I said absolutely no. I'm also
Speaker 10: here to announce good news today, the FDA is filing
Speaker 10: a federal registered notice to change the label on an
Speaker 10: exciting treatment called prescription look over and so it can
Speaker 10: be available to children with autism. So you could see
Speaker 10: like how casually he is doing just doing this like no, no, no, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 10: Like I'm really proud of my wife for saying no
Speaker 10: to taking tyle lanol for a fever, and like they
Speaker 10: also look look at this and it's like the like, oh,
Speaker 10: they pushed her to take a seat of metaphine for
Speaker 10: a low grade fever. It's like that's an extremely normal
Speaker 10: thing for a doctor to say to you, Like, take
Speaker 10: time ellenol for your fever is like the least like
Speaker 10: medically invasive thing a doctor can possibly recommend. Like what
Speaker 10: are we doing here?
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's really basic medicine. And also like there's like
Speaker 12: there's a ways to profit off of this too, because
Speaker 12: if you can't take any pain medication when you're pregnant,
Speaker 12: but you can take I think they were recommending something
Speaker 12: like I don't even know it was like something fullic
Speaker 12: acid thingy. They were recommending that you take something which
Speaker 12: obviously now can be like profit off of and sold.
Speaker 12: This is a very capitalist, very grifter approach to medicine
Speaker 12: and healthcare because obviously, always talk to your doctor and
Speaker 12: your obgian about taking any medication when you're pregnant, Like,
Speaker 12: talk to your doctor.
Speaker 11: They're going to be the best source of information.
Speaker 10: So the fullic acid thing is a licoverin, which is
Speaker 10: a medicine for anemia and counteracting the effects of chemotherapy meds.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I wouldn't.
Speaker 10: And then there's specifically like, oh, this will stop your
Speaker 10: children from having autism. Okay, no it won't.
Speaker 11: No, no, no no.
Speaker 12: I mean like there are there are respected organizations speaking
Speaker 12: up right now kind of like about like the facts,
Speaker 12: about the studies, about what's real. So there's like Physicians
Speaker 12: for Reproductive Health, you know, saying like there's decades of
Speaker 12: study of studies of Thailand all being safe to take
Speaker 12: during pregnancy. There's a COG, which is a big professional
Speaker 12: membership organization of like tens of thousands of obgyns saying like, hey,
Speaker 12: Thailand all is safe during pregnancy. So there's been decades
Speaker 12: of studies on thailan al use and pregnancy. Some of
Speaker 12: the studies published in the Journal of the American Medical
Speaker 12: Association that says how safe it is, So like it
Speaker 12: is it is, it is safe. It is absolutely one
Speaker 12: hundred percent safe to take to treat pain and fever
Speaker 12: during pregnancy. So, like, you know, in terms of like
Speaker 12: who can you look to, Like, definitely look at the
Speaker 12: obgyns right now and what they're saying and the physicians
Speaker 12: and these respected organizations, because they're going to tell you
Speaker 12: the truth. But the problem is that that this information
Speaker 12: is not reaching the public.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and instead, yeah, they're just getting the President of
Speaker 10: the United States and all of these just weird conspiracy
Speaker 10: people that they've installed as the people running the US
Speaker 10: medical establishment being like, oh no, actually this is really
Speaker 10: bad for you for reasons.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's all very vague, it's not really backed by
Speaker 12: like decades of medical research. And like also too, there's
Speaker 12: so many people who have not taken any medication during
Speaker 12: pregnancy and they still have children who are autistic.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's just like it's just absolutely ridiculous. And like
Speaker 10: any way you look at the numbers, like in terms
Speaker 10: of you know, if you look at like the increasing
Speaker 10: race of tile and all usage by pregnant people versus
Speaker 10: like autistic kids. It's not like the timely usage goes
Speaker 10: up way higher and then the autistic numbers don't change
Speaker 10: that much relative to it. It's just like it's all
Speaker 10: just the nonsense.
Speaker 11: Well so, so.
Speaker 12: There is the eugenics of it all, and there's also
Speaker 12: the aspect that we've been dealing with with the rampant
Speaker 12: abortion bands and the criminalization of pregnancy that we've been
Speaker 12: seeing over honestly over the decades. It's about controlling bodies
Speaker 12: and like this is also with trans healthcare too, Like
Speaker 12: it's about it's about eugenics, about kind of this necropolitics
Speaker 12: of choosing who lives and dies and being able to
Speaker 12: choose everything about a person's body, even how they're just stated,
Speaker 12: you know, like oh, the parents shouldn't take this and
Speaker 12: they shouldn't do this, And then it opens up when
Speaker 12: it comes to control and surveillance and criminalization of a
Speaker 12: pregnant person that can go in so many different directions
Speaker 12: because you know they're telling you not to take tile
Speaker 12: and all. If they just randomly chose tilan Al, they
Speaker 12: can randomly choose anything. They could talk about epidurals, because
Speaker 12: there is like this idea that you should suffer and
Speaker 12: that you shouldn't shoot the fever, and that you should
Speaker 12: experience pain during pregnancy, just like that one quote that
Speaker 12: you shared about his wife. So they're going to like
Speaker 12: start targeting other things. And also there's already so much
Speaker 12: criticism and control and judgment and stigma over things like
Speaker 12: if you're working while you're pregnant, if you're drinking coffee
Speaker 12: while you're pregnant, if you're eating certain things. There's already
Speaker 12: so much like policing over pregnant bodies without even touching
Speaker 12: on abortion, but like they're also trying to control how
Speaker 12: you even dispose of pregnancies, Like if you're looking at
Speaker 12: the states that are requiring you to call the police
Speaker 12: if you have a miscarriage, so that it's like they
Speaker 12: want to control how you miscarry, how you have an abortion.
Speaker 12: Worth noting too, because this is absolutely connected to abortion
Speaker 12: and abortion pills. If the government is coming out and
Speaker 12: saying that tail and all causes autism and it's not
Speaker 12: safe to take while you're pregnant or to use to
Speaker 12: treat a fever in young children, then they can also
Speaker 12: say things like the abortion pill is not safe because
Speaker 12: they've been trying to get the FDA to take away
Speaker 12: the approval of mifipristoe saying that it's danger is And
Speaker 12: you know, if they're going to say that tile and
Speaker 12: all is dangerous and causes autism, then it's like it's
Speaker 12: going to be so easy for them to say that
Speaker 12: the abortion pill is deadly as well.
Speaker 10: And they've already been doing this with vaccines in terms
Speaker 10: of like it like they've been restricting access to vaccines
Speaker 10: to people without pre existing conditions, which admittedly is a
Speaker 10: lot of people, Like the list of pre existing conditions
Speaker 10: is really long and you should just try to get
Speaker 10: them anyways. But like, yeah, like this isn't a hypothetical.
Speaker 10: They are already doing this with vaccines, a thing that
Speaker 10: we do all need in order to not get horribly
Speaker 10: sick and die from plagues, a thing which there are
Speaker 10: many of right now.
Speaker 12: Yeah, And I think that this definitely goes to show
Speaker 12: how topics like abortion and early pregnancy loss and miscarriage
Speaker 12: and abortions later in pregnancy, like the way they've been
Speaker 12: talking about this has spread to all aspects of pregnancy,
Speaker 12: and it's spreading to other areas too, Like so when
Speaker 12: we haven't addressed the bands and the stigma and the criminalization,
Speaker 12: it's it's been spreading. It's to vaccines, it's spreading to
Speaker 12: trans healthcare. It's just it's just I feel like I've
Speaker 12: been watching this black hole just grow and grow and
Speaker 12: grow over the years and and just take away our
Speaker 12: access to these to these really basic medical things. And yeah,
Speaker 12: like I just see, like we let it happen with abortion,
Speaker 12: and then now all of a sudden, now we can't
Speaker 12: take thailan all during pregnancy because it caused autism. Yep,
Speaker 12: there's so much to say about the eugenics and autism
Speaker 12: aspect of this, so much to say more than like
Speaker 12: we can say right now.
Speaker 10: Don't worry. There will be another episode of this show
Speaker 10: about yeah, with some doctors next week probably just.
Speaker 12: Like focusing right now on like pregnancy and policing pregnant
Speaker 12: bodies and tail and all and paid bandage and what's
Speaker 12: real the fact that tailan al is safe to take
Speaker 12: while pregnant and doesn't cause autism.
Speaker 11: You know, it's really dwelling on that. But like, there
Speaker 11: is a lot to say.
Speaker 12: There's a lot to say about the implications of this
Speaker 12: where like where this came from in our society and
Speaker 12: where it's going, and it's all really horrifying.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's it's exceptionally bleak, but I do think and
Speaker 10: this is I think a theme we're going to be
Speaker 10: returning to a lot in the coming days and weeks.
Speaker 10: But like, the only silver lining for this is that
Speaker 10: this shit is not popular. It's just not People hate it.
Speaker 10: People hate the administration. They have been hating the administration.
Speaker 10: Every day it goes by, they hate it more, you know.
Speaker 10: And this is part of the control strategy, right, part
Speaker 10: of the reason why they're making these incredibly draconian moves
Speaker 10: into authoritarian moves into the domestic spheres because it's a
Speaker 10: way of suppressing descent, and they have to do that.
Speaker 10: They have to suppress dessense, and they have to take
Speaker 10: things from us, and they have to continue to try
Speaker 10: to just beat everyone into submission because they can't do
Speaker 10: it through actual persuasion. What they have is the violence
Speaker 10: of the state, and they're going to try to keep
Speaker 10: doing that. But the violence of the state only functions
Speaker 10: insofar as people allow it. Shoe function, you know, And
Speaker 10: this has always been sort of the secret of the
Speaker 10: United States, which is that like a bunch of the
Speaker 10: things that they're doing, or they're attacked as a crackdowns
Speaker 10: that they're attempting to do, are effectively unenforceable because people
Speaker 10: simply refuse to cooperate with them. And you know, this
Speaker 10: is a field well, I mean, I don't know until
Speaker 10: they just straight up ban tile and all. This is
Speaker 10: a thing where I guess we're mostly just trying to
Speaker 10: spread information, but like the things that they do can
Speaker 10: be opposed, and when people oppose them on mass they lose.
Speaker 10: And I don't know, I want to give people a little.
Speaker 11: Tiny bit of hope, you want to be positive.
Speaker 12: Yeah, So the deterioration of public health and the United
Speaker 12: States is absolutely state violence. Focusing on taile andol and
Speaker 12: stigmatizing autism and people with autism is like distracting from
Speaker 12: so many things that are actual public health emergencies. So
Speaker 12: when they're talking about pregnancy, they're talking about tilentel and autism.
Speaker 12: There are so much more severe things going on in
Speaker 12: the United States right now when it comes to both
Speaker 12: the health of pregnant people and infants. So there's the
Speaker 12: Black maternal mortality crisis, which is so severe in so
Speaker 12: many states that it's just constantly like abortion bands have
Speaker 12: made that even worse. There's terrible infant mortality rates rising
Speaker 12: in states. So for example, Mississippi declared infant debts and
Speaker 12: emergency because they halted that CDC information data collection program.
Speaker 12: So Mississippi declared a public health emergency from rising infant mortality.
Speaker 12: And there's also I mean, I believe that the abortion
Speaker 12: bands are a medical crisis as well. And there's also
Speaker 12: huge obgyn deserts in this country, Like we're seeing like
Speaker 12: the loss of obgyn health providers where people can't access
Speaker 12: a obgyn for miles and miles and miles and there's
Speaker 12: just entirely a lack of providers. These are all very
Speaker 12: very serious public health emergencies. And yet they're talking about autism.
Speaker 10: Yeah. Well, and as such as they're talking about is
Speaker 10: they're making all of these crises worse, Like specifically the
Speaker 10: opgyn crisis, It's like, yeah, I don't know, they've been
Speaker 10: kicking a bunch of people off of their access to
Speaker 10: of their access to government insurance, and like what does
Speaker 10: that to oh wait, hold on, it just absolutely annihilates
Speaker 10: the income and revenue base of a bunch of hospitals
Speaker 10: that already like weren't making much money in rural areas,
Speaker 10: and so more of them close because they lease their
Speaker 10: revenue sources, and suddenly all of these crises just continue
Speaker 10: to get worse.
Speaker 12: Yeah, So we have like this stigmatization of autism, parents
Speaker 12: of autistic children, trans people, trans children, when like they're
Speaker 12: focusing on this and they're vilifying and dog piling and
Speaker 12: stigmatizing and and all of these things these groups. While
Speaker 12: there is this snowballing of crises, the damage already just
Speaker 12: from Roe v. Wade being overturned in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 12: Like it's like been three years and there's just been
Speaker 12: this like cascading just ever increasing public health disasters from it.
Speaker 12: And yet we're we're stigmatizing vulnerable people.
Speaker 10: Yeah, in the ways that we've been talking about.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 10: Their ideology is about inflicting suffering on vulnerable people because
Speaker 10: they think that it's good. And that's a thing that's
Speaker 10: you know, i mean just obviously incompatible with public health
Speaker 10: as a concept, which is you know, part of why
Speaker 10: they're sort of dismantling it. Part of it is that
Speaker 10: these people are all like selling their own weird anti
Speaker 10: vaccine grift stuff that they've been selling for years and
Speaker 10: years and years and years, and all of this has
Speaker 10: just sort of come together into just the sort of
Speaker 10: abyss where every all, everything that was the public health
Speaker 10: infrastructure in this country, which was insufficient to begin with,
Speaker 10: i'd just been disappearing more and more into yeah.
Speaker 11: The erosion of our public health.
Speaker 12: You know, this isn't like new, these decades of you know,
Speaker 12: this coming into being where we are right now, but
Speaker 12: it's been really horrible to watch as a healthcare worker,
Speaker 12: as somebody who cares about just like everyone being able
Speaker 12: to get like evidence based care, have access to medical providers,
Speaker 12: and then also the ability to do whatever kind of
Speaker 12: health care they need to be able to do on
Speaker 12: their own as well to just have this solid medical information.
Speaker 12: And then also there's the public education of it all too,
Speaker 12: because already, like there's this attack on public education, which
Speaker 12: autistic children need a lot of support in order to thrive,
Speaker 12: and schools are you know, they could be equipped to
Speaker 12: do that where I've seen wonderful programs and wonderful education
Speaker 12: services that really set people up for success.
Speaker 11: And this goes for like everyone.
Speaker 12: Obviously, like any child is going to benefit from this,
Speaker 12: but it just it makes everything so much worse. A
Speaker 12: like parents and families and just autistic people just don't
Speaker 12: get enough support period, just like trans people as well.
Speaker 12: And then we're all just being thrown under the bus
Speaker 12: for the capitalist class and the elites so they can
Speaker 12: continue to like you know, hide their their pedophilia rings
Speaker 12: and like the whole just the fact that they're all
Speaker 12: like because like what you said earlier about RFK, Yeah,
Speaker 12: these are all a bunch of child molesters telling us
Speaker 12: that we're not strong or brave enough to endure pain
Speaker 12: that we can easily treat with the medical technology that
Speaker 12: we have. And I feel like I normally, I feel
Speaker 12: like I used to not talk like this. I used
Speaker 12: to not be like child molesters in the government, like
Speaker 12: I kind of fe but I'm like, this.
Speaker 11: Is literally where we are right now somehow.
Speaker 12: So here I am, like, you know, talking about til
Speaker 12: and all being safe for pregnant people Thailand all not
Speaker 12: causing autism, and then talking about the fact that our
Speaker 12: government is wrung run by a bunch of pedophiles. Not
Speaker 12: quite where I expected to be if you had talked
Speaker 12: to me like eight years ago.
Speaker 10: Maybe it's really something.
Speaker 11: It's it's really wild to be talking about this right now.
Speaker 11: And like we knew this was coming too.
Speaker 12: Like there's been months of whispers where it's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 12: they're going to say tilan all causes autism. So like this,
Speaker 12: I knew this was coming somehow. I don't even know how.
Speaker 10: It's just yeah.
Speaker 12: I feel like it's all very transparent and like there's
Speaker 12: leaks and there's whatever. But I like, I knew this
Speaker 12: was coming for months, and yet here we are.
Speaker 10: Here we are, Yeah, And I don't know. I think
Speaker 10: that's as good of a place to end unless you
Speaker 10: have anything else you want to make sure you get in.
Speaker 12: I just want to say again that it's safe to
Speaker 12: take tailan all during pregnancy and it doesn't cause autism.
Speaker 10: Yeah, absolutely, and tell everyone you.
Speaker 12: Know that and share good resources like ACOG acog Physicians
Speaker 12: for Reproductive Health PRH I believe is their initials acronym.
Speaker 10: We will put links to stuff in the description of this.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and also ask your doctor about medication that you
Speaker 12: should take, whether you're predunt or not. You know, it's
Speaker 12: cool to ask your doctor stuff, like just ask them questions.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, that is what they are there for.
Speaker 6: Gooddy and welcome to here.
Speaker 13: I'm Andrew Siege andrasm on YouTube and I'm here.
Speaker 4: With James Stout. For those of you wondering what my
Speaker 4: last name.
Speaker 13: Is, Hello, Hello, And for those who couldn't tell about
Speaker 13: my accent or maybe don't recognize it, I'm from Trinado, Tobago,
Speaker 13: but when and based and you may or may not
Speaker 13: have seen Trinad's name being called up in JD. Van's
Speaker 13: and Marco Rubio's mouths dately, particularly with the moves the
Speaker 13: US has been making in the Caribbean Sea as of late.
Speaker 13: So to provide a little context on the insighting incident
Speaker 13: of this episode, the current Prime Minister Trinado Biego came
Speaker 13: a PUSA prossessor, expressed very passionate support for the US's
Speaker 13: recent move on an alleged Venezuela based drug vessel. I
Speaker 13: say alleged because no proof has been provided that it
Speaker 13: was a drug vessel or anything of that nature that
Speaker 13: the United States struck. The Prime Minister said, and I quote,
Speaker 13: that she has no sympathy for traffickers and that the
Speaker 13: US should kill them all violently.
Speaker 4: Jesus Christ for those I.
Speaker 13: Mean most people do not know much about Trinitian politics.
Speaker 13: I don't expect them to. Our current prime minister she
Speaker 13: won this year actually, and she kind of carried on
Speaker 13: that trend of incumbent losing the elections that took place,
Speaker 13: you know, post COVID lockdown twenty twenty era. So the
Speaker 13: previous prime minister was Prime Minister, doctor Keith Rowley. He
Speaker 13: was prime minister for like ten years. He became prime
Speaker 13: Minister after she lost her last stint as prime minister.
Speaker 13: Because she's kind of a mess in a couple of
Speaker 13: different ways. I mean, both parties are pretty corrupt, but
Speaker 13: they're corrupt and incompetent in some very critical ways. Corrupt
Speaker 13: and racists and a couple other issues. That trend continues
Speaker 13: with her new candidacy. You know, she's not only feeling
Speaker 13: the country in some crucial ways. You know, she canceled
Speaker 13: our Independence Day celebrations. She fired like thousands of workers
Speaker 13: from a local agency that's responsible for landscaping around the
Speaker 13: country basically you know, cut in grass and clear entrains.
Speaker 6: That sort of thing.
Speaker 13: Fired like thousands of them, right, and all the entire
Speaker 13: country is overgrown and all those people have, like like
Speaker 13: right before their children have to go to school. You know,
Speaker 13: they had no income to support them. So there's like
Speaker 13: a lot of cruelty, a lot of corruption, a lot
Speaker 13: of incompetence, and in this particular case, diplomatic carelessness, recklessness
Speaker 13: because she goes and she says this despite the fact
Speaker 13: that not only the US violated law, international law, but
Speaker 13: also we are small. You may not be able to
Speaker 13: see train that in a lot of maps because we
Speaker 13: are small. You know, we may be one of the
Speaker 13: more populated Caribbean countries, but we are still small. Venezuela
Speaker 13: is our closest neighbor, and she has been exceedingly irresponsible
Speaker 13: in the ways that she approached Venezuela. Because the previous
Speaker 13: administration actually had an agreement with Venezuela regarding the extraction
Speaker 13: of their fossil fuels in the waters that are between
Speaker 13: Trinidad and Venezuela. We had to get permission from the
Speaker 13: United States to get into that agreement with Venezuela because
Speaker 13: Venezuela is currently under sanction, and for the longest time,
Speaker 13: Trinad has had to walk this sort of tight rope
Speaker 13: of playing nice with both the US and Venezuela. She's
Speaker 13: basically come in guns blazon to make state months that
Speaker 13: appear to be openly aggressive towards Venezuela, towards Venezuela.
Speaker 6: And sovereignty and so on.
Speaker 13: Now, her reasoning is that Trinidad has been ravaged by
Speaker 13: a lot of violence and addiction that have been caused
Speaker 13: by these drug cartails coming from South America, including Venezuela.
Speaker 13: This is a very real issue, the illegal gun and
Speaker 13: drug and human trafficking that takes place between South America
Speaker 13: and Trinidad. We are transship one point for that sort
Speaker 13: of activity, and that kind of thing brings violence.
Speaker 6: The US.
Speaker 13: Two is that while she may be able to say
Speaker 13: things like make God bless and protect the members of
Speaker 13: the US military, the US and the US military are
Speaker 13: in part responsible for the violence that is ravaged Latin America.
Speaker 6: But it's also not even particularly interested.
Speaker 13: Regardless of what their words may say, they're not particularly
Speaker 13: interested in deal with with the drug issue. At the
Speaker 13: end of the day, it really comes down to regime
Speaker 13: change and a desire to control then as well as resources.
Speaker 13: But let me take it back for a moment and
Speaker 13: provide a longer history of what's going on.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 13: The United States became independent in seventeen seventy six. You know,
Speaker 13: Trinidad became a colony of the UK in seventeen ninety seven,
Speaker 13: not long after that, because prior to being under the UK,
Speaker 13: Trinado was under the Spanish, and while being under the
Speaker 13: Spanish was settled by French settlers, so it was like
Speaker 13: Spanish laws French settlers and then later.
Speaker 6: On UK governance.
Speaker 13: And so the War of eighteen twelve, which is you know,
Speaker 13: the war took place between the US and the UK,
Speaker 13: led to some African Americans siding with the UK and
Speaker 13: exchange for emancipation and in exchange for their services in
Speaker 13: that war. That group of people, which became North Americans,
Speaker 13: were resettled in South Trinidad and actually descended from some
Speaker 13: of them allegedly, So there is this history of exchange
Speaker 13: taking place between the US and Trinidad. You know, during
Speaker 13: World War Two, America had military bases established in Trinidad.
Speaker 13: We had Wall of Field which was commissioned in nineteen
Speaker 13: forty one and the Chagram Must Naval Base which was
Speaker 13: fully operational nineteen forty three, and that provided strategy, naval
Speaker 13: and air facilities in the Caribbean. Thanks to the destroyers
Speaker 13: for basses agreement with the British. The British got destroyers
Speaker 13: and the US got basis in the British colonies. Now,
Speaker 13: thankfully the BASS was scale back and eventually decommissioned and
Speaker 13: return into Trinian Tobey was controlled by nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 13: but that took a lot of protest and margin to accomplish.
Speaker 13: It was a whole thing or trying to get Yankee
Speaker 13: out of Trinidad. Yankee did provide some benefits to Trinidad
Speaker 13: in terms of establishing infrastructure for highways and that sort
Speaker 13: of thing, but there was also a not so positive social.
Speaker 6: Impact of the American presence.
Speaker 13: You know, one Calypsonian known as the Mighty Sparu sang
Speaker 13: in a song called Gene and Dina that basically the
Speaker 13: American presence funded a lot of households due to prostitution well,
Speaker 13: and the song was basically about how Jane and Dinah
Speaker 13: had to go and find other work now that the
Speaker 13: Americans were leaving. So, after the failure of the West
Speaker 13: Indies Federation and the independence of countries like Jamaica and
Speaker 13: Trinantobago from the UK, the location of the former military
Speaker 13: base Shagaramas also ended up becoming the temporary location of
Speaker 13: the capital of the short lived Westerndies Federation. After the
Speaker 13: West Indies Federation broke apart, Shagrammas became the place where
Speaker 13: the Treaty of Chagaramas was signed between the newly independent
Speaker 13: countries of Trinando, Tobago and Jamaica and so forth, which
Speaker 13: established Cara comm the Caribbean Community and Common Market in
Speaker 13: nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 6: CARACOM will come up later.
Speaker 13: Cara Commas kind of like if the EU was like
Speaker 13: entirely toothless and didn't really do much of anything. It's
Speaker 13: like a nice idea of trying to get a bit
Speaker 13: of regional collabor and inspiration and trade and movement. But
Speaker 13: it's still more expensive to go between islands than it
Speaker 13: is to go from an island in the US. So
Speaker 13: CARACOM hasn't exactly succeeded in facilitating ireland movement thus far.
Speaker 13: But CARACOM will come up later on right trying Tobago
Speaker 13: buyet independence in nineteen sixty two. We became a republic
Speaker 13: in nineteen seventy six, and we were under the Prime
Speaker 13: ministership of doctor Eric Williams from nineteen sixty two to
Speaker 13: nineteen eighty one. Now, doctor Eric Williams, you know, was
Speaker 13: our first prime minister, and so he's respecting that regard.
Speaker 13: He also wrote Capitalism and Slavery, which was a really
Speaker 13: impactful piece of literature on the you know, role of
Speaker 13: capitalism in the abolition of slavery, or rather the economic
Speaker 13: motivation for the abolitioners as opposed to the claimed moral
Speaker 13: virtue of the British Empire in abolish and slavery when
Speaker 13: it did right, right. So he did some good academic
Speaker 13: work and you know, he was instrumental in the establishments
Speaker 13: of Trinantibago was an independent country, but he also suppressed
Speaker 13: the black power movements that took place a little while
Speaker 13: after we became independent because of his failures. He also
Speaker 13: banned the Trindadian born American immigrant Quamitia otherwise known as
Speaker 13: Totally Carmichael, which is like a world renowned socialist and panafganist.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 13: So, through the seventies we had an oil boom and
Speaker 13: we became really really industrialized. We had another boom in
Speaker 13: two thousands, and unlike other Cribean countries, we didn't have
Speaker 13: to be dependent on tourism, and so we ended up
Speaker 13: going in a different developmental direction. The thing about the
Speaker 13: oil booms is that they really had more to do
Speaker 13: with sitting happenings in the Middle East than really anything
Speaker 13: that we did. You know, the oil bom just kind of.
Speaker 6: Fell on our lapse in that way.
Speaker 13: Right three, there was an invasion of Grenada by the
Speaker 13: United States after Maurice Bishop's who and the Organization of
Speaker 13: Eastern Caribbean States Dominica, Barbados and Jamaica called for the
Speaker 13: US to come an assist in dealing with this Marxist
Speaker 13: Leninist get in power in Grenada, while Tranto Bago, the UK,
Speaker 13: and Canada criticized the invasion. It was a violation of
Speaker 13: international law according to the UN General Assembly, but as usual,
Speaker 13: the law doesn't really apply to the US, so nothing
Speaker 13: really came.
Speaker 6: Out of that.
Speaker 13: Otherwise, the relation between the US and Trinato Bago has
Speaker 13: been you know, we have a lot of trade. You know,
Speaker 13: we have a large diaspora in the US. There's a
Speaker 13: lot of travel between the countries. Most of our tourism
Speaker 13: comes from the US. We have a lot of American
Speaker 13: based oil and gas companies established in Trinidad, and our
Speaker 13: whole consumerist culture is basically a copy in many ways
Speaker 13: of what the US does when they sneeze, we catch
Speaker 13: a cool as the saying goes, Yeah, I know, I'm
Speaker 13: establishing a lot of context, but it's together an idea
Speaker 13: of how we are where we are right now. Right, so,
Speaker 13: next door to Trina, we have Venezuela, and we really
Speaker 13: had this sort of diplomatic relationship going on with Maduro
Speaker 13: and the USA at the same time under the former
Speaker 13: Prime Minister, doctor Keith Roudi, who was of the same
Speaker 13: party as our.
Speaker 6: First Prime minister, Doctor arc Williams.
Speaker 13: Right with the issues taking place in Venezuela right now,
Speaker 13: there's been a large influx of migrants from Venezuela living Intronautobego.
Speaker 6: Right now, we'll mainly Trinidade.
Speaker 13: Yeah, right, I have a lot of Venezuelans now living
Speaker 13: in trinad some of them legally, some of them illegally.
Speaker 13: Prior to that recent wave, and by recent I'm talking
Speaker 13: like twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, Prior to that wave, we
Speaker 13: had Venezuelans introing that and we had Trinadians in Venezuela.
Speaker 6: Because you know, we're neighbors, right, it's close, you know.
Speaker 13: See you had Trinadians involved in the mining sector in Venezuela.
Speaker 13: You had Venezuelan's involved in the cucoa plantations in Trinidad.
Speaker 6: So we've always been a very.
Speaker 13: Mixed up group, right right, And this idea of strict
Speaker 13: border control between the countries is a very recent, politically
Speaker 13: motivated situation. Now with everything going on in Latin America
Speaker 13: thanks to the US intervention and the US is constantly
Speaker 13: failing war on drugs, we have a lot of violence
Speaker 13: passing between our our territories, you know, guns, drugs, human trafficking,
Speaker 13: as I mentioned. Yeah, and then Venezuela now is I
Speaker 13: mean their hands are not clean. I'm not saying any
Speaker 13: country's hands are cleaning this. I'm not trying to pay
Speaker 13: into a good guy bad guy at ecotomy. You know,
Speaker 13: Venezuela is still whole and strong to this claim that
Speaker 13: they have from since before they're in the penance that
Speaker 13: like more than half.
Speaker 6: Of Guyana actually belongs to them.
Speaker 13: Guyana, by the way, is an English speaking Caribbean culture
Speaker 13: country border in Venezuela, Surinam and Brazil. So Guyana recently
Speaker 13: explored and discovered a bunch of offshore reserves which you know,
Speaker 13: they're really excited to capitalize upon, and you know they
Speaker 13: have a lot of deals and agreements taking place with
Speaker 13: that is concerned. All of a sudden, Venezuela's like, you
Speaker 13: know that piece of land that we've long been saying
Speaker 13: is ours, Yeah, that that really is ours. And they started,
Speaker 13: you know, they're putting out maps claiming that most of
Speaker 13: Guyana is actually Venezuela and all these different things. So
Speaker 13: it's a very it's a very threatening situation because Venezuela
Speaker 13: is a military power in its own right, Yeah right,
Speaker 13: Guyana turned out we don't have much military prowess. So
Speaker 13: in a sense, I understand why both Trinidad and Guyana
Speaker 13: are cozying up with the US right now. But at
Speaker 13: the same time, this recent administration's cozying up has not
Speaker 13: been the most tactful, you know, because we do have
Speaker 13: a diplomatic approach that has worked well for US for
Speaker 13: a very long time. Now, the argument coulding made that
Speaker 13: maybe that diplomatic response, a diplomatic balance cannot be maintained
Speaker 13: forever our you know, neutrality cannot persist as things are
Speaker 13: heating up in the region. But we had an opportunity
Speaker 13: to respond carefully to respond in a measured fashion to
Speaker 13: the US's recent move with bombing the alleged drug vote.
Speaker 6: And we did not do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a pretty squndid chance to just like say,
Speaker 4: you know, we should respect international law here and and
Speaker 4: you know, like the easiest thing to say would be
Speaker 4: like there's a set of prodigious for doing this, we
Speaker 4: could follow them. Yeah, it's not hard to say that that.
Speaker 13: That that deal we had with Venezuela, that was a
Speaker 13: deal that we were able to negotiate on the bider.
Speaker 6: That was the deal.
Speaker 13: When Trump came into power, he just took back. He
Speaker 13: was like, Naya, can't do that anymore. So with Trump
Speaker 13: going in this either with US or against this kind
Speaker 13: of direction, that calls for extra you know care and
Speaker 13: you know you kind of dealing with a bomb that
Speaker 13: you're trying to work around, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 13: But in the same year that Trump got elected, Camera
Speaker 13: Pasad Prossessor, our current prime minister, got elected. You know,
Speaker 13: she's known for being reckless, she's known for being a
Speaker 13: bit of a drunkard. She's passionately pro Trump. She was
Speaker 13: a COVID conspiracist. In the vein of one of her
Speaker 13: famous Coats is sunlight will kill COVID. She's passionately pro us,
Speaker 13: passionately anti Muduru, passionately racist, and very much anti character. Okay,
Speaker 13: right now, there's a bit of a history there because
Speaker 13: Triniad and Guyana, two Caribbean countries, is very large East
Speaker 13: Indian populations, as in Indians from India. Yeah, when the
Speaker 13: Western New Federation was getting it start, both Guyana and
Speaker 13: Trinidad's Indian populations had the concern that, considering the rest
Speaker 13: of the Caribbean as black majority, that they would not
Speaker 13: be adequately represented in a West Indies federation.
Speaker 6: And so that sort of opposition to.
Speaker 13: That level of regional unity seems to have persisted within
Speaker 13: some circles of in East Indian or Indocribbean politics. Okay, interesting,
Speaker 13: not all right, but some seem to have an opposition
Speaker 13: to too much Carecom involvement because they feel that their
Speaker 13: voices were drowned out by black people. And I mean
Speaker 13: there's a lot of anti blackness in that community, but
Speaker 13: that is not the subject of this particular episode. So
Speaker 13: that sort of opposition to WES in these federation seems
Speaker 13: to have carried over into opposition towards Cara com and
Speaker 13: when there was loading out among P and M supporters,
Speaker 13: which is the party of Dr Rowley and Doctor Williams,
Speaker 13: as well as something parts to momentum taking place, Camela
Speaker 13: ended up coming into power, right, And when she came
Speaker 13: into power, she's making these moves, making these statements and
Speaker 13: disregarding cara Com and disregarding cara Comm's opinion, disregarding cara
Speaker 13: comm involvement in Trindad's moves and decisions.
Speaker 6: As a small country.
Speaker 13: Cara com is supposed to be our way of beefing
Speaker 13: up our voice on the international stage. And she's basically
Speaker 13: saying then that you know, we a will do our
Speaker 13: own thing, right. Yeah, Well, I forgot to mention another
Speaker 13: thing about Kamla, just for a bit of context. Cambridge
Speaker 13: Analytica came into turnd and basically ran an experiment using
Speaker 13: our elections to test out some new strategies they ended
Speaker 13: up taking into the US.
Speaker 14: Right.
Speaker 13: They practiced their electoral manipulation in Trinidad, which is how
Speaker 13: Kamla won in the first time she was elected back
Speaker 13: in twenty ten, twenty fifteen. It was through collaboration with
Speaker 13: Cambridge Analytica. So again yet another connection between the US
Speaker 13: and Trinidad for better and for weeks. Yeah, So what's
Speaker 13: happening now is that, you know, on the second of September,
Speaker 13: the US bombed Perrogue and claimed to kill ele from
Speaker 13: people and claimed that there was a drug vote, despite
Speaker 13: the fact that they haven't provided any proof that the
Speaker 13: footage was extremely grainy, and even if they did have
Speaker 13: proof that it was a drug vote. Summary execution on
Speaker 13: the High C's is not exactly in line with international though,
Speaker 13: right right. If these are quote unquote violent drug traffickers
Speaker 13: who are killing people and do not these ridiculous things,
Speaker 13: you're supposed to bring them in. You're supposed to interrogate them,
Speaker 13: You're supposed to go through a certain procedure.
Speaker 6: Right Yeah. All the smoking mirrors about.
Speaker 13: Drugs and fighting drugs and all these different things, it
Speaker 13: really is that smoking mirrors, because if it was about that,
Speaker 13: they would be trying to get information to target the
Speaker 13: heart of the operation. What the US is doing right
Speaker 13: now is flexing, right, Yeah, it's flexing their muscles in
Speaker 13: the region to show what it is willing to do.
Speaker 13: It's trying to poke and prod Veniceuelda correspond in kind
Speaker 13: so that it has the excuse it needs or the
Speaker 13: further excuse to intervene. There was another strike, another boat
Speaker 13: bombing on the fifteenth of September, and there was another
Speaker 13: strike on the ninth teenth of September against another boat.
Speaker 13: And it's a very very worrying place to be and
Speaker 13: time to be alive, right, I would say, you know,
Speaker 13: we have Guyana as a player. You know, they're still
Speaker 13: working with US oil companies. They collaborate with the US.
Speaker 13: They have this territorial anxiety with regards to Venezuela, and
Speaker 13: they're part of Cara com Guhyana's part of Cara Coom
Speaker 13: trying to you know, work it out through that channel
Speaker 13: and through other channels. Venezuela, in response to Camera's energy,
Speaker 13: has basically put out steep bands talking about, hey, this
Speaker 13: Cama lady kind of crazy or show about that because
Speaker 13: if any US missile comes out to Trinidad, we are
Speaker 13: responding to Trinidad.
Speaker 4: Right in Trinidad is like not the same as the US,
Speaker 4: right like like that, it is not like mutually assured
Speaker 4: destruction exactly.
Speaker 13: So she is, you know, speaking very recklessly and in
Speaker 13: the meantime, the Venezuela's saying response, you know, if any
Speaker 13: sort of US incursion is launched out of Trinidad, which
Speaker 13: she invited, by the way, she said, a US CAD
Speaker 13: based whatever they want and here if they want to
Speaker 13: be a standing ready we right. I don't know where
Speaker 13: she got this WII from, but she's saying, oh, yeah,
Speaker 13: they could come and they could you know, launch stuff
Speaker 13: from here. And Venezuela's like, you're talking kind of crazy
Speaker 13: right now. You should care about your citizens because we
Speaker 13: know your citizens don't like what you're doing, So why
Speaker 13: are you doing this kind of thing? Yeah, And it's
Speaker 13: bigger than just when as we love the US and Trinidad,
Speaker 13: because Venezuela is also aligned with Russia. Right, it's I
Speaker 13: believe Russia's only ally in the Western hemisphere.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 13: And while the drug issue and the crime issue is
Speaker 13: a significant concern, most of the drugs are coming from
Speaker 13: Colombia in the first place, which the US is not
Speaker 13: currently targeting.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 13: And at the end of the day, as I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 13: it seems to be coming down to regime change and
Speaker 13: resources and the control of Venezuela's resources. You know, we
Speaker 13: are now in a situation where our fishermen are having
Speaker 13: to stay home out of fail Oh geez, that their
Speaker 13: fishing boats could be struck out of the water.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Yeah, you know, we are in a situation where Camera's
Speaker 13: fan base is just as trumpion and cultish as the
Speaker 13: Marca based seemingly seems to be perfectly fine with what's
Speaker 13: going on. Although in some ways I think that that
Speaker 13: might even be astroturfed or inflated artificially, because there was
Speaker 13: recently an expos that determined a lot of the pro
Speaker 13: unc which is Camera's party, the pro unc pro Kamela
Speaker 13: buzz that occurs on social media.
Speaker 6: It's bot driven, Like you go into these.
Speaker 13: Profiles and their bots just you know, fake names, fake
Speaker 13: profer pictures, AI posts.
Speaker 4: Oh geez, yeah, yeah, it's just entirely fabricated.
Speaker 13: This is also at a time when the US is
Speaker 13: building a massive embassy in our country, when cameras seemingly
Speaker 13: open in the floodgates to military collaboration with the US,
Speaker 13: where we are dealing with our own economic woles and
Speaker 13: crime wars and so on. And you know, we also
Speaker 13: have the largest Chinese embassy in the region, and we
Speaker 13: have a lot of collab with China. We may recently
Speaker 13: made moves to recognize Palestine with a Palestinian diplomat now
Speaker 13: reside in the country. It feels like we are putting
Speaker 13: ourselves in a very risky position, and whether or not
Speaker 13: we could have done more or less to get out
Speaker 13: of this position, you know, considering the US has its
Speaker 13: backyard policy with regard to the rest of the Americas,
Speaker 13: with regard to the fact that Trump has created this
Speaker 13: Department of War, that the US seems to be flailing
Speaker 13: around as a dieing empire. Does the fact that the
Speaker 13: Criminan has been called out so frequently with violence in
Speaker 13: an effort to manufacture consent for what seems to be
Speaker 13: coming next, With the fact that there was a field
Speaker 13: intervention to overthrow Maduro in the past, known as Operation Gideon,
Speaker 13: right back in twenty twenty, all this has me a
Speaker 13: but stressed.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, there was a particularly insane attempt to
Speaker 4: throw Madeira in twenty twenty, right, the Silver Core thing.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, they had this American security foom and some
Speaker 13: Venezuelan dissidents just they tried to inflam as I see,
Speaker 13: and basically as soon as they landed they got arrested.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, I think some of them got detained by
Speaker 4: Venezuelan fishermen who realized they only had BB guns. It
Speaker 4: sucks that, Like having spent time in Venezuela and with
Speaker 4: Venezuelan people a lot, you know, for years now, it's
Speaker 4: Venezuelan people who are going to pay price for all
Speaker 4: of this, right, Like it's not and potentially people in
Speaker 4: Trinidut of Tobago as well, Like they very clearly do
Speaker 4: not want Maduro to be running their country, right. I
Speaker 4: saw that in the election, and we saw that in
Speaker 4: the protests after election. They have every reason to want
Speaker 4: to leave the country and go somewhere safe, but that's
Speaker 4: not possible for many of them.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean, like I said, there's a lot of
Speaker 13: Venezuelan's intron at right now. Yeah, so any moves that
Speaker 13: advanced with us make, and they're obviously going to make
Speaker 13: with consideration to the fact that they have their own
Speaker 13: people internet as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, And like they're being demonized even though they've
Speaker 4: done everything they can to separate themselves from Maduro and
Speaker 4: like they are being.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's unfortunately a lot of enophobia in Trinidad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really sad, like and we see it here too, Right,
Speaker 4: this allegation that they're all gang members, which is like,
Speaker 4: if we think that gang violence is bad in Venezuela
Speaker 4: and im parts of Venezuela is bad, then surely it
Speaker 4: would make sense to people who don't want any part
Speaker 4: in that might leave somewhere else. Yeah, and rather than
Speaker 4: supporting them, we're just we're just killing like the the
Speaker 4: lowest tier people, right, Like, even if we entertain the
Speaker 4: idea that the boat could have been carrying drugs, and
Speaker 4: when we put aside the fact that hasn't been proven
Speaker 4: of the boats plural the people driving the boats and
Speaker 4: other people like making the calls here, yeah, they're the
Speaker 4: people being.
Speaker 6: Killed, exactly exactly.
Speaker 13: It's the same principle with all these these these drug
Speaker 13: bus and and and gang bus that take place in Drainad.
Speaker 13: You know, they go and they roll in and they
Speaker 13: arrass these small fries, but the big bosses call them
Speaker 13: the shots unharmed. Yeah, you know, the multinational criminal empires
Speaker 13: that aren't moving the people and moving the drugs, moving
Speaker 13: the guns in the region, they're untouched.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And like even the Maduro's to nephews, like they were
Speaker 4: released after they were detained for trying to run drugs
Speaker 4: I hat right Like, like you say, the people making
Speaker 4: the real decisions are largely insulated from all this. It's
Speaker 4: working people in Venezuela who, like, they don't have other opportunities, right, Like,
Speaker 4: I have heard the most disheartening stories, especially for Venezuelan fishermen, right, Like,
Speaker 4: their economy is so bad that they are not able
Speaker 4: to put fuel in their boats. It wouldn't be economical
Speaker 4: to put fuel in their fishing boats, even if they
Speaker 4: caught a full load of fish. They wouldn't be able.
Speaker 4: No one has any money to buy the fish at
Speaker 4: a high price, so they can't pay for the fuel.
Speaker 4: And this is a country which sits on a massive
Speaker 4: oil reserve. But yeah, yeah, people can't afford to put
Speaker 4: fuel in their fishing boats. Like you know, these people
Speaker 4: are victims of a system that has left them with
Speaker 4: very few opportunities, and the way we're responding is by
Speaker 4: killing them and by destabilizing a whole part of the
Speaker 4: world that no one asks for this there, you know,
Speaker 4: apart from apparently your Prime minister.
Speaker 13: Yeah, so, I mean, this was a very rambly episode,
Speaker 13: more ambley than my usual, but I just wanted to
Speaker 13: get the word out on what's going on in my
Speaker 13: corner of the globe. To let the Americans and dance
Speaker 13: know to you know, please do what you can to
Speaker 13: stand to speak out against this American intervention. Educate yourself
Speaker 13: from what's going on. For trainees who may be in
Speaker 13: the audience, you know, probably hunkered down and have a
Speaker 13: crisis bag or emergency bag set up if worst comes
Speaker 13: to worst, and everyone else, really just get the knowledge
Speaker 13: and do what you can in your area to disrupt
Speaker 13: this machine.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, that's it for me. All power to all
Speaker 6: the people.
Speaker 10: Please, this is it could happen here.
Speaker 8: Executive Disorder our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the
Speaker 8: White House, the crumbling world what it means for you.
Speaker 8: I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Miawong Jamestown and
Speaker 8: Robert Evans. This week we're covering the week of September
Speaker 8: eighteen to September twenty four.
Speaker 4: Luckily, nothink that remarkable has happened as a bit short.
Speaker 8: One another famously slow newsweek in the United States of
Speaker 8: America and abroad. Only the most stable out of all
Speaker 8: democratic countries.
Speaker 2: Yeah oh yeah, I mean of the democracies were easily
Speaker 2: the most democratic.
Speaker 4: Shining city on a hill. It's all saying that's right,
Speaker 4: that's right, elevated. Yeah, so let's talk about this guy
Speaker 4: who opened fire and ice detention facility to start off with.
Speaker 2: Then sure, that's the big news story today is that
Speaker 2: there's been a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas.
Speaker 2: This is not the first shooting at a North Texas
Speaker 2: ice facility this year. Two detainees were killed and one injured.
Speaker 2: Last I saw, they were in an ice van. It
Speaker 2: looks like and the shooter killed themselves pretty quickly. It
Speaker 2: seems like, yeah, like fired a few rounds and then
Speaker 2: killed themselves.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Cash Hotel, who's the director to the FBI, shared pretty
Speaker 4: quickly after shooting on x dot com the Everything website
Speaker 4: a photo of a strip eclip of what looks a
Speaker 4: lot like ain't milimeter Mauser ammunition. One round had the
Speaker 4: wood anti ice written on it in blue pen in
Speaker 4: block capital letters.
Speaker 2: Yeah lazy, we can agree on that, like, especially compared
Speaker 2: to etching them onto a bullet. This has been I
Speaker 2: think immediately adopted by God. I mean, it seems like
Speaker 2: I haven't done a deep survey, but most of the
Speaker 2: liberals and leftists that I follow on both Twitter and
Speaker 2: Blue Sky, and on just looking at friends on Facebook.
Speaker 2: They have pretty immediately gone after this as a false
Speaker 2: flag or something.
Speaker 10: Liberals and left us casting doubt on the authenticity of this.
Speaker 2: I'm seeing both people be like, well, the shooter must
Speaker 2: have been a right winger who lazily put anti ice
Speaker 2: on the bullet or this is some sort of federal
Speaker 2: conspiracy but a lot of conspiracism here.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we simply don't know very much about the shooting
Speaker 8: at this point. It's unclear who the shooter was aiming for.
Speaker 8: If they were just aiming at Ice property right like
Speaker 8: unknowingly shooting like migrant detainees inside.
Speaker 2: Did they think whoever was an advan was a cop?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, most of this lines up with the person being
Speaker 4: the sort of person who ends up being a high
Speaker 4: profile shooter, right Like. They're not so much an ideologically
Speaker 4: motivated person. It's someone who, like you say, pretty low effort,
Speaker 4: wrote anti ice on their bullets at the last minute
Speaker 4: of not on the bullet but on the casing that
Speaker 4: holds the fucking powder that the bullet goes in. I
Speaker 4: can understand how that works.
Speaker 2: And this just fits. This is something I tried to
Speaker 2: talk about pretty regularly, shootings in the United States are
Speaker 2: heavily driven by mimetic spread.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: This has been happening since Columbine. There have been more
Speaker 2: than one hundred copycat shootings of Columbine. And you do
Speaker 2: have shooters who are let's say original, right, like the
Speaker 2: christ Church shooter, where they have new ideas for things
Speaker 2: to do in mass shootings, and then in the wake
Speaker 2: of those, because whenever someone does something really new, it
Speaker 2: gets a lot of attention, right, Like, if there's a
Speaker 2: mass shooting that like gets a lot more media coverage
Speaker 2: than other ones, there will be people who copy it
Speaker 2: and who copy specific aspects of that shooting. And what
Speaker 2: I'm seeing with this guy that kind of just fits
Speaker 2: into that pattern is you had a really high profile
Speaker 2: North Texas shooting at a nice facility. Then you had
Speaker 2: a really high profile shooting where somebody with a hunting
Speaker 2: rifle shot at targets from the top of a roof. Right,
Speaker 2: I'm seeing both of those things in this shooting, and
Speaker 2: I guess it's just like, yeah, that kind of scans
Speaker 2: to me, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess another thing that has been fueling this
Speaker 4: conspiracy zerm so the guy used a Mauser rifle, different
Speaker 4: type of Mauser rifle to the last one. It looks
Speaker 4: to me like a Con ninety eight.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The previous one was a very old Mauser that had
Speaker 2: been rebarreled the thirty eight to six, which is a
Speaker 2: very common American round. This one looks to have been
Speaker 2: an original Car ninety eight K that was still an
Speaker 2: eight millimeter Mauser, which was the gun the Nazi that
Speaker 2: was the standard battle rifle of the Wehrmacht during World
Speaker 2: War Two. It's not weird he would have access to that.
Speaker 2: He probably didn't have to buy it or passed a
Speaker 2: background check to get it. Looking at Garrison found his
Speaker 2: mother's Facebook. They'll talk some more about that, but one
Speaker 2: of the things that was on there is her talking
Speaker 2: about how she recently had to clean out like a
Speaker 2: barn and a farm that her grandfather and dad had
Speaker 2: owned and get rid of a lot of their stuff.
Speaker 2: It kind of makes sense to me. One of them
Speaker 2: very likely was the veteran could have brought back a
Speaker 2: Car ninety eight K, as hundreds of thousands of gis did, yeah,
Speaker 2: from the war, and it would have just gotten passed
Speaker 2: down under the family right, not weird.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no way at all. Like you say, there are
Speaker 4: probably hundreds of thousands of these in the United States.
Speaker 2: It was very common. And again that's more or less
Speaker 2: probably what happened with the Charlie kirkshooter. Why they had
Speaker 2: a mouser, right, Yeah, because it was their grandpa's rifle.
Speaker 2: Probably had it re rebarreled or whatever.
Speaker 4: You know. Yeah, not uncommon at all someone in especially
Speaker 4: somewhere like Texas where you know, those rifles even if
Speaker 4: you didn't bring them back from World War One, like
Speaker 4: could have been obtained by private party transfer any time
Speaker 4: in the last seventy five years. So he'd been placed
Speaker 4: on probation for twenty sixteen marijuana offense, for which he
Speaker 4: pled guilty and received deferred adjudication. I guess in Texas
Speaker 4: it's considered dealing marijuana, But it just seems to be
Speaker 4: that he was in possession of an amount greater than
Speaker 4: a quarter ounce but less than five pounds. Maybe that's
Speaker 4: not that familiar with Texas law in that regard, but
Speaker 4: that is a thing that we found out about him.
Speaker 4: I'll just add that, Like, I don't know if that
Speaker 4: effects his ability to obtain a new firearm by doing
Speaker 4: a forty four to seventy three.
Speaker 2: It's it's unclear, but it wouldn't. It doesn't matter in
Speaker 2: Texas because again, you can just meet a guy in
Speaker 2: a parking lot and buy.
Speaker 4: A gun exactly. Yeah, it's not relevant as I.
Speaker 2: Did when I lived in Texas almost every month.
Speaker 4: Would be great today of Texas. Yeah, see, it's easy
Speaker 4: to get a gun in Texas.
Speaker 2: How did he get the gun? It could have he
Speaker 2: could have gotten it by accident. He could have traded
Speaker 2: groceries for it, like you just don't know, but there's
Speaker 2: there's no barriers to him owning this. Yeah, we still
Speaker 2: don't know very much about this guy outside of his
Speaker 2: like public arrest record. I have like a LinkedIn that
Speaker 2: hasn't been updated in a few years. Yeah, he voted
Speaker 2: in the twenty twenty Democratic primary. We know that from
Speaker 2: Texas voting records. His mom's Facebook has a few political sentiments,
Speaker 2: but not expressed very commonly. She's posted a few times
Speaker 2: about Greg Abbot's pro gun stances. Yeah, she was definitely
Speaker 2: like anti NRA, anti.
Speaker 8: Abbot, anti NRA, upset about Abbot and a Senator Korn
Speaker 8: and Cruise not taking action for gun control.
Speaker 4: Damp. Yeah, this isn't the sort of gun that would
Speaker 4: ever be impacted by now proposed gun control legislation, right, Like,
Speaker 4: this is kind of central to the gun that people
Speaker 4: generally fail is reasonable to people to own.
Speaker 2: Yes, assuming that it was something that he inherited from
Speaker 2: a grandfather, a great grandfather. Even like gun control bills
Speaker 2: that are looking at stopping face to face sales wouldn't
Speaker 2: stop this because the dims always tend to include an
Speaker 2: exception for like, yeah, inheriting your dad's hunting rifle or
Speaker 2: something like that.
Speaker 8: Right, Yeah, On an old Google Plus profile that's cashed deep,
Speaker 8: his profile picture is like a Soviet communist caricature. But again,
Speaker 8: that is no indication of a recent political alignment. We
Speaker 8: still don't have a detailed look at this guy's politics.
Speaker 8: But people have been quick to call this a false
Speaker 8: flag when I think this appears more like in the
Speaker 8: manifestation of this reality brain rottedness that we've talked about
Speaker 8: vis a vis the years of lead paint, like brain
Speaker 8: rot inspires like ill thought or logical actions that maybe
Speaker 8: appear akin to a half baked false flag. But this
Speaker 8: is like just a result of this weaponized on reality
Speaker 8: fiction inspires reality, and then reality is seen through the
Speaker 8: lens of fiction, so people project onto the state this
Speaker 8: like nineteen fifty Cia staging world events. Thing, like everything's
Speaker 8: become so like Eddington pilled.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I remember there was there was a really big
Speaker 10: example of this someone I forget exactly what it was,
Speaker 10: like someone like graffitied like Chuck Schumer's garage or something,
Speaker 10: and everyone that I knew was confessed it was a
Speaker 10: false flag, like if all over Twitter's Olver Blues, everyone
Speaker 10: thought it was a false flag. And it's just like
Speaker 10: all of that has just accelerated alongside this process that
Speaker 10: you'reson you're describing, where you have the unreality tunnel of
Speaker 10: all this is a false flag. Then you have the
Speaker 10: other unreality tunnels that are like generating these people, and
Speaker 10: they're just sort of like, yeah, flowing parallel to each other,
Speaker 10: nashing into each other. Yeah.
Speaker 8: No, Like people are so quick just to point the
Speaker 8: Black's rule image, to discount every single thing that might
Speaker 8: confuse you at first glance, Like if you cannot understand
Speaker 8: that someone who is suicidal would do a crazy thing
Speaker 8: like this inspired by recent events and scribble something onto
Speaker 8: a bullet trying to shoot at ICE equipment or ICE
Speaker 8: agents ice property inadvertently killing actual ICE detainees. If you
Speaker 8: have no way to understand that as a premise, and
Speaker 8: the only way that you can see something like this
Speaker 8: is happening is like a beat cop walking up to
Speaker 8: the crime scene realizing he has to alter it to
Speaker 8: fit an agenda. Like that is a way more disjointed
Speaker 8: and like broken reality to like force yourself to believe
Speaker 8: than just take the facts as they come and evaluate
Speaker 8: them slowly without jumping to a very quick assumption that
Speaker 8: satisfies your like emotional reaction to a tragic event like
Speaker 8: this where multiple people have died. With Trump in power again,
Speaker 8: I think it's entirely possible that oppositional political violence will
Speaker 8: take a form that resembles quote unquote left wing attacks
Speaker 8: increasingly through the next few years. It's not twenty eighteen anymore.
Speaker 8: Calling this guy a leftist right now doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 8: We don't have a clear look at his politics or
Speaker 8: if he really even had serious politics. But there are
Speaker 8: a lot of like seemingly normal people who are depressed, demoralized,
Speaker 8: or angry and might not write a stupid twitter brained
Speaker 8: manifesto and scribbling anti ICE gets a point across, whether
Speaker 8: that's sincere or some kind of ironic ship post if
Speaker 8: the ICE sounds weird in comparison to fuck ice or
Speaker 8: abolish Ice. Again, not everyone is part of like the
Speaker 8: leftist twitter brained terminology circle. It seems like he wasn't
Speaker 8: really thinking things through intently anyway, as is common with
Speaker 8: these like quick copycat style attacks and attacks like this
Speaker 8: are also sometimes just harshly driven by suicide wanting to
Speaker 8: do something as a part of the suicidal act, And like,
Speaker 8: who knows what this shooter was aiming for or what
Speaker 8: they thought they were aiming for. We do not have
Speaker 8: enough information yet, And.
Speaker 2: It's worth noting NBC has interviewed his brother. Kind of
Speaker 2: sounds like from the text of the NBC article like
Speaker 2: they broke the news to him, which is oof, that's
Speaker 2: fucked up, not great. Yeah, but he said the last
Speaker 2: time he'd seen his brothers two weeks ago, he was
Speaker 2: not particularly political. He had never mentioned anything about ICE.
Speaker 2: As far as his brother knew, he had no hatred
Speaker 2: or particular feelings Ice either way. He was registered as
Speaker 2: political independent. His brother said that his parents had a
Speaker 2: rifle and that he knew that his brother knew how
Speaker 2: to shoot it, but that he didn't think he knew
Speaker 2: how to make a shot like that. I don't think
Speaker 2: he knew anything about the quality of shot. And it
Speaker 2: doesn't sound like he did anything but shoot into a
Speaker 2: van and then kill himself. So he was recently unemployed
Speaker 2: and was looking to move to his parents' land in Oklahoma,
Speaker 2: but he was raised in Allan. The whole unemployed didn't
Speaker 2: sound like he felt like he had a lot of
Speaker 2: maybe opportunity going forward. His life was not going great,
Speaker 2: like I don't know, like I'm not having trouble seeing
Speaker 2: this all add up now.
Speaker 8: I mean, the people who do some crazy hit like
Speaker 8: this often have a suicidal impulse running through an action
Speaker 8: like this, and sometimes his manifests were something akin to
Speaker 8: like you know, this is like a bad term, but
Speaker 8: like suicide by cop right, and like similar to what
Speaker 8: Roberts said about like mimetic and like copycat shootings. You
Speaker 8: can see some of what's on display here in the
Speaker 8: lineage of Luigi Mangioni allegedly writing denying to pose on
Speaker 8: bullets than the Charlie kirkshooting with stuff for non bullets. Yeah,
Speaker 8: but this is something that's not like in our Zeitgei.
Speaker 8: So it doesn't require you to be like an online
Speaker 8: communist to do something like this, nor is it relegated
Speaker 8: to a cop trying to manufacture a fake narrative to
Speaker 8: cover up a murder of immigrants to frame it in
Speaker 8: this left wing violence spike that the right is currently
Speaker 8: really running with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, look, folks, if you are convinced that this is
Speaker 2: a conspiracy, I really doubt much that we say is
Speaker 2: going to convince you. Otherwise. It's kind of a I
Speaker 2: don't want to go on too bleak of a rantier,
Speaker 2: but like I almost feel like there's not really a
Speaker 2: point in trying to stand up for basic reality anymore,
Speaker 2: because number one, people are increasingly going to dig into
Speaker 2: the reality tunnel that's most comforting to them, and that's
Speaker 2: going to be the one where, like they don't have
Speaker 2: to deal with the complexities of the world. That like,
Speaker 2: some people who on paper have espoused beliefs that are
Speaker 2: similar to you will also do fucked up shit right
Speaker 2: like that, that's just America. That's living in a country
Speaker 2: with four hundred million guns. That's living in a country
Speaker 2: where mass shootings go viral and where people act based
Speaker 2: off the virality of shootings that they watch or see
Speaker 2: or hear about. Yeah, and honestly, like, there's a part
Speaker 2: of me that feels like caring about the reality of
Speaker 2: the situation is almost a vanity project that like, it
Speaker 2: doesn't win you anything. Yeah, it doesn't get you anywhere,
Speaker 2: it doesn't help you make the world better. Maybe just
Speaker 2: embracing a fall Like the right has gotten very far
Speaker 2: in embracing completely fraudulent realities, So why do I even care?
Speaker 8: I mean, this is something I've talked about with like
Speaker 8: the flattening of tactics, with the right adopting state sponsored
Speaker 8: cancel culture and the left getting more conspiratorial in like
Speaker 8: replies to tweet some Blue Sky posts talking about how
Speaker 8: you know, the bulleting markings have to be a false flag.
Speaker 8: I'm seeing people share memes like Pepe like psyop memes,
Speaker 8: but like like leftists and like like oh wow, yeah,
Speaker 8: liberals sharing these memes that you used to just see
Speaker 8: under like unhinged right wing accounts to talk about how
Speaker 8: big world events are all stage or the Feds are
Speaker 8: faking everything, and it's it's just this complete like swap
Speaker 8: more accurately a flattening of tactics, and yeah, like it.
Speaker 4: It.
Speaker 8: It sucks to be in a position where I'm trying
Speaker 8: to be like slow and methodical and how I evaluate
Speaker 8: things and not just jump to posting funny reaction images
Speaker 8: about how everything is a syop and how everything is
Speaker 8: a false.
Speaker 2: Flag lameo obvious psyop work done.
Speaker 8: Because that seems so much more emotionally compelling, and instead
Speaker 8: I'm just tired.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just tired all the time. Anyway, go on and
Speaker 2: believe whatever you want. Let's continue the episode, all right,
Speaker 2: Let's talk about Antifa when we come back.
Speaker 4: It comes from a mind control.
Speaker 6: Pond, this.
Speaker 10: Speaking of false flags and Tiffa Antifa.
Speaker 2: I hardly No, that doesn't Garrison, just continue.
Speaker 10: I don't have anything to say about that.
Speaker 2: All right, listen, folks, We're going to be doing what
Speaker 2: James is going to be doing with our collective lawyer
Speaker 2: Moira Meltzer Cohen, an episode on what this actually means legally,
Speaker 2: and we will be doing that with a lawyer who
Speaker 2: is competent to speak on that more than we are. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess kind of what we want to do briefly
Speaker 2: in this episode is try and pull people back from
Speaker 2: a ledge if you're feeling like you're on one right now,
Speaker 2: because it's bad. The current situation is bad. The administration
Speaker 2: is absolutely going after people on the left. They absolutely
Speaker 2: will be increasingly applying terrorism enhancements to charges for anything
Speaker 2: that can be deemed as politically motivated by the left.
Speaker 2: But this declaration, as people pointed out, it's not like
Speaker 2: a thing the president declaring something a domestic terrorist group. Like,
Speaker 2: it's not like none of this is anything that like
Speaker 2: has a legal force behind it, Which doesn't mean again
Speaker 2: that they're not going to continue to go after people,
Speaker 2: But this is stuff that started under the Biden administration,
Speaker 2: applying RICO charges and whatnot.
Speaker 8: This is stuff that goes back to the nineties, like
Speaker 8: right to scare, yeah right, yeah, with with environmental organizations.
Speaker 8: There is no real domestic terrorism designation. That's why they're
Speaker 8: trying to go after like funders and trying to find
Speaker 8: ties to like international groups to have that terrorism like
Speaker 8: label make more legal sense. But Trump did actually sign
Speaker 8: an executive order to quote unquote designate Antifa as a
Speaker 8: domestic terrorist organization.
Speaker 6: Quote.
Speaker 8: All relevant Executive Departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable
Speaker 8: authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations,
Speaker 8: especially those involving terrorist actions conducted by Antifa or any
Speaker 8: person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa, or for
Speaker 8: which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf
Speaker 8: of Antifa provided materials support, including necessary investigatory and prosecutoral
Speaker 8: actions against those who fund such operations.
Speaker 4: I mean, like anything in the United States, if you're
Speaker 4: going to be prosecuted for a federal crime, the US
Speaker 4: Attorney has to bring a case against you, and there
Speaker 4: has to be a crime that you have committed. The
Speaker 4: executive branch does not make law, but legislative branch makes law.
Speaker 4: They try, and they tried a lot last time as well.
Speaker 4: I do want to remind everyone that right now we
Speaker 4: still have courts, and as we're seeing in Los Angeles
Speaker 4: and in other places, grand juries are not returning indictments.
Speaker 4: When the a USA brings a shoddy case or tries
Speaker 4: to proscute some of something that isn't a crime, that
Speaker 4: right now is the case. I'm not saying it will
Speaker 4: be forever. I'm saying that that's where we're at, and
Speaker 4: we can take a step back from the ledge if
Speaker 4: we know that I hope for people who are understandably
Speaker 4: very afraid.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I'm not saying don't be afraid because these
Speaker 2: are scary times. I'm just saying, like, don't assume that
Speaker 2: there's no point to fighting back, or there's no way
Speaker 2: to do so that you'll just like wind up in
Speaker 2: a fucking camp because people are going to court right
Speaker 2: now and winning yea, and those court cases have not
Speaker 2: been invalidated by the administration that they're not just taking
Speaker 2: people into custody anyway, Like people have repeatedly gotten off
Speaker 2: for charges of assaulting ice officers because they were bullshit charges, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: So that's all I'm trying to say right now.
Speaker 10: Yeah, you know, in terms of what these people are
Speaker 10: actually worried about, I think if you read the executive order,
Speaker 10: you can see what they're scared of, right, you know,
Speaker 10: to do the mildly cringe and or a quote authority
Speaker 10: is Brital, oppression is the mask of fear God, to plade,
Speaker 10: stole is stealing my shit, pricks are holding hands, meme
Speaker 10: coating and.
Speaker 2: Or apparently is a big Star Wars guy.
Speaker 10: But if you look at like what's actually in there, right, Like, Okay,
Speaker 10: I mean, some of it's like obviously twenty twenty stuff,
Speaker 10: and then they're talking about like violent assaults on immigration
Speaker 10: and Customs enforcement and other law enforcement officials in routine dosing,
Speaker 10: and other threats against public figures and activists.
Speaker 13: Like.
Speaker 10: They are very worried about the fact that everywhere ICE
Speaker 10: appears a whole bunch of people, most of who are
Speaker 10: just like random people in sweatpants. I have seen so
Speaker 10: many pictures from every single city that there's like loscual
Speaker 10: ice deployments are there's just like people in sweatpants who
Speaker 10: just like walk out of their houses and start taking
Speaker 10: pictures of ICE agents. They are very much concerned about this, right,
Speaker 10: This is why they're trying to do this crackdown because
Speaker 10: the resistance to this stuff is actually working well enough.
Speaker 10: You know, it's not not that they haven't been able
Speaker 10: to do ICE raids, but it has degraded their capacity
Speaker 10: to do it significantly. And that's why they're rolling this
Speaker 10: shit out so that they can, you know, as an
Speaker 10: attempt to intimidate people and as attempt to like get
Speaker 10: people to stop doing the stuff that they've been doing,
Speaker 10: which has been like effective enough to really shift the
Speaker 10: way ICE has been forced to do these things.
Speaker 4: And yeah, yeah, Like if you go back to the
Speaker 4: like one of the first incidents of people like imposing
Speaker 4: an ice rad it was in South Park in San Diego. Right,
Speaker 4: These people are not like like organized members of Antifa.
Speaker 4: Like South Park is a pretty bougey place. It's like
Speaker 4: a vegan, small plates restaurant and cocktail place. There're people
Speaker 4: who are pissed that their neighbors are getting abducted. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they're just people who were there and were like, no,
Speaker 4: fuck you, this seems wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And again, like we talked about this last week,
Speaker 10: like this is happening in Wheaton, Like people in evangelical
Speaker 10: college towns are or seeing ice trucks roll up and
Speaker 10: like just walking over to them and yelling at them
Speaker 10: and filming them, and that sometimes is enough to make
Speaker 10: them just run away. And that's what this is. You know,
Speaker 10: they're terrified of the fact that they live in an
Speaker 10: entire country of people who don't like that you're dragging
Speaker 10: their neighbors away at gunpoint, and that's a sign to
Speaker 10: do more and not you know, sort of given to
Speaker 10: fear every time there's some executive order bullshit.
Speaker 4: That happens yep, talking about things where the regime has
Speaker 4: not been as successful as it wanted to. Right, Let's
Speaker 4: talk about the case of the Guatemalan children. We spoke
Speaker 4: about this on ED I think last week potentially the
Speaker 4: week before.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: These were the kids who were grabbed from their beds
Speaker 4: of a labored eight weekend, and in that time Judge
Speaker 4: Sparkle Supernanan thesued an emergency protective order. But we've now
Speaker 4: seen a class action which would bring a more permanent
Speaker 4: protective order for these children. Judge Timothy Kelly, I'm going
Speaker 4: to quote him here. He was talking about the government's
Speaker 4: case and he said it had quote crumbled like a
Speaker 4: house of cards. This is in part because a whistleblower's
Speaker 4: account contradicted the government's claim, and this claim was made
Speaker 4: by Acting Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Angi Salazar.
Speaker 4: Salazar said under oath that the children have VIEN screen
Speaker 4: to ensure they would not be subject to abuse on neglect.
Speaker 4: The whistlebows claimed that at least thirty of these children
Speaker 4: had been deemed ineligible for return because they have indicators
Speaker 4: of being victimized by child abusers before, so returning them
Speaker 4: would obviously return them to that situation of abuse or
Speaker 4: potentially do so. Right. The whistleblowers further stated that this
Speaker 4: was in an OORR database Office of Refugee Resettlement database
Speaker 4: and such that the acting director would have access to
Speaker 4: that information.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: They printed a lot of other evidence to Judge Kelly,
Speaker 4: who granted protection to the children in the case, and
Speaker 4: to quote all un accompanied Guatemalan children who have received
Speaker 4: neither a final removal order nor permission from the Attorney
Speaker 4: General to voluntarily depart the United States. So, if you remember,
Speaker 4: the government had previously said that they were resettling these
Speaker 4: children and that the DHS had to do with it,
Speaker 4: that it was an Office of Refugee Resettlement operation, right,
Speaker 4: and that their families wanted them home and the families
Speaker 4: didn't want them home.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: They dropped that claim later, So this is a whim right.
Speaker 4: They couldn't take these little children away in the night
Speaker 4: and spirit them off to somewhere where they would be
Speaker 4: in danger. Let's move on to Executive Order number two
Speaker 4: for this week's episode. This is the one that you
Speaker 4: probably heard less about than the Antifa one, But this
Speaker 4: is the quote unquote gold card executive order. Oh god, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's a gold card. Trump has been true thing about this, right,
Speaker 4: He truced about it in June. Also in June, Howard
Speaker 4: Lutnik announced that they were already seventy thousand people waiting
Speaker 4: for these gold cards. Applications could be made at Trump
Speaker 4: card dot Gov. That the original stated price was five million.
Speaker 4: The executive order signed this week slashed the cost to
Speaker 4: just one million US dollars one million, one million, and
Speaker 4: their dollars, and as our currency continues to crush it,
Speaker 4: that will only get more affordable for folks elsewhere in
Speaker 4: the world. So that's great, it's good. This is Trump's
Speaker 4: promise plan to sell permanent residency. Right when he first
Speaker 4: announced this, we kind of wondered, how's he going to
Speaker 4: do this statutorily? Right, How's he going to do it legally?
Speaker 4: When it turns out his plan is to consider the
Speaker 4: donation as evidence that the person is quote of exceptional
Speaker 4: business ability and that makes them eligible for an EB
Speaker 4: two visa.
Speaker 10: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so like you could you could have never engaged
Speaker 4: in business in your life, right, you could receive a
Speaker 4: small loan of one million dollars from your parents, sure,
Speaker 4: and that would allow you to get one of these.
Speaker 4: Now people will go through all the usual background checks, right, which,
Speaker 4: according to the EO, will be expedited.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: You can't be like a Apple background bug Daddy. He's
Speaker 4: dead now, but you couldn't be him with a million dollars,
Speaker 4: right and do this. For example, I.
Speaker 2: Like the idea that Abubaka Albigdadi would like try to
Speaker 2: move to the US, but would put his real name
Speaker 2: and his application for.
Speaker 6: Coming.
Speaker 4: You gotta check for this. Yeah, but everyone's god damaged,
Speaker 4: unfortunate man. He shares that name with a bad guy.
Speaker 2: And there's like a fifty percent chance that it would
Speaker 2: have gotten approved that just like no one would have
Speaker 2: liked would have had his name.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well look guys, the Khalif of Isis is like fucking
Speaker 2: living in Brooklyn.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, he's going to all those founders meetings, you know,
Speaker 4: with other CEOs to discuss managing a large organization.
Speaker 2: I'm excited for his ted doc.
Speaker 4: He's put its address as a tunnel in a HGS
Speaker 4: controlled area of Syria. No, okay, So to be clearous
Speaker 4: is dead. It's killed in the first Trump administration. Yes,
Speaker 4: a corporation donating for an individual would pay two million, right,
Speaker 4: so it's more expensive if a corpse doing it on
Speaker 4: your behalf, and the cards will supposedly be old and
Speaker 4: have Donald Trump's face on them, which is nice. At
Speaker 4: the same time, the Trump administration added one hundred thousand
Speaker 4: dollar bill to the H one B visa application, so
Speaker 4: the visa application fee. The H one B, if you're
Speaker 4: not familiar, is an immigration scheme for skilled non immigrant labor.
Speaker 4: And particularly interested in this because this was one of
Speaker 4: the moments that the Trump Coalition began to fracture in
Speaker 4: the early days of the Trump administration, Like, we saw
Speaker 4: the kind of tech right as exemplified by Elon Musk,
Speaker 4: going like, no, H one B is a good they
Speaker 4: allow us. They allow them to bring people to this
Speaker 4: country and pay them not very much and take advantage
Speaker 4: of their skilled labor. It's what they allowed the tech
Speaker 4: industry to do, right, Sure. And then we saw the
Speaker 4: more straight up white nationalists right being like, but those
Speaker 4: people aren't white, we don't want them here. And it
Speaker 4: seems like it is that Cadra of the the Trump
Speaker 4: coalition that that part of his of his ideological sort
Speaker 4: of port base, which has won out in this instance. Right,
Speaker 4: because companies cannot save money paying someone twenty grand less
Speaker 4: if they have to pay one hundred ges to get
Speaker 4: them into the country, right, Like, individuals could make that donation,
Speaker 4: I guess, and get the visa that way, like if
Speaker 4: they came from wealthy family and in another country and
Speaker 4: want it just desperately wanted to work in the US.
Speaker 4: But generally h one vs are used because employees they
Speaker 4: can't leave.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: Your visa is tied to your employer, so the employment
Speaker 4: can be much less favorable, especially in the tech industry
Speaker 4: where people are always shopping and changing jobs to try
Speaker 4: and get a better wage, better benefits, et cetera. They
Speaker 4: can't do that, and so that will be coming to
Speaker 4: an end. Finally, I want to talk about immigration judges,
Speaker 4: and the Trump administration has fired even more of them.
Speaker 4: According to NPR, when Trump came into office, they're about
Speaker 4: seven hundred and thirty five of these judges. There are
Speaker 4: now fewer than five hundred and eighty.
Speaker 2: Why, oh my god.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's quite a remarkable cut.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: Not all of them were fired. Some of them took
Speaker 4: advantage of the quote unquote fork in the road offer.
Speaker 4: If we remember like early early Trump two point zero
Speaker 4: do stuff in immigration judges just so people understand, Like
Speaker 4: people are like what they fire a judge, how can
Speaker 4: they do that? Immigration judges are not part of the
Speaker 4: independent judiciary. They are a better way of seeing them
Speaker 4: would be a civil servants. Nonetheless, they have in many cases,
Speaker 4: I guess, worked to bring the trappings and the procedures
Speaker 4: of due process to the immigration world. Right, Like in
Speaker 4: many cases they have you know, they're not just rubber
Speaker 4: stamping deportation orders. Right, people do have a chance to
Speaker 4: make their case in front of immigration judges. And even
Speaker 4: in Trump two point o, people are still getting asylum
Speaker 4: in the United States. The courts right now are extremely
Speaker 4: backed up. Right, people are getting here in dates in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty eight. As we heard earlier this week, some
Speaker 4: courts I read that one court is now running at
Speaker 4: twenty five percent of its capacity, have twenty one judges.
Speaker 2: And it has five yep.
Speaker 4: So this means that people will be in detention for longer.
Speaker 10: I mean that's like kind of intentional, right, Like.
Speaker 4: Well, one could make that case very Yeah. The DOJ
Speaker 4: has reduced requirements for staffing these positions, and the Trump
Speaker 4: administration has authorized about six hundred jags to military lawyers
Speaker 4: to take on the role. I don't think they're going
Speaker 4: to get the rubber stamp on deportations from those people
Speaker 4: that they.
Speaker 2: Expect to get.
Speaker 4: It depends on it if they sort of hand pick
Speaker 4: those jags or they just got a bunch of people
Speaker 4: from the National Guard. But sure, I don't think that
Speaker 4: that's going to be the just like straight up deportation
Speaker 4: factory that some people might assume.
Speaker 6: It to be.
Speaker 4: But nonetheless, right now what we have is five hundred
Speaker 4: and eighty judges, tens of thousands of people in detention,
Speaker 4: and detention numbers and detention over crowding growing every single day,
Speaker 4: So that is not good. Detention facilities are at the
Speaker 4: best of times, and conditions are pretty awful. For I
Speaker 4: think i've heard right now talking of things that are
Speaker 4: pretty awful. Here are some products and services.
Speaker 2: We're back and uh, next, I think we're talking about tariffs.
Speaker 2: Wait a second, do y'all hear that music?
Speaker 4: Sorry?
Speaker 6: Jazz right, jazz?
Speaker 9: Sorry, jazz right jazz.
Speaker 4: Wow, we haven't had the song for a while. That
Speaker 4: was nice, wasn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was good.
Speaker 4: That was good, just like old times.
Speaker 2: Bring it back, just like old times.
Speaker 4: Several months ago, Garrison has a star alarm clock, do
Speaker 4: you Garrison?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, good. I think that would be that would
Speaker 2: be too much. That would be too much. I would
Speaker 2: I would need we would need to interview.
Speaker 4: Listen if you're listening and you do stop it all.
Speaker 2: Right, Mia? How our tariffs be?
Speaker 6: Do so?
Speaker 10: We have some tariff news. One is that we have
Speaker 10: a Supreme Court date for the case over whether a
Speaker 10: whole bunch of the tariffs are going to be allowed
Speaker 10: to continue or not. That is going to be on
Speaker 10: November fifth. We also have something no movement, which I
Speaker 10: think is pretty interesting. So when last we spoke of tariffs,
Speaker 10: we mentioned that there were two countries that had gotten
Speaker 10: political tariffs on them, Brazil for arresting Volsonnaro and prosecuting
Speaker 10: him and India for buying oil from Russia. And there
Speaker 10: was a lot of speculation that these would be fairly
Speaker 10: quickly resolved.
Speaker 6: They have not been.
Speaker 10: They are both still into effect. This is having massive
Speaker 10: consequences on a whole bunch of stuff. And the the
Speaker 10: place that I want to focus on with this is
Speaker 10: US agriculture because we have been seeing some extremely alarming
Speaker 10: things out of the American agricultural sector. That has really
Speaker 10: not broken out of like Midwest agriculture circles very much.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 10: One of the major consequences of in some sense also
Speaker 10: the tariffs on Brazili. One of the major consequences of
Speaker 10: the US tariffs on China is that, like China did
Speaker 10: in twenty eighteen, China has simply refused to buy any
Speaker 10: American soybeans. The US grows for export fifty two million
Speaker 10: tons of soy every year, and more than half of
Speaker 10: that is old to China.
Speaker 2: And again, if you're conspiratorial and belief that, like you know,
Speaker 2: the soy, the soy is ruining people, you shouldn't support this.
Speaker 10: Well no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you should.
Speaker 6: You should.
Speaker 10: You should be opposed to this because you should be
Speaker 10: wanting to export soy to China so that you can
Speaker 10: make you can the Chinese woke in soy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I was saying.
Speaker 10: Yes, oh, yeah, there do yeah, yeah, yeah, you should.
Speaker 2: Support the export of soy to China. We're getting it
Speaker 2: out of the US and to our greatest feel political enemy.
Speaker 10: And the other people who support the export of soy
Speaker 10: to China are American farmers. So god, I guess this
Speaker 10: is like This is like the farming thing that I
Speaker 10: say on this show. I did technically. There was technically
Speaker 10: a farm behind my house growing up. This is something
Speaker 10: that's very common in mid Western agriculture, is a soybean
Speaker 10: corn rotation. Doing a soybeing corn rotation is good for
Speaker 10: the soil, So it's very very common in American agriculture.
Speaker 4: Should you can fix nitrogen and soil with legumes.
Speaker 10: Yeah, but in order to do this you have to
Speaker 10: be able to sell the soybeans. And when this happened
Speaker 10: in twenty eighteen, this was kind of kind of behind
Speaker 10: the scenes, so that there was a whole big trade
Speaker 10: stand off in twenty eighteen, and one of the things
Speaker 10: that played a big role in ending it was the
Speaker 10: fact they trying to just didn't buy soybeans from the
Speaker 10: US for a year and it really, really, really messed
Speaker 10: with the American agricultural market. I'm going to read an
Speaker 10: account from the Progressive Farmer. This is a quote from Mackay.
Speaker 10: For most soybean farmers in North Dakota, you're looking at
Speaker 10: about one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars loss
Speaker 10: per acre on every acre of soybeans planted. Grackle said
Speaker 10: on his own farm, he expects losses to top four
Speaker 10: hundred thousand dollars this year. Grackle said the losses are
Speaker 10: not just tied to individual farmers. It's the small businesses.
Speaker 10: Local grocery stores, hardware stores, are local schools or financial institutions.
Speaker 10: They're all feeling the hurt from this. Yeah, So what's
Speaker 10: happening right now is that there is a bunch of
Speaker 10: soybeans that are being that are just sitting there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, like no one wants to buy them.
Speaker 10: And I've seen a few things talking about like okay,
Speaker 10: they're you know, there's processing plant opening up. We can
Speaker 10: turn them into soybean oil and use like in the
Speaker 10: US and do that. But like, this is becoming a
Speaker 10: really serious logistical problem because the thing about corn and
Speaker 10: soybeans is that it's not like you store them in
Speaker 10: different things, right, because if you're a farmer, you're growing
Speaker 10: both of them. The sort of storage hubs that they
Speaker 10: use are the same ones. And the problem is that
Speaker 10: there are basically stockpiles building up of these soybeans that
Speaker 10: can't be sold. And this is becoming an increasing problem
Speaker 10: because there's the corn harvest and you have to put
Speaker 10: the corn somewhere. It's a good example of the kind
Speaker 10: of middle miniature logistical nightmares that are cropping up all
Speaker 10: up and down the supply chains as these tariffs sort
Speaker 10: of continue to roll in, and as the instability of
Speaker 10: them getting needs to roll in that you and I
Speaker 10: aren't seen yet or we haven't seen much of the
Speaker 10: effectives other than some small price increases, but down the
Speaker 10: supply chain there are increasing parts of the population who
Speaker 10: are just dealing with these just horrific logistical nightmares. This
Speaker 10: is going to be We're going to see the acceleration
Speaker 10: of this with a deminimous exemption being eliminated, and in
Speaker 10: the meantime, China is just basically going to the country
Speaker 10: that the US lap fifty percent tariffs on there go
Speaker 10: going to Brazil and attempting to basically supply their entire
Speaker 10: soybean demand largely from Brazil, which is like the other
Speaker 10: major soybean exporter. So this is also very important politically
Speaker 10: because the American farming sector is very, very powerful. There
Speaker 10: have been some bailouts already, but they're not going to
Speaker 10: be able to sustain the American farming sector, especially if
Speaker 10: this goes on for more than one year only. There
Speaker 10: was only one year in twenty eighteen when they didn't
Speaker 10: buy and it was at fiasco. If this goes on
Speaker 10: for an extended period of time, it is going to
Speaker 10: cause significantly larger problems. Also, the economy was doing a
Speaker 10: lot better in twenty eighteen than it is right now.
Speaker 10: I mean, it's still kind of a mess. But yeah,
Speaker 10: so this this is going to turn into an increasing
Speaker 10: sort of political thorn for Trump among a bunch of
Speaker 10: people who are supposed to be his base, because people
Speaker 10: are very, very frustrated about this, and it is getting
Speaker 10: very little press attention. This has been the American farming
Speaker 10: tariff update question mark.
Speaker 8: No, I mean, why would we want to hear about
Speaker 8: farming tariff news when instead we can just keep the
Speaker 8: culture war machine going to have everyone just gobsmacked over
Speaker 8: that instead, Like that's the whole point of their political machine.
Speaker 8: It's not that everything is a distraction from something else, right,
Speaker 8: It's that if you keep everyone engaged with this with
Speaker 8: like culture war nonsense, left wing terrorism, Charlie Kirk whatever,
Speaker 8: like all of this stuff.
Speaker 10: No one's going to care about farming tariff news.
Speaker 4: Even if you're a big liberal outlet right, you put
Speaker 4: it out there in like half your fucking audience is
Speaker 4: going to be like lol la maal they voted for Trump,
Speaker 4: sucks for them, like yeah yeah.
Speaker 10: And the question effectively is are the people who previously
Speaker 10: had been kept in line by woke bathroom anti dei
Speaker 10: like trans women in sports stuff going to be able
Speaker 10: to be kept in line when the soybeans are running
Speaker 10: in the field. And we will we will see, we
Speaker 10: shall see.
Speaker 8: Yeah, speaking of some Charlie Kirk culture war, The Department
Speaker 8: of Education has partnered with the America First Policy Institute
Speaker 8: and Turning Point USA for a new civics program. This
Speaker 8: is called the America two fifty Civics Education Coalition. They'll
Speaker 8: work with over forty national and state organizations to quote
Speaker 8: spearhead nationwide initiatives to engage students, educators, and communities and
Speaker 8: conversations about liberty, citizenship, and America's enduring values unquote. Other
Speaker 8: organizations a part of this coalition include Prager You, Moms
Speaker 8: for Liberty, Alliance, Defending Freedom, Heritage Foundation, and the three
Speaker 8: explicitly Christian lobbying Groups. Now, all of these groups are
Speaker 8: basically Christian lobbying groups, but three with like Christian or
Speaker 8: religious names in the title of the organizations now partnering
Speaker 8: directly with the state for this educational coalition. Let's play
Speaker 8: video from the new website explaining the initiative.
Speaker 14: American education once a shining light guiding generations, built on faith, heritage, patriotism,
Speaker 14: But over the past sixty to seventy years, that brilliance
Speaker 14: has been dimmed.
Speaker 6: A great institution has been.
Speaker 10: Crumbled from within, playing Civil rights era.
Speaker 14: Hatred for America, false revisionist history, and division.
Speaker 7: From fundamentally transforming the United States.
Speaker 4: Oh that's a triggering phrase for me.
Speaker 10: Critical race theory, gender queer drag queens.
Speaker 14: Now on the two hundred and fiftieth nation, the Department
Speaker 14: of Education, the America two fifty Civics Education Coalition, and
Speaker 14: partners across America are reigniting that light, restored understanding, and
Speaker 14: returning education to the States where it belongs.
Speaker 4: For this was a bunch of white kids right.
Speaker 14: That inspired the world, and under the leadership of President
Speaker 14: Trump and Secretary McMahon.
Speaker 10: That's Lend MacMahon.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, Oh my god, are you fucking kidding me?
Speaker 4: AI generated lighthouse, Oh my god.
Speaker 6: Because we are Americans.
Speaker 10: The futures ours. Oh my god, it's one of the
Speaker 10: craziest things I've ever seen.
Speaker 6: Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 8: So the framing of the video is that this lighthouse
Speaker 8: has gone out and Linda McMahon emerges, polishes and fixes
Speaker 8: the lighthouse, which now shines across the nation, igniting our patriotic.
Speaker 4: Education to find a lighthouse in America. So they aied one.
Speaker 10: With audio from w W secretary.
Speaker 8: Man, it's like the most hyper reality American brain even
Speaker 8: say that this is this is like the here's a
Speaker 8: lead paint thing that we're talking about, like talking about
Speaker 8: how a maried education has been like totally destroyed. And
Speaker 8: they're playing footage of like Civil Rights era like protests
Speaker 8: and like leaders. You can't parody this.
Speaker 4: Nah no.
Speaker 2: And it's all set to the to the soundtrack and
Speaker 2: edited in the manner of like a big budget Hollywood
Speaker 2: acyluster from fifteen years ago. Yeah yeah, yeah, which I guess,
Speaker 2: you know, fucking conservative Christians are always but fifteen years yeah,
Speaker 2: and the culture shit like so that scans but yeah,
Speaker 2: like it, this is like it sounds like a fucking
Speaker 2: uh uh. Who's the guy who did independence stake? God
Speaker 2: damn it, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: I don't know shit about popular culture, but yeah, we
Speaker 4: should just know that seventy years ago education was segregated
Speaker 4: in this country. Oh yeah, that's race they want, which
Speaker 4: is yes, I just want to I just want to
Speaker 4: just sort of drop that nugget.
Speaker 8: And I've listened in person to Charlie Kirk argue that
Speaker 8: we should repeal the Civil Rights Act, like that's what
Speaker 8: these people want.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I just want to join the dots for
Speaker 4: folks who haven't and history as an heerenty revisionist, that's
Speaker 4: what we do. We don't just like go to go.
Speaker 4: We've done it all now, we've worked it all out.
Speaker 4: No need for any more historians. That's that, that's not
Speaker 4: how history works.
Speaker 10: The chief education officer of Turning Point Education, this is
Speaker 10: his real name, doctor hutts H Hertzburg triple H said
Speaker 10: that quote that.
Speaker 4: Was also wwe character Is it the same guy?
Speaker 10: No, this is a this is a Christian educator.
Speaker 8: Oh okay, he says quote Turning Point USA is more
Speaker 8: resolved than ever to advance God centered, virtuous education for
Speaker 8: students flourishing across our nation. With that in mind, we
Speaker 8: are honored to partner with the distinguished organizations that comprise
Speaker 8: the America two fifty Civics Education Coalition to restore, revive,
Speaker 8: and reclaim robust American Civics education for all students throughout
Speaker 8: our country unquote. Earlier today is Wednesday, the state of
Speaker 8: Oklahoma has announced that they will be establishing TPUSA chapters
Speaker 8: in every high school across the state. Oh great, here's
Speaker 8: the Superintendent Ryan Waters of Oklahoma.
Speaker 7: I'm excited to announce it that every Oklahoma high school
Speaker 7: will have a Turning Point USA chapter. We have seen
Speaker 7: the outpouring from parents, teachers, and students that want to
Speaker 7: be engaged in a meaningful work going on a turning Point.
Speaker 7: They want their young people to be engaged in a
Speaker 7: process that understands free speech, open engagement, dialogue about American greatness,
Speaker 7: a dialogue around American values. We're so excited to partner
Speaker 7: with Turning Point USA with this initiative. For far too long,
Speaker 7: we have seen radical leftists with the Teachers' Union dominate
Speaker 7: classrooms and push woken doctrination on our kids. They fight parents' rights,
Speaker 7: they push parents out of the classroom, and they lie
Speaker 7: to our kids about American history. What we're going to
Speaker 7: continue to do is make sure that our kids understand
Speaker 7: American greatness, engage in civic dialogue, and have that open discussion.
Speaker 7: We will continue to do all that we can to
Speaker 7: make sure Oklahoma students have the best education plots.
Speaker 10: Part of this announcement, He's written on Twitter. Quote radical
Speaker 10: leftist teachers. Unions have dominated classrooms for far too long,
Speaker 10: and we are taking them back. I think, Robert, we
Speaker 10: talked with this guy last year at the rn C.
Speaker 2: Yep, Yeah, we should.
Speaker 10: We might do something with that interview at some point.
Speaker 2: I wish he'd got he'd been out of a job
Speaker 2: by now. But life, life, Huh.
Speaker 8: The last thing I want to discuss today is quote
Speaker 8: unquote transgender terrorism, something I've seen many friends and posters
Speaker 8: across the internet be really, really concerned about, for you know,
Speaker 8: a lot of good reasons. Ken Kleppenstein has released a
Speaker 8: few articles the past few days. First to one from
Speaker 8: last week, quote the FBI ready's new war on trans people.
Speaker 8: The FBI is preparing to label transgender people as violent
Speaker 8: extremists in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder. That is
Speaker 8: how hand framed that on the headline, and for his
Speaker 8: tweet alongside the article. Other outlets like them dot Us
Speaker 8: has spread this reporting even further. Quote FBI to categorize
Speaker 8: trans people as nihilistic violent extremist. Threat Group report says
Speaker 8: the Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly preparing to categorize
Speaker 8: transgender people as violent extremists. This framing is incorrect, and
Speaker 8: I will explain why in great detail shortly. The Federal
Speaker 8: Bureau of Investigation is not getting ready to categorize transgender
Speaker 8: people as like a category, as like a class of people,
Speaker 8: as violent extremists. There is no evidence that this is
Speaker 8: currentlyh they're doing. There's no internal communications arguing this. Even
Speaker 8: the Heritage Foundation's proposal to create a new category of
Speaker 8: trans terrorism is not arguing this, as I will quote
Speaker 8: from here shortly. But let's get into what the first
Speaker 8: article from Clippenstein actually wrote. Based on a source inside
Speaker 8: the government quote the senior official explains that there is
Speaker 8: no process per se for dealing with trans people as
Speaker 8: a quote unquote the threat group, but feels that trans
Speaker 8: individuals will be increasingly targeted under the banner of violent extremism.
Speaker 8: Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender
Speaker 8: subjects as a subset of the bureau's new threat category,
Speaker 8: nihilistic violent extremists unquote. We've talked about nihilistic violent extremists
Speaker 8: on this show before, back in spring, and we all
Speaker 8: know that the Trump administration has been targeting trans people
Speaker 8: like this is something that everyone who listens to this
Speaker 8: show is aware of. This is this is a real thing.
Speaker 8: But there is not actually any new verifiable information in
Speaker 8: this report. There's rhetoric from people like Donald Trump Junior
Speaker 8: and right wing influencers talking about transgender terrorists and this
Speaker 8: trend of transgender terrorists as they have been for the
Speaker 8: past two years. Me and Mia did that piece about
Speaker 8: fake trans terrorists, like almost two years ago. That was
Speaker 8: two years ago to we we've been tracking this rhetoric
Speaker 8: for a long time. So stuff like that that fills
Speaker 8: up a lot of the space in articles like this,
Speaker 8: but new verifiable information is actually quite short. In this article,
Speaker 8: Ken has a single unnamed official who quote unquote feels
Speaker 8: like trans people could be labeled nihilistic violent extremists. Now,
Speaker 8: in Ken's previous reporting about this label, he misunderstood the
Speaker 8: ENV label. This label exists just essentially for seven to
Speaker 8: sixty four. The child this exploitation group that operates on
Speaker 8: the discord and telegram and branch off groups from that.
Speaker 8: We've talked about them on the show be here before
Speaker 8: as well. And the nihilist of violent extremism term predates
Speaker 8: the Trump administration. This isn't a cash betel thing. This
Speaker 8: this predates the Trump admin. This was active last year,
Speaker 8: and it primarily is to categorize and map these child's
Speaker 8: exploitation rings and some overlapping communities like the school shooter fandom.
Speaker 8: But in Ken's article here, there's no like leaked documents
Speaker 8: in this report showing like current memos or communications on
Speaker 8: this topic. Ken's great for leaks, but there's there's not
Speaker 8: lea documents in this report.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 8: As we all know and we've reported, the right wing
Speaker 8: hate campaign against trans people is a real thing. It's
Speaker 8: coming from the Trump administration, from state level government as
Speaker 8: well as the entire conservative media apparatus. But I think
Speaker 8: right now especially, it's really important to read reports like
Speaker 8: this very carefully. Trans Fear mongering massively boosts social media engagement,
Speaker 8: which then can encourage people to use framing like this
Speaker 8: that might actually kind of be irresponsible. Now, a few
Speaker 8: hours before Pilplstein published this first article. The Heritage Foundation
Speaker 8: and their Oversight Project released a petition to have the
Speaker 8: FBI designate a new category of violent extremism, which they
Speaker 8: call trans ideology inspired violent extremism or TIV.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 10: TIV is based on the belief that violence is justified
Speaker 10: against those who do not share radical views of transgender ideology.
Speaker 10: It has led to an increasing trend of TIV domestic
Speaker 10: terrorist events across the country in recent years. TIV has
Speaker 10: played a role in the majority of mass shootings at schools,
Speaker 10: that is the Heritage Foundation's claim. The petition includes a
Speaker 10: list of quote unquote TIV motivated attacks, including multiple attackers
Speaker 10: who either were not trans or were clearly not motivated
Speaker 10: by trans ideology, as reporting at the time and government
Speaker 10: documents have shown, including acts from the past like six
Speaker 10: or seven years. But Heritage rights that quote experts estimate
Speaker 10: no citation that fifty percent of non gang related school
Speaker 10: shootings since twenty fifteen have quote involved or likely involve
Speaker 10: trans ideology unquote fifty percent.
Speaker 8: Have involved or likely involved. Yet in this list they
Speaker 8: can only list three school shootings. They can only list three,
Speaker 8: even their own list, which they say fifty percent likely
Speaker 8: involve trans ideology.
Speaker 10: There's been more than three school shootings this year.
Speaker 8: This month, There's been more three school shootings not involving
Speaker 8: trans people this year.
Speaker 10: This is a wild, wildly atrocious.
Speaker 4: Is sad?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just fabricate dude, right, Like and again like
Speaker 2: reality doesn't matter, Like that's that's the point.
Speaker 8: Like, no, this is the Heritage Foundation, Like come on, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8: But importantly, like a violent extremism designation would not mean
Speaker 8: that all trans people as a class are deemed violent extremists.
Speaker 8: What it would do is it would create a category
Speaker 8: to use for investigations into violent acts, graph patterns of violence,
Speaker 8: argue in court documents, and possibly include some preemptive surveillance
Speaker 8: on people or groups that are deemed as threats as
Speaker 8: a part of this strut group. But in the petition,
Speaker 8: Heritage says that no, not all transgender individuals or their
Speaker 8: allies are domestic terrorists.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 10: They are even free to engage it in offensive and
Speaker 10: hateful speech under the First Amendment, so long as they
Speaker 10: do not stray into unlawful incitement, defamation, true threat, obscenity,
Speaker 10: or some other category of non protected speech.
Speaker 8: The domestic terror destination becomes relevant only when individuals or
Speaker 8: groups one are motivated by an ideology that encourages, promotes,
Speaker 8: or condones violence, and two take or incite unlawful violent
Speaker 8: action or threats based on that ideology. Both criteria must
Speaker 8: be met. Unquote, that's from the Heritage's own petition.
Speaker 10: It's not.
Speaker 8: There's nothing in Heritage's own petition or Ken's article that
Speaker 8: says that trans people entirely are going to be deemed
Speaker 8: terrorists or a domestic like extremist threat group. That's not
Speaker 8: what either Heritage or what the actual details of articles
Speaker 8: like Ken's is saying. And to further kind of show
Speaker 8: this divide, the Heritage petition also addresses the nihilist violent
Speaker 8: extremism label as a completely separate thing, unrelated trans people
Speaker 8: that they do not want combined into one single category.
Speaker 8: I don't know why Ken keeps pushing this label so much.
Speaker 8: It's really important to understand how trans people are actually
Speaker 8: under threat right now, because they are right The biggest
Speaker 8: threats to transporople right now are access to healthcare specific
Speaker 8: for people who are under the age of eighteen and
Speaker 8: things like bathroom bands and trying to restrict transmitter people
Speaker 8: from public life.
Speaker 10: But the other biggest.
Speaker 8: Threat to transpeople right now is like ourselves, and we
Speaker 8: don't need to do the government's work for them to
Speaker 8: keep us so demoralized. Spreading misinformation or unverified reports like
Speaker 8: this that just makes everyone panicked and freak out actually
Speaker 8: harms us and our community. The trans panic industrial complex
Speaker 8: is dangerous, and people need to be very careful about
Speaker 8: this because it's an extremely dangerous time and having an
Speaker 8: accurate assessment over what's going on is going to be
Speaker 8: crucial to survive the next few months to years.
Speaker 2: No, and again, we've seen this on the right, and
Speaker 2: this has played a role in radicalizing a lot of
Speaker 2: people on the right and getting them to do fucked
Speaker 2: up shit. Is year of like they're coming for you.
Speaker 2: They're coming for you. They're going to be coming for
Speaker 2: you tonight, right like you're already dead. You know, there's
Speaker 2: money in pushing and there's clout in pushing hopelessness. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I don't want to be telling people everything's good,
Speaker 2: because it's not that things are very dangerous for trans
Speaker 2: people right now in a way they have not been
Speaker 2: at any point previously in very recent history. Things are
Speaker 2: much worse right nobody's denying that, but you have to
Speaker 2: look at like the facts of how they're worse, as
Speaker 2: opposed to not reading an article or analyzing what the
Speaker 2: article actually says, or analyzing what the Heritage Foundation says
Speaker 2: and saying they've they're declaring all of us terrorists, right,
Speaker 2: because that's.
Speaker 10: Not going to end well, no, don't panic organize. That's
Speaker 10: the actual solution to this. I also want to briefly
Speaker 10: note on I've seen a lot of comparisons of this
Speaker 10: to the black identity extremism designation, and I want to
Speaker 10: bring this back to something that Garrison mentioned earlier about
Speaker 10: the way that the nihilist extremism category was like specifically
Speaker 10: designed to target like a specific sort of complex network
Speaker 10: of yeah, pedophile discord servers. Yeah, this is the same
Speaker 10: methodology that was used for Black identity extremism. Black identity
Speaker 10: extremism wasn't a category they conjured out of nowhere to
Speaker 10: go after all black people. It was a category that
Speaker 10: was specifically designed to go after specific activists in the
Speaker 10: wake of Occupy and the wake of Ferguson. Yeah, and
Speaker 10: this is completely just not the process that is happening
Speaker 10: for this, right, Like, we're not dealing with Okay, there
Speaker 10: is a specific group of transactivists that the government wants
Speaker 10: to target, so they're creating a label for it, right,
Speaker 10: We don't have any evidence of that at all. What
Speaker 10: we have is anonymous sources saying they feel like something
Speaker 10: might happen.
Speaker 8: That trans people could be targeted, and you're like, yeah,
Speaker 8: trans people have been targeted like that, that's what's happening. Yeah,
Speaker 8: Are they going to be labeled denialist of violand streamists
Speaker 8: at this point?
Speaker 10: Unlikely? Could the FBI consider adopting something like the Heritage
Speaker 10: proposal for FORTIV?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 8: Possibly, Yeah, that is that is absolutely a possibility. Would
Speaker 8: that come into reality the same way that people are
Speaker 8: talking about it online or the way that headlines are
Speaker 8: framing it. No, it's not about designating all trans people
Speaker 8: as terrorists as a class.
Speaker 10: It's not about that. And it also wouldn't function like
Speaker 10: the black identity extreamist thing, because again, that was like
Speaker 10: they already had people they were going after and they
Speaker 10: wanted a legal category that they could deploy in order
Speaker 10: to go after them. That's not what's happening here. They
Speaker 10: don't have like a list of like trans discord servers
Speaker 10: that they're about to round up for like doing a protest,
Speaker 10: Like that's not what's happening here.
Speaker 8: No, but they could go after people who make threats online,
Speaker 8: and that's something that I'm sure Cashtel's FBI yeah, would
Speaker 8: love to do. And if they can sort those people
Speaker 8: into a category like tive to argue in a prosecution
Speaker 8: or to or to make like a flow chart to
Speaker 8: direct investigations, then that's the realm they're gonna use.
Speaker 10: Yeah, but even that, we are so far away from
Speaker 10: them even like starting that process that you should be
Speaker 10: concerned about the actual threats from like I don't know,
Speaker 10: I mean just like literally there's there's been a series
Speaker 10: of attacks on trans people, just like in neighborhoods in
Speaker 10: Seattle by just like gangs of dudes. Right, That's like
Speaker 10: an actual, substantive thing that is happening. That is not this,
Speaker 10: that is not some sort of nebulous like we are
Speaker 10: relying on opinions of unnamed officials. We can look at
Speaker 10: and evaluate and figure out what we're going to do
Speaker 10: about it instead of just giving into the panic industrial
Speaker 10: complex and panicking about it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, things that are frame bombastically like this go super
Speaker 8: viral and they spread a lot, and that's what the
Speaker 8: algorithms are encouraging. I mean, same thing with the algorithmic
Speaker 8: boosting of you know, false flight conspiracy theories, because those
Speaker 8: are so much more satisfying. They spread like wildfire across
Speaker 8: blue sky and Twitter and like even things like Instagram stories,
Speaker 8: and just be very careful about anything that goes viral
Speaker 8: because that claim is trying to influence your brain. It's
Speaker 8: trying to worm its way into your brain to take
Speaker 8: the form as a thought that you had yourself. And
Speaker 8: be super careful because this type of weaponize on reality
Speaker 8: has been used so successfully the past ten years against
Speaker 8: the right. This is how the whole like you know,
Speaker 8: migrant panic wave started lies about immigration. This like panicked framing.
Speaker 8: These things spread like wildfire online and now you have
Speaker 8: large swaths of the country believing in this genuine like
Speaker 8: like you know, migrant crisis. And this is how social
Speaker 8: media functions to influence how your brain thinks and how
Speaker 8: your brain process is fact from fiction and forms like
Speaker 8: a collective sense of reality. And you are also being
Speaker 8: targeted by this same process in different ways than the
Speaker 8: right is, but this process is still targeting you as well,
Speaker 8: and it's like super important to like, read things critically
Speaker 8: and take time before jumping to conclusions, because I don't
Speaker 8: think we need more quick, emotionally satisfying conspiracy theories in
Speaker 8: our life.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, that's the news this week, we sure did report it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the news.
Speaker 4: This week we reported the head out of media go away.
Speaker 2: We reported the news. Hey, We'll be back Monday with
Speaker 2: more episodes every week from now until the heat death
Speaker 2: of the Universe.
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