Speaker 1: Old media.
Speaker 2: This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 2: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 2: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis today
Speaker 2: I'm joined by James Stout, Miya Wong, and Robert Evans.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: This episode, we're covering the week of September eleven to
Speaker 2: September eighteenth.
Speaker 4: Normally a week in history when very little happens.
Speaker 2: The most normal week of American politics.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Traditionally, nothing around the first third of September's days
Speaker 1: has as ever mattered in American history.
Speaker 2: We should schedule our calendar just to block out this
Speaker 2: whole section of the year each time.
Speaker 1: I already have it written down in micah calendar as
Speaker 1: the week to forget, so I just spend it drinking.
Speaker 2: Robert, do you want to introduce our first topic?
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean our first topic, as we talked about
Speaker 1: last week, is the fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk,
Speaker 1: particularly its impact on free speech and the pretext it's
Speaker 1: being used for to justify a crackdown on the quote
Speaker 1: unquote left. Different NGOs and other organizations that are being
Speaker 1: accused of being part of a vast and let's say,
Speaker 1: unlikely conspiracy to commit terrorism that has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with what's actually been discovered about Tyler Robinson Charlie Kirk's killer,
Speaker 1: but nonetheless it's being used that way, and kind of
Speaker 1: the first thing to probably talk about is what's come
Speaker 1: out about Tyler Robinson's motivations in the time since we
Speaker 1: recorded our last episode. Honestly, I was kind of surprised
Speaker 1: Gerre when we recorded on Friday.
Speaker 3: I had expected us.
Speaker 1: To need to do an update before Monday in order
Speaker 1: to catch up. Really, there wasn't much that came out.
Speaker 2: No, I did a brief update confirming that he was
Speaker 2: living with a transperson, but that was really all we
Speaker 2: knew with the time that could be confirmed. That was
Speaker 2: pretty evergreen as we suspected it might be, and I
Speaker 2: will say, frankly, the motive still remains not entirely clear,
Speaker 2: but we do have some more concrete details about his
Speaker 2: online background. Yeah, and a few others like ancillary pieces
Speaker 2: which is included in the charging document, as well as
Speaker 2: reporting on his discord logs.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I think we should talk first about the whole
Speaker 1: trans roommate thing of it all because obviously, first off,
Speaker 1: this is one of the most massive reaches I've seen,
Speaker 1: Like they're always desperate to have a trans connection anytime
Speaker 1: there's a shooting.
Speaker 2: They were trying to establish this literally like seconds after
Speaker 2: it happened.
Speaker 1: And that's been the case with like the last year
Speaker 1: and a half or two worth of mass shootings yea,
Speaker 1: or at least a sizeable number of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a meme.
Speaker 4: Right for why it's like a four Chan thing to
Speaker 4: suggest that any mass shooter was trans and now it's
Speaker 4: just become reality.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in this case, the legation started coming out from
Speaker 1: the police that his roommate was transgender. This was before
Speaker 1: the discord logs had leaked. So I want you to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit. Gare you found the Reddit profile
Speaker 1: of Tyler Robinson's roommate. Yeah, So first question is do
Speaker 1: we know if they actually were trans and do we
Speaker 1: know if they actually were in some sort of a relationship.
Speaker 1: What is the actual evidence that exists to suggest that
Speaker 1: based on what we have so far, they.
Speaker 2: Did post about their transition on multiple subreddits and public
Speaker 2: facing posts, and they referred to having a boyfriend BF
Speaker 2: that was helping them cope with the results of the
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four election. But that's really all we can
Speaker 2: tell from this at the time of public Reddit profile
Speaker 2: for the roommate of Tyler Robinson, who had again some
Speaker 2: sort of romantic relationship with the like nitty gritty you know,
Speaker 2: arc of their whole relationship is like not explicitly clear,
Speaker 2: but but certainly a pad a romantic relationship.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I want to make it clear, which should
Speaker 1: be obvious to anyone who has like a third of
Speaker 1: a brain cell to rub together against the inside of
Speaker 1: their skull. There's not any evidence that this roommate was
Speaker 1: tied in any way to the Tyler Robinson's crimes, and
Speaker 1: in fact, the exit evidence.
Speaker 2: The state is arguing this that the roommate had no
Speaker 2: prior knowledge and has been fully cooperative. That the roommate
Speaker 2: is not involved.
Speaker 1: Not only is fully cooperative, but turned Tyler in.
Speaker 2: In part or produced evidence that was now used in
Speaker 2: the charging documentary. Tyler turned himself in with his father,
Speaker 2: like officially, but there was certainly conversations happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's one of those things you can come
Speaker 1: down morally on that however you want. It's just a
Speaker 1: matter of there's absolutely no evidence, as people like Matt
Speaker 1: Walsher saying that this is part of some grand LGBT conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Their roommates seemed horrified to have been and you know,
Speaker 1: understandably terrified to have been potentially implicated in a massive act,
Speaker 1: massively faced active murder, right, Like, that's a that's a
Speaker 1: scary thing to come. You like get a discord message realizing, oh, fuck,
Speaker 1: now I'm potentially implicated in this.
Speaker 3: So I do have some.
Speaker 1: Understanding for what a shocking moment that is. Like, it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine, yeah, dealing with that in any way,
Speaker 1: shape or form. That's just a wild thing to have
Speaker 1: happened in the middle of your fucking day, presumably while
Speaker 1: you're at work or some shit. This would have been
Speaker 1: around noon, so I'm guessing they were on the job
Speaker 1: when they got these messages. She's a horrible, horrible thing
Speaker 1: to deal with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's go over some of the text exchanges included
Speaker 2: in the charging document. It's technically not an indictment because
Speaker 2: they did not charge via grand jury. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 2: placeholder for that. Yeah, but it's referred to as like
Speaker 2: a charging information document that they included some text messages
Speaker 2: because it was the clearest evans to lay out to
Speaker 2: charge them with the crime. So not the only evidence,
Speaker 2: as we will soon discuss. And these text logs are
Speaker 2: are core to like people like Walsh's current argument that
Speaker 2: the trans roommate must have actually been involved because they
Speaker 2: think that the messages that I'm going to read here
Speaker 2: we were like scripted between the roommate and the shooter
Speaker 2: specifically to exonerate the roommate, and that's the conspiracy that
Speaker 2: people like Walsher spreading. Let's go over this section of
Speaker 2: this document.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 2: The police interviewed Robinson's roommate, a biological male who was
Speaker 2: involved in a metal relationship with Robinson. The roommate told
Speaker 2: police that the roommate received messages from Robinson about the
Speaker 2: shooting and provided those messages to police. On September tenth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five, the roommate received a text message from
Speaker 2: Robinson which said, drop what you are doing, look under
Speaker 2: my keyboard. The roommate looked under the keyboard and found
Speaker 2: a note that stated I had the opportunity to take
Speaker 2: out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it unquote.
Speaker 2: Police found a photograph of this note. The following text
Speaker 2: exchange then took place. After reading the note, the roommate responded,
Speaker 2: what with many question marks? You're joking, right, Robinson? I
Speaker 2: am still okay, my love, but I am stuck in
Speaker 2: orm for a little while longer yet, shouldn't be long
Speaker 2: until I can come home. But I got to grab
Speaker 2: my rifle still. To be honest, I'd hoped to keep
Speaker 2: this secret till I died of old age. I'm sorry
Speaker 2: to involve you, roommate. You weren't the one who did it, right,
Speaker 2: many question marks, Robinson, I am sorry, roommate. I thought
Speaker 2: they caught the person, Robinson. No, they grabbed some crazy
Speaker 2: old dude that interrogated someone in similar clothing. I had
Speaker 2: planned to grab my rifle from my drop point shortly after,
Speaker 2: but most of that side of town got locked down.
Speaker 2: It's quiet, almost enough to get out. There's one vehicle lingering.
Speaker 3: Roommate.
Speaker 2: Why Robinson, Why did I do it? Roommate? Yeah, Robinson,
Speaker 2: I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be
Speaker 2: negotiated out. If I'm able to grab my rifle unseen,
Speaker 2: I will have left no evidence. Going to attempt to
Speaker 2: retrieve it again. Hopefully they have moved on I haven't
Speaker 2: seen anything about them finding it. Roommate, how long have
Speaker 2: you been planning this, Robinson? A bit over a week.
Speaker 2: I believe I can get close to it, but there's
Speaker 2: a squad car parked right by it. I think they
Speaker 2: already swept that spot. But I don't want to chance it, Robinson.
Speaker 2: I'm wishing i'd circle back and grabbed it as soon
Speaker 2: as I got to my vehicle. I'm worried what my
Speaker 2: old man would do if I didn't bring back Grandpa's rifle.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it had a serial number, but
Speaker 2: it wouldn't trace to me. I worry about Prince. I
Speaker 2: had to leave it in a bush where I changed outfits.
Speaker 2: I didn't have the ability or time to bring it
Speaker 2: with I might have to abandon it and hope they
Speaker 2: don't find Prince. How the fuck will I explain losing
Speaker 2: it to my old man. Only thing I left was
Speaker 2: the rifle wrapped in a towel. Remember how I was
Speaker 2: engraving bullets. The fucking messages are mostly a big meme.
Speaker 2: If I see notices bulge ooh wu on Fox News,
Speaker 2: I might have a stroke. All right, I'm gonna have
Speaker 2: to leave it that really fucking sucks. Judging from today,
Speaker 2: I'd say Grandpa's gun does just fine. IDK, I think
Speaker 2: that was a two thousand dollars scope, Robinson, Delete this exchange, Robinson.
Speaker 2: My dad wants photos of the rifle, he says, Grandpa
Speaker 2: wants to know who has what. The Feds released a
Speaker 2: photo of the rifle and it is very unique. He's
Speaker 2: calling me r n not answering, Robinson. Since Trump got
Speaker 2: into office, my dad has been a pretty diehard Mega.
Speaker 2: I'm going to turn myself in willingly. One of my
Speaker 2: neighbors here is a deputy for the sheriff. You are
Speaker 2: all I worry about, love roommate. I'm much more worried
Speaker 2: about you, Robinson. Don't talk to the media. Please, don't
Speaker 2: take any interviews or make any comments. If police ask
Speaker 2: you questions, ask for a lawyer, and stay silent. That's
Speaker 2: the end of the exchange.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: It seems like this person fairly wisely stopped engaging with their.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's not a good response to give to that. No,
Speaker 1: that's not and discord again. One of the one thing
Speaker 1: I would hope this would bust is the This has
Speaker 1: to have been a professional hit man, assassin of some sort,
Speaker 1: which is a job that I mean, it technically exists.
Speaker 1: Like there are guys who are for the fucking crypts
Speaker 1: of the Bloods. You could call them professional hitmen, and
Speaker 1: that they kill people for money. But they're not like
Speaker 1: the people you see in movies, Like they're guys who
Speaker 1: will walk up with a thirty eight and gut shoot
Speaker 1: somebody and run the fuck off like they're they're not
Speaker 1: We're not talking about like smooth operators. Those people almost
Speaker 1: don't exist as a profession and certainly not as a
Speaker 1: standard thing in the United States. And that that like
Speaker 1: the fact that he was having this kind of conversation
Speaker 1: on discord.
Speaker 2: This is I believe, regular text.
Speaker 3: So these are regular regular text.
Speaker 4: This is straight up yeah sms right, Like, yeah.
Speaker 1: He's messaging this shit through unencrypted lines and left a
Speaker 1: note under his keyboard and dropped the rifle in the woods,
Speaker 1: Like this is all about what you respeck from a
Speaker 1: twenty two year old kid who's a reasonably good shot
Speaker 1: with a rifle and had no real other skills, Like
Speaker 1: it's what it looked like.
Speaker 4: Yes, this doesn't even seem like someone who spent a
Speaker 4: great deal of time planning, right, like learning about that.
Speaker 2: They said they've been planning about it for about a week.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this lines up with what they said, right, like
Speaker 4: like yeah, and they seem almost surprised.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got this weird feeling reading it, Like Tyler
Speaker 1: almost is shocked that they did it. Like there's this
Speaker 1: almost sense of being pulled by history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's seemingly confused by his own actions in his CeNSE.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like watching himself almost like.
Speaker 1: Yes, and like I I inscrite, like one of the things.
Speaker 1: It sounds like and this is a little unclear, but
Speaker 1: it sounds like in terms of those memes winding up.
Speaker 1: But he was doing that before, maybe even before he'd
Speaker 1: ever planned to shoot Kirk. That's just like a thing
Speaker 1: he did for shit.
Speaker 3: For people.
Speaker 2: People have pointed to that as being like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: obviously the roommate knew something was up. If if the
Speaker 2: roommate was aware that that Robinson was carving bullets, that's,
Speaker 2: first of all, that's not a crime. No, people just
Speaker 2: do weird shit sometimes, especially if someone goes to the range.
Speaker 2: Often maybe they're gonna fucking scribble on a bullet. Like
Speaker 2: that's not indication of anything that's legitimately concerning frankly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's indication again that this guy was very online
Speaker 1: in the gamer right, yea, right.
Speaker 3: But that's it.
Speaker 2: So it's not just people like Walsh who are casting
Speaker 2: doubt on the authenticity of these messages. Plenty of liberals
Speaker 2: and people on the left have taken to suspecting that
Speaker 2: these could have been written by an quote unquote FBI
Speaker 2: agent or law enforcement as fake evidence to frame the shooter.
Speaker 2: And people have pointed towards some weird verbiage like calling
Speaker 2: his dad his old man and referring to quote unquote
Speaker 2: like law enforcement type language like interrogate And Yeah, to me,
Speaker 2: this is not very confusing. He talks like this because
Speaker 2: he's raised Mormon and plays a lot of tactical video
Speaker 2: games thousands of hours I have. I have a Steam profile, huge,
Speaker 2: huge gamer. And he might talk a little odd because
Speaker 2: he just did a fucking crazy thing.
Speaker 3: I don't even think it's that odd.
Speaker 1: It's nice people call someone they're in love with, my love.
Speaker 1: That's a thing that happens in the world.
Speaker 3: Like, that's not like a.
Speaker 2: Very normal what are we doing here?
Speaker 3: Yeah, why are we questioning this part of the story?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: But and again, like these texts were handed over to
Speaker 2: local police by Robinson's roommate. Why fake evidence that would
Speaker 2: jeopardize the case when the police already have a lot
Speaker 2: of other evidence DNA ballistic evidence, the friend group discord
Speaker 2: chat where he also admitted to the crime right before
Speaker 2: he turned himself in. Like, these textlogs don't even like
Speaker 2: make him out to be a crazy leftist. He talks
Speaker 2: like very vaguely about Kirk, like spreading hatred.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he says nothing about politics. And again, as we'll
Speaker 1: talk about because there's some evidence here suggesting that both
Speaker 1: Tyler and their roommate, like their politics were mixed from
Speaker 1: what little we can glean.
Speaker 2: About them, right, or a very minor part of their
Speaker 2: lives in a sense, like yeah.
Speaker 1: They're not talking about redistribution of wealth, they're not talking
Speaker 1: about overthrowing the government.
Speaker 2: Oh no, they're not talking about politics in that way.
Speaker 2: This seems more like personal to him.
Speaker 1: Yes, he's in love with a transperson and he didn't
Speaker 1: like what Charlie Kirk said about trans people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like if the government's going to fake messages,
Speaker 2: why would they do so in a way that exonerates
Speaker 2: the trans roommate the real ideological target here.
Speaker 1: Especially look at what the government is doing right now.
Speaker 1: Right they're going after quote unquote Antiva, They're going after
Speaker 1: the Open Society Foundation, George Soros, all of these left
Speaker 1: wing NGOs. If they were faking this, would he not
Speaker 1: have referenced one of those organizations? Would there not be
Speaker 1: a fucking black and red flag somewhere in there?
Speaker 4: It would be so easy. If you're going to implicate someone,
Speaker 4: you could implicate it in text messages really easily, Like
Speaker 4: it's ridiculous to suggest that, yeah, the state did this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, why would you fake that?
Speaker 3: Why would you fake it that way?
Speaker 2: Baffling, incomprehensible. These texts are not load bearing to this case.
Speaker 2: Plenty of other there's plenty of other evidence. And this
Speaker 2: isn't the same thing as like cops planting evidence or
Speaker 2: like a district attorney making subjective claims about intent, like
Speaker 2: you don't need to overestimate state intelligence here.
Speaker 1: No, we don't even need her what we have. There
Speaker 1: was no need for them to have done anything at all,
Speaker 1: because Robinson specifically notes that as soon as pictures of
Speaker 1: the rifle were posted online by police, his dad fucking
Speaker 1: Costs family knew because it is a unique gun Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 1: It is an antique mouser that was sportized and rebarreled,
Speaker 1: presumably personally by his grandfather. Both his grandpa and his
Speaker 1: dad seem to have recognized it immediately. There was no
Speaker 1: getting away with it once the rifle was found.
Speaker 2: This is totally different from like the MS thirteen tattoo thing,
Speaker 2: where the trumpetministration argued for an interpretation of tattoos and
Speaker 2: then printed out a picture with like very clearly photoshopped
Speaker 2: letters to draw a parallel between what they think the
Speaker 2: tattoos meant and with their interpretation of it as letters
Speaker 2: and numbers, which trump in all of his genius, mistook
Speaker 2: for being actual tattoos. And then they just ran with
Speaker 2: it because no one has the capacity to tell the
Speaker 2: president you're wrong. This is completely different than faking all
Speaker 2: these text messages. There's metadata, there's cell phone records, it's
Speaker 2: probably still on the roommate's own phone. Like physical a
Speaker 2: physical evidence, and like subjectively saying that you don't know
Speaker 2: any gen z that talks like this, that's not valid evidence.
Speaker 2: Twenty two year olds know how to use punctuation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let me tell you of someone who crades hundreds
Speaker 4: of papers every year from people who are largely but
Speaker 4: not all, between eighteen and twenty five. Yeah, young people
Speaker 4: can use punctuation. This is not like some kind of
Speaker 4: forensic fucking literary analysis required.
Speaker 2: And the information obtained in these chat logs and through
Speaker 2: interviews with his parents match reporting by Ken Klippenstein, who
Speaker 2: got leaked messages from the shooter on Discord, very very similar.
Speaker 2: Like lots of libs and people on the left are
Speaker 2: saying this is fake because they wanted the shooter to
Speaker 2: be conservative and they think that these texts damage the
Speaker 2: narrative that they have chosen. I think that's why we're
Speaker 2: seeing people react so strongly to this. It's not about
Speaker 2: actually evaluating the evidence on like a base level, right,
Speaker 2: Like this guy grew up in a conservative Mormon family.
Speaker 2: His dad's pretty mega Robinson figured out he was bisexual
Speaker 2: and started to move a little bit to the left
Speaker 2: on like gender and sexuality issues. And even like a
Speaker 2: lot of gen Z straight guys kind of have this
Speaker 2: political profile, right, they're like pro gun, but their life
Speaker 2: revolves around like gaming Discord and read it more than
Speaker 2: like the political and.
Speaker 1: They're probably often pro capitalist, just not bigoted against queer people. Yea,
Speaker 1: because that's not as common anymore. These aren't political partisans.
Speaker 2: They're not even on our slash bread tube, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's not what's happening. He played, he played furry
Speaker 2: sex games on Steam when he was younger. One of
Speaker 2: his Steam names was Donald Trump because yeah, he's twenty
Speaker 2: two years old. Trump was an Augury when he was
Speaker 2: like thirteen or whatever.
Speaker 4: Like, god, yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 3: We fucked the kids up so bad.
Speaker 2: It's it's a largely it's largely a political and like
Speaker 2: this what he did is is existential violence manifesting a
Speaker 2: political action from someone who isn't otherwise overtly political, right,
Speaker 2: because shooting Charlie Kirk incredibly political action, even if that's
Speaker 2: not the way that that the shooter maybe conceived it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like this person happened, So it happened across a
Speaker 4: queer person who they are very fond of. Right, they
Speaker 4: have queer people in their lives. That is not indicative
Speaker 4: of any politics other than they have a queer person
Speaker 4: in their.
Speaker 3: If this person stand the Soviet Union, we would fucking
Speaker 3: know about.
Speaker 2: It because they would be running with that.
Speaker 3: Used a mos in.
Speaker 5: For one thing.
Speaker 1: So they would have missed a little bit of Moses
Speaker 1: slander for you today to break up the horrors. Speaking
Speaker 1: of crackdowns, crack down on your wallet by buying these.
Speaker 2: Products and services.
Speaker 4: Beautiful, lovely.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, First Amendment crackdown. Massive rhetoric coming out of Stephen
Speaker 1: Miller and from Pam Bondi and basically every mouthpiece of
Speaker 1: the administration about going after the left, about dismantling particularly
Speaker 1: organizations like the Open Sciety Foundation, going after George Soros
Speaker 1: and his son. There's talk about prosecuting people criminally and
Speaker 1: using the death penalty, even on folks who are quote
Speaker 1: unquote funding terrorism, a term which has been so broadly
Speaker 1: described by mouthpieces of the administration as to include potentially
Speaker 1: just about anybody.
Speaker 2: This could be like bail funds, environmental NGOs, legal support NGOs,
Speaker 2: like It's it's really unclear at the exact form that
Speaker 2: this is going to take, but this is stuff that
Speaker 2: the administration has pined about doing for a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's unclear. You know, it's one of the
Speaker 1: big pieces of news that's happened. Within twenty four hours
Speaker 1: of us recording this episode, which we recorded on Thursday,
Speaker 1: the eighteenth is that Trump has designated Antifa a domestic
Speaker 1: terrorist organization.
Speaker 3: Of that's not he's said that.
Speaker 1: What I'm saying is he said that, he said up
Speaker 1: to me, those words that he has said.
Speaker 2: Words that he has said before, including in twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: For the letter of the law.
Speaker 1: For one thing, there's a wild difference between what you
Speaker 1: could do legally to an international foreign terrorist organization, yeah,
Speaker 1: and in domestic terrorist organization.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because of the First Amendment, you can't just declare legally
Speaker 1: in terms of what is written law, the president can't
Speaker 1: just declare a group of people to be a domestic
Speaker 1: terrorist organization. It's usually an enhancement charge, yes, and then
Speaker 1: just go after people who have spoken out or donated
Speaker 1: money to legal charities that are randomly declared to be
Speaker 1: in support of that that's not legal, which doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it what happened. Let me be really clear. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's not what the law is about.
Speaker 2: And they've tried to do that in Atlanta was Top
Speaker 2: Crop City and the Lena Solidarity Fund and going after
Speaker 2: the Bail Fund and people who had donated money to
Speaker 2: like the Forest Defense Fund, right, and this Trump is
Speaker 2: similarly actually to Atlanta Is also talked about using Rico
Speaker 2: charges to get people in trouble who are funding these
Speaker 2: quote unquote domestic terror organizations, and on Yeah, September seventeenth,
Speaker 2: Trump Truth, I am pleased to inform our many USA
Speaker 2: patriots that I'm designating Antife, a sick, dangerous radical left disaster,
Speaker 2: as a major terrorist organization. I will also be strongly
Speaker 2: recommending that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance
Speaker 2: with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for
Speaker 2: your attention to this matter.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, for a use the word major right,
Speaker 4: which doesn't like there's a domestic terrorism is a concept
Speaker 4: that's nebulous FTO, Foreign terrorist organization is an extremely clear
Speaker 4: legal definition. He didn't use either of those. This is yeah,
Speaker 4: this is a thing that like Ted Cruz, and I
Speaker 4: think he enjoyed it. I'm sure there are other people involved.
Speaker 4: But Ted Cruz in before twenty twenty twenty nineteen, tried
Speaker 4: to introduce a resolution in the Senate condemning Antifa like
Speaker 4: this has been a thing.
Speaker 2: Marjor Taylor Green introduced legislation which went nowhere, or talked aboutization.
Speaker 2: I don't even know if she actually introduced it like
Speaker 2: this year about designating Antifa terrorist organization. It's been It's
Speaker 2: been something like Andy know has been advocating for for years.
Speaker 1: It's a really important point that they have attempted and
Speaker 1: failed to do this numerous times because the law doesn't
Speaker 1: let them. And this is something that if you have
Speaker 1: been in the riot reporting on public shootings business as
Speaker 1: long as I have been, christ one thing I can
Speaker 1: tell you is that in the wake of something like this,
Speaker 1: it was the same with christ Church and the immediate
Speaker 1: wake of christ Church, there was this really shocking moment
Speaker 1: where a bunch of conservative I talked to these people
Speaker 1: because I published the art the defining article on that shooting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a shitload of conservative organizations came out and said, you
Speaker 1: know what, maybe we've been wrong about demonizing Muslim immigrants.
Speaker 1: Maybe like that was really fucked up and we should
Speaker 1: like those people were talking about that, people who you
Speaker 1: would not expect that now, they didn't keep talking that way.
Speaker 1: They got a pretty quick But what you have in
Speaker 1: a moment like this is there's a limited period of
Speaker 1: time where people's shock and horror and surprise at what
Speaker 1: has happened creates spaces of possibility for folks who have
Speaker 1: an agenda and you have a clear plan for what
Speaker 1: to push, to push the overton envelope in their direction. Right,
Speaker 1: this is not a period of time that lasts for ever.
Speaker 1: And the folks who are largely orchestrating the conservative response
Speaker 1: to Charlie Kirk's murder are aware of this, and they
Speaker 1: are making the best use of this period of time
Speaker 1: that they can get. Now, that doesn't mean the fact
Speaker 1: that this is a limited period of time doesn't mean
Speaker 1: there aren't long term consequences, doesn't mean that they can't
Speaker 1: make significant progress on their plan to stifle free speech.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean we're not in massive danger. Because we
Speaker 1: are in danger, folks. I'm not telling you we're not.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you these spaces of possibility don't last for ever,
Speaker 1: in part because the public moves on, and in part
Speaker 1: because there is always a backlash to the backlash, and
Speaker 1: you're seeing pieces of that already.
Speaker 2: They are seeing pieces of that.
Speaker 1: Carl Rove of all motherfucking people wrote it article about
Speaker 1: how the administration is unfairly blaming liberals and leftists for
Speaker 1: the actions of an individual shooter. Tucker Carlson came out
Speaker 1: and it made a statement that like, if the government
Speaker 1: is able to go after you for this, they'll come
Speaker 1: after conservatives at some point. He's not wrong about it.
Speaker 1: I don't credit him doing that because of a serious
Speaker 1: moral thing. I credited him to be a relatively intelligent
Speaker 1: guy who was like, no, no, no, if they're able
Speaker 1: to do this to you know whatever, milktoast liberals, eventually
Speaker 1: it will happen to me.
Speaker 2: Right and specifically, like Pam Bondi is, the etern General
Speaker 2: made some statements a few days ago about them going
Speaker 2: after quote unquote hate speech, yeah, which spawned a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of conservative commentators Steven Krawdertucker Carlson, as well as
Speaker 2: Matt Walsh. And under no circumstances do you have to
Speaker 2: hand up to Matt Walsh. But this prompted them to
Speaker 2: be like, no, actually, we don't believe in hate speech
Speaker 2: as a legitimate legal category. There should be social consequences
Speaker 2: for people who celebrate the murder of an innocent man,
Speaker 2: but there should not be legal consequences for hate speech. Right,
Speaker 2: We're fine with the government helping us like docks you
Speaker 2: and get you fired from your job, but prosecuting hate
Speaker 2: speech as a category is something that we do not
Speaker 2: agree with, and neither did Charlie Kirk. So there's been
Speaker 2: like that small reaction, which then prompted Pambondi to be like, no,
Speaker 2: when I say hate speech, what I really mean is
Speaker 2: like threats and assignment of violence, and like, yeah, okay.
Speaker 4: Fighting words I think is a legal term, right, Like
Speaker 4: incitements to violence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know, there's some stuff that's always been
Speaker 1: illegal and never been punished. For example, when conservatives, I've
Speaker 1: been dealing with this for years, threaten to kill and
Speaker 1: rape activists and show up outside of their houses and
Speaker 1: harass them. As a general rule, the police don't do anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if those activists are on the left, right, even though
Speaker 1: that crosses the boundary into fighting words, however, they have
Speaker 1: legally could they choose not to.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But if someone is out there saying in the wake
Speaker 1: of the Charlie Kirk shooting, I want to incite people
Speaker 1: to kill this person, that is illegal. You're not allowed
Speaker 1: to say I want to incite people to murder this person.
Speaker 1: That is a crime. If you're posting insane say that
Speaker 1: you have broken the law. They won't go after a
Speaker 1: conservative for doing that. But they'll go after you, right
Speaker 1: like that is how things work, you know. However, we
Speaker 1: have seen people who have been attacked for speech that
Speaker 1: absolutely is not crossing the line into fighting words.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: One of the better examples for this happened at Texas Tech.
Speaker 3: It happened.
Speaker 1: You've had variends of this happened at a couple of
Speaker 1: colleges all around the country. They're specifically at Texas Tech,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, one of Texas's kind of premier
Speaker 1: state schools.
Speaker 3: There was a video of.
Speaker 1: An incident on the day that Charlie Kirk was killed,
Speaker 1: where a student scene jumping up and down, yelling profanity
Speaker 1: at a vigil in a free speech zone outside of
Speaker 1: a student union building on the campus, saying y'all, Homie dead,
Speaker 1: making fun of people who were mourning Kirk's death. At
Speaker 1: one point, she touched a guy's hat. The video of
Speaker 1: her went viral. Governor Greg Abbott called for her to
Speaker 1: be arrested and expelled. She was expelled immediately. She was
Speaker 1: arrested and charged with assaults shortly thereafter. Her family has
Speaker 1: not made a statement. Very wisely, There's really nothing they
Speaker 1: could say that would be great.
Speaker 3: At this point.
Speaker 1: There has been some pushback from student organizations in the
Speaker 1: state because this is blatantly illegal. Calling what she did
Speaker 1: assault is nonsense. In my opinion from watching the video,
Speaker 1: she was at a free speech zone. Laughing y'all homely
Speaker 1: dead when someone is killed is not fighting words. That
Speaker 1: is not illegal. You are allowed to say stuff like
Speaker 1: that under the letter of the law. Does this mean
Speaker 1: this person won't get convicted of a crime. It's Texas,
Speaker 1: and she's a black woman, she might. And this is
Speaker 1: very chilling. This is deeply concerning, right. This is not
Speaker 1: the only case. There's a universe, smaller university outside of
Speaker 1: Austin where again a student was videotaped celebrating individual for
Speaker 1: Kirk's death. That person was expelled as well. There have
Speaker 1: been a number of teachers fired obviously, stuff like this
Speaker 1: has been happening all over the country, right, And this
Speaker 1: is deeply worrying. And even if even if the space
Speaker 1: of possibility closes on these people faster than they're expecting,
Speaker 1: if the crackdown on the Open Society Foundation doesn't happen,
Speaker 1: if this Antifa stuff doesn't go any further than the
Speaker 1: last time they've talked about going after Antifa, stuff like
Speaker 1: this is going to continue to happen, and it will
Speaker 1: only accelerate over the next couple of years, right, and
Speaker 1: that is a massive problem.
Speaker 2: Part of this culture shift can be seen in what
Speaker 2: some people are probably not very smartly calling the biggest
Speaker 2: attack on free speech they've ever seen in their life,
Speaker 2: which is on Wednesday evening, ABC put Jimmy Kimmel's show
Speaker 2: on hold quote unquote indefinitely, following pressure from the FCC
Speaker 2: and affiliate stations owned by Nextstar. Before ABC's announcement next
Speaker 2: our release statement quote, Next Stars owned and partner television
Speaker 2: stations affiliated with the NBC Television Network will preempt Jimmy
Speaker 2: Kimmel Live for the foreseeable future, beginning with.
Speaker 4: To it's show.
Speaker 2: Next to Our strongly objects to the recent comments made
Speaker 2: by mister Kimmel concerning the killing and Charlie Kirk and
Speaker 2: will replace the show with other programming in its ABC
Speaker 2: affiliated markets unquote. Sinclair Broadcasting also stated it would not
Speaker 2: air Kimmel's show and called on Kimmel to apologize to
Speaker 2: the Kirk family and donates to the Kirk family as
Speaker 2: well as TPUSA. Earlier that Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr
Speaker 2: advocated on the conservative podcaster Benny Johnson's show. Quote, it's
Speaker 2: really sort of past time that a lot of these
Speaker 2: licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast Disney and say,
Speaker 2: we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you
Speaker 2: straighten this out, and we, the licensed broadcaster, are running
Speaker 2: the possibility of fines or license revocation from the SEC
Speaker 2: if we continue to run content that ends up being
Speaker 2: a pattern of news distortion unquote. Carr then made vague
Speaker 2: threats towards like direct FCC involvement. Quote, we can do
Speaker 2: this easy way or the hard way. These companies can
Speaker 2: find ways to change con it can take action frankly
Speaker 2: on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for
Speaker 2: the FCC ahead on quote. The FCC controls broadcast licenses
Speaker 2: for local TV channels, and next Star is planning a
Speaker 2: merger with Tegna, which requires SEC approval. And this is
Speaker 2: obviously a coerced attack on free speech.
Speaker 1: And we've seen a lot of people shows and whatnot
Speaker 1: getting polled and people speaking out getting in trouble because
Speaker 1: they're companies. They're trying to do a merger. Right, that's
Speaker 1: not new.
Speaker 2: Yes, this has happened with ABC already, this happened with
Speaker 2: a CBS and paramount. I think some people, including people
Speaker 2: on the right, are misunderstanding some of the circumstances of
Speaker 2: the firing or the being put on hold, as well
Speaker 2: as what like Kimmel said, Like kim wasn't joking about
Speaker 2: or celebrating Kirk's death. What he did do is possibly
Speaker 2: like falsely insinuate that the shooter was Mega when evidence
Speaker 2: at the time pointed otherwise. Kimmell said, quote, we hit
Speaker 2: some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang
Speaker 2: desperately trying to characterize the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk
Speaker 2: as anything other than one of them and doing everything
Speaker 2: they can to score political points from it.
Speaker 4: Unquote.
Speaker 2: He then went on to tell a joke about how
Speaker 2: Trump did not seem very sad in the wake of
Speaker 2: Charliekirk's death, comparing the death to a goldfish in Trump's mind.
Speaker 2: That was the way the joke was framed. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: that's what Kimmel actually said. You can interpret that either way.
Speaker 2: Whether he's just saying that megas are desperately trying to
Speaker 2: make it look like he's not one of them, and
Speaker 2: scoring political points. Or you can interpret it as Kimmel
Speaker 2: kind of insinuating that the shooter probably is mega. I
Speaker 2: don't know Kimmel's mind. I'm not sure what he exactly
Speaker 2: meant by that. But the Rolling Stone reported that sources
Speaker 2: told them the quote. Senior executives at ABC, its owner,
Speaker 2: Disney and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how
Speaker 2: to minimize the damage. Multiple execs felt Kimmel had not
Speaker 2: actually said anything over the line, but the threat of
Speaker 2: Trump administration retaliation loomed. Yeah, and this is again, this
Speaker 2: is chilling, absolutely chilling speech. The things he said, we're
Speaker 2: not in line with the best available evidence at the
Speaker 2: time that he said them. But they weren't hate speech,
Speaker 2: they were not incitement to violence. There was nothing a
Speaker 2: league know about them. And again you had a fucking
Speaker 2: right wing figure on television urging for homeless people to
Speaker 2: be executed, the involuntary lethal ejection to solve the homeless crisis. Quote,
Speaker 2: just kill them. He's not getting fired.
Speaker 1: No, he had to make a half assed apology, but
Speaker 1: that's it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can had to pretend to be sorry if
Speaker 5: I had a nickel for every time someone on Fox
Speaker 5: News said that like any mass shooter at all was
Speaker 5: linked to a trans person, Like none of my trans
Speaker 5: friends would ever be homeless. Again, Like they say this
Speaker 5: shit all the time and nothing happens, even though it
Speaker 5: is I mean literally just it is straight up tofammatory yep.
Speaker 5: And they say that shit constantly and nothing happens. And
Speaker 5: this is just a the pure I mean example of
Speaker 5: just the latant political suppression of speech. And also this
Speaker 5: sort of like we talked about this with the mergers,
Speaker 5: is the structural problem with the way that like the
Speaker 5: American quote unquote free press is supposed to be structured,
Speaker 5: which is that they're all for profit companies and because
Speaker 5: of that, all you need to do is just buy
Speaker 5: out or threaten their profit enough and they'll just fall
Speaker 5: on line. And that's what we've been watching with news
Speaker 5: outlet after news outlets, news outlet like firing anyone who
Speaker 5: said anything being about Kirk.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: I think with that that concludes our Charlie Kirk assassination
Speaker 2: aftermath discussion for now, But there is in fact other
Speaker 2: news this week happening. James, do you have stuff, Yeah,
Speaker 2: un Fortunately, I'm like, I'm like bracing myself because I
Speaker 2: know that James's news is never that good either.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the good news these days.
Speaker 2: Really the passport thing was killed, right, the Mark Ruvio.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some good news.
Speaker 1: Actually, there was a Senate bill, a writer on a
Speaker 1: bill that was introduced that would have given Marco Rubio
Speaker 1: the power to revoke passports for citizens for effectively political
Speaker 1: speech and the guise of speech protecting you know, quote
Speaker 1: unquote terrorists. That failed, like that was pulled by the sponsor,
Speaker 1: which is good. There was a backlash to it, and
Speaker 1: again when there's backlashes, that's that's good. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's it's so annoying to have to
Speaker 2: like we all know that like pointing out the hypocrisy
Speaker 2: doesn't work as like a real strategy. But like there's
Speaker 2: if there's a way besides that to like actually channel
Speaker 2: resistance to these authoritarian and like speech chilling measures besides
Speaker 2: just smugly going like haha, the Party of free speech
Speaker 2: strikes again, which I understand how that's emotionally compelling. Well,
Speaker 2: it's not going to stop them from taking away your
Speaker 2: free speech. No, yeah, speaking of free speech, here's some
Speaker 2: free ads.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we are back I don't worry, folks. It is
Speaker 4: all downhill from here. I'm afraid because things have not
Speaker 4: been good outside of the coverage and repercussions of the
Speaker 4: Charlie Kirk shooting. And to start with, I want us
Speaker 4: to talk about Ghana. This is one of those stories
Speaker 4: that unfortunately has been kind of eclipsed this week, but
Speaker 4: it shouldn't be, so we're going to talk about it. So,
Speaker 4: the United States has begun using Ghana as a pass
Speaker 4: through to send people back to other countries in West Africa.
Speaker 4: In international law, when somebody has protection from being sent
Speaker 4: to a place and you send them back via another place,
Speaker 4: that is called chain refoulment.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: One could probably also pronounce that it's a bit where
Speaker 4: a French word, but I have decided not to. In
Speaker 4: this instance, I'm sending people to Ghana when their home
Speaker 4: countries has been deemed to be too dangerous by a
Speaker 4: United States court, or they are unable to send them
Speaker 4: back to that country for some other reason. Right, people
Speaker 4: in this part of the world don't need visas to travel,
Speaker 4: so they can send them to neighboring countries without requiring
Speaker 4: Like that, the Ghana can just bust them back, right,
Speaker 4: it doesn't require a great deal of paperwork. So a
Speaker 4: court has ordered the United States that there was an
Speaker 4: attempt right to secure protections for these people via them
Speaker 4: into a temporary restraining order to prevent them either being
Speaker 4: sent away. Some of them were in Ghana at the
Speaker 4: time the case was filed, right, so to prevent them
Speaker 4: being sent from Ghana to places where they may face
Speaker 4: as we're about to hear, torture, death, pretty much the
Speaker 4: worst ship that can happen to people. So the court
Speaker 4: did order the United States to produce a document which
Speaker 4: details the exact nature of its agreement with Ghana. At
Speaker 4: the time I'm writing, the United States has not produced that.
Speaker 4: Gharanean sources have repeatedly suggest did that one exists. Right
Speaker 4: in Ghanan government press conferences and internal Ghanan news reporting,
Speaker 4: the case was bought by both Gambia and Nigerian citizens, right,
Speaker 4: so people who don't want to be returned to those
Speaker 4: countries and their attempt to obtain a restraining order. In
Speaker 4: one instance, one of the people who bought the case
Speaker 4: fled after torture by the police and military and was
Speaker 4: explicitly told that if he came back they would kill
Speaker 4: him and what the US is doing here is using
Speaker 4: Ghana as a pass through to send him back.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, some of them also detailed in the case they're
Speaker 4: transport They said they were in straight jackets for sixteen
Speaker 4: hours on the flight the US. Right, the government, the
Speaker 4: United States government in this instance has once again claimed
Speaker 4: that these people are out of its hands and it
Speaker 4: has no way of stopping the government of Ghana from
Speaker 4: sending them back to these other countries. Right. This is
Speaker 4: an argument that is attempted to make in several other instances,
Speaker 4: and I do just want to fly that like this
Speaker 4: use of third party countries for deportation has much increased
Speaker 4: under the Trump administration, that it was the Biden administration
Speaker 4: who begun funding Panamanian deportations right way before Donald Trump
Speaker 4: was even elected, and I have documented that extensively in
Speaker 4: my series on the Darien Gap. The court determined in
Speaker 4: this case that it didn't have the jurisdiction to grant
Speaker 4: the plaintiff's relief right, so that means that they're not
Speaker 4: able to get a restraining order. One of the people
Speaker 4: had actually already been returned to the place where they
Speaker 4: had a convention against torture, protection from and was in
Speaker 4: hiding at the time. At the court case right, the
Speaker 4: judge said that the government's actions were part of a
Speaker 4: quoting here pattern and widespread effort to evade the government's
Speaker 4: legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.
Speaker 4: We are recording this on the eighteenth of September. It's
Speaker 4: a Thursday, and about fifteen minutes ago, another United States
Speaker 4: flight just landed in Ghana. Practice of BSHB ongoing. Secondly,
Speaker 4: what I want to talk about is sadly another shooting,
Speaker 4: the killing of Silverio Viegas Gonzales in Chicago. Diegos. Gonzales
Speaker 4: was a thirty eight year old father, a Mexican national,
Speaker 4: and he was shot by either one or two ICE
Speaker 4: agents while driving away from them. An ICE statement claimed
Speaker 4: that he drove towards them and ended up dragging an
Speaker 4: agent a significant distance. Surveillance camera footage at the scene
Speaker 4: shows one agent talking to Vegas Gonzales in his vehicle.
Speaker 4: We then see the vehicle reverse away from them and
Speaker 4: then move around them to the left when it sees
Speaker 4: a gap in traffic. The ICE agents have placed their vehicle,
Speaker 4: which is an SUV, in front of his vehicle. Sort
Speaker 4: of cramping it into the curve right, so he has
Speaker 4: to reverse backwards and then move forward and to the
Speaker 4: left in order to try and drive away, which is
Speaker 4: what he's trying to do. Right. We can only see
Speaker 4: one of the officers in the footooth We see the
Speaker 4: other officer later in other footage. The officer in the
Speaker 4: footage does not appear to be dragged that he appears
Speaker 4: to draw his weapon in by standard footage. We then
Speaker 4: see two officers pull theegas Gonzales from the vehicle and
Speaker 4: they begin administering first aid. We're just rewatching the footage
Speaker 4: now and you can see the other age and on
Speaker 4: the other side of the vehicle.
Speaker 2: This sounds very similar to the time that Ice shot
Speaker 2: at the car driving away just a few weeks ago.
Speaker 4: Sure, and Sam Beernardino absolutely, Yeah. Generally, I have no
Speaker 4: idea of what rules Ice are operating under. It's not
Speaker 4: considered best practice to open fire a vehicle that is
Speaker 4: moving away from you unless it is actively endangering no
Speaker 4: someone else's life, right.
Speaker 1: In part because even if it's endangering someone else's life,
Speaker 1: a handgun will not stop a car. Yeah, maybe you
Speaker 1: hit the driver, but the odds are just as good,
Speaker 1: if not much better, then it goes through a window
Speaker 1: and remains lethal going past the car during people's lives.
Speaker 5: And also it's worth mentioning on the other side of
Speaker 5: the car from the officer who we see draw his
Speaker 5: gun is the other agent. Yes, yeah, so if you're
Speaker 5: shooting at the car, you're you're shooting at your other.
Speaker 1: Agian guns don't stop cars generally, unless you're calling a
Speaker 1: fifty caliber anti materiel rifle. Guns don't stop cars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they do stop people, but they but they keep bullets
Speaker 1: keep going when they miss. It's just bad. It's a
Speaker 1: bad thing to do. It's irresponsible. It's normal cop shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so what we see is at least two shots fired,
Speaker 4: and then we begin to see that then they leave
Speaker 4: the screen of the surveillance camera, right, so we don't
Speaker 4: see exactly like we're unable to see. I guess where
Speaker 4: those bullets impact the bystander. Footy Sen shows his vehicle
Speaker 4: crashed into the undercarriage of a large lorry like a truck,
Speaker 4: and he's hit that vehicle in a way that could
Speaker 4: also have been fatal, right like the way that he's
Speaker 4: he's hit that vehicle, like the engine block of the
Speaker 4: car goes underneath, so it would be the driver who
Speaker 4: would take the main impact because the because the trailer
Speaker 4: is higher off the ground. Right, Hopefully that's making sense
Speaker 4: to people. Totally, he's traveled about one hundred feet in
Speaker 4: this time period. Unraveled Press have a pretty good account
Speaker 4: of this. I've cobbled together I think most of the
Speaker 4: open source video and also the surveillance video. There don't
Speaker 4: appear in those videos to be any other agents present,
Speaker 4: and when we see the agents rendering aid, none of
Speaker 4: them appears to be in the state someone would be
Speaker 4: had they been dragged by a fast moving car. Also, again,
Speaker 4: like with reference to shooting at a moving vehicle, off
Speaker 4: the moving vehicle is dragging your colleague, you're shooting also
Speaker 4: at your colleague if you shoot at the vehicle. So, unfortunately,
Speaker 4: one of this changes the fact that this guy is
Speaker 4: now dead. Right. The Mexican Consular has confirmed his age.
Speaker 4: They said he was working as a cook as his profession,
Speaker 4: and that he was from michual Pun. The consulate has
Speaker 4: been in touch with his family. Generally, I'm not familiar
Speaker 4: with this instance and what will happen. Generally, the Mexican
Speaker 4: Consulate will help with returning the remains of Mexican nationals
Speaker 4: to their families in Mexico. That's most of what I
Speaker 4: have on his death. It seems to have moved like
Speaker 4: very quickly through the news cycle, which is unfortunate because
Speaker 4: obviously you have children who have lost a father here
Speaker 4: like this. This is a tragedy too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, this is tragic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: You know, And I am sitting here haunted by the
Speaker 5: fact that they killed this guy two days after the
Speaker 5: Charlie Kirk shooting. I think most of the people who
Speaker 5: are listening to the show right now don't know this happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these agents aren't going to get prosecuted into court
Speaker 2: of law for this, the same way that absolutely the
Speaker 2: Charlie kirkisas ad will.
Speaker 4: Yeah, generally, like local dealer, there have been some cases,
Speaker 4: but I'm not really aware of any filed against Border
Speaker 4: Patrol agents. Generally, DHS has an agency which investigates like
Speaker 4: use of force incidents, right, and it is I will
Speaker 4: say it is extremely There have been times when agents
Speaker 4: have been charged.
Speaker 2: They are rare Stephen Miller's DHSS. That seems very unlikely.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like I'm aware of some charges, for instance, in
Speaker 4: San Diego for like agents who have allowed drugs to
Speaker 4: cross the border.
Speaker 5: Right, sure, it is pretty rare. Yeah, So let's let's
Speaker 5: talk about what ICE's occupation of Chicago has been. Like, Yeah,
Speaker 5: I kind of want to start with something that's been
Speaker 5: very frustrating, which is a lot of the way that
Speaker 5: Chicago has been discussed in the wake of Trump, like
Speaker 5: not deploying the National Guard. There has been about oh,
Speaker 5: if you resist Trumpet will like, you know, you can
Speaker 5: defeat him, and like that's true. But also ICE and
Speaker 5: Border patrol are on the ground in Chicago as we're
Speaker 5: listening to this right now, dragging people from their homes.
Speaker 5: The raids have gone to a significant extent the way
Speaker 5: that we expected them to. They have been largely very
Speaker 5: very fast lightning raids. A lot of them have been
Speaker 5: an outlying part of Chicago land, which has been making
Speaker 5: it difficult to both track them and determine numbers because
Speaker 5: a lot of these parts of these massive Chicago suburbs.
Speaker 5: We're going to talk about one later called Elgin that
Speaker 5: has one hundred thousand people in it, but also doesn't
Speaker 5: have the kind of I mean they have like local journalists,
Speaker 5: but they don't have like the kind of press core
Speaker 5: that they're like the city of Chicago proper has and
Speaker 5: so documentation isn't much harder, which is part of why
Speaker 5: they've been striking out there. It's largely been Ice, but
Speaker 5: Border Patrol has shown up, and part of the Border
Speaker 5: Patrol appearing has been that this has also been a
Speaker 5: giant pr blitz for a Trump administration officials, as the
Speaker 5: people at Unraveled have pointed out, and we'll be talking
Speaker 5: to them more next week about what things have been
Speaker 5: like on the ground. A senior Border Patrol official, Gregory
Speaker 5: Bovino has claimed too, we don't actually have like photograph
Speaker 5: everyone's in there, but he was posting on X that
Speaker 5: he was. He went to Franklin Park, which is where
Speaker 5: Ice shot that guy a couple of days after the shooting. Okay,
Speaker 5: he has been releasing an entire stream of TikTok and
Speaker 5: X posts to sort of like advertise his presence in
Speaker 5: the city and doing this whole we did this in
Speaker 5: LA or doing this here now thing. JMC. You don't
Speaker 5: talk a little bit about who he.
Speaker 4: Is, Yeah, I do. So. Beveno was, at least until recently,
Speaker 4: he's appeared to be as you say working in Chicago now.
Speaker 4: His Twitter now reads Commander op at Large CA Gregory K. Bavino.
Speaker 4: He was a chief patrol agent in Neil Centro sector
Speaker 4: when we saw Operation Return to Sender right. Operation Return
Speaker 4: Tocember was December of twenty t twenty four. That's happened
Speaker 4: under a Biden administration. This was the first of these
Speaker 4: border patrol roving stops way north of the border, right
Speaker 4: up in the central Valley, stopping people in home depots,
Speaker 4: stopping people people who appeared to be Latino, Latina Latine
Speaker 4: on the street. I would say that cal Matters has
Speaker 4: had a really good coverage of that, and I can
Speaker 4: link it in the show notes. We also saw the
Speaker 4: deployment of Border Patrol to La right, that was the
Speaker 4: El Centre section, So people aren't familiar with El Centro
Speaker 4: east of San Diego along the border right, it's sort
Speaker 4: of most of the way to Arizona if your driving
Speaker 4: from San Diego. He is really, like I would say,
Speaker 4: a man of the moment in terms of Trump's border patrol.
Speaker 4: Right like, border Patrol is an agency that's changed a
Speaker 4: lot over the years. There was a time with Border
Speaker 4: Patrol recruiter from the Peace corps now is not that time.
Speaker 4: One thing that Bevino has been very good at in
Speaker 4: the sense of like doing what the administration wants from
Speaker 4: a border patrol agent right now is his use of
Speaker 4: social media. My understanding is that they have a whole
Speaker 4: team dedicated to this in the El Centro sector, right,
Speaker 4: that they have videographers and photographers and such to make
Speaker 4: social media for the border patrol. And Bavina really seems
Speaker 4: to have been stepping up in importance, like he has
Speaker 4: this sort of he also cuts a very distinctive figure
Speaker 4: with this kind of crop side haircut, like you can
Speaker 4: find a picture of his haircut online. I don't how
Speaker 4: to describe it. It's where the brick picture shows him
Speaker 4: holding an ar with a low powered variable octic Like
Speaker 4: he is this new tactical, aggressive, very aggressive social media
Speaker 4: presence border patrol officer. Right. And we've seen El Centro
Speaker 4: Border Patrol station specifically be at the forefront of a
Speaker 4: lot of these operations. As I said, even going back
Speaker 4: to the Biden era, if you're wondering, border patrol sectors
Speaker 4: are not just around the cities that they're named for, right,
Speaker 4: They can go a long way north, So it's the
Speaker 4: San Diego sector, the El Centro sector. These are not
Speaker 4: necessarily defined by places that you would recognize as being
Speaker 4: close to San Diego or El Centro, which is why
Speaker 4: you would have seen them operating as far north as
Speaker 4: Los Angeles. I'm not as familiar with northern border sectors,
Speaker 4: haven't spent as much time there, but I would imagine
Speaker 4: that there is a border patrail sector that attains to
Speaker 4: the area that Chicago is in. So perhaps, but you know,
Speaker 4: it's now doing some kind of operational command for these
Speaker 4: urban things rather than working in that sector. I'm not
Speaker 4: entirely sure, but yeah, that's who he is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and he's been you know, he's been making an
Speaker 5: enormous deal of showing up in Chicago, and this has
Speaker 5: been something that's increasingly This is part of what it
Speaker 5: means for ice and Border Patrol to show up in
Speaker 5: the city, is you get these fucking, just absolutely hideous
Speaker 5: pr ops. On Tuesday, Kercy nome last scene shooting a
Speaker 5: dog joined a raid in Elgin, which is a pretty
Speaker 5: far flung suburb of Chicago with about one hundred thousand
Speaker 5: people in it, and she showed up to do basically
Speaker 5: a PR junket at this raid at five in the
Speaker 5: morning in Elgin, where I survived with helicopters. They blew
Speaker 5: up someone's door and they grabbed a bunch of people,
Speaker 5: and then they were forced to release two of the
Speaker 5: seven people they grabbed because they immediately turned out to
Speaker 5: be US citizens. Kurst has denied that they detained them
Speaker 5: and said that, oh no, actually we just separated them
Speaker 5: for their protection. What we did the operation like that
Speaker 5: doesn't seem to be true from everything that we've heard
Speaker 5: from witnesses the scene. But yeah, this is you know,
Speaker 5: these are the way that these enforcement operations, the way
Speaker 5: that these raids have gone is at the beginning of
Speaker 5: a major operation, cycles turned into these press circuits for
Speaker 5: people like Chursy Nome.
Speaker 4: Yeah, GNOME's been on a few raids like this has
Speaker 4: been a consistent thing, right, that these raids are a
Speaker 4: content creation exercises much tall law enforcement.
Speaker 1: Yes, and it excuse to dress up all that good stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know it. It's this, it's this like
Speaker 5: reveling both in this you know, in this sort of
Speaker 5: like like constructed like I'm holding an air fifteen lookout
Speaker 5: tough I am image and also just in the cruelty
Speaker 5: and the suffering in the same way that the alligator
Speaker 5: Alcatraz stuff was. But it's worth noting that most of
Speaker 5: the raids have not looked like this, Like this this
Speaker 5: was a raid where like, you know, people were woken
Speaker 5: up in this basically this random suburb at five in
Speaker 5: the morning because like they heard an explosion and ice
Speaker 5: had blocked off all of their streets and their armored
Speaker 5: vehicles and helicopters. Most of what they've been are not
Speaker 5: like that. They've been following the pattern established in LA
Speaker 5: of very very rapid raids to avoid rep response networks,
Speaker 5: targeting accombination of houses, job sites, and you know, places
Speaker 5: like home depot and you know, when we talked about
Speaker 5: this beginning a couple of weeks ago, we talked about
Speaker 5: how these people are being deployed largely from this naval
Speaker 5: base that is hours out from the city, right And
Speaker 5: that's part of why these a lot of these raids,
Speaker 5: although they have been going to the South Side, which
Speaker 5: is significantly far away, but a lot of these raids
Speaker 5: have been in places like Elgin that are further north
Speaker 5: and are more outlying because they are closer to this
Speaker 5: naval base than the core of the city of Chicago,
Speaker 5: and it's easier to do there because there's less resistance.
Speaker 5: There's been a bunch of raids in Elgin. They took
Speaker 5: a student from a community college. They've just been dragging
Speaker 5: people from their homes and workplaces. There was a very
Speaker 5: very well publicized raid in Naperville, which is another sort
Speaker 5: of outlying suburb, where they grabbed people who are like
Speaker 5: fixing someone's roof.
Speaker 4: Was that the one where people remained on the roof?
Speaker 4: Yeah some time? Yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, really horrible seeing people are extremely pissed off. There's
Speaker 5: another story that I's gotten very very little coverage that
Speaker 5: was horrifying in Displains, which is the suburb just north
Speaker 5: of Oha, where ice agents and masks did a very
Speaker 5: very standard thing that they've been doing.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: This is, I mean a kind of standard ice tactic
Speaker 5: where they wait for people to get back into a
Speaker 5: truck and then they block the truck off with their
Speaker 5: trucks to prevent it from leaving. And I'm going to
Speaker 5: read a CBS report of what happened next because I
Speaker 5: think it's important to understand what is actually like for
Speaker 5: these people. Edgar, who's one of the people who was
Speaker 5: in the car said that when the agent originally came
Speaker 5: to the passenger door, he tried holding the door closed
Speaker 5: for preventing him from opening it. He said at the
Speaker 5: time that he and his family had no idea who
Speaker 5: was at the vehicle, and everyone was scared. When the
Speaker 5: agent tried opening the door, Edgar said he was tased
Speaker 5: in the face. That's when he told everyone in the
Speaker 5: truck to run for their lives. Despite being a US citizen,
Speaker 5: they ran out of fear. So what's happening here is
Speaker 5: there's these two brothers and their dad who is undocumented.
Speaker 5: The two brothers were born in Chicago, and they block
Speaker 5: off this car. They show up in masks. The people
Speaker 5: in the car have absolutely no idea who they are,
Speaker 5: and when they try to not get their car broken into,
Speaker 5: they tase this guy, who is an American citizen in
Speaker 5: the face. He has to go to the hospital because
Speaker 5: they tased him in the face. And this there are
Speaker 5: stories like this. This is a particularly bad one, but
Speaker 5: there are stories like the rest of the raids that
Speaker 5: we've been talking about every single day in Chicago that
Speaker 5: do not break containments at all. In a country that
Speaker 5: is literally entirely just talking about Charlie Kirk. There are
Speaker 5: people being dragged from their homes. There are people being
Speaker 5: dragged from their fucking places of work, They're being dragged
Speaker 5: from their schools. And this is just what the US
Speaker 5: is right now now, as fucking unbelievably bleak as this
Speaker 5: is right, and people are terrified, but they're also angry,
Speaker 5: and people are also organizing, and as we saw in LA,
Speaker 5: people are forming rapid response networks and they're showing up
Speaker 5: in places that I never would have thought. I mean,
Speaker 5: maybe there'd be NGO networks, but they're doing things in
Speaker 5: places I just wouldn't have thought possible. I want to
Speaker 5: close this by there was a report on Thursday by
Speaker 5: Sean Molkay, who's the news editor at The Reader, which
Speaker 5: is a good independent outlet in Chicago. So ICE tried
Speaker 5: the same tactic of blockading someone's truck and grabbing them
Speaker 5: in a suburb called Wheaton, Illinois, and a bunch of
Speaker 5: people when they tried to do this smash and grab
Speaker 5: of this person's truck, a whole bunch of people showed
Speaker 5: up and confronted them and screamed at them and recorded them,
Speaker 5: and this caused the ICE people to take off and
Speaker 5: run away without detaining the person. And this is a
Speaker 5: stunning development if you know anything about either Chicago Land
Speaker 5: or evangelicalism. Wheaton is the home of Wheaton College, which
Speaker 5: is like, it's one of like the three big right
Speaker 5: wing like Christian universities, alongside like Brigham Young and Liberty.
Speaker 5: This is wild. This was one of the home bases
Speaker 5: of power of the Bush era moral majority right like
Speaker 5: Wheaton College is a school where dancing was illegal and
Speaker 5: until two thousand and three, like, they've banned dancing for
Speaker 5: one hundred and forty three years. And if people in
Speaker 5: Wheaton are showing up to do direct actions against Ice,
Speaker 5: these people they're cooked, right, They will be able to
Speaker 5: do a significant amount of damage. They have been doing
Speaker 5: significant amount of damage. We've just been talking about the
Speaker 5: amount of damage they've been doing. But if this is
Speaker 5: what is happening in places that used to be moral
Speaker 5: majority strongholds right, places that produce some of the most
Speaker 5: famous like Christian right wingers who shaped an entire half
Speaker 5: century of American politics, if people there are showing up
Speaker 5: and doing direct actions against Ice and winning, things are
Speaker 5: fucking changing. People are radicalizing very quickly, and despite everything
Speaker 5: that's been happening by all of the Kirk stuff Trump's
Speaker 5: pulling keeps getting worse and worse, And I think this
Speaker 5: is a good reminder that, like these people, part of
Speaker 5: the reason they're moving so fast and so hard right
Speaker 5: now is because they know they are staggeringly unpopular and
Speaker 5: they have to get their crack down and they have
Speaker 5: to build a political and legal power right now before
Speaker 5: it gets even worse for them, and they're terrified that,
Speaker 5: you know, if there are a thousand wheatns, what if
Speaker 5: enough people resist them, they don't have the capacity to
Speaker 5: stop them. Because everybody fucking hates these people and they
Speaker 5: hate what they're doing. Nobody actually likes, you know, shock
Speaker 5: troopers showing up in the neighborhoods and dragging the people
Speaker 5: they love away from them. And it's going to be
Speaker 5: a really, really long and hard battle. But the fact
Speaker 5: that people are fighting in places where that would have
Speaker 5: been unimaginable even ten years ago is I think at
Speaker 5: least a small sign of hope in the darkness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's probably where we ought to end, is
Speaker 1: a small sign of hope in the darkness.
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