Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
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: Welcome Dick.
Speaker 4: It happened here, a podcast that played some role in
Speaker 4: the defeats of the Republicans reposed ban on using Medicaid
Speaker 4: to pay for trans healthcare. I am your host, Mia Wong,
Speaker 4: and with me are three of the people who helped
Speaker 4: make this whole thing possible. This is David Forbes, journalist
Speaker 4: from the Ashville Blade, and Medica's News, Mattie Cassagin of
Speaker 4: the namesake Medicast News, and Miura Laisine of Free Radical
Speaker 4: and also Medica's News and all of you welcome to
Speaker 4: the show. Congratulations on your defeat of the Republican part
Speaker 4: already and helping to save trans healthcare for unbelievably large
Speaker 4: numbers of people in this country.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like a sentence that's kind
Speaker 5: of hard to accept, and you know, in a lot
Speaker 5: of ways, it is really what we've been trying to say.
Speaker 5: It's been like a collective effort of everyone involved, especially
Speaker 5: to people at the grassroots, and you know, like I
Speaker 5: guess to give listeners a little bit of context. So
Speaker 5: going back to May, they're in the big beautiful bill
Speaker 5: that unfortunately did pass. Originally Republicans included a ban on
Speaker 5: government funding for Medicaid for gender transition procedures, and originally
Speaker 5: just from miners in the House. Then right before they
Speaker 5: passed it through the House, they actually removed the miners claws,
Speaker 5: so it was applying for all adults on Medicaid who
Speaker 5: are trans At this point, everyone started kind of freaking out,
Speaker 5: which is very reasonable because you know, there's over two
Speaker 5: hundred thousand trans people on Medicaid depending on the numbers,
Speaker 5: like hundred and seventy thousand depending on who you ask.
Speaker 5: And so what we found is, you know a lot
Speaker 5: of other sources have told us this that the bird roll,
Speaker 5: which is basically, you know, parliamentary procedure in the Senate
Speaker 5: that only exists in the Senate because of the filibuster
Speaker 5: pretty much is one way that we could kill this
Speaker 5: is what they told us back in May, and so
Speaker 5: that's something that we reported on and tried to take
Speaker 5: like you know, basically like a don't panic angle or
Speaker 5: don't panic yet at least you know, like that there's
Speaker 5: a lot of ways to fight back against this, and
Speaker 5: we provided you know, templates for here's how you can
Speaker 5: email your senators and this is exactly what you should
Speaker 5: tell them.
Speaker 6: You should call them.
Speaker 5: You could call specific people on specific committees and tell
Speaker 5: specific things to them. And you know, of course a
Speaker 5: lot of other organizations and people also chipped into this,
Speaker 5: you know, a for t PE, head of campaigns and whatnot.
Speaker 5: But I think you know, at the end of the day,
Speaker 5: what really pushed the needle was the people calling in
Speaker 5: and waking Democrats up to this issue. And basically what
Speaker 5: ended up happening is we Wove sent it. Widen basically
Speaker 5: argued to the parliamentarium that hey, this trans Medicaid band,
Speaker 5: it's not not a budgetary matter, it's actually a policy matter.
Speaker 5: And the parliamentarian agreed and ruled that it was basically
Speaker 5: a sixty vote threshold and not a fifty vote threshold.
Speaker 5: So what that meant is that as long as all Democrats,
Speaker 5: or at least forty Democrats forty one Democrats were closing
Speaker 5: this measure, it was basically guaranteed to be kicked out
Speaker 5: of the bill. And we did end up having enough
Speaker 5: Democrats to basically ensure that that provision didn't make it
Speaker 5: into law, even though unfortunately the bill did pass at
Speaker 5: the end of the day.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think one thing that's notable about this, I
Speaker 7: think one thing to emerge in our discussions, and while
Speaker 7: she's not in the podcast, I really want to thank
Speaker 7: Koreean Green for very invaluable policy insight into some of
Speaker 7: this and some of the specific ways and weaknesses to
Speaker 7: go after politicians on this. And you know, certainly we
Speaker 7: were not alone in this. I think there were a
Speaker 7: lot of grassroots organizations as well, and I think kind
Speaker 7: of the approach that emerged and was successful, I think
Speaker 7: it's kind of important how it happened, because one, it
Speaker 7: identified a specific weakness who weren't just vaguely asking legislators
Speaker 7: to do something about this. And two, I think it
Speaker 7: did something which traditionally definitely democratic politicians, but even a
Speaker 7: lot of the gay ink to use a term popular
Speaker 7: among the law of transactivists like big lobbying groups and
Speaker 7: establishment nonprofits been loath to do, which is it got
Speaker 7: angry at democrats. It warned them that people were watching.
Speaker 7: It wasn't like pretty please, you know, will you do
Speaker 7: something to stop this? And from two decades dealing with politicians,
Speaker 7: that's a much more effective way to approach. If you're
Speaker 7: just going to ask nicely, they'll ignore you. They ignore
Speaker 7: your entire demographic, if you're marginalized, if they're afraid of you. However,
Speaker 7: if they're worried about their phone lines being shut down
Speaker 7: with pushback, people are getting angry at them, then they
Speaker 7: get worried and feel like they need to do something.
Speaker 7: So I think both with our article and with some
Speaker 7: of the other grassroots groups involved, it really kind of
Speaker 7: put the focus back on what people can do. But
Speaker 7: it did it by identifying weakness and then pressing really
Speaker 7: hard on it. And I think that's kind of a
Speaker 7: break with how some of the very unsuccessful higher level
Speaker 7: tactics that have you know, been used or not been
Speaker 7: used against transphobic legislation before.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think I think it's important to, you know,
Speaker 4: look at the changing terrain of this all because a
Speaker 4: lot of the sort of gig lobbying efforts were based
Speaker 4: on conditions that don't exist anymore. And you could argue
Speaker 4: how effective they were back in like you know, like
Speaker 4: twenty fifteen. Yeah, right, and I still think there are
Speaker 4: more effective things that could have been done. Then there
Speaker 4: is no argument now like you can't just rely on
Speaker 4: sort of like access as democratic politicians and being like, oh, hey,
Speaker 4: wh're this org? You want this thing to happen. And
Speaker 4: we saw this a lot, and this is something that
Speaker 4: our policy analyst friend Karine Green, who have had in
Speaker 4: the show before, was talking about with like with the
Speaker 4: Biden administration was the way that all of these orgs
Speaker 4: sort of just fell in line behind the Biden administration,
Speaker 4: like fucking over trans people's healthcare in ways that no
Speaker 4: one ever really talked about, and that kind of access
Speaker 4: model got flipped, you know, whatever they were trying to
Speaker 4: do before, and you can are you know, you can
Speaker 4: have arguments about like what they thought they were doing.
Speaker 4: At this point, it's just like no, like you're not
Speaker 4: existing to like protect queer people, You're existing to protect
Speaker 4: the Democrats from queer people. And you know, and and
Speaker 4: and the situation we're in now is one where and
Speaker 4: there was some very very scary reporting coming out of
Speaker 4: the Democrats were like it wasn't clear if they were
Speaker 4: actually going to try to whip the votes together, like
Speaker 4: to actually vote against this stuff, and so like we're
Speaker 4: at a point where regardless of whatever you would have
Speaker 4: supported before, and again like I think I think they
Speaker 4: were wrong before, but like now, no, you had this
Speaker 4: is the only way to do this shit, Like there's
Speaker 4: no other mechanism.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So this has been something I've especially noticed in
Speaker 8: like recording on this because myself and Matti we both
Speaker 8: co reported on the initial story breaking the effect that
Speaker 8: the Medicaid ban was going in there. Mattie especially did
Speaker 8: all the stuff at the bird role. When we initially
Speaker 8: started working in the story, it was just a small
Speaker 8: tip we had that there was going to be something
Speaker 8: big coming in the next funding bill, and I can
Speaker 8: definitely speak that at the time, Democrats, lobbyists and so forth,
Speaker 8: they were just very like business as usual, right, they
Speaker 8: were just even knowing that a lot of this was
Speaker 8: kind of had the chance of emerging, and that there
Speaker 8: was going to be a lot of bad stuff emerging,
Speaker 8: a lot of it was still like trying to use
Speaker 8: these whole tactics from way back when to just act
Speaker 8: like everything is still as if it's you know, twenty fifteen,
Speaker 8: twenty fourteen, and once everything started to unferral and dedicae
Speaker 8: band became added in to the bill itself. Witnessing it
Speaker 8: all from just a reporting perspective was like it felt
Speaker 8: like watching them all go into panic mode and yet
Speaker 8: at the same time be like trying to find ways
Speaker 8: to kind of push us to the side.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And while I am.
Speaker 8: Of course, like god so incredibly thankful we were able
Speaker 8: to play any type of role and getting this done.
Speaker 8: Like so, it's become a narrative among so many, for
Speaker 8: lack of a better phrasing, proponents of gay ink, proponents
Speaker 8: of the status quo, proponents of just you know, your
Speaker 8: social democracy types, that the way forward is to be nice,
Speaker 8: to beg and plead for our rights, so hope that
Speaker 8: they give us it. If we ask really really nicely,
Speaker 8: and we beg and plead and we say thank you,
Speaker 8: and we don't be too rude or else we'll earn
Speaker 8: it and we'll deserve whatever they give. You know, It's
Speaker 8: like what ultimately became the final straw was like, we
Speaker 8: sent out a push for every single just reader, follower,
Speaker 8: every single listener podcast like everyone at home who just
Speaker 8: spread this around, put pressure on the politicians, made it
Speaker 8: clear this wasn't acceptable, made it clear that no, they
Speaker 8: can't just ignore us and act like we don't exist,
Speaker 8: and that no, they can't just wash their hands away
Speaker 8: and pretend like this is all fine and that their
Speaker 8: records came that no, it's this is something that matters,
Speaker 8: This is something that has to be fought. And it
Speaker 8: really boiled down to just the intense pressure everyone put publicly,
Speaker 8: like yeah, and I think it is just a very
Speaker 8: ultimate testament to how the true power in any political
Speaker 8: system lies not with just a handful of elected NEPO
Speaker 8: babies end up getting into office, but with the regular
Speaker 8: people who make their voice heard, who band together and
Speaker 8: aren't afraid to say, hey, this shit is fucked up.
Speaker 8: We need to do something about it.
Speaker 7: Y'all are mentioning how like, whatever debate about the gang
Speaker 7: approach before, it's it's not just dead now it's catastrophically failed.
Speaker 7: I honestly think that's kind of beyond debate at this point.
Speaker 7: But one thing that I think kind of this shows
Speaker 7: is that when you're doing with politicians, if all you
Speaker 7: have is hey, pretty please be nice to us mater earlier,
Speaker 7: you just can you be ignored. But like if they
Speaker 7: go no, what else do you have then? If you
Speaker 7: don't have some other kind of leverage. And one thing
Speaker 7: I've seen consistently at local, state, and federal levels is
Speaker 7: the odds are a lot better if people are.
Speaker 9: Ancher and the politicians are afraid.
Speaker 7: Yep, So I think, yeah, nothing, that that's the real
Speaker 7: vantage the grassroots have. You know, stop caring about the
Speaker 7: politicians are your friends or really care about us? Because
Speaker 7: generally the answer is they don't. None of them are
Speaker 7: our friends. And more focus on what can you and
Speaker 7: your communities, your friends, the larger networks you're part of
Speaker 7: do to make their lives miserable until the part of
Speaker 7: the SASCO you're trying to fight becomes unsustainable for them too.
Speaker 5: What I heard from people on the on the hill
Speaker 5: are people close to people on the hill, is basically
Speaker 5: that the whole bird rule maneuver for this specific provision,
Speaker 5: there was you know, definitely whispers of it, you know,
Speaker 5: especially among lobbyists and maybe some staffers. But until it
Speaker 5: was being publicly advocated for this specific tool to be
Speaker 5: used by constituents towards senators Democratic senators specifically, it wasn't
Speaker 5: really like hugely in consideration or like that wasn't something
Speaker 5: they were planning to do in a very strongly like
Speaker 5: maybe it would have happened eventually, but it definitely does
Speaker 5: seem like the constituent pressure specifically did help kind of
Speaker 5: make Democrats realize that, hey, we're watching, you're watching you do,
Speaker 5: like whether you're invoking these parliamentary procedures that you aren't
Speaker 5: supposed to know about, Like you're not supposed to know
Speaker 5: about this stuff, right, It's like it's really obscure stuff
Speaker 5: that no one knows about except like super autistic policy ner.
Speaker 5: It's like like me and a current probably, but yeah,
Speaker 5: and this kind of stuff is really what turns the needles.
Speaker 5: And like you can look at the other side too, right,
Speaker 5: Like you know, there are extremely effective lobbies in Congress
Speaker 5: you can look at you can look at the lobby
Speaker 5: that literally got this provision into the bill. They sent
Speaker 5: a letter to Speaker Johnson saying, hey, you should expand
Speaker 5: this from miners only to adults because we think this
Speaker 5: will actually help it survive the burg Row better. And
Speaker 5: this was a public letter, right, And you know you
Speaker 5: might say, oh, well that's not a big deal. Rights,
Speaker 5: It's a letter, right, But how many gay rights organizations
Speaker 5: released a letter to Democrats saying they should in book
Speaker 5: the Bird Rule? Yeah, I'm not aware of any like.
Speaker 7: I think that's the key part of this is that, yes,
Speaker 7: eventually some of those groups did start belatedly moving against this. Yes,
Speaker 7: eventually it's probably into a second Some politicians did, in
Speaker 7: various ways start moving against this. But I think it's
Speaker 7: important not to get kind of the cart before the horse.
Speaker 7: That came after the grassroots pressure came after weeks of
Speaker 7: people getting angry at them, blowing up their phones, very
Speaker 7: public criticism, all the things that I think we're told
Speaker 7: a lot of the time by liberals and Democrats were
Speaker 7: not supposed to do. You know, be nice or you
Speaker 7: know your concerns won't be heard. Well, it turns out
Speaker 7: is that the Isaac Ollas is the case. And you
Speaker 7: mentioned those conservative lobbyists, people will know, you know. I
Speaker 7: don't think it's always a rule that the tactics or
Speaker 7: enemy can be adopted for various reasons.
Speaker 9: But the NRA and a.
Speaker 7: Lot of these terrible groups don't go into Congress going hey,
Speaker 7: please be nice to us. They go in going do this,
Speaker 7: or we're going to make your life Hell yeah. And
Speaker 7: if you're if this is terrain, people are going to
Speaker 7: fight on. That's how you have to fight as far
Speaker 7: as because that's what moves politicians at every level is
Speaker 7: it's oh my god, I do not want this group
Speaker 7: angry at me.
Speaker 8: And there's one thing I want to add to is
Speaker 8: since the bird Rolls and Folk in the Band was
Speaker 8: taken out, there has emerged a common narrative online. It's
Speaker 8: not really one specific person doing this, it's just kind
Speaker 8: of something that's kind of collectively emerged in that claiming
Speaker 8: that the credit lies with politicians, with lobbyists, with staffer,
Speaker 8: it's with all these anonymous people behind closed doors who
Speaker 8: are supposedly the ones that actually did the work, and
Speaker 8: no one else matters. I want to strongly emphasize that
Speaker 8: that is not only not true, but dangerous rhetoric.
Speaker 9: It's propaganda.
Speaker 8: Yes, it's an attempt to reinforce the role that the
Speaker 8: state has in subjugating everyone, to reinforce the fact that oh, no,
Speaker 8: the way things are is perfect. You can trust all
Speaker 8: these leaders to protect you when you can't. They are
Speaker 8: the reason we got in this mess. The Gayank tactics
Speaker 8: are the things that have failed and led to this
Speaker 8: in the first place. Liberals had plenty of opportunities prevents
Speaker 8: this and they didn't. And ultimately, the reason that this
Speaker 8: narrative spreads is because at the end of the day,
Speaker 8: gay Yank has called that for a reason because well, yes,
Speaker 8: their interests happen to align on the realm of queer
Speaker 8: rights because they themselves are queer. At the end of
Speaker 8: the day, they are still representing the upper class, and
Speaker 8: their primary interests are still going to be with protecting
Speaker 8: the upper class and protecting the role they have in
Speaker 8: subjugating the lower class and subjugating marginalized people who are
Speaker 8: not in their economic class.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which is most trans people, like almost all of us.
Speaker 10: Yeah, this is like.
Speaker 7: Really important because I don't think the intersections of queerness
Speaker 7: and definitely not transist in class get talked.
Speaker 9: About nearly enough.
Speaker 7: Which is is that queer in transy or overwhelmingly working
Speaker 7: class demographics. Yep, like the legislators you know, like Sara McBride,
Speaker 7: but also like the people running gag coorganizations are not
Speaker 7: just like not generally representative of our wider communities in.
Speaker 9: A lot of ways.
Speaker 7: They also just have had incredibly different lives almost always,
Speaker 7: with some exceptions, they've been part of the gentry their
Speaker 7: entire lives, and most queer and trades people, especially trans people,
Speaker 7: are as far from the gentry as you get. So
Speaker 7: that does create like this massive gulf, but also I
Speaker 7: think it's one reason these groups are so out of touch.
Speaker 7: But also I think it does, you know, if we
Speaker 7: put the power back on ourselves, if we realize that
Speaker 7: this kind of grasstreots Anger is much more representative of
Speaker 7: where queer and trans people are, If this willingness to
Speaker 7: fight directly in whatever tactics people choose is much more
Speaker 7: like in keeping with like queer culture and tradition and history,
Speaker 7: then I think there's a lot of power there. And
Speaker 7: I think this is an example of successfully wielding that.
Speaker 7: I think Mirror was correct about this propaganda that's kind
Speaker 7: of been spreading in the wake, and it was particularly
Speaker 7: I think egregious because it specifically like tried to credit
Speaker 7: Sara McBride, who had just come off a really obnoxious
Speaker 7: interview with The New York Times where she was literally
Speaker 7: against all.
Speaker 9: The aggressive trans rights and then after the band.
Speaker 7: Finally got killed, this you know, various sources, and honestly,
Speaker 7: I don't know anyone hearing this stuff in whatever capacities is
Speaker 7: a journalist act was whatever. I think it's just professionally
Speaker 7: good to be more skeptical when these kind of convenient
Speaker 7: narratives emerge. But kind of embers, Oh, behind the scenes,
Speaker 7: she'd been doing so much. Yeah, sure, in public she'd
Speaker 7: been you know, very either low key or refusing defend
Speaker 7: trains rights at all, even justifying some of the narratives
Speaker 7: of our enemies. But sure she was doing all this
Speaker 7: behind the scenes.
Speaker 4: She refused to fucking do anything when they ban trans
Speaker 4: people from fucking up bathrooms in DC.
Speaker 3: Yes, like in Capitol Town.
Speaker 8: You wouldn't even defend her own staffers.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 7: So, like it's worth being skeptical of the claim that, oh,
Speaker 7: she was doing so much behind the scenes. However, you know,
Speaker 7: if she was prompted in the last week of a
Speaker 7: multi week effort to suddenly start taking some action based
Speaker 7: on anger, great. Part of the point these strategies is
Speaker 7: to prompt people who don't want to act into feeling
Speaker 7: like they're forced to act. But I think in twenty
Speaker 7: years of covering politics at various levels, if politicians don't
Speaker 7: like something, you will know. If they support something, you
Speaker 7: will know they will be very loud and very public,
Speaker 7: because the public platform is one of the biggest powers
Speaker 7: they have, as well as doing whatever behind the scenes
Speaker 7: if they're quiet about something or even seem opposite to it,
Speaker 7: especially if it involves a group on the front.
Speaker 9: Lines like trans communities.
Speaker 7: And then later on they try to kind of take
Speaker 7: back credit of saying, oh, look, you know, we were
Speaker 7: doing so much behind the scenes that is pretty universally
Speaker 7: attacked to commit to demobilized people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I want to note that the point of
Speaker 5: us saying this is not to say that you know,
Speaker 5: Sarah McBride or you know Saffher's or these other people
Speaker 5: didn't do anything, like, of course, they did stuff right like,
Speaker 5: they voted, they were voting. Note, they probably made some
Speaker 5: phone calls and stuff, right, But what we're saying is like, Okay,
Speaker 5: they basically did the bare minimum of what they're supposed
Speaker 5: to do right like, and that was only after a
Speaker 5: huge pressure campaign from the grassroots and from people who
Speaker 5: they would literally not be even in office without. Like
Speaker 5: I did the math in an article way back in
Speaker 5: that last November, and there's like exit polls showing that
Speaker 5: like eighty six percent of LGBTQ people voted for Democrats
Speaker 5: last year. That's like a crazy margin. That's like it's
Speaker 5: up there with you know, black voters and LGBTQ people
Speaker 5: are like the biggest bass of the Democratic Party, right,
Speaker 5: Like they would have lost three or four more Senate
Speaker 5: seats they would it would have been like a fifty
Speaker 5: six fifty seven seat chamber if it were not for
Speaker 5: literally the people that are advocating for this healthcare. And
Speaker 5: it's so absurd that, like Sarah McBride, what she did was,
Speaker 5: if we assume everything that's been said is true about
Speaker 5: this is what she's done is basically she got Democrats
Speaker 5: to not vote to take away the healthcare of two
Speaker 5: hundred thousand trans people, which is like, why was that
Speaker 5: even a question like this? This is the actual story
Speaker 5: that came out of this. In my opinion, that was
Speaker 5: bigger is that this was ever in question that there
Speaker 5: might be like seven or eight Democrats who would vote
Speaker 5: to ban medicate from two D three hundred thousand trans
Speaker 5: people like and the fact that we're supposed to, like
Speaker 5: give them a huge applause for not doing that is
Speaker 5: kind of obscene to me.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think the readiness to thank politicians kind of
Speaker 7: cuts against the grassroots anger and organizing that works so
Speaker 7: well here because you don't want them. And actually I
Speaker 7: think it's certainly a good rule not to thank politicians
Speaker 7: because what you want constantly keep them in, if that's
Speaker 7: the terrain you're going to fight on, is they need
Speaker 7: to feel like they're on thin ice. They need to worry,
Speaker 7: their staff needs to worry about Okay, we got to
Speaker 7: keep this out of the bill, because holy hell, you
Speaker 7: do not want those queers mad at you. That's where
Speaker 7: you want to get closer to if putting pressure on
Speaker 7: politicians is what needs to happen, and so buying these narratives,
Speaker 7: thanking them that takes the pressure off. Don't ever do that,
Speaker 7: you know, yes, And so I think it's it's kind
Speaker 7: of important, and you know, to quote the Internet masterpiece
Speaker 7: of old drill tweet like you do underneath circumstances, have
Speaker 7: to hand it to them. At best, they acted late
Speaker 7: grudgingly after they faced a ton of anger that resulted
Speaker 7: and was helped amplified by a ton of work from
Speaker 7: bluntly like working.
Speaker 9: Class trans people and working class queer people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I would argue that what Representative McBride did specifically,
Speaker 5: even assuming that it like help us in the short
Speaker 5: term with this bill, the way that she's been kind
Speaker 5: of talking about this internally and in the New York
Speaker 5: Times interview is actually extremely dangerous for trans people because
Speaker 5: I believe it or not, they're not going to stop
Speaker 5: with this this bill. They're going to do it again.
Speaker 5: They're going to do it again, probably in budget bills
Speaker 5: or another reconciliation bill. And at some point it's going
Speaker 5: to come down to the wire where Democrats will have
Speaker 5: to publicly defend the right of trans people to have
Speaker 5: healthcare and to be alive and to exist. That that's
Speaker 5: going to happen at some point. And what McBride has
Speaker 5: been telling everyone, what she's been telling as her client
Speaker 5: on New York Times, what she was telling Democrats behind
Speaker 5: the scenes, according to the notice article, is that you
Speaker 5: can't talk about these issues. You have to be really quiet.
Speaker 5: You just have to do it behind the scenes. Because
Speaker 5: it's too hot topic of an issue. You know, you
Speaker 5: don't want to accidentally, like I don't know, show the
Speaker 5: world that trans people might actually deserve to exist. It
Speaker 5: doesn't It doesn't even make sense.
Speaker 9: I think they just doesn't.
Speaker 5: They just like feel gross arguing it, like personally like
Speaker 5: they don't there's no political like, there's no like good
Speaker 5: political calcitalusts. They just feel gross talking about trans people.
Speaker 5: Is my opinion that this is why they don't want
Speaker 5: to do it. It's like it's bad for them politically.
Speaker 5: They will lose votes, they will lose political power. They
Speaker 5: just like hate us. Basically, I don't know, we.
Speaker 8: Should never be nice or kind or thank politicians, like
Speaker 8: both Maddie and David had said they are not our friends.
Speaker 8: Like there is a popular approach that I think a
Speaker 8: lot of people end up having towards these kind of
Speaker 8: quote unquote leaders that they are somehow these mythical saviors
Speaker 8: of everyone, that they're all leading these nonprofits, they're leading,
Speaker 8: these companies, these governments save us. They are not our friends.
Speaker 8: They do not give a shit about us. You would
Speaker 8: be surprised to things I've heard behind closed doors that
Speaker 8: they have said they are not your friends. They hate
Speaker 8: every single fucking poor person. They will never say that vocally,
Speaker 8: but they hate us.
Speaker 9: Especially the transplants.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, oh, and it's like us to be subservient
Speaker 8: to them until the day we fucking die, because it's
Speaker 8: all about consolidating their own power. And the kind of
Speaker 8: core of what I'm getting at here is kill the
Speaker 8: idol in your head. You should never have an idle like.
Speaker 8: There is no person worth idolizing, not only not gay,
Speaker 8: and not even only not anyone in this call, this
Speaker 8: podcast now, no one at all should be idolized, because
Speaker 8: doing that is placing all the power in the hands
Speaker 8: of people you don't know, in the hands of people
Speaker 8: who are just as human as anyone else. And even
Speaker 8: if they're very good, people who do good things are
Speaker 8: fundamentally capable of fucking up and doing bad. And if
Speaker 8: you idolize someone, you end up condoning everything they do,
Speaker 8: whether you even say it or otherwise. It comes with
Speaker 8: the territory. Fundamentally, you should not rely on other people
Speaker 8: to save you. You should rely on you and your community.
Speaker 8: You need to fucking work with your community to bring
Speaker 8: about the outcomes you want. And I mean you the
Speaker 8: listener like you specifically, Yes, you need to work with
Speaker 8: your community to bring about what you need.
Speaker 7: I think that's that's kind of the message that should
Speaker 7: emerge from this is no one in Washington organization and
Speaker 7: politician are the ones of the power here.
Speaker 9: You are.
Speaker 7: You and your friends are you and your community are
Speaker 7: And I know we've said that a little bit before,
Speaker 7: but it's worth re emphasizing how much people can do
Speaker 7: when they get together and decide to do something about
Speaker 7: these issues.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that's a really good note to
Speaker 4: end on. However, come up before we do that very
Speaker 4: exciting news, do you all want to introduce introduce the
Speaker 4: new news network.
Speaker 5: Hell yeah, we have a huge news to announce that's
Speaker 5: related to the news website that we used to write
Speaker 5: this article about. The bird Roll, formerly known as Maddicast
Speaker 5: News will now be known as trans News Network, and
Speaker 5: we're basically relaunching completely. We're switching up our business model
Speaker 5: from technically was a for profit before, but now it's
Speaker 5: going to be part of fiscally sponsored nonprofit of community partners.
Speaker 5: And we're also moving off subset to behive and so,
Speaker 5: you know, as Mira and David were saying, earlier, like
Speaker 5: we don't want you to rely on us to save you,
Speaker 5: Like it's kind of like a team effort, right, Like
Speaker 5: we do have a part to play. We'll help will
Speaker 5: help you give you information, but we also could use
Speaker 5: help from you. We could use help from the listener,
Speaker 5: especially people who do have you know, some people have
Speaker 5: more time, some people have more resources or money. And
Speaker 5: one thing that we are looking to do with our
Speaker 5: relaunch is to fundraise so we can basically, you know,
Speaker 5: ensure that basically our journalists like you know, Mirra and
Speaker 5: David have the financial stability they need to continue making
Speaker 5: journalism like this. And so we're launching with a fundraiser
Speaker 5: and we're gonna we'll have a link I guess with
Speaker 5: the podcast description and there will be like you know,
Speaker 5: you can get a free gift if you donate a
Speaker 5: certain amount. That's a huge way to help. But as well,
Speaker 5: you know, you also need to actually listen to the
Speaker 5: things that people in your community say, like what are
Speaker 5: the things people in your community are saying that can help?
Speaker 5: What are other ways that you can contribute back to
Speaker 5: save yourselves basically because put all in this together, and yeah.
Speaker 7: I think also one of the reasons I'm really excited
Speaker 7: about the Trans News Network and the transition as it were,
Speaker 7: to the Trans is that I think our collective experiences
Speaker 7: and our experience with this fight as well, have shown
Speaker 7: that there is a real need for hard hitting, powerful,
Speaker 7: unrepentantly radical and trans journalism, trans journalism that actually gets
Speaker 7: trans communities and proceeds kind of to take the fight
Speaker 7: from there. And so that's that is badly needed. And
Speaker 7: I think we are, from our own experiences and from
Speaker 7: kind of what we've all built working together like able
Speaker 7: to be part of that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and just to have one thing because I know
Speaker 8: how many trans people artistic and need to hear this
Speaker 8: spout out. I'm one of them. This is explicitly a
Speaker 8: worker's co op. We are doing this radical from the
Speaker 8: ground up. Everyone gets eqal say this is a community thing.
Speaker 8: This is not some like, oh, you know, we're doing this,
Speaker 8: but then there's a nice CEO who makes five hundred k. Now,
Speaker 8: this is the money is going to the journalists who
Speaker 8: need it. This is a group of us basically deciding, hey,
Speaker 8: we need to fucking keep doing this work. We want to,
Speaker 8: we need to support, we need help. Yeah, and we're
Speaker 8: joining the bandwagon of all these news outlets doing workers
Speaker 8: co ops because that's the only way you can fucking
Speaker 8: make money in this industry nowadays.
Speaker 9: It's also the fairest and best way to do it.
Speaker 11: Yep.
Speaker 3: It is it.
Speaker 8: It's objectively the best and most ethical way to do
Speaker 8: this under the healthscape of capitalism, yep.
Speaker 5: And Antimyra's point, and I'm gonna we went on this
Speaker 5: podcast earlier this year to talk about trans journalism, and
Speaker 5: you might want to listen to that as well if
Speaker 5: you're curious on like just the struggles that a lot
Speaker 5: of us have dealt with, and number one is, you know,
Speaker 5: the material need for money basically. And I'm going to
Speaker 5: say what I said in that episode again, which is
Speaker 5: that one hundred dollars for some people, like you know,
Speaker 5: let's say working class transferson is very different compared to
Speaker 5: one hundred dollars for people in other social classes. You know,
Speaker 5: maybe someone working in tech or something like, maybe you'll
Speaker 5: get a dinner at the one hundred dollars and it's
Speaker 5: not a big deal to you, right, it could be
Speaker 5: life changing for someone else who's literally like spending their
Speaker 5: life creating news to help trans people like you know this,
Speaker 5: this article that we wrote, it wasn't a huge amount
Speaker 5: of money that that took to create that. But at
Speaker 5: the same time, we don't have a lot of money
Speaker 5: to go around like it's it's being basically a small
Speaker 5: number of people. We have a we have a good
Speaker 5: number of like paid subscribers to but really in order
Speaker 5: to keep expanding the way we want to, we really
Speaker 5: need more money and it's going to be so huge
Speaker 5: to trans people everywhere.
Speaker 7: So yeah, So if someone has money and it's interested
Speaker 7: in support trans journalism, that is all the things we've
Speaker 7: just talked about and I think makes a real difference. Yeah,
Speaker 7: please sign episode Haide subscriber donate to the fundraiser. Every
Speaker 7: single dollar of that we will put to use.
Speaker 8: Yep.
Speaker 5: Our first goal is basically to hire one of our
Speaker 5: journalists as a part time W two employee, which should
Speaker 5: be literally life changing.
Speaker 4: So yeah, yeah, And when we said this in the
Speaker 4: last episode, and we're going to say it again, working
Speaker 4: class trans journalism can exist if you support it, And
Speaker 4: every single dollar that you sent to a working class
Speaker 4: trans journalist is going one hundred times further that it's
Speaker 4: going for any other thing you can do to like
Speaker 4: like it's going so much further that it is giving
Speaker 4: it to like fucking the Human Rights Committee or whatever
Speaker 4: the fuck, Like, wait, is what's actually with it? Organization?
Speaker 3: Human Rights Campaign?
Speaker 11: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, here was that one?
Speaker 11: Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, by the way, did I mention it's tax seductible, So.
Speaker 9: Got to throw that in there.
Speaker 5: If you itemiz your deductions, if you give like one
Speaker 5: hundred dollars to us, then you get to pay like
Speaker 5: you know whatever, like thirty dollars less goes to the
Speaker 5: federal government, which means slightly less money for ice in Israel.
Speaker 5: That's how I see it anyway.
Speaker 8: Okay, your God, I'm tired of living off my measly savings,
Speaker 8: dear God.
Speaker 5: Please, yeah, you can tell her really trying to sell
Speaker 5: this well.
Speaker 7: And also I think, like you know, Mirror and myself
Speaker 7: both do other trans journalism work. I'm part of the
Speaker 7: editor at The Ashville Blade, which is a local trans
Speaker 7: journalist co op, and you know, we've seen how far
Speaker 7: that goes. So so yeah, like the more support for
Speaker 7: trans journalism period, TRANSUS Network, the Free Radical Asheville Blade,
Speaker 7: some of the other projects out there, the better.
Speaker 3: Yep, this has been Nick.
Speaker 4: It happen here, Support, support trans journalism, and go keep
Speaker 4: fighting the good fight.
Speaker 12: Hi everyone, and welcome to it could happened here. We
Speaker 12: are joined once again by Gillian Brockel, who is once
Speaker 12: again going to talk to us about the terrible actually
Speaker 12: world of deportation flights, how we can track them, what
Speaker 12: we can learn from following them, and what it tells
Speaker 12: us about the US's massive deportation regime. Welcome back, Thanks
Speaker 12: for joining.
Speaker 13: Us, Thank you for having me, James, I appreciate it.
Speaker 12: You're welcome. All right, let's get going here this We've
Speaker 12: got a lot to go whether there's been a lot
Speaker 12: of planes deporting.
Speaker 13: People, deporting and removing, so we've really stopped saying deporting
Speaker 13: because we don't know who hasn't gotten due process and
Speaker 13: who does and does not actually belong to the country
Speaker 13: they're being sent to.
Speaker 12: Yeah, in many cases, it's more like what we saw
Speaker 12: in the extraordinary, very much so kind of war on Terry.
Speaker 12: I think it was pretty a better way to describe it. See,
Speaker 12: let's start out. I suppose it was Jibouti.
Speaker 13: Yeah, so the eight men that were sent to Djibouti,
Speaker 13: that's the flight I first tracked on May twentieth. They
Speaker 13: were taken on a Gulf Stream five operated by Journey
Speaker 13: Aviation from Harling in Texas to Shannon Airport in Ireland,
Speaker 13: and I you know, called the cops in Ireland to
Speaker 13: try and stop. It didn't work, and then they went
Speaker 13: to a US military base in Djibouti, where Judge had
Speaker 13: ordered them to remain while he considered their case. So
Speaker 13: those men are now in South Sudan where Trump wanted
Speaker 13: to send them. They were held in Jibouti for six weeks.
Speaker 13: We know from court filings that they were held inside
Speaker 13: a shipping container in a far corner of the base
Speaker 13: near a burn pit where the trash for the base
Speaker 13: was burned, and that smoke from this pit was getting
Speaker 13: into the shipping container through the events and causing the
Speaker 13: men and the ICE guards to cough and feel ill.
Speaker 13: There was also an independent journalist named Alex Planck who
Speaker 13: got a photo from a source on the base showing
Speaker 13: one of the detainees shackled at the ankles and being
Speaker 13: escorted by an ICE guard to the restroom because the
Speaker 13: shipping container did not have its own restroom. And he
Speaker 13: said that most of the members of the military at
Speaker 13: the base didn't even know that they were there. And
Speaker 13: you know, this base is generally considered like one of
Speaker 13: the worst assignments to get when you're in the military.
Speaker 13: Plank said he talked to a defense contractor who said
Speaker 13: that they stopped sending their employees to that base because
Speaker 13: it was just too terrible. So during the six week period,
Speaker 13: I and other flight trackers we tracked five trips by
Speaker 13: round trip trips by Journey Aviation jets to and from
Speaker 13: their base in Miami and Djibouti, all traveling through Shannon.
Speaker 13: Presumably these were flights that were swapping out ICE guards,
Speaker 13: but we really don't know because ICE does not provide
Speaker 13: any information about its air operations. Everything we know is
Speaker 13: through court filings and through open source intelligence like the
Speaker 13: ADSB Exchange. Then on July third, the Supreme Court cleared
Speaker 13: the way for these third country removals, and this one
Speaker 13: specifically to South Sudan. All of US flight trekers were
Speaker 13: watching the airspace really closely, and we knew that one
Speaker 13: of Journey's jets was already there on the ground in Jibouti,
Speaker 13: so that's what we were looking for. But then on
Speaker 13: the evening of July fifth, about two days later, DHS
Speaker 13: announced that it was done. They had removed the detainees
Speaker 13: to Saua, Sudan via a military flight earlier that day.
Speaker 13: And I have gone over the air track data for
Speaker 13: that region six times on ADSB exchange, and I haven't
Speaker 13: been able to spot this military flight. And granted, Djibouti
Speaker 13: is a real ADSB dead zone, but Juba isn't. Juba
Speaker 13: actually has quite good coverage, and you know, Addis Ababa
Speaker 13: also has very good coverage which they would have had
Speaker 13: to fly over. So it's clear to me that this
Speaker 13: military flight, if it happened as DHS claims, probably flew
Speaker 13: the entire trip with its transponder turned off, which is
Speaker 13: something that the military can do, but it's not standard.
Speaker 13: I think people would be surprised how rare actually it
Speaker 13: is for military flights to do that, unless they're going
Speaker 13: on a combat or a spy mission. Most military aircraft
Speaker 13: fly with their transponders on. So if you think about
Speaker 13: the Iran air strikes a couple of weeks ago, the
Speaker 13: week before the air strikes, there were thirty two Globe
Speaker 13: Masters and Strata tankers that flew from the US to
Speaker 13: bases in Europe, in a single night that like every
Speaker 13: av geek was like, whoa, you know, and we knew
Speaker 13: that that happened because they flew with their transponders on,
Speaker 13: even though it made it really obvious that some kind
Speaker 13: of military operation was probably imminent. And then even during
Speaker 13: the air strikes, these aircraft would take off from Europe
Speaker 13: with their transponders on, turn them off over the Mediterranean
Speaker 13: when they were heading east, do whatever they were doing,
Speaker 13: and then turn them back on when they were headed
Speaker 13: back toward Europe. So even part of the combat mission,
Speaker 13: they still have their transponders on. So the fact that
Speaker 13: the flight to Sasudan, which was not a combat or
Speaker 13: a spy mission, appears to have flown the entire trip
Speaker 13: with its transponder off is quite notable to me. And
Speaker 13: you know, I see it as an extension of ISIS
Speaker 13: tactics on the ground where they are covering their faces
Speaker 13: and refusing to identify themselves. But I'm, you know, kind
Speaker 13: of surprised that they got the military to go along
Speaker 13: with that.
Speaker 12: Yeah, if it was really a military flight relic, it
Speaker 12: could be something kind of military adjacent like some DHS
Speaker 12: or other government aircraft, right.
Speaker 3: I mean We don't know.
Speaker 13: Yeah, they said it happened via military flight on this date,
Speaker 13: but we don't know.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 13: So on July eighth, the spokesperson for the South Sudanese
Speaker 13: government told the AP that the men were there and
Speaker 13: that they were quote under the care of the relevant
Speaker 13: authorities who are screening them and ensuring their safety and
Speaker 13: well being. We have no idea what that means. Does
Speaker 13: that mean they're in prison there? Does that mean that
Speaker 13: they are going to be sent to their countries of
Speaker 13: origin as they claimed at one point? We have no idea. Yeah,
Speaker 13: And then just a few minutes ago, we're recording this.
Speaker 13: On Besiel Day, July fourteenth, the same plane that first
Speaker 13: took these men to Djibouti scheduled to take off from
Speaker 13: El Paso for Shannon Airport in Ireland. Once again, where
Speaker 13: it goes after that, Well, you might know by the
Speaker 13: time you hear this, but right now it's anyone's guess.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's baffling, like some of this stuff, like the
Speaker 12: deportations to or no deportations, like rendition to South Sudan.
Speaker 12: Right like even Homan, who's the Trump's quote unquote borders
Speaker 12: are or immigrations are seems to be asserting that he
Speaker 12: has no idea what happened to them once they've landed there,
Speaker 12: Like right, at one point they suggested that they didn't
Speaker 12: think they would be detained, but like did they just
Speaker 12: let them out into the street in I mean, when
Speaker 12: people are released from custody in the United States, that's
Speaker 12: exactly what they do, right, they let them out into
Speaker 12: the street. Like, Yeah, a lot of volunteers here in
Speaker 12: San Diego have spent a lot of time, you know,
Speaker 12: because often people are released without Sometimes they're released without
Speaker 12: religious garments, which are very important to them. Often they're
Speaker 12: released without any sort of orientation as like where are
Speaker 12: they how they get where they're going? Can they afford
Speaker 12: a flight? You know, how do they book a flight?
Speaker 12: Do they have the relevant documents to book a flight?
Speaker 12: Like it's a complete clusterfuck. And that's it in the US.
Speaker 13: Right, And I mean think about it. If you're like
Speaker 13: Laosian or Vietnamese man in your fifties or sixties, which
Speaker 13: a lot of these men are older gentlemen, and you're
Speaker 13: what just like led out into the streets of Juba,
Speaker 13: which is, you know, a big city, but there's a
Speaker 13: lot of instability in this country, Like what are you
Speaker 13: going to do it a spig dinker? Like what you know?
Speaker 12: Yeah, you're very vulnerable, very vulnerable, and you probably don't
Speaker 12: have any material resources. It's not that you can get
Speaker 12: your credit card and take out much of money and
Speaker 12: fly somewhere else. Nor do these people really have in
Speaker 12: many cases anywhere to go, right, Like the reason that
Speaker 12: they're being taken to third countries is generally that they
Speaker 12: have withholding of removal or Convention against torture claims that
Speaker 12: they can't be removed to their home countries. Since we
Speaker 12: recorded this, we have found out that people in South
Speaker 12: Sudan are being detained. According to a like called The
Speaker 12: Daily with your South Studentees Outlet, those people are incarcerated
Speaker 12: in South Suda.
Speaker 13: Like the man for me and Mar. You know, they're
Speaker 13: arguing that, you know, I suppose, oh, we can't send
Speaker 13: him to me and Mar, But if you're going to
Speaker 13: send him to another place where he's likely to be tortured,
Speaker 13: is really any different? And also they are sending people
Speaker 13: to me and Mar. They have departed people to me
Speaker 13: and Marr in the last few months, as you James
Speaker 13: have reported.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's right, they've sent more than a dozen people
Speaker 12: to MEMMR and seem to be continuing at least they
Speaker 12: have not said they will stop. And most of those
Speaker 12: people were directly detained by military intelligence and MEMMA when
Speaker 12: they landed, so that those people will have been tortured.
Speaker 12: And yeah, this this other person who had withholding it
Speaker 12: for removal, doesn't mean that he will not be tortured.
Speaker 12: I mean, if we look at like migrants making the
Speaker 12: journey to the United States are routinely kidnapped, tortured, ransom killed,
Speaker 12: sexually assaulted. I've heard of all of these first hand.
Speaker 12: I don't suspect it will be any different. You know,
Speaker 12: once they're outside the US again, they're extremely vulnerable. And
Speaker 12: we saw this a lot in Chitl forty two, when
Speaker 12: the Trump administration and the Bid administration would just boot
Speaker 12: people back over the border. Often they would do lateral transfers,
Speaker 12: so you enter in the San Diego sector, they drop
Speaker 12: you in the Laredo sector or somewhere further east, and
Speaker 12: those people then have zero network right and often don't
Speaker 12: speak Spanish and are extremely vulnerable. It's pretty much the
Speaker 12: worst case outcome here.
Speaker 13: Well, unfortunately, in the next part I'm about to tell
Speaker 13: you about how all of that is about to increase exponentially.
Speaker 12: Yeah, talking of things that are increasing, they're not actually increasing.
Speaker 12: We sort of have to do to advertisements every show
Speaker 12: that will get to be one of them. Now, all right,
Speaker 12: we are back. I have you enjoyed those adverts here?
Speaker 12: We had some new ones for like a religiously sanctient gold,
Speaker 12: which I'm very exciting about. This is one thing Jesus
Speaker 12: loved it. Money changes a lot of stuff in the
Speaker 12: Bible about that.
Speaker 13: I think silver especially right.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I think big precious metals. Guy, love to see
Speaker 12: currency speculation. Okay, let's talk about Djibouty, place where the
Speaker 12: United States has a big base that it is using
Speaker 12: for housing people that is renditioning to other countries.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 13: So when we first recorded this, we were just doing
Speaker 13: a Djibouti update about the men who were renditioned to
Speaker 13: South Sudan, and we knew at the time that there
Speaker 13: was another Journey Aviation jet about to take off. And
Speaker 13: now we know what happened with that flight. It landed
Speaker 13: again in Djibouti and two days later DHS announced that
Speaker 13: it had renditioned five more people to the country. Of Swatini,
Speaker 13: which I've been to. I reported there in twenty eleven.
Speaker 13: I spoke to you teachers who were starving because they
Speaker 13: hadn't been paid for eight months by the king, who
Speaker 13: you know is the last absolute monarch in Africa. And
Speaker 13: you know, the teachers that I spoke to were terrified
Speaker 13: to disappear into the prisons that these five men have
Speaker 13: now been renditioned to. I worked with another independent journalist
Speaker 13: named Alex Plank, and we published a story using OSIN
Speaker 13: to prove that that journey flight to Djibouti was carrying
Speaker 13: the five men and from there they were transported by
Speaker 13: a C seventeen US military you know, huge aircraft that
Speaker 13: flew with its transponders off from Djibouti to Swatini to
Speaker 13: deliver these men.
Speaker 12: Seems like that is the emerging standard for these military
Speaker 12: deportation flights, right at least for the final leg.
Speaker 13: Yeah, so the last week has been pretty crazy.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 13: An Omni seven sixties did a removal flight to a
Speaker 13: couple places in Africa, and at least two and perhaps
Speaker 13: three large military jets also did removal flights from the
Speaker 13: United States, landing in Gemo just for fun and landing
Speaker 13: in different countries in Africa. Now, the interesting thing about
Speaker 13: that and about Journey is that until this past week,
Speaker 13: Africa and Central Asia have really been the purview of
Speaker 13: this other ice air operator that's really gone under the radar.
Speaker 13: But I think it's possible might be doing some things
Speaker 13: that are even more sinister than your usual ice air flights.
Speaker 13: So this company is called Aircraft Transport Service. They are
Speaker 13: Florida base, but they are now all of their aircraft
Speaker 13: are based in Mesa, Arizona, which is an ICE hub,
Speaker 13: and they're at the end of their five year contract
Speaker 13: doing these special high risk removals to dangerous areas or
Speaker 13: with you know, allegedly dangerous migrant passengers. Their flights really
Speaker 13: began to spike in mid February up until July fourth.
Speaker 13: They have five private jets that they lease from their
Speaker 13: owners to operate these flights. And I've looked at all
Speaker 13: of their flights and it's not clear if they are
Speaker 13: doing any flights that aren't ICE, but certainly at least
Speaker 13: most of their business is ICE. And so I've tracked
Speaker 13: nineteen different trips, different ice removal trips that they've done
Speaker 13: since February eighteenth, and most of these have gone to
Speaker 13: countries in Africa, and that really began to surge around
Speaker 13: April twenty ninth. And what I've noticed is that on
Speaker 13: June twenty six, New York Times published a story about,
Speaker 13: you know, the Trump administration is pressuring all of these
Speaker 13: countries to accept more of these third country removals, and
Speaker 13: there's a lot of overlap between that list of countries
Speaker 13: and the countries that ATS has been landing in for
Speaker 13: the last four months. There is a pair of flights
Speaker 13: in particular that I find pretty alarming. They went out
Speaker 13: within thirty minutes of each other on May twentieth, which
Speaker 13: was the same day that the flight to Djibouti, when
Speaker 13: the flight that was supposed to go to Sasudan and
Speaker 13: these flights, so these flights started doing their usual ice
Speaker 13: removal route, which is, you know, MESA, maybe we stop
Speaker 13: in Fort Worth to pick up more migrants, then you
Speaker 13: do a fuel stop in San Juan, you do another
Speaker 13: fuel stop in Senegal, and then you go wherever you're
Speaker 13: going to go in West Africa. These flights, thirty minutes
Speaker 13: apart from each other, flew directly from San Juan to
Speaker 13: Mauritanium and we're on the ground for thirty minutes, and
Speaker 13: then from their flew to Senegal. You know, I can't
Speaker 13: prove anything because ICE does not communicate about its air
Speaker 13: operations at all, you know, unless they feel like it
Speaker 13: because they want to brag about it, or because you know,
Speaker 13: they're ordered to bite courts. These flights to me seem
Speaker 13: particularly alarming as possible flights where there could have been
Speaker 13: third country removals that we don't even know about. And
Speaker 13: Marissa Cavas, she's an independent reporter who has a site
Speaker 13: called The Handbasket. At the end of April, she reported
Speaker 13: that there was a third country removal that hasn't gotten
Speaker 13: a lot of attention and I don't know why, because
Speaker 13: it's really messed up. A third country removal of an
Speaker 13: Iraqi man to Rwanda, which happened on April fourth, after
Speaker 13: he legally migrated to the US. He was accused of
Speaker 13: murder in Iraq. There's incontroversial evidence proving that he did
Speaker 13: not commit this crime. He wasn't even in Iraq when
Speaker 13: it happened, but the Biden administration continued with his removal,
Speaker 13: and because he couldn't go back to Iraq because he
Speaker 13: would have been executed. They had been looking for a
Speaker 13: safe third country for him. They did not finish that
Speaker 13: when they handed the keys over to the Trump administration.
Speaker 13: So on April fourth, he was removed to Rwanda. And
Speaker 13: he has a lot of media contacts, and no one
Speaker 13: has heard from him. I have not seen a report
Speaker 13: about him, you know. I tried to contact his family,
Speaker 13: was unsuccessful. I contacted his attorney and didn't hear back.
Speaker 13: So ATS operated a flight. It began at about eleven
Speaker 13: thirty on April second to this Fort Worth airport that's
Speaker 13: right next to an iced attention center San Juan, Senegal,
Speaker 13: and then landed in Nairobi. Now Nairobi is not Kigali
Speaker 13: in Rwanda, but they're only about an hour apart. And
Speaker 13: if you look at the flight data, the aircraft at
Speaker 13: that point had been operating for about twenty three hours straight,
Speaker 13: which is stretching the boundaries of legality, even if you
Speaker 13: have two crews. So there's a lot of reasons why
Speaker 13: ICE might have taken him to Nairobi and then done
Speaker 13: something else for the last leg I think the most
Speaker 13: likely the explanation is that the crew had to rest
Speaker 13: and I decided that they didn't want to wait, so
Speaker 13: they may have chartered a local puddle jumper to take them,
Speaker 13: you know, over the lake to Quida.
Speaker 12: It's pretty common, I think too, when I've flew into Kikali,
Speaker 12: I think I've stopped in Kinshasa and Nairobi. I don't
Speaker 12: know if it's a big planes can't land there. It's
Speaker 12: just the kind of the way it works. Fewer people
Speaker 12: are flying to Kigali directly from the USO Europe than
Speaker 12: are going to places like King Shasta, Nairobi, so it
Speaker 12: might just be that they don't do direct flights. But yeah,
Speaker 12: I don't think I've ever done a direct like big
Speaker 12: plane flight, right.
Speaker 13: It seems that the only aircraft going in and out
Speaker 13: of there are going to Nairobi and Kampala, and from
Speaker 13: there you connect somewhere else.
Speaker 12: It's a pretty small airport.
Speaker 13: So so yeah, that's ATS. They've kind of flown under
Speaker 13: the radar because global x is doing so much more
Speaker 13: in terms of numbers. But I think it's quite possible
Speaker 13: that ATS's mission for the past few months has been
Speaker 13: to sort of pilot program small amounts of third country
Speaker 13: removals to these different countries, just like omar Amin because
Speaker 13: after Omaramin was sent to Rwanda. The State Department sent
Speaker 13: a cable that Mrsakabas obtains saying, oh man, it totally worked.
Speaker 13: This is great. Let's send ten more people.
Speaker 12: At a cost to one hundred thousand head right, right again,
Speaker 12: maybe suggesting cars rationally, one hundred grand is going to
Speaker 12: cover more than your paperwork, you.
Speaker 13: Know, right, And just to be clear about you know,
Speaker 13: the cost all of these military flights that have been
Speaker 13: flying around Africa now doing isis dirty work. Those cost
Speaker 13: about twenty eight five hundred dollars an hour to operate,
Speaker 13: and of course cost is the least important thing here.
Speaker 13: But my god, you know, for an administration that claims
Speaker 13: to care about government waste.
Speaker 12: Yeah, this is ridiculous. We don't know how much they're
Speaker 12: paying people in South Sudana, the monarchy of Aswardini. We
Speaker 12: don't know what they're sort of bribing these people to accept.
Speaker 12: I just checked with Mauritania. It's currently a level three
Speaker 12: State Department travel warning telling people to reconsider travel due
Speaker 12: to terrorism and crime. That's why we're sending people. I
Speaker 12: have explained the many and varied human rights abuses that
Speaker 12: have happened in Mauritania on the show before, so you
Speaker 12: can go back and listen to other episodes. Do you
Speaker 12: want to want to hear about those hundreds of Mauritanians,
Speaker 12: if not thousands, entered the United States in the tail
Speaker 12: end of the Biden administration. I'm thinking like it was
Speaker 12: late summer of twenty twenty three when I recall seeing
Speaker 12: many of them. Just in my workdown at the border.
Speaker 12: We often get very hot, like September's Octobers in southern California,
Speaker 12: and a few times have come across Mauritanian people who
Speaker 12: are in really bad just during those sort of hot months,
Speaker 12: and it's always stuck with me that, like some of
Speaker 12: the stories they had were horrific treat and I'm sure
Speaker 12: that it's some of those people who are now being
Speaker 12: sent back and just the fact that they tried to
Speaker 12: leave will have made things even worse for them.
Speaker 13: So yeah, I mean these flights going to Mauritania, which
Speaker 13: includes one of the military flights last week, you know,
Speaker 13: slavery still exists in Mauritania. There's a minimum of ninety
Speaker 13: thousand people there who are still enslaved. That's the low
Speaker 13: end of the estimates. And you know, it's been illegal
Speaker 13: since nineteen eighty one, but the practice is really protected
Speaker 13: by a culture of secrecy, not just among Mauritanian elites,
Speaker 13: but the multinational corporations who are embedded there and will
Speaker 13: just kind of look the other way while they're you know,
Speaker 13: extract natural resources with people in the minds that like,
Speaker 13: they're not really a check if they're enslaved or not. So,
Speaker 13: you know, maybe we're doing third country deportations and removals there.
Speaker 13: Maybe we're just sending Mauritanians back to a really horrible place.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and it doesn't hugely matter, right, We're sending people
Speaker 12: back to a place where they are very likely to
Speaker 12: be tortured, to be as you say, like faust un
Speaker 12: free labor, to be incarcerated without having committed a crime.
Speaker 12: Doesn't really matter whether's people are wont it's fucked. The
Speaker 12: embassy doesn't let us people drive around Mauritania at night,
Speaker 12: have to be in the capitol. They can only walk
Speaker 12: in certain places. Give an idea of like how this
Speaker 12: double standard is applied talking of multinational corporations, I would
Speaker 12: love to hear from. So let's do that now, all right,
Speaker 12: we are back and we were talking about the safety
Speaker 12: of private jets. Some of these flights have some pretty
Speaker 12: horrific safety practices, right, and this, like, when you mentioned this,
Speaker 12: it instantly reminded me of a thing that I have
Speaker 12: had no luck trying to sell stories on for four years.
Speaker 12: It is standard practice for ICE and TVP to transport children,
Speaker 12: children in their custody without proper child seats or other restraints, right,
Speaker 12: which is you know, to my knowledge, you can get
Speaker 12: a ticket for that in some states. Right, Like if
Speaker 12: you're driving a child, like you put a little two
Speaker 12: year old in the seat without a like a child
Speaker 12: seat that they have to have, Like, rightfully, you're endangering
Speaker 12: that person's life. But apparently our government's doing it every day.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean the law doesn't apply to the upholders
Speaker 13: of the law.
Speaker 12: Right right, Yeah, many such cases.
Speaker 13: Many such cases which I'm about to explain more.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, let's learn some more.
Speaker 13: So these ice flights, you know, most of these are
Speaker 13: happening on larger jets A three twenties owing seven thirty
Speaker 13: sevens inside the cabin. REPUBLICA has done some really good
Speaker 13: reporting on this from April. There's another outlet called Capitol
Speaker 13: and Maine that also did a terrific story in twenty
Speaker 13: twenty one, and the University of Washington also has a
Speaker 13: lot of research and information on what it's like inside
Speaker 13: the cabin of these planes. And you know, as a
Speaker 13: former flight attendant, I find it fucking disgusting and really unsafe.
Speaker 13: Flight attendants on these flights are not allowed to look
Speaker 13: at or speak to migrant passengers. They aren't allowed to
Speaker 13: serve them food or water. All of the migrants on
Speaker 13: these flights are shackled wrist to ankles, and some of them,
Speaker 13: if they're allowed or distressed or just annoying, the ice
Speaker 13: guarts are wrapped in restraint blankets and harnesses and have
Speaker 13: hoods put over their faces. Just this morning, JJ and DC,
Speaker 13: one of the ice air trackers on Blue Sky, posted
Speaker 13: a video of a migrant passenger in a hood being
Speaker 13: loaded onto a Vello jet in Seattle and he's being
Speaker 13: pushed by three ice guards and falls to the ground
Speaker 13: face first and then they just sort of man handle
Speaker 13: him back up the stairs.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 13: So, you know, as a former flight attendant, I just
Speaker 13: want to say, in the event of an emergency, how
Speaker 13: the fuck is a flight attendant supposed to evacuate the
Speaker 13: passengers in ninety seconds when their seat belts are getting
Speaker 13: tangled in their handcuffs and all they can do is
Speaker 13: shuffle down the aisle when they can't see because they
Speaker 13: have a hood over their head. If the cabin loses pressure,
Speaker 13: how can they reach up for their oxygen masks when
Speaker 13: their handcuffs are attached by a chain to their leg irons.
Speaker 13: How are they going to get the mask on themselves
Speaker 13: if they're wearing a hood? How are they going to
Speaker 13: get their life fests on when they can't reach back
Speaker 13: to wrap the strap around their waists? And these emergencies
Speaker 13: are not theoretical. We know from court filings that between
Speaker 13: twenty fourteen and twenty twenty one there were six emergency
Speaker 13: evacuations of ice air flights. Of those incidents, the evacuation
Speaker 13: times of only two are known, and they took two
Speaker 13: and a half minutes and seven minutes. And to be clear,
Speaker 13: we only know about those evacuations because of lawsuits. So
Speaker 13: there may very well have been more evacuations since twenty
Speaker 13: twenty one and we just don't know about it.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean it's likely right, like the Biden administration
Speaker 12: did it, especially when they were deporting Haitian people like
Speaker 12: huge numbers of flights.
Speaker 13: Right until May and June September twenty one, when Biden
Speaker 13: did the Haitian mass deportation. That was the highest amount
Speaker 13: of deportations that witness at the border has recorded.
Speaker 12: Yeah. That was also the last time I was able
Speaker 12: to write about Biden's administration policy nbc BA. I think
Speaker 12: I crossed the line saying something mean about Uncle Joe.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, but we should be very clip. This has been
Speaker 12: a bipartisan thing.
Speaker 13: Oh yes, oh yes. So on each of these flights
Speaker 13: there is generally one or two ICE officials and at
Speaker 13: least fifteen ICE contracted guards. Migrant passengers have reported being verbally,
Speaker 13: physically and sexually abused by these guards, and flight attendants
Speaker 13: on board have no power to stop them. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 13: ninety two migrant passengers traveling from the US to Ethiopia
Speaker 13: were left shackled on a plane in the car Senegal
Speaker 13: for twenty three hours because the crew timed out. They
Speaker 13: were kicked, dragged, tied up, threatened by ICE guards, and
Speaker 13: when the labs filled up, they soiled themselves. Flight attendants
Speaker 13: report that the guards on these flights regularly ignore their
Speaker 13: safety commands. And will even you know, try and nark
Speaker 13: on them. They'll complain to the flight attendant's supervisors at
Speaker 13: their airline when they're asking people to follow federal aviation
Speaker 13: regulations just like everyone else in America has to do.
Speaker 13: But when flight attendants have complained to the FAA about this,
Speaker 13: the FAA defers to ice. You know, this is not
Speaker 13: just a matter of like, it's disrespectful, two dangerous flight attendants.
Speaker 13: You know, this is extremely dangerous. And one of the
Speaker 13: most important parts of aviation safety is something called crew
Speaker 13: resource management or CRM. This is something that all pilots
Speaker 13: and flight attendants are trained in every year and have
Speaker 13: to retrain every year, and basically CRM boils down to
Speaker 13: pilots need to listen to the flight attendants about safety,
Speaker 13: and flight attendants are trained to be assertive with the
Speaker 13: pilots about safety. This was developed after a notorious incident
Speaker 13: in the nineteen seventies where a plane was on the ground,
Speaker 13: it was filling up with smoke, and the pilot ignored
Speaker 13: flight attendants please to evacuate, you know, just for some
Speaker 13: like garden variety sexism probably, and everyone on board died
Speaker 13: of smoke inhalations. Two hundred and eighty people. So after that,
Speaker 13: crews are trained every year to really flatten the hierarchies.
Speaker 13: You know, I think people think like, oh, the captain
Speaker 13: has four epaulets and the first officer has three, and
Speaker 13: you know, oh hierarchy.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 13: Air crews are actually very like the hierarchies are flattened
Speaker 13: intentionally on purpose. They train to flatten it across job titles,
Speaker 13: across gender education, racial cultural divides, because it is safer
Speaker 13: to fly that way. When everyone feels that, you know,
Speaker 13: they have a stake in safety and they'll be heard
Speaker 13: if they say something about safety, everyone else is safer.
Speaker 13: So if you've got these ice guards stepping into the
Speaker 13: middle of that, throwing their weight around, overruling flight attendants
Speaker 13: and pilots, and the FAA isn't backing them up, you
Speaker 13: have confusion about who's in power on board, you have
Speaker 13: a total breakdown of CRM and so beyond just like
Speaker 13: people physically being able to get off of the planes,
Speaker 13: this is so unsafe to have this kind of environment
Speaker 13: with these guards. So the last incident I want to
Speaker 13: talk about was in June seventeen. To me, this is
Speaker 13: the scariest one of all of the safety incidents. There
Speaker 13: was an Ice Air emergency. This flight landed, it was
Speaker 13: filling up with smoke. This is almost just like the
Speaker 13: plane in the seventies. The flight attendants told the pilots
Speaker 13: to evacuate, and the pilots ignored them. A bunch of
Speaker 13: people on board were hospitalized. We don't know how many
Speaker 13: or who, but frankly, everyone on board could have died
Speaker 13: from smoke inhalation very easily. And I really think you
Speaker 13: can point to the presence of the ICE guards here
Speaker 13: as a big factor in the failure to evacuate. That
Speaker 13: is not how pilots are trained.
Speaker 8: Jeez.
Speaker 13: So again, Yeah, if you're a flight attendant or a
Speaker 13: pilot and you do not want your airline to contract
Speaker 13: with Ice, now is the time to tell them. Tell
Speaker 13: your union help flight attendants for Global X and a
Speaker 13: Vello get jobs somewhere else. Ye, you know, do whatever
Speaker 13: you can to slow this down, because it is all
Speaker 13: about to increase if they get their way.
Speaker 12: Yeah, jeez, that is fucking bleak.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, you said it's going to get bigger. Like, let's
Speaker 12: talk about that, Like, can you kind of zoom out
Speaker 12: and explain Ice Air to us, and like We've talked
Speaker 12: about these small flights a lot, but like that's not
Speaker 12: the bulk of the flights that they do right.
Speaker 13: Right, So ice Air right now has twelve large jets,
Speaker 13: you know, a three twenty seven thirty sevens chartered from
Speaker 13: different airlines that they're using for their deportations, and then
Speaker 13: these private jets are you know, used less for these
Speaker 13: smaller high risk deportations. They're running like thirty thirty five
Speaker 13: flights a day at this point. So May twentieth turned
Speaker 13: out to be like kind of a big day for
Speaker 13: I Air because that was the Djibouti flight. That was
Speaker 13: when ats started using the Tyson call sign. It's also
Speaker 13: the day that the larger operation really just searched in activity.
Speaker 13: And you know, the other flight trackers tell me that
Speaker 13: ice Air used to take weekends and holidays off and
Speaker 13: they don't do that anymore. They were deporting people on
Speaker 13: juneteenth and July fourth. In May, ice operated a record
Speaker 13: number of flights, which was at least one thousand and
Speaker 13: eighty three flights that flight trackers recorded, one hundred and
Speaker 13: ninety of which were removal flights. And then the rest
Speaker 13: are like these internal shuffle flights between different ICE attention
Speaker 13: centers and return trips, and then in June they set
Speaker 13: a record again with one one hundred and eighty seven flights,
Speaker 13: of which two hundred and nine were removal flights. All
Speaker 13: of this data is a witness at the border dot
Speaker 13: org and it's kept by Tom Cartwright, who is a
Speaker 13: real hero. He has been tracking flights basically by himself
Speaker 13: for five and a half years, and he publishes very
Speaker 13: detailed monthly reports. And yeah, as you said earlier, you
Speaker 13: know he's been tracking this through the Biden administration too,
Speaker 13: which is how we know that, you know, the Trump
Speaker 13: deportation machine from the first term, you know, Biden didn't
Speaker 13: really slow it down that much, and now Trump is
Speaker 13: picking up the reins again and surging it again. So
Speaker 13: the airlines right now that are flying these larger removal
Speaker 13: flights are global X also called Global Crossing Airlines, a
Speaker 13: Velo Airlines, Eastern Air and on the international and except
Speaker 13: for ATS, who you know I talked about earlier, has
Speaker 13: their own contract. All of these carriers who fly for
Speaker 13: ICE are subcontracted through a flight broker called CSI Aviation.
Speaker 13: CSI Aviation signed a five year contract with the Biden
Speaker 13: administration last year that has been paused because of a
Speaker 13: lawsuit from a rival flight broker that wanted that contract.
Speaker 13: So since late February, CSI has been brokering these flights
Speaker 13: on a six month no bid contract that started at
Speaker 13: one hundred and twenty eight million dollars and was quickly
Speaker 13: doubled and then went up to two hundred and seventy
Speaker 13: four million, and then just a couple of days ago,
Speaker 13: I don't think anyone else has reported this, it was
Speaker 13: raised again to three hundred and thirty nine million dollars.
Speaker 13: So they've got about sixty million dollars left on this
Speaker 13: contract for the next six weeks, and that's before the
Speaker 13: huge windfall and funding that ICE just got from Trump's
Speaker 13: big beautiful bill. The administration has said it once to
Speaker 13: triple deportations, and right now they just don't have the
Speaker 13: airct that and DHS. On Twitter and Instagram a couple
Speaker 13: of days ago, they posted this really ghoulish meme that
Speaker 13: said fire up the deportation planes, and there was like
Speaker 13: a skeleton lifting weights with a caption that said my
Speaker 13: body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations.
Speaker 1: So that's gross.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that was really weird. They've been doing a lot
Speaker 12: of this like post stuff right.
Speaker 13: Like I said, they only have twelve jets right now,
Speaker 13: and they're flying those capacities, so they can't triple deportations
Speaker 13: unless they start bringing in more airlines. So the other
Speaker 13: day I posted a call to action to flight attendants
Speaker 13: and to flight attendant unions saying, you know, if you
Speaker 13: don't want your airline to do these flights, now is
Speaker 13: the time to tell them.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 13: CSI Aviation is run by a man named Alan Way
Speaker 13: and his daughter, Deborah Mastis. Alan Way is the former
Speaker 13: chair of the New Mexico Republican Party. He's hosted a
Speaker 13: bunch of Trump rallies over the years. He ran unsuccessfully
Speaker 13: for Senate and governor of New Mexico in the past
Speaker 13: on an anti immigrant platform, which local media at the
Speaker 13: time pointed out, you know, well, you're mostly doing deportation flights,
Speaker 13: so that would really be enriching yourself. His daughter, Deborah Masis,
Speaker 13: was one of the fake electors in New Mexico during
Speaker 13: the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 3: Wow Yeah.
Speaker 13: She was subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the January
Speaker 13: sixth insurrection and the New Mexico State Attorney General's office
Speaker 13: investigated her. Eventually, they're not press charges because she and
Speaker 13: the other fake electors claimed they didn't know they're fake
Speaker 13: certifications were going to be used for anything illegal. And
Speaker 13: the Project on Government Oversight has some pretty good reporting
Speaker 13: on CSI aviation. If you want to see.
Speaker 12: That, yeah, it will put it in this show notes like, yeah, insane,
Speaker 12: Like this whole thing is just like complete. I would
Speaker 12: watch or look at some of the footage from inside
Speaker 12: deportation flights because it is inhumane.
Speaker 13: It's yeah. I mean, I hope that any flight attendants
Speaker 13: who are forced to work these flights can find a
Speaker 13: way to quit. But if they can't quit for financial reasons,
Speaker 13: because all of these people are you know, very underpaid,
Speaker 13: you know, I hope that they can provide us with
Speaker 13: more information about what is going on inside these flights.
Speaker 12: Yeah, definitely, that will be at least give people a
Speaker 12: chance to see what their tax dollars are being spent on.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 13: I mean one of the things that I've been thinking about,
Speaker 13: you know, terrorism is like a really loaded word that
Speaker 13: gets misused a lot against black and brown people, But
Speaker 13: I think that's the right word for all of these removals.
Speaker 13: Because they're random, they're violent, they're getting civilians for political purpose,
Speaker 13: and they're designed to frighten the larger population potential victims.
Speaker 13: Right the Trump administration is trying to scare all undocumented
Speaker 13: immigrants and anyone adjacent to them, since you know, a
Speaker 13: lot of citizens are being arrested too.
Speaker 12: Yeah, or green cardholders, people with buckets of documents are
Speaker 12: being deported a rendition right.
Speaker 13: Now, and they're saying, you know, they're trying to make
Speaker 13: them so scared that if they don't self deport they
Speaker 13: could end up in South Sudan, they could end up
Speaker 13: in Mauritania. You know, that's what this policy is designed
Speaker 13: to do, is to terrorize the people of this country.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Absolutely, it's pretty bleak. We have an encrypted email address,
Speaker 12: so if you are I guess a deportation flight attendant
Speaker 12: and you would like to talk to someone, I can
Speaker 12: pasidoron to give you in two or you might have
Speaker 12: you any crypted email address and you can plug it
Speaker 12: if you do.
Speaker 13: Yeah, you can definitely leak to me on signal.
Speaker 12: Okay, yeah, nice. We have cool zone tips at ProtonMail
Speaker 12: dot com or cool Zone tips at proton dot me.
Speaker 12: I believe they both work. It's only encrypted if the
Speaker 12: address that it's sent from is also encrypted. So in
Speaker 12: this instance you would need a proton mail or you
Speaker 12: can cook up your own encryption. Yeah, that would be
Speaker 12: the way to get in touch if you want to
Speaker 12: get in touch. This this just fucking sucks, like and
Speaker 12: there's going to be so much more of it in
Speaker 12: the next couple of years with this budget, Like this
Speaker 12: is going to become well it already isn't everyday thing.
Speaker 12: This is going to become even more common.
Speaker 8: I know.
Speaker 12: They're also like they're doing some weird shuffle to avoid
Speaker 12: sanctions with Venezuelan Airlines.
Speaker 13: Right, yeah, they fly I believe it is, to Honduras,
Speaker 13: and then Venezuela flies their own plane to Honduras to
Speaker 13: pick them up.
Speaker 12: Right yeah cool, I'm sure to sup. I have a
Speaker 12: great time. Want to get back to Venezuela. And in
Speaker 12: Venezuela's also offering humanitarian flights for a citizens who are
Speaker 12: stuck in Mexico right now, So like, if people want
Speaker 12: to do something about this, what can they do?
Speaker 13: The first thing you can do is boycott Avello Airlines.
Speaker 13: They are commercial airlines, so don't fly with them. You
Speaker 13: can write to the airlines you use regularly right now
Speaker 13: and tell them that if they are considering contracting with
Speaker 13: ICE not to that you will boycott them too. You
Speaker 13: can complain to the FAA about the safety issues on
Speaker 13: these flights. I doubt that they'll do anything, but I
Speaker 13: think there's value in saying something anyway. If you have
Speaker 13: contacts in aviation or in any of the countries that
Speaker 13: these people are being sent to, and you find something out,
Speaker 13: you can leak to me on signal. And if you
Speaker 13: work in aviation, tell your airline and your union right
Speaker 13: now that you are not going to operate these flights.
Speaker 13: And if you want to get started tracking flights yourself,
Speaker 13: we need a lot of help, especially in the overnight hours.
Speaker 13: A good first step is to go to Globe dot
Speaker 13: adsb exchange dot com and in the general search window
Speaker 13: type Tyson.
Speaker 12: You've been doing really, really great reporting on this, and
Speaker 12: I'm sure people want to continue to follow it. It
Speaker 12: is a shame that other outlets are not running it.
Speaker 13: But God bless them.
Speaker 12: Yeah, just try.
Speaker 13: Out there if you want to know what James is
Speaker 13: talking about. There's a brief explanation at the end of
Speaker 13: one of my stories that I've written recently at hard
Speaker 13: g History dot ghost dot io. I have a couple
Speaker 13: stories there about the recent flights to Africa, and you
Speaker 13: can read the bottom and you'll find out what James
Speaker 13: is talking about.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's a little teaser for you, right, go get
Speaker 12: the t Yeah, Okay, thank you for joining us. I'm
Speaker 12: sure we'll hear from you again soon.
Speaker 13: Thank you, James.
Speaker 4: It it could happen here, the podcast about I don't know
Speaker 4: how am I supposed to do the pivot from like.
Speaker 12: It the Stephen King novel, which could at any point
Speaker 12: happen in a place where you are.
Speaker 4: I was trying to get to the podcast coming to
Speaker 4: you not quite live from a place where a bunch
Speaker 4: of just masked guys are driving people off the street.
Speaker 3: But that works too, Stephen.
Speaker 4: King, good pivot. Haven't done that one yet. I'm your host,
Speaker 4: Miya Wong. With me is James Stout, and we're also
Speaker 4: joined by the wonderful freelance journalists melbuer At a fucking Christ.
Speaker 3: Holy shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that happened simultaneously as I inhaled and like
Speaker 4: apparently a piece of popcor were and just like fucking
Speaker 4: rail gunned into the back of my throat.
Speaker 3: Relief for this.
Speaker 6: All professionals here.
Speaker 3: This is going great. Is journalist John Pactor carpentual. Good lord,
Speaker 3: I'm so.
Speaker 4: Good at my job. So what we're gonna be talking
Speaker 4: about is the continued resistance to ice and ice actions
Speaker 4: in LA and in sort of broader parts of California
Speaker 4: as stuff has shifted and intensified. So both of you two,
Speaker 4: welcome to the show.
Speaker 6: Glad to be here, Happy to be here.
Speaker 4: So I think the place I want to start is,
Speaker 4: could you give people just kind of a brief reminder
Speaker 4: of what happened during that sort of big flare up
Speaker 4: several weeks ago of protests and ice actions in LA.
Speaker 3: I can probably speak a little bit more to that.
Speaker 10: So as part of the federal immigration raids that Donald
Speaker 10: from promise, Los Angeles was one of the first targets
Speaker 10: of pretty large scale and pretty frankly random immigration raids.
Speaker 10: So it started in early June where you started to
Speaker 10: see you know, massed agents without oftentimes badges or names
Speaker 10: on their badges or sometimes even serial numbers. First they
Speaker 10: started in home depots areas like that, just sort of
Speaker 10: running around parking lots, tackling people and throwing them into
Speaker 10: buses pretty understandably, Los Angelinos started to protest, and they
Speaker 10: started to protest pretty hard, and that happened for a
Speaker 10: few weeks. Eventually the Marines in the National Guard were
Speaker 10: both deployed to federal buildings more large scale protests, and
Speaker 10: that sort of brings us to the last few weeks,
Speaker 10: which I think mel can probably speak to.
Speaker 14: Yeah, so, you know, the National Guard and the Marines
Speaker 14: were deployed like mid right, and we kind of saw
Speaker 14: a little bit of petering out of like the mass
Speaker 14: protests that we saw at the beginning of June. But
Speaker 14: still there were a number of organizations and groups that
Speaker 14: were trying to keep tabs on the sort of roving
Speaker 14: patrols that were happening in Los Angeles throughout the month
Speaker 14: of June and early July. So these groups were taking
Speaker 14: in tips and trying to maintain a sort of map
Speaker 14: of rapid response locations to the ice detainments, kidnappings, suspension
Speaker 14: of constitutional rights, if you will. And so what we
Speaker 14: saw was, you know, a good number of weeks of
Speaker 14: social media sort of proliferating these posts about where ice
Speaker 14: patrols had gone. And because the you know, and this
Speaker 14: is something that organizations have spoken to in the last
Speaker 14: couple of weeks. But because they're pounder, surveillance, as you
Speaker 14: could say, by these organizations was pretty successful. The sort
Speaker 14: of ice patrols began to not happen throughout the later
Speaker 14: half of the day.
Speaker 6: They would happen early in the morning.
Speaker 14: They would you know, hit a location, grab as many
Speaker 14: people as possible, pull them.
Speaker 6: Into the van, and take them away.
Speaker 14: And they had gotten it down to something like less
Speaker 14: than ten minutes that they were on scene, and it
Speaker 14: made it a little bit difficult for folks to be
Speaker 14: able to respond forcefully to those events. And they kept
Speaker 14: it to parking lots, car washes, you know, businesses, random
Speaker 14: street vendors, places that they could enter quickly and leave quickly.
Speaker 14: We saw in the middle of June and the later
Speaker 14: half of the month that if they were trying to
Speaker 14: execute warrens, for example, in a neighborhood, they would be
Speaker 14: blocked in almost immediately by neighbors. So you can see
Speaker 14: that there was a pretty consistent response by Angelino's across
Speaker 14: the board as.
Speaker 6: Much as they could.
Speaker 14: And while this was happening, there was also a pretty
Speaker 14: dedicated group of individuals who were spending a lot of
Speaker 14: time outside the Mentro Detention Center downtown in downtown LA,
Speaker 14: which is where many of these vans were going in
Speaker 14: and out of before they were taking detainees elsewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 14: so you know, across the board, what we've seen is
Speaker 14: quite a bit of organizing. Much of this organizing is
Speaker 14: decades in the making, especially in Los Angeles, but also
Speaker 14: in places like Ventura County and a little bit up
Speaker 14: north where you see the same kind of work that's
Speaker 14: being done. In the later half of the month, early July,
Speaker 14: I should say, we began to see some pretty intense
Speaker 14: movements by Border Patrol, most notably in MacArthur Park on
Speaker 14: July eighth, I believe, and in the cama Rio Oxynard area,
Speaker 14: which is right on the border of Venture County and
Speaker 14: other county name escapes me at to cannabis farms that
Speaker 14: next week, and.
Speaker 6: Those were large scale operations.
Speaker 14: A lot of militarized Border Patrol National Guard I believe
Speaker 14: helped with both of those operations as well, and also
Speaker 14: saw some pretty intense community response to those.
Speaker 12: So, Sean, you mentioned you wanted to talk a little
Speaker 12: more about the organizing right the way people that are
Speaker 12: organized to try and kind of resist this, or at
Speaker 12: least like do what they could.
Speaker 10: One of the things that I think is interesting, this
Speaker 10: isn't unique to Los Angeles. We're seeing groups organize what
Speaker 10: I've been hearing called megri patrols here in Los Angeles.
Speaker 10: There's also pretty heavy touch of this from San Diego.
Speaker 10: One of the things that I thought was really really
Speaker 10: interesting was in Los Angeles has been preparing for a
Speaker 10: moment like this since the late sixties. Frankly, you know,
Speaker 10: you have groups that have a pretty solid through line
Speaker 10: since the mid sixties at the dawn of the Chicano movement,
Speaker 10: and these are groups that already have experience with large
Speaker 10: scale attainments. Not throughout the city like we were seeing
Speaker 10: the last few weeks, but there's this really impressive level
Speaker 10: of organization. Where I saw a detainment in Boyle Heights
Speaker 10: of a gentleman who was accused of.
Speaker 3: Getting a police officer.
Speaker 10: Within I think three minutes of them arriving, not only
Speaker 10: was there one or two people, but there was like
Speaker 10: fifteen people already onseen Boyle Heights is pretty singular in
Speaker 10: its preparation. However, it was not uncommon. I mean in
Speaker 10: MacArthur Park. There was a detainment of a few people
Speaker 10: who were walking down the street. I was maybe eight
Speaker 10: minutes away when I heard about the raid. There was
Speaker 10: already like ten people there, including a college professor, including
Speaker 10: members of Union del Barrow and Attendance Union. I have
Speaker 10: a bit of a theory that I don't know if
Speaker 10: Los Angeles was chosen because they wanted to prove a point.
Speaker 10: And there is a part of me that wonders seeing
Speaker 10: how quickly people are responding to these raids. There's a
Speaker 10: part of me that wonders at that point was even made.
Speaker 12: I think the government's actions can be understood in like
Speaker 12: owning the libs and like if your Facebook uncle got
Speaker 12: to make government policy, it wouldn't look that different from this.
Speaker 12: So I think that was certainly like the point early on,
Speaker 12: and they'd have detained a lot of people in LA Like,
Speaker 12: but yeah, they're organizing. You have very entrenched work in
Speaker 12: class communities, even going back way before the sixties, right,
Speaker 12: like if we look at the zoot suit, right, if
Speaker 12: we look at the Brassero program and the attempts to
Speaker 12: expel people after that, Like if we look at United
Speaker 12: farm Workers, like across LA County, we have a long
Speaker 12: history of organizing, so like it's a hard target for
Speaker 12: them for sure.
Speaker 4: And I think it's really interesting listening to YouTube talk
Speaker 4: about this matches a lot of what I was hearing
Speaker 4: about the way that it all kind of decentralized in
Speaker 4: between sort of May and June. And the thing that
Speaker 4: reminds me of really interestingly is what was happening to
Speaker 4: sort of other protest movements but reversed. You know, if
Speaker 4: you look at like the Pala Side encampments right where
Speaker 4: it's okay, you put a bunch of people in one
Speaker 4: spot and then they all get crushed because the police
Speaker 4: can bring overwhelming numbers. And it feels like the raid
Speaker 4: response has almost been the reverse of that, where ices
Speaker 4: had to adopt, at least in that period, had to
Speaker 4: adopt the sort of hyper bolbile in and out like
Speaker 4: rapid strike kind of thing, like because they were suddenly
Speaker 4: faced with a scenario where like if they tried to
Speaker 4: like stay in mass in an area, it went really
Speaker 4: badly for them. And that's absolutely fascinating to me.
Speaker 10: One of the things that I think is interesting is
Speaker 10: the first few days you saw a pretty heavy amount
Speaker 10: of raids sort of in the Central Courridor near downtown
Speaker 10: or you know, near East Hollywood, things like that, and
Speaker 10: those were extremely heavily protested. You know, there was a
Speaker 10: protest sort of the first day of when the raids
Speaker 10: really really started in the garment districts or in the
Speaker 10: fashion district excuse me. Within minutes there was like seventy
Speaker 10: five people there and you know, they were shouting. You know,
Speaker 10: they were there before all of the vehicles for federal
Speaker 10: agents were actually there. That's the one where you know,
Speaker 10: you saw quite a bit of Union folks who arrive
Speaker 10: extremely quickly, you know. And one of the other things
Speaker 10: that I think is really interesting about this organizing is
Speaker 10: you're also seeing regular people who I don't know if
Speaker 10: they normally would organize something where they're sort of facing
Speaker 10: off with federal agents.
Speaker 3: You're starting to see.
Speaker 10: Them mobilized in a way that I don't know if
Speaker 10: you would normally see them. You know, one of the
Speaker 10: ladies that I spoke to as part of the rapid
Speaker 10: Response sort of network is a teacher. And I talked
Speaker 10: to her and I was like, hey, like, why do
Speaker 10: you do this? And she told me She's like, look
Speaker 10: like I teach in a heavily immigrant community. My job
Speaker 10: is to take care of these kids, and unfortunately now
Speaker 10: part of that is driving around the neighborhood and looking
Speaker 10: for white vans filled with people wearing masks.
Speaker 4: That's both incredibly moving and beautiful and also one of
Speaker 4: the most hideous things I've ever heard in my entire life.
Speaker 12: There were quite a few teachers at the SEIU rally
Speaker 12: which was on the ninth of June, which was with
Speaker 12: David Wuerta, the president of the SCIU, was detained, I guess,
Speaker 12: allegedly for obstructing federal agents are correctly.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 12: I met a lot of people who were older who
Speaker 12: I think were like soidedly liberal in their politics, but
Speaker 12: not particularly radical, And it was a really interesting combination
Speaker 12: of these older people who were outraged and somewhat inexperienced
Speaker 12: in street politics and younger people who were outraged and
Speaker 12: somewhat inexperienced in street politics. Like it wasn't the same
Speaker 12: crowd that you see the people who I'd seen in
Speaker 12: twenty twenty when I covered stuff in La. Haven't really
Speaker 12: covered much of the Palestine stuff in LA, but a
Speaker 12: lot of the people who I interviewed in June were
Speaker 12: citizen children of non citizen parents, and like they felt
Speaker 12: like an obligation on behalf of their community and their
Speaker 12: family to show up, And like it was really moving
Speaker 12: to see people who were clearly very afraid by the
Speaker 12: third night of like unhinged state violence. Right, Like Sean
Speaker 12: was there too about the amount of like les lethal's
Speaker 12: that were just being discharged by the third night, Like
Speaker 12: the protest was split up, and so was the policing.
Speaker 12: Like there wasn't really ever a point where all the
Speaker 12: protesters were able to get together because the police had
Speaker 12: so many roads bucked off and like you were just
Speaker 12: turned down the street and they'd be firing Leslie thought
Speaker 12: you'd turned down the street and there's tear gas. You
Speaker 12: turned down the street and there's pepper balls like all
Speaker 12: over downtown LA. And these people were very afraid, but
Speaker 12: they still kept coming out, And that was quite like
Speaker 12: inspiring to me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean, I think that's the situation that
Speaker 4: we're in right where you know, the sort of the
Speaker 4: fear and the horror has to is being forced to
Speaker 4: give way to action because the only alternative to that
Speaker 4: is just watching them take your family and take your
Speaker 4: neighbors and taking the people you love. The Carabell until
Speaker 4: one day they take you and it doesn't have to
Speaker 4: get to there.
Speaker 12: Maybe you know what else is going to take you,
Speaker 12: God specifically take money from your wallet. It's these incredible
Speaker 12: products and services which we're lucky enough to be able
Speaker 12: to share with our listeners.
Speaker 3: We are back.
Speaker 4: I notably did not want to do an actual pivot there,
Speaker 4: but we're back.
Speaker 10: I think, you know, speaking on sort of the climate
Speaker 10: of Los Angeles and at the same time this sort
Speaker 10: of insistent joy that Los Angeles has. There's a very
Speaker 10: famous song most of your listeners may have heard it, Lachona,
Speaker 10: which is basically just a song about a woman who
Speaker 10: won't listen to her husband and gets drunk, and you
Speaker 10: see it at every single protest in Los Angeles involving
Speaker 10: immigrant rites. And one of the interesting things about it
Speaker 10: is multiple times at the protests, I would see this
Speaker 10: beginning of dancing to La Chona, and then multiple times
Speaker 10: it would be broken up. I think this was the
Speaker 10: thirteenth mid June. And eventually it got to a point
Speaker 10: where I remember saying, you know, these protesters seem to
Speaker 10: really want to listen to this song, and I have
Speaker 10: a feeling it's going to end up being played in
Speaker 10: a weird spot. What ended up happening is by the
Speaker 10: end of it, I saw a bunch of people with
Speaker 10: like these gnarly bruises all over their body, you know,
Speaker 10: welts from less Lethal's fire, in the middle of the street,
Speaker 10: dancing to La Chona. They finally got their chance, and
Speaker 10: you know, it's whenever the Dodgers win. This speaks to
Speaker 10: sort of the specific culture of Los Angeles. I have
Speaker 10: seen more fires and people dancing around them to that
Speaker 10: song than any other song, including protests, so throughout the
Speaker 10: last five years.
Speaker 3: But there's also you know.
Speaker 10: I live in Boyle Heights and one of the really
Speaker 10: interesting and kind of horrific things is I had sort
Speaker 10: of been cued up and trained to listen for the
Speaker 10: ice Cream Man, both the actual van and there's a
Speaker 10: guy that does Rospatos who just walks down the street
Speaker 10: honks a bicycle horn. And I am an actual child,
Speaker 10: and every time I heard that bicycle horn, just like
Speaker 10: I'm sick. It would just like run out with a
Speaker 10: lot of cash and by Rospatos, And for about a
Speaker 10: week you didn't hear him. He didn't A lot of
Speaker 10: businesses were closed and then After about a week he
Speaker 10: started to see younger people that looked kind of like
Speaker 10: the guy that used to do it, you know, usually
Speaker 10: the son or the daughter sort of working for their parents.
Speaker 10: Now we're starting to see, you know, a little bit
Speaker 10: of a more of a return to regularity. But you know,
Speaker 10: one of the things that was really interesting about all
Speaker 10: this organizing is, you know, you have unions. You also
Speaker 10: have like former politicians and things like that. You know,
Speaker 10: I got an email from a former city councilman with
Speaker 10: the subject line that just said, it is happening here. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and I remember thinking that's that's probably not good.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's not great talking of it is happening. I
Speaker 12: think both the NML you were there, you went up
Speaker 12: to Camario right the raid on the cannabis grow operation
Speaker 12: and subsequent stand up that was just like a different
Speaker 12: scene from like DTLA. Can you explain if people aren't familiar,
Speaker 12: maybe very briefly explain the operation and the consequences.
Speaker 14: So Sean and I just sat in federal court for
Speaker 14: five hours prior to that in downtown LA, where federal
Speaker 14: judge was listening to arguments being made in the hopes
Speaker 14: of getting a temporary restraining order on the grounds that
Speaker 14: these roving patrols in Los Angeles were unconstitutional, and we
Speaker 14: left court, and you know, one of our sources who
Speaker 14: was also there at the Federal courthouse was talking about
Speaker 14: how they had heard about this raid happening in Cambrio
Speaker 14: and Carpenteria, two different cannabis grow houses, and you know,
Speaker 14: by the time he left, it had been happening for
Speaker 14: five hours at that point, so they, under a warrant,
Speaker 14: had rated both of these cannabis co operations, which are
Speaker 14: you know, quite large. We're talking hundreds of workers who
Speaker 14: work in these processing centers and greenhouses and such. And
Speaker 14: local organizers, particularly organizers with VC Defensa, which is in
Speaker 14: Ventura County, who has been doing really successful organizing following
Speaker 14: ice vehicles wherever they go to try and head off
Speaker 14: these roving patrols.
Speaker 6: They've really thrown a wrench in things up there.
Speaker 14: One of the organizers was following one of these border
Speaker 14: patrol vehicles and watched as the border patrol vehicle drove
Speaker 14: past the gates of a military base out there, and
Speaker 14: then kind of got an idea that, Okay, something big
Speaker 14: is happening.
Speaker 6: This is not normal, Like this is not.
Speaker 14: Usually what happens when we follow these cars usually they're
Speaker 14: going into neighborhood or things of that nature. And so
Speaker 14: almost immediately these groups were organizing to try and see
Speaker 14: where these cars, armored vehicles were going, and they hit
Speaker 14: two different locations. One of the locations, the one in
Speaker 14: came Rio, just outside of is kind of in the
Speaker 14: middle of nowhere.
Speaker 6: It's flanked on all sides with farm fields.
Speaker 14: You know, there's dirt highways and you know, two lane
Speaker 14: highways that kind.
Speaker 6: Of bisect everything.
Speaker 14: And what they did when they started this raid is
Speaker 14: they blocked off the roads leading into and out of
Speaker 14: this particular greenhouse, right and so they had checkpoints like roadblocks,
Speaker 14: barricades at like four or five different locations at these
Speaker 14: intersections around the greenhouse, and at every single barricade there
Speaker 14: were people. So you know, there were these sort of
Speaker 14: like face offs between heavily militarized border patrol agents kit.
Speaker 6: It out in the nines.
Speaker 14: You know, everything that you could possibly think of. They had,
Speaker 14: you know, these massive vehicles. National Guard helped them, you know,
Speaker 14: block off these roads. The local police helped them block
Speaker 14: off these roads, which you know, if you know about
Speaker 14: the sheriff in Ventura County. He's one of the only
Speaker 14: guys who doesn't care about sanctuary state ordinances.
Speaker 6: So it was a standoff essentially.
Speaker 14: And when Shawn and I arrived, it was right around dusk,
Speaker 14: so you know, it had been many hours since these
Speaker 14: raids began, and essentially what Border Patrol found is that
Speaker 14: they couldn't leave because these roads were being blocked off.
Speaker 14: They got some fans through, but the vast majority of
Speaker 14: those vehicles were still there, and they weren't prepared to
Speaker 14: be there that long.
Speaker 6: They had to air drop supplies, water, food in order
Speaker 6: to you know, shore up these folks.
Speaker 14: And you know, as word got out of the sort
Speaker 14: of commit unity response to this event, more people showed up.
Speaker 14: So by the time Sean and I got there, we
Speaker 14: were driving up list Posus and suddenly there's cars just
Speaker 14: parked on either side of the road, and we ended
Speaker 14: up parking, i think, like three quarters of a mile
Speaker 14: away from the nearest blockade and all have to hike
Speaker 14: in because there was no space for cars. You know,
Speaker 14: I mean, we get up there and it's just about
Speaker 14: dusk and you can hear the chanting in the distance,
Speaker 14: and you know, it was a really horrible and also
Speaker 14: moving experience to walk up on you know, community response
Speaker 14: to this, and you know, the standoff continued for another
Speaker 14: couple of hours, but it was you know, half of
Speaker 14: the folks there are concerned community members, folks of mixed
Speaker 14: status families who understand the absolute terror of what happens
Speaker 14: when the government is chasing after your dad, you know,
Speaker 14: and also individuals who were looking for parents, uncles, you know,
Speaker 14: they had no idea idea where their family members were.
Speaker 14: I think the total number of people who were detained
Speaker 14: and are probably going to be deported ended up somewhere
Speaker 14: around three hundred and sixty one across two farms. Yeah,
Speaker 14: it's significant, absolutely insane, you know, and the standoff lasted
Speaker 14: for a couple extra hours into the night. People turned
Speaker 14: on their car headlights so that we had light out there.
Speaker 6: There was you know a.
Speaker 14: Pretty solid group of individuals who were in communication with
Speaker 14: other blockades asking for folks to shift to other locations,
Speaker 14: sharing supplies and water, you know, and then border patrols
Speaker 14: started getting antsy. You could see them playing with their guns,
Speaker 14: you know, their riot munition's weapons. They were shifting, they're
Speaker 14: forming and reforming, and you know, organizers kind of understood
Speaker 14: that something was about to happen, so they backed off,
Speaker 14: strategically retreated because there were marches planned for the next day.
Speaker 14: They were leaving, I could see off in the distance.
Speaker 14: It witness this directly until we drove up on it.
Speaker 14: But you could see off in the distance that all
Speaker 14: of these cars, this line of cars was going around
Speaker 14: the back end of the factory on a side road
Speaker 14: and then ending up a little bit farther down Lasosos
Speaker 14: and there was flashing lights everywhere. Turns out that they
Speaker 14: were trying to make their getaway and they hit what
Speaker 14: I think was probably a traffic jam because folks were
Speaker 14: ready to go. They had packed up their cars and
Speaker 14: they were leaving when they tear gassed everybody so they
Speaker 14: could make their getaway.
Speaker 6: So, like Sean and I.
Speaker 14: By the time we drove up on it, because we
Speaker 14: saw in the distance, it was like that cloud is
Speaker 14: not normal, This isn't dust, Like that's tear gas.
Speaker 6: Let's get in the car and go see what's going on.
Speaker 14: We drove up just as the last canisters were being
Speaker 14: spent on the road and it was just a fog,
Speaker 14: you know, and cars people were panicking. You know, you
Speaker 14: can tear gas in your fricking car, man. You know,
Speaker 14: it was pretty pretty intense. Not a great experience.
Speaker 12: Yeah, And videos from downtown LA on the first day
Speaker 12: of protests and as Sean was there covering it, they
Speaker 12: had agents in gas masks in their vehicles and they
Speaker 12: were tear gasing in front. And then that seems to
Speaker 12: have been like their protocol, right, they will just tear
Speaker 12: gas the fuck out of the block and then we'll
Speaker 12: wear our gas masks inside our vehicles and leave. But
Speaker 12: I wanted to explain people I've seen this a lot
Speaker 12: will be wondering why Border Patrol with in Ventura, so, like,
Speaker 12: just to clarify or Oxnard or wherever they were at.
Speaker 12: The United States border isn't just a land border, like
Speaker 12: the United States has four edges, just like well, there's
Speaker 12: lots of edges, but you know, just like anything that's
Speaker 12: a big square, right, the ocean is a border too,
Speaker 12: and Border Patrol has this somewhat arbitrar one hundred mile
Speaker 12: enforcement zone in which they operate. So when you see
Speaker 12: border patrol operating a long way from a land border,
Speaker 12: that's because they are still within one hundred miles of
Speaker 12: a border. You know, to include the Great Lakes up north.
Speaker 12: Most of the United States population lives inside a border
Speaker 12: patrol enforcement zone.
Speaker 14: Right, so you know, you won't see as many us
Speaker 14: there are warrants to be served. For example, in Omaha, Nebraska,
Speaker 14: where there was a raid on a factory there that
Speaker 14: was a warrant investigation. Generally speaking, though, Yeah, that's why
Speaker 14: you see it in Boston, in Chicago, in Florida, and
Speaker 14: in most of California. It lives, you know, withinside that border.
Speaker 14: And so you know, the thing that I can say
Speaker 14: is that that next day when we went up and
Speaker 14: spoke to organizers, kind of got the skinny on how
Speaker 14: they were able to mobilize so quickly. As we were
Speaker 14: leaving that march, you know, a federal judge issued a
Speaker 14: temporary restraining order in Los Angeles County. Seven cities I
Speaker 14: think that were a party to the suit.
Speaker 10: It's not just Los Angeles County, it's the entire district
Speaker 10: of the CBD, thank you. Yes, yeah, it was quite
Speaker 10: a few cities filed suit as well as the ACLU
Speaker 10: farm workers several individual plaintiffs, which blocks them essentially from
Speaker 10: having a large scale rate with no warrant. So a
Speaker 10: judge basically told them, hey, you have to have a
Speaker 10: reason to be stopping and detaining people.
Speaker 9: The judge.
Speaker 10: I don't want to read too much into a judge's
Speaker 10: personal thoughts, but it became pretty clear even when they
Speaker 10: were having the hearing that the judge had pretty much
Speaker 10: had her own concerns that I don't think we're even
Speaker 10: in the filings. And it also baighteen is essentially the
Speaker 10: basement in a federal building, which is where a significant
Speaker 10: amount of the people are being held, and it forced
Speaker 10: them to allow lawyers access as well as a lot
Speaker 10: of them were essentially in these rooms that were like
Speaker 10: fifty to sixty people and there was one phone in
Speaker 10: the middle of it, so they were not getting private counsel.
Speaker 10: And with the restraining order, which I believe ends time
Speaker 10: next week, now they actually have to provide access to lawyers,
Speaker 10: you know, basic constitution stuff.
Speaker 14: Yeah, man, let me tell you, it was really, really
Speaker 14: bizarre to sit in a federal hearing. And now, look,
Speaker 14: I've read transcripts from other reporters who listen in on
Speaker 14: these federal immigration issue hearings that we've had over the
Speaker 14: last six months. It is a whole other experience to
Speaker 14: be sitting in a courtroom with your little notepad, listening
Speaker 14: to the government's lawyers try and make the case that no,
Speaker 14: we're not actually racially profiling people here. We are just
Speaker 14: stopping them based on their appearance, facial expressions, what they're wearing,
Speaker 14: potentially the.
Speaker 6: Language that they choose to speak.
Speaker 14: And all of us sitting in the gallery are like, okay,
Speaker 14: you actually made that argument in an open court. Cool,
Speaker 14: you know what I mean, Like absolutely insane to hear
Speaker 14: that come out of a DOJ lawyer's mouth, where they're like,
Speaker 14: we take umbrage with the fact that you're saying that
Speaker 14: we're racial profiling. By the way, here's all the things
Speaker 14: that we are doing, which is essentially profiling people.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 14: So the tro is essentially just in we're seeing the
Speaker 14: Fourth Amendment, which is saying, you know, you cannot conduct
Speaker 14: these roving patrols and stop people without probable cause or
Speaker 14: weren't you just can't do it, you know.
Speaker 6: And what that's done is we have seen much.
Speaker 14: Less of the immigration enforcement activity that was a feature
Speaker 14: of June and early July, and it's kind of moving
Speaker 14: to the peripheric. I know that there are things happening
Speaker 14: in San Diego, James, and we've seen some potential reports
Speaker 14: out of Sacramento. We've seen reports up north in San Francisco,
Speaker 14: you know, in terms of the enforcement zone in California.
Speaker 14: We're also seeing ramping up immigration activities in places like
Speaker 14: Chicago and other cities Utah for example. And now in
Speaker 14: the last week and a half, we've seen half of
Speaker 14: the federalized National Guard be taken off deployment and sent home.
Speaker 14: And as of today, the twenty first of July, they're
Speaker 14: sending home the Marines, you know, which good right, But
Speaker 14: it's very clear that whatever they were trying to accomplish
Speaker 14: in Los Angeles to make a point to be a
Speaker 14: battering ram to set Los Angeles, which has always kind
Speaker 14: of been known as the sanctuary city and the surrounding
Speaker 14: area as like the example of what immigration enforcement activity
Speaker 14: in this new era of Trump two point zero what
Speaker 14: have you will look like?
Speaker 6: And ultimately I don't think they were successful.
Speaker 14: I mean you look at the Raven MacArthur Park for example,
Speaker 14: or it was meant to be this you know, big
Speaker 14: operation essensibly to try and crack down on fake ID processing.
Speaker 14: Sean can talk to more of the context around MacArthur
Speaker 14: Park than I can. But they showed up and organizers
Speaker 14: had already cleared the park. You know, we were there
Speaker 14: for two and a half hours before they even showed up,
Speaker 14: and we watched as organizers put up signs. They were
Speaker 14: sitting at the home depot up the street making sure
Speaker 14: the folks knew that there might be a raid today.
Speaker 14: Like organizers had called through the entire park and said,
Speaker 14: this might happen today. If you're a mixed status or
Speaker 14: you know, your status is not one with papers, you
Speaker 14: might want to go home. You know, they cleared the
Speaker 14: soccer field, which had forty five people playing soccer on it,
Speaker 14: you know, and so by the time these armored vehicles
Speaker 14: are running down the street and doing all of their theater,
Speaker 14: there's no one there at all. You know, there's journalists,
Speaker 14: there's us. You know, there's a couple of unhoused folks
Speaker 14: who said, you know, screw that, I don't want to leave,
Speaker 14: but the vast majority of people had already gone, and
Speaker 14: so all that they got out of it was a
Speaker 14: really shitty hype video and a mayor and a governor
Speaker 14: who were like really really pissed off, and you know,
Speaker 14: a city that's just not going to just roll over
Speaker 14: and let this kind of crap happen, you know. And
Speaker 14: I think that's really emblematic of like what's been going
Speaker 14: on in Los Angeles for the last six weeks is
Speaker 14: they did not get the response that they were expecting,
Speaker 14: and they weren't prepared for that response and for the
Speaker 14: you know, for that to be a continuous response to unconstitutional, oppressive,
Speaker 14: violent actions by ICE and by the agencies that are
Speaker 14: enabling ICE.
Speaker 12: So yeah, you know, I think when we say city,
Speaker 12: we should like be clear that we're referring to like
Speaker 12: the city kua like community, not city like as government entity. Right, Like,
Speaker 12: there really hasn't been any certainly here in San Diego.
Speaker 12: At Sanieo police departmentally don't assist ICE, but they do
Speaker 12: show up to like form a coordinate around them, right like,
Speaker 12: to prevent any confrontation between them and protesters. And we
Speaker 12: saw like every police agency, like literally every police agency
Speaker 12: in La County and also Ventura County sheriffs were there
Speaker 12: for the biggest protest days. The city hasn't used its
Speaker 12: resources in that sense to stop this, right They've made
Speaker 12: rhetorical statements, but they haven't done anything with their police.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think this speaks to a kind of
Speaker 4: larger thing, which is that like these people thought they
Speaker 4: could just come into cities around the country and just
Speaker 4: shock and all everyone would really went over because like
Speaker 4: they think they're the Nazis. But the thing about the
Speaker 4: Nazis is that like people supported them, right, Like all
Speaker 4: the shit the Nazis were able to do happened because
Speaker 4: people wanted it to happen. And in a country where
Speaker 4: people don't want that shit to happen, where everyone looks
Speaker 4: at this and goes, what the fuck is going on,
Speaker 4: we're like it's like seventy nine percent support for like
Speaker 4: the effects of immigration on the US right now, where
Speaker 4: everyone's looking at this and just being like, no, they
Speaker 4: can't do it. There aren't enough of them. I don't know,
Speaker 4: Like it's just so stunning to me watching them like
Speaker 4: have to do the tactical adaptations that like normally like
Speaker 4: protest groups have to do because the cops have tuned
Speaker 4: more resources than them. But they're having to do it
Speaker 4: because they's just like every single person walking down the
Speaker 4: street is like fuck you eat shit, And so they're.
Speaker 3: Just like outnumbered everywhere they go.
Speaker 4: It's and that's all to say, it's not like fucking horrible,
Speaker 4: because yeah, resisting fashion fucking sucks a lot of the time,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people get hurt and it's hideous,
Speaker 4: and also it's what has to be done. The last
Speaker 4: thing that I wanted to ask is, so, with the
Speaker 4: injunction kind of like coming to an end soon, what
Speaker 4: do you think is the future of sort of what
Speaker 4: ICE is going to be doing, and what the response
Speaker 4: is going to be, and what border patrol are doing
Speaker 4: in this sort of month to come.
Speaker 3: It's hard to say.
Speaker 10: One of the things that I'm curious about is we
Speaker 10: won't really know what the federal government's plan is until
Speaker 10: I think it's the We'll just say late July when
Speaker 10: the next hearing is. So the temporar straining order ends
Speaker 10: in late July. Generally speaking, with temporaries training orders on
Speaker 10: law enforcement, what you see is they either continue while
Speaker 10: the hearings commence, or you see a pretty large mountain
Speaker 10: of evidence that says, hey, we did this, this, this, this,
Speaker 10: and this that's changed it, so we're now sort of
Speaker 10: in cooperation with the order. That is likely one of
Speaker 10: the reasons why we've seen fewer raids here in Los Angeles. Ultimately,
Speaker 10: a temporary restraining order is I don't want to call
Speaker 10: it a wilder extreme action at all, but those are
Speaker 10: generally signed when a judge agrees that it is extremely
Speaker 10: likely that, given the current situation, the plaintiffs have a case.
Speaker 10: So unless the federal government comes by with like this
Speaker 10: gigantic mountain of new training and all these new plans
Speaker 10: and things like that, my guess is we'll probably see
Speaker 10: at least some of the things in that temporary restraining
Speaker 10: order continue. I also think it's possible that the federal
Speaker 10: government is just going to say, you know what, this
Speaker 10: temporary restraining order only applies to this specific area. We'll
Speaker 10: just go somewhere else.
Speaker 12: It's the Central District of California, right, so like San
Speaker 12: Luis Obispo Center, Arbora, then sure at La Riverside County
Speaker 12: as well.
Speaker 2: I think Riverside.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it doesn't include San Diego, doesn't include the Northern District,
Speaker 12: which is most of the west coast of California, or
Speaker 12: the Eastern District, which is most of the Valley and
Speaker 12: further north eastern California. So yeah, it's perfectly possible they
Speaker 12: could go somewhere else and still do their shit within
Speaker 12: California or like you say, like there are so many targets,
Speaker 12: right because immigrants are part of the fabric of our society.
Speaker 12: They are everywhere, and that's you know, they can just
Speaker 12: go for wherever they think a soft target is.
Speaker 14: And there's also work noting that. You know, these organizers
Speaker 14: are going to continue to organize.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 14: So these groups Central CSO and Union of Barrio and
Speaker 14: you know the various other groups. Again, I've been around
Speaker 14: for decades. VC Defense that has been around since twenty sixteen. Right,
Speaker 14: this is only a portion of the organizing that they do.
Speaker 14: You know, they didn't start with or they will not
Speaker 14: end with just these patrols.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 14: So they've built out infrastructure and mutual aid group networks
Speaker 14: that are buying groceries for folks and mixed status families
Speaker 14: that are covering the sort of bills that are not
Speaker 14: being paid because people are too afraid to go to work.
Speaker 14: They're doing childcare, they're getting kids to school, they're trying
Speaker 14: to provide legal defense. You know, like these are you know,
Speaker 14: coalitions of individuals who live in these areas who are
Speaker 14: doing long term organizing to shore up the community whether
Speaker 14: or not there is an onslaught of immigration enforcement activity
Speaker 14: in a certain geographical area.
Speaker 6: So in terms of organizing.
Speaker 14: It's just going to keep happening and that's good, right,
Speaker 14: And you know, I think that what's hardening to see
Speaker 14: after the last you know, seven weeks of really intense,
Speaker 14: really scary, really horrifying kidnappings and detainments on the streets
Speaker 14: in southern California, is you know, an equal and often
Speaker 14: more you know, stronger response to it from the community
Speaker 14: that you know reminds you that this is.
Speaker 6: Not the end and.
Speaker 14: Folks are prepared for picking up the slack when things
Speaker 14: fall through. You know, people are not falling through the cracks.
Speaker 14: People are not having their lives shattered without someone watching
Speaker 14: and trying to help.
Speaker 6: So that's an important piece there, you know.
Speaker 14: So I would say that in terms of the response
Speaker 14: and what happens next, like it's a multi front thing.
Speaker 14: You have these legal cases finding their way through the courts.
Speaker 14: You have from all levels, right, and you have individuals
Speaker 14: who are trying to keep track of folks who have
Speaker 14: been detained and deported and sending money back to Mexico
Speaker 14: or whatever, you know, other country that these folks are
Speaker 14: being sent back to making sure that things are as
Speaker 14: much as they can. You know, there aren't any rips
Speaker 14: in the safety net. And I think that's the main
Speaker 14: lesson of the last seven weeks is like that sort
Speaker 14: of response is incredible, and you can replicate it anywhere
Speaker 14: that you are.
Speaker 6: You know a lot of folks.
Speaker 14: Like to, you know, kind of roll their eyes at
Speaker 14: the idea of like organizing starts with.
Speaker 6: Talking to your neighbor.
Speaker 14: No, actually it does, right, And you know there's these models,
Speaker 14: especially in southern and central California, where this organizing works right.
Speaker 14: It's not particularly ideological in many ways, sometimes it is,
Speaker 14: but the basic function of it is to make sure
Speaker 14: that your neighbor doesn't fall into a hole, right, And
Speaker 14: they'll do the same for you so you don't fall
Speaker 14: into a hole should something happen to you. So you know,
Speaker 14: start there and take a look at these models that
Speaker 14: these absolute fucking heroes pardon my language, are doing in
Speaker 14: this area and know that you can also do that.
Speaker 4: So yeah, these people in every facet of this are
Speaker 4: just you somewhere else or help.
Speaker 3: Maybe they are literally you. I don't know. Yah, I
Speaker 3: keep up the good work.
Speaker 12: Sure do you want to explain to us very briefly
Speaker 12: the FBI arrests and the case against at least one
Speaker 12: of us and so see so members.
Speaker 10: Well, right now, there's only one criminal complaint, and that's
Speaker 10: for Alejandro Oriana, who is accused of conspiracy to commit
Speaker 10: civil disorder as well as aiding and embedding a conspiracy
Speaker 10: to commit civil disorder. The criminal complaint, all it really
Speaker 10: says is that he gave a dispense with face shields
Speaker 10: to protesters who were dressed like they might do something bad.
Speaker 10: At no point during the criminal complaint does it even say, hey,
Speaker 10: he handed it to a guy and then that guy
Speaker 10: committed a crime.
Speaker 3: Doesn't even go that far.
Speaker 10: It just goes those guys look kind of I don't know,
Speaker 10: they look like they're about to do something, and says
Speaker 10: that you know, these people were dressed in such a
Speaker 10: way where it might interfere with law enforcement activities, like
Speaker 10: you know, it would deaden the impact of less leevil weapons.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean the impact of leslie for weapons on
Speaker 12: your face is potentially told.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and you know, beyond that, you know, there was
Speaker 10: a search warrant for another member of Centro CSO who
Speaker 10: was roughly handled by FBI agents on a walk through
Speaker 10: the park and was given a search warrant and her
Speaker 10: phone was taken. I asked the US Attorney's office if
Speaker 10: they were related, and first I was told I don't
Speaker 10: know what you're talking about, which I thought was a
Speaker 10: little interesting. Never gotten that response from any official, and
Speaker 10: then a few hours later got an official response that said, no,
Speaker 10: it is another case. So what that means time will tell,
Speaker 10: but I think it's likely that there will be more
Speaker 10: to come. On top of that. I think it's interesting
Speaker 10: to note that the first arraignment for Oreana was an
Speaker 10: absolutely packed court and.
Speaker 3: Support of them.
Speaker 4: Where can people find you two's work and where can
Speaker 4: people support you as you do a whole bunch of
Speaker 4: incredibly critical journalism on the continuing resistance to the fascist
Speaker 4: deportation campaign.
Speaker 14: A lot of my reporting goes to bluesky, so you
Speaker 14: can find me at melviw or Blueskuy dot social. I
Speaker 14: have a newsletter, Words about Work dot blog, and you
Speaker 14: can also find me on my Instagram. My link tree
Speaker 14: is linked in all sorts of places, so you can
Speaker 14: find all those links in one convenient.
Speaker 3: Place, including the description of this episode.
Speaker 6: Hey yeah, those are the places where you can find me.
Speaker 10: You can find me on a cat with news on
Speaker 10: all social media platforms, although most of my sort of
Speaker 10: breaking stories come on Blue Sky first, and I'm a
Speaker 10: freelance journalist, so usually you can just google my name
Speaker 10: and you'll see some stories there. On my Blue Sky
Speaker 10: and Instagram, there's a link tree if you want to
Speaker 10: support Hell.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and to everyone listening to the show, always remember
Speaker 4: you are many, they are few.
Speaker 12: Pedophile is a correct pronunciation going into.
Speaker 2: This just for and that's the sentence we're starting the
Speaker 2: episode with. Welcome to It could happen here a podcast
Speaker 2: where we teach you how to pronounce the word pedophile
Speaker 2: or pedophile or pedophily your Greek. You know, that's not
Speaker 2: how the Greeks say it. Welcome to the show. We're
Speaker 2: talking about some breaking news about friend of the pod
Speaker 2: Kylie Ray Jepstein, a joke I did on the Behind
Speaker 2: the Bastards episodes about Epstein that nobody liked.
Speaker 12: Least of all the lawyers.
Speaker 3: I don't like that either.
Speaker 2: It wasn't even really a joke, just something I shouldn't
Speaker 2: have said. Yeah, so this is all.
Speaker 3: Barely breaking news because this is stuff that we've known
Speaker 3: about for like ever.
Speaker 2: None of this is a mystery. We're not going to
Speaker 2: be blowing any minds here that Jeffrey Epstein sexually trafficked
Speaker 2: and molested children, or that Donald Trump probably did as well,
Speaker 2: or well, he didn't do the trafficking, but you know
Speaker 2: he was a party to it. Yeah, allegedly, you know,
Speaker 2: being alleged by a lot of people, Rupert Murdoch, one
Speaker 2: of them by Dach, who is currently being sued for
Speaker 2: ten million dollars in his capacity as owner of The
Speaker 2: Wall Street Journal. So on July seventeenth, twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: at six forty five pm Eastern Standard time, the Wall
Speaker 2: Street Journal published an article with the title Jeffrey Epstein's
Speaker 2: friends sent him body letters for a fiftieth birthday album.
Speaker 2: One was from Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: Body is one way to describe it.
Speaker 2: Bondy is one way to describe it.
Speaker 3: Yes, Yes, indeed, it's really good to see a leftist
Speaker 3: outlet like Wall Street Journal take this thing head on.
Speaker 2: Yeh finally, Yes, you know, I've had my issues with them,
Speaker 2: you know, being hardline Marxists as they are. That doesn't
Speaker 2: fully del with my own beliefs. But you have to
Speaker 2: resp sfeckt them in this instance. You know, I'm not
Speaker 2: as much of a Stalinist as the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 2: famed Stalinists.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's why they've counseled us, because they're two wake.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The Little Red Book published by the Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 2: Big malfansmphlets imprint.
Speaker 12: History would absolve me. Yeah, a little Red Book.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. They've got a beautiful leather bound edition of
Speaker 2: Ted Kaczinski's manifesto. Speaking of letter bound editions, Gillan Maxwell,
Speaker 2: I think this initially came out because it was a
Speaker 2: Spanish like small scale publisher that published that put out
Speaker 2: this like leather bound book for Gillan for to give
Speaker 2: to Jeffrey and god do I want to see the
Speaker 2: whole copy because I am curious to who else submitted letters.
Speaker 2: But during the FBI investigation and everything around Epstein, this
Speaker 2: was found and it got leaked out to the Wall
Speaker 2: Street Journal. I think the New York Times has now
Speaker 2: seen it, so they're not the only people who have
Speaker 2: seen it. You've got a piece of paper and there
Speaker 2: is a drawing that may or may not have been
Speaker 2: done by Trump, but is alleged by some to have
Speaker 2: been done by Trump. Although he denies this, having said
Speaker 2: that he has never written a picture in his life.
Speaker 2: But it's like a silhouette of a naked woman. And
Speaker 2: then Donald Trump's signature where pubic hare would be right,
Speaker 2: classy man, Yeah, our current.
Speaker 12: Our president. Yeah, I had the guy with the nuclear codes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great stuff. And then the actual text on the
Speaker 2: letter is written in the form of like a dialogue. Right,
Speaker 2: So it's like written as like a fake script of
Speaker 2: a conversation between Trump and Epstein voiceover. There must be
Speaker 2: more to life than having everything, Donald, Yes, there is,
Speaker 2: but I won't tell you what it is, Jeffrey, nor
Speaker 2: will I since I also know what it is. Donald.
Speaker 2: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey. Jeffrey, yes, we do,
Speaker 2: come to think of it, Donald, Enigma's never a Have
Speaker 2: you noticed that, Jeffrey. As a matter of fact, it
Speaker 2: was clear to me the last time I saw you Trump,
Speaker 2: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy birthday, and may
Speaker 2: every day be another wonderful secret.
Speaker 4: The thing I need a listener to understand about this episode, right,
Speaker 4: that is not the most incriminating thing Donald Trump is
Speaker 4: going to say in this episode.
Speaker 2: It's not even close to it. Although it is It
Speaker 2: is very funny. This could hardly be more directive. The
Speaker 2: letter was just Jeffrey, I love being a pedophile with
Speaker 2: you love Donald Trump? Right, Like that's less.
Speaker 3: Direct yet he has gone further. Yeah, but like he's
Speaker 3: just saying it.
Speaker 2: So the Wall Street Journal publishes this, and they publish
Speaker 2: this with like the least bit of editorializing that they can, right,
Speaker 2: they're being very careful with this. Trump loses his fucking mind.
Speaker 2: And this is obviously coming on the heels I probably
Speaker 2: should have started with this important context. This is coming
Speaker 2: on the heels of Pambondi and the Justice Department announcing actually,
Speaker 2: everything's cool and they're not going to be dropping any
Speaker 2: more info on Epstein. There's no client list or anything.
Speaker 2: After Bondi had earlier this year been like I have
Speaker 2: the Epstein client list on my desk, and they handed
Speaker 2: out the Epstein papers, you know, release one, these like
Speaker 2: big binders that fucking the limbs of TikTok Lady and
Speaker 2: Jack Pasobaic and a munch of other right wing influencers.
Speaker 2: Well walked out of the White House with these big
Speaker 2: binders being like, Aha, we've got it. We've got all
Speaker 2: the files that are gonna put all the dims behind jail.
Speaker 2: And then a couple months later, BONDI and the DJ
Speaker 2: is like, actually, there's nothing else to tell anybody. We've
Speaker 2: got nothing. There's nothing interesting at all about Epstein. So
Speaker 2: then this shit comes out, right, it gets leaked from someone,
Speaker 2: presumably someone within the FBI. Right, I think that's what
Speaker 2: we're left to assume at this point, because this was
Speaker 2: revealed as a part of their investigation. Right, this is
Speaker 2: some of the stuff that was confiscated, you know, when
Speaker 2: Gilan Maxwell got taken into custody. Okay, so a couple
Speaker 2: of things have happened since then. For one thing, Trump
Speaker 2: is suing the Wall Street Journal for I believe at
Speaker 2: least twenty billion dollars. This lawsuit was launched in a
Speaker 2: federal court in Miami. Trump said, true's social The lawsuits
Speaker 2: filed not only in behalf of your favorite president, all
Speaker 2: caps me, but in order to continue standing up for
Speaker 2: all Americans who will no longer tolerate the abusive wrongdoings
Speaker 2: of the fake news media. So this is what Trump
Speaker 2: is claiming. And obviously Trump denies any wrongdoing, denies anything
Speaker 2: but kind of lightly knowing Jeffrey Epstein and for some context,
Speaker 2: Trump and Epstein have been seen together numerous times. There
Speaker 2: are pictures and videos of them both together. Trump talked
Speaker 2: about in interviews, including one with New York Magazine where
Speaker 2: he said, like me, Jeffrey's known to really like women,
Speaker 2: and some of them are on the younger side. Right.
Speaker 2: He's been saying shit like this for years.
Speaker 3: Quote. I've known Jeffer fifteen years. Terrific guy. He's a
Speaker 3: lot of fun to be with it. Deeven said, he
Speaker 3: likes beautiful women as much as I do. And many
Speaker 3: of them are on the younger side, no doubt about it.
Speaker 3: Jeffrey enjoys his social life. Two thousand and two, we
Speaker 3: know they were friends. The information suggests that I think
Speaker 3: it's around two thousand and five or six, they had
Speaker 3: a falling out over a real estate deal. With the
Speaker 3: real estate deal and one alleged incident at mar A Lago, Yes,
Speaker 3: where jeff Free was acting quote unquote inappropriately to a
Speaker 3: daughter of a member of the club and then Trump
Speaker 3: barred him from the club. And Trump has claimed this
Speaker 3: multiple times through the years. Between this and the real
Speaker 3: estate deal that's led to their falling out.
Speaker 2: There's other stories. There's one. I've heard that Epstein got
Speaker 2: really angry because Trump was physically like touching one of
Speaker 2: Epstein's girlfriends, like one of his actual like partner girlfriends,
Speaker 2: and that he got angry over that. We don't know,
Speaker 2: but we do know that they were seen socially together
Speaker 2: and talked about being friends for quite a while.
Speaker 3: They were neighbors, and they were like socialites, both in
Speaker 3: New York and in Frorida.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, for a while, from the eighties up through
Speaker 2: the early two thousands. Right now. Trump has denied sending
Speaker 2: this letter. He said that this doesn't sound like me.
Speaker 2: He wrote on truth Social I don't draw pictures.
Speaker 3: Now that was a lot.
Speaker 2: This has sparked one of my favorite investigatory cycles. The
Speaker 2: New York Times published an article right after this post
Speaker 2: that says Trump says he doesn't draw pictures, but many
Speaker 2: of his sketches sold an auction, and it's like photos
Speaker 2: of a bunch of To be fair, none of these
Speaker 2: are sketches of naked women. But there's a crude black
Speaker 2: marker drawing of the Empire, state building.
Speaker 3: A lot of city skylines.
Speaker 2: Allegedly, the drawing of the woman was drawn in black marker, right,
Speaker 2: and they're noting that he did a lot of black
Speaker 2: marker drawings. Right, he signs his bills in shoppy, doesn't
Speaker 2: he signs his bills in sharpie, And that he has
Speaker 2: a signature that does kind of look like pubic hair. Right,
Speaker 2: if you were to like draw a crude set of Genitalia,
Speaker 2: Donald Trump's signature could stand in for pubic hair, right,
Speaker 2: Like the way that he signs this signature, that's one
Speaker 2: way you could interpret it, right, It's also.
Speaker 4: Worth noting, and I think this is actually really important
Speaker 4: when he signs this, right, he signs it like like
Speaker 4: on this picture of like the Empire State Building. Right,
Speaker 4: it's a really shitty drawing the Umper State Building. His
Speaker 4: signature is like right next to the building. If you're
Speaker 4: drawing a picture of a naked woman and you shift it,
Speaker 4: like if.
Speaker 2: The Empire State Building was sitting down in like an
Speaker 2: L shape and had pubiccare, that's where the signature right, bes.
Speaker 3: Everything is exactly the same.
Speaker 12: It's the SIPI State Building had pubic care.
Speaker 2: There's also a drawing that he did. It's called the
Speaker 2: money Tree drawing. It looks like if the giving tree
Speaker 2: was filled with dollars, and again, the signature kind of
Speaker 2: looks like pubic hair.
Speaker 12: So Trump's a little artist, just like a since underneath
Speaker 12: the money tree to meditate. That gets his alternative.
Speaker 3: Trump did like yearly drawings and the doodles for like
Speaker 3: charity auctions, and that's what most of these are from.
Speaker 2: And to be fair, a lot of US presidents have
Speaker 2: been doodlers, you know. Ike, our former president doodled himself
Speaker 2: with huge muscles during a meeting talking about the overthrow
Speaker 2: of Guatemala by the.
Speaker 3: Same it's so funny.
Speaker 2: It's so funny. I mean, so many people died in
Speaker 2: a horrible deaths, but it's really pretty funny.
Speaker 12: Chad Eisenhower.
Speaker 4: Just shredded entire indigitous civilizations, wipe off the face of
Speaker 4: the earth forever, Like.
Speaker 2: Look at Chad Eisenhower.
Speaker 12: If you have a chat eise in how a tattoo,
Speaker 12: please submit it to Sophie on Twitter. She's just I write, Okay.
Speaker 2: Look, I feel confident saying iHeartRadio will pay for anyone's tattoo.
Speaker 2: If you want to get Chad Eisenhower, as long as
Speaker 2: it's a facial tattoo, you know.
Speaker 12: Yeah, you can get it in that uv ink that
Speaker 12: doing tattoos in when you're in.
Speaker 2: The club, people.
Speaker 12: Beautiful stuff, triggering a stampede from the dooms.
Speaker 8: Fill.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're gonna cause another one of those fucking Jersey
Speaker 2: nightclub fires that killed one and twenty people. It's not funny.
Speaker 2: A lot of people died anyway. There was also another
Speaker 2: God I should have it up here, but it's another
Speaker 2: investigation into like does the writing that Trump did sound
Speaker 2: like his other writing? And they found that Number One,
Speaker 2: Trump has a number of times in the past put
Speaker 2: out writing in the form of a hypothetical script between
Speaker 2: other people. That is a thing he's done in the past.
Speaker 2: And then multiple phrases that were used in this letter
Speaker 2: are phrases he has used in the past, in some
Speaker 2: cases multiple times.
Speaker 3: Except some of the Mega investigators were able to use
Speaker 3: Grok to ask if Trump ever used the word enigma before,
Speaker 3: and Grok said no, So we closed that case. Never
Speaker 3: mind the fact that he said it on the campaign
Speaker 3: trail in twenty sixteen, and he said multiple times in
Speaker 3: his best selling.
Speaker 12: Book No Evidence he wrote that book.
Speaker 2: He loves the word Well, I'm not gonna say he
Speaker 2: loves it, but he's used the word enigma before, right,
Speaker 2: He described Ben Carson as an enigma. He's described Dan
Speaker 2: Rather as an enigma. So maybe he and Epstein were
Speaker 2: both fucking Dan Rather. Is that possible. I'm gonna say yes.
Speaker 3: I think you should also be impeached for that.
Speaker 2: I think so.
Speaker 12: I'm sorry I have just just kept talking of Grook.
Speaker 12: I'm reading the Trump versus murderc lawsuit, which describe Eggs
Speaker 12: dot Com as quote the Internet's watering hole. What no, sorry, no, yeah,
Speaker 12: no longer the everything website.
Speaker 2: The watering hole. What are you doing? What is wrong
Speaker 2: with you? People? Fucking jump off a bridge? You stupid sons?
Speaker 2: A bitious.
Speaker 3: It is interesting you still really met at Elon because
Speaker 3: Elon is also one of the originators of this current
Speaker 3: wave of like Epstein focus.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting after the letter came out, Elon was
Speaker 2: just like, obviously a fake. Obviously. I think he's scared.
Speaker 2: I think some g men showed up at his door
Speaker 2: and were like, this is a nice life you've got,
Speaker 2: fucking Elon Musk. It would be a shame of a
Speaker 2: hell fire missile hit your house, hit your fucking compound
Speaker 2: with all of your wives.
Speaker 4: But the thing is, and this is the fun part
Speaker 4: about this is like it doesn't matter what Elon says now,
Speaker 4: like he already opened the floodgates and the games are fucking.
Speaker 2: Open now, like no, no, no, do you.
Speaker 3: Know what else the gates are open from.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is our advertisers and we're back. So this is
Speaker 2: the gist of the situation. Now, this letter is out,
Speaker 2: and a lot of people, even I and I still
Speaker 2: am to some extent kind of there's been so many
Speaker 2: ops this that has to be it for old Donnie Trump.
Speaker 2: One Nitny wiggles his fucking way out right, you know
Speaker 2: that said this does seem to be pissing off a
Speaker 2: lot of his more diehard people, right, including fucking the
Speaker 2: Dilbert guy. We don't need to give any name besides
Speaker 2: the Dilbert guy, but the Dilbert Guy's pissed about this.
Speaker 2: A lot of people who have been like really religious
Speaker 2: Trump supporters are pissed as a result of this.
Speaker 12: Sean Ryan, the right pissed about this.
Speaker 3: Even Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been more
Speaker 3: Trump critical the past week and has given interviews to
Speaker 3: another mega influencer turned soft Trump critic, now Benny Johnson,
Speaker 3: about how Trump handled this so poorly. A lot of
Speaker 3: them are trying to make this down into like a
Speaker 3: messaging fail or like a rhetoric fumble, which obviously it's
Speaker 3: so much more substantial than that. But cracks are forming
Speaker 3: in a way that we haven't released scene for his
Speaker 3: base in a long time.
Speaker 4: And the thing I think is really important about this
Speaker 4: is that, Okay, so this is me a going history mode.
Speaker 4: If you look at a thing that has been studied
Speaker 4: by an enormous amount by the left, and I think
Speaker 4: studied mostly wrong, which is how did the Bolsheviks actually
Speaker 4: take power in nineteen seventeen. And the answer is that
Speaker 4: when they came for Kerensky in the October Revolution, everyone
Speaker 4: stayed home. Everyone looked at Kerensky and was like, I'm
Speaker 4: not dying for that dip shit, Like fuck them, Like
Speaker 4: if there's like dueling machine gun companies in the street,
Speaker 4: i Am not going to go die for Alexander Kerensky.
Speaker 4: And that's all they won because everyone stayed home. And
Speaker 4: that's the thing with Trump, right. The thing that's important
Speaker 4: about this is that the way that Trump can be
Speaker 4: defeated is if enough of his base just stays the
Speaker 4: fuck home whenever the sort of terminal crisis hits and
Speaker 4: every single thing we get like this, we're more and
Speaker 4: more of his base.
Speaker 3: Is like, well, I mean I.
Speaker 4: Could go face down a machine gun line for this guy,
Speaker 4: but he did piss me off by Epstein, So like
Speaker 4: fuck that. The more that happens, the better it is
Speaker 4: for all of us. When never the confrontations start to emerge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think in general just the more so much
Speaker 2: of the modern right is built on the Epstein stuff,
Speaker 2: and a lot of it is a myth. Right, there's
Speaker 2: a mythical idea that Epstein is trafficking small children and
Speaker 2: he's not. He was trafficking teenage girls, because that's what
Speaker 2: mostly rich adult men want to fuck, right, That's just
Speaker 2: the reality of the situation.
Speaker 3: Including famously Donald Trump. Yeah, he has like said this before,
Speaker 3: and you can look at the many court cases that
Speaker 3: have often been solved out of.
Speaker 2: Court alleged by him.
Speaker 3: And like there's this clip of the Howard Stern Show
Speaker 3: from the mid two thousands, which is kind of an
Speaker 3: endless source of men saying horrible things. I will include
Speaker 3: this clip here thing about four year olds.
Speaker 9: Oh, absolutely, would you do it?
Speaker 10: I have no problem?
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you have any age limit?
Speaker 8: Or would you.
Speaker 11: No, No, I have no age. I mean I have
Speaker 11: an age.
Speaker 3: I don't want to be like you, a twelve year old?
Speaker 3: Can I make a prediction for you? Good lord? This
Speaker 3: is the incorrect response to this question. Yes, this question
Speaker 3: has a very clear like cut off point, which even
Speaker 3: still is a little bit iffy. But this is absolutely
Speaker 3: the wrong answer. The answer is not twelve years old.
Speaker 12: This is that is Marity legally the wrong answer.
Speaker 2: Oh man.
Speaker 4: You know, one of the things I think it's also
Speaker 4: really important about this is looking at this in the
Speaker 4: context of Trump's unbelievable number of sexual assault allegations. And
Speaker 4: we're going to get into that in a second, but
Speaker 4: first we need to ask the question, Okay, has Donald
Speaker 4: Trump ever intentionally looked at the naked body of an
Speaker 4: underage girl? And in order to figure out the answer
Speaker 4: to this, I am going to turn to the man himself,
Speaker 4: Donald Trump, talking about walking into the changing rooms of
Speaker 4: teen Miss USA pageants, and I quote, you know, no
Speaker 4: men are anywhere, and I'm allowed to go in because
Speaker 4: I'm the owner of the pageant, and therefore I'm inspecting
Speaker 4: it is this one.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: You know they're standing there with no clothes and you
Speaker 4: see these incredible looking women, and I sort of get
Speaker 4: away with things like that. Now, that is our president
Speaker 4: Donald J. Trump saying that he walks into changing rooms
Speaker 4: and looks at the bodies of naked underage girls and
Speaker 4: says that they are end like quotes incredible looking women.
Speaker 3: I remember when this quote was going around like maybe
Speaker 3: ten years ago. Yeah, and then just no, one know.
Speaker 12: No, it's gone into the memory hole now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, disappear right, Like there's so much of this shit.
Speaker 12: Like the Access Hollywood tape, but like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think it's actually worth like looking at this.
Speaker 4: There's another quote from Vox where they say this is
Speaker 4: an incident of like Trump walking in on a changing
Speaker 4: room like of again like naked underage girls.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: Billottel told BuzzFeed. She mentioned the incident to Trump's daughter Avonka,
Speaker 4: who shrugged it off, saying, quote, yeah he does that,
Speaker 4: so like yeah, like this is multiple people cooperating that
Speaker 4: he just like walks into the changing rooms of naked
Speaker 4: underage girls and like looks at their bodies. Right now,
Speaker 4: I will call that pedophile shit, right Like, I don't
Speaker 4: know if he wants to sue me for one billion dollars,
Speaker 4: please don't but.
Speaker 2: Like sounds like he's alleging pedophile.
Speaker 11: Shit.
Speaker 4: He's the one who said this, so, like, you know,
Speaker 4: and it's worth noting also last year a jury did
Speaker 4: rule that Trump had sexually assaulted an advice columnist named
Speaker 4: em J. Carroll, and he had to pay her like
Speaker 4: five million dollars. There's also again the like grab him
Speaker 4: by the pussy thing, which is him just talking about
Speaker 4: sexually assaulting women, which he does constantly. He kept on
Speaker 4: just like walking up to like people at his pageants
Speaker 4: and just kissing him without their consent, which is again
Speaker 4: sexual assault and directly tied to the Epstein case. We
Speaker 4: have an allegation by former model Stacy Williams, which for
Speaker 4: some reason, I don't know why everyone has suddenly forgotten
Speaker 4: about this, who alleged that she was introduced to Trump
Speaker 4: by Epstein, who like walked her to Trump Tower to
Speaker 4: meet Donald Trump, where he then sexually assaulted her like
Speaker 4: in front of Epstein.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in Trump Tower. This was also included in the
Speaker 3: list The New York Times together a few days ago
Speaker 3: on like Trump and Epstein's friendship quote. One of the
Speaker 3: young women who later said, mister Epstein greendon abus he
Speaker 3: was recruited into his world while working as a spot
Speaker 3: and an at mar A Lago. Another accuser recalled being
Speaker 3: eyed by Trump during a brief encounter in mister Epstein's
Speaker 3: office and claimed that mister Epstein told Trump at the time, quote,
Speaker 3: she's not for you.
Speaker 4: So like he just like says this shit, right, And
Speaker 4: I think this is, you know, part of the problem
Speaker 4: that we've been sort of getting it here, right, which
Speaker 4: is that like the conservative mythos about Epstein is that
Speaker 4: it's like four year olds, right, and it's like, no,
Speaker 4: Epstein was doing the shit that Donald Trump talks about doing, right,
Speaker 4: But because it's like attached to Epstein, right, Like Trump
Speaker 4: doesn't want to admit that he's been doing this, even
Speaker 4: though he's been admitting that he's been doing this for
Speaker 4: decades and decades and decades. It's harder for the conservatives
Speaker 4: to deal with this because like all of these people
Speaker 4: think the child marriage should be legal and that creeping
Speaker 4: on like fifteen year olds isn't pedophilia.
Speaker 12: It's not hard for them to deal with this because
Speaker 12: they don't have a fucking problem with it.
Speaker 3: Like Matt Wallash's talking about how like venteen year olds
Speaker 3: are the most fertile. So yeah, this is very common
Speaker 3: among certain aspects of like this like evangelical.
Speaker 2: Again, it's a major thing on the right to fight
Speaker 2: for it to be legal to marry fourteen year old girls,
Speaker 2: you know, as all as their parents say yes.
Speaker 4: And you could look at this from a conspiracy productive
Speaker 4: and be like, okay, like is there a ruling cabal
Speaker 4: of pedophiles I control the United States? And it's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's the Baptists and like the systematic cover up of
Speaker 4: this shit by the Catholic Church, right, it's Epstein. Yeah,
Speaker 4: But it's also like Trump admitting that he's like again
Speaker 4: perving on like doing pedophiles shit, but like walking in
Speaker 4: on these changing rooms of these fucking girls. He's just
Speaker 4: like admitting this on TV, right.
Speaker 3: And I think like the current thing that Trump's trying
Speaker 3: to do is make this Epstein thing another one of
Speaker 3: the many lines of attack against him throughout the years.
Speaker 3: And he's done a really good job at deflecting some
Speaker 3: things that have some actual like serious data on had
Speaker 3: some serious investigations, and like there was aspects of like
Speaker 3: Russian interference in the twenty sixteen election. It may not
Speaker 3: have changed the outcome of the election in a substantial manner.
Speaker 3: But this is something that the FBI like legitimately investigated
Speaker 3: and had like real findings of, and he was able
Speaker 3: to just completely like rewrite what that investigation was into
Speaker 3: this like completely like astroturfed and like orchestrated hoax. And
Speaker 3: now it's like one of the main things that he
Speaker 3: talks about. And whenever there's new things that people bring
Speaker 3: up about why Trump is bad, he just compares it
Speaker 3: to the Russia hoax. Everything's just just like the Russia hoax.
Speaker 3: This is just another Democrat hoax against me. And this
Speaker 3: has been such an effective way for him to diffuse
Speaker 3: so many lines of attack against him. It's by just
Speaker 3: repeating long enough and often enough that it's just a
Speaker 3: baseless hoax. And he can do this anytime, and he'll
Speaker 3: replace like, oh, you know, this is a hoax, but
Speaker 3: you know when Hunter Biden does stuff, that's the real
Speaker 3: thing that the Democrats then try to cover up Hunter's laptop.
Speaker 3: They talk about Hunter's laptop so many times, something that
Speaker 3: does not matter. But like, this is the trend that
Speaker 3: he's been able to do. And eventually journalism get tired
Speaker 3: of having to repeat the same thing over and over again,
Speaker 3: explaining that these things are not baseless hoaxes but are
Speaker 3: legitimate investigations, legitimate concerns, and people just get tired of it.
Speaker 3: And he's able to like warp reality around things that
Speaker 3: he says. And this is the thing he's currently trying
Speaker 3: to do with Epstein. This is why he's calling it
Speaker 3: the Epstein hoax, using the same rhetoric that he used
Speaker 3: around all of the Russia stuff around the twenty twenty election,
Speaker 3: around Hunter Biden's laptop, and it's going to tire people out.
Speaker 3: And you can already kind of feel some of this
Speaker 3: like iteration of it losing some steam. And like I
Speaker 3: thought the Wall Street Journal piece would like invigorate people's
Speaker 3: discussion of like Trump's, you know, alleged pedophilia, and I
Speaker 3: think it's I don't know, at least in like observing
Speaker 3: the online ecosystem, immediate ecosystem the last few days. I
Speaker 3: don't know if Trump's strategy is working, but it is
Speaker 3: growing stagnant and that's just kind of the pace of
Speaker 3: the Internet sometimes. But if he's able to keep doing
Speaker 3: what he's currently I'm not sure if this stuff's going
Speaker 3: to really matter in two months beyond, you know, whatever
Speaker 3: comes out in discovery for the like Murdoch lawsuit.
Speaker 12: We should maybe explain who Murdoch is. Just it's Murdoch
Speaker 12: Murdoch is.
Speaker 3: He's a leftist revolutionary.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's going to say, member of the Communist Party.
Speaker 12: Murdoch is an Australian tabloid magnate who owns the tabloid
Speaker 12: press more or less at some point in time. He
Speaker 12: has probably owned most of the tabloid press in the
Speaker 12: English language almost all around the world.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 12: He owns The Sun in the UK, also The Times
Speaker 12: in Australia. He owns the Daily Sun and Deai Telegraph.
Speaker 12: In the US he owns a Wall Street Journal and
Speaker 12: the New York Post. He also owns Sky News, which
Speaker 12: broadcast like in the UK, he owns Fox News. He
Speaker 12: used to own people in the UK, remember the News
Speaker 12: of the World. He owns a massive amount of the
Speaker 12: tabloid and I guess the broadsheet press now. But he
Speaker 12: has historically been very right wing right. It's fair to
Speaker 12: say that Murdock outlets have boosted Trump enormously in his
Speaker 12: assent to office. However, now it appears they have fallen
Speaker 12: out and like that is significant. I think it is
Speaker 12: significant that this guy who has played a huge role
Speaker 12: in Trump's like, we don't have the sort of liberal
Speaker 12: Walter Cronkite anymore, right, Like the person who can change
Speaker 12: their mind on something and take the nation with them
Speaker 12: in the way that Kronkite had a role in doing
Speaker 12: at least in the Vietnam War. The boomer and gen
Speaker 12: x conservative people still have that in Fox News, right,
Speaker 12: Like Fox News can because it's like the constant background
Speaker 12: noise in people's lives in so much of this country.
Speaker 12: It can take people with it. And the fact that
Speaker 12: Trump has gone after Murdoch, I think that is potentially
Speaker 12: if they're falling out continues, that is potentially the most
Speaker 12: damaging part of this for him.
Speaker 4: I want to read a quote. I think I've talked
Speaker 4: about this on the show before, but Murdoch's role in
Speaker 4: doing the sort of reality shape stuff for Trump until
Speaker 4: now and Garrison what we were talking about about how
Speaker 4: Trump is able to sort of create his own reality.
Speaker 4: I want to read this quote from the Bush administration
Speaker 4: that's very famous, which is like the reality based community quote.
Speaker 4: Because the neo cons were trying to do the same thing, right,
Speaker 4: There's a very famous quote from the Bush administration which
Speaker 4: is attributed to a journalist named Ron Suttzkind. And he's
Speaker 4: doing an interview with like a Bush administration aid, and
Speaker 4: I'm just going to quote fromit. The aid said that
Speaker 4: guys like me were quote in what we call the
Speaker 4: reality based community, which he defined as people who quote
Speaker 4: believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.
Speaker 4: That's not the way the world really works anymore, he continued.
Speaker 4: We're an empire now, and when we act, we create
Speaker 4: our own reality. And while you're studying reality judiciously, as
Speaker 4: you will will act again, creating other new realities which
Speaker 4: you can study too, And that's how things will sort out.
Speaker 4: Tree's actors and you, all of you will just be
Speaker 4: left to study what we do. And that's you know,
Speaker 4: a lot of what trump Ism is too, right, which
Speaker 4: is like, yeah, I know all of you people are
Speaker 4: trying to like describe reality. I'm just simply going to
Speaker 4: change it by saying shit right and doing shit.
Speaker 3: And like all he has to do is like diffuse
Speaker 3: the possible damage that this Epstein thing can do to
Speaker 3: his base, Like he does not care about the other
Speaker 3: half of the country at all. He knows that they
Speaker 3: hate him, that does not matter. All he has to
Speaker 3: do is create enough of a doubt in the mind
Speaker 3: of the base that this thing isn't real. There's no
Speaker 3: proof that this Wall Street Journal story is real. This
Speaker 3: is all a hoax. The Epstein files were written by Obama,
Speaker 3: even though the second Epstein investigation was kicked off when
Speaker 3: he was president in twenty nineteen. But all these files
Speaker 3: were written by.
Speaker 12: My own garrison. I think it's bold of you to
Speaker 12: say that Trump was president in twenty nineteen. That's very
Speaker 12: much up for.
Speaker 3: Different controversial claim now about who was president in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 12: Yeah, certainly, like who is president in twenty twenty is
Speaker 12: something that the country now disagrees about.
Speaker 4: Yeah. The thing I want to say about this, though,
Speaker 4: right is, the neocons believe they could do this. Right,
Speaker 4: the neocons believe they had seized the range of empire
Speaker 4: and they could forever shape reality to their will, and
Speaker 4: they couldn't this quote from two thousand and four, Right,
Speaker 4: the neocons tried to do this, and they invaded a
Speaker 4: rock and they thought they could just fucking will like empire,
Speaker 4: like we create reality they thought they could just turn
Speaker 4: a rock into their own personal playground, and it destroyed them.
Speaker 4: Like where are the neocons now?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: Like some of them are obviously the Trump administration, but
Speaker 4: like this is not a neocons.
Speaker 2: Some of them are now in the anti Trump or
Speaker 2: side of this.
Speaker 12: Yeah yeah, right, yeah, many of them are in the
Speaker 12: Lincoln project.
Speaker 4: The thing is right, the neocons are, like they don't
Speaker 4: they do not rule the empire anymore.
Speaker 3: Right, that's Trump.
Speaker 4: These people they ran into a piece of reality that
Speaker 4: they tried to devour and consume and replace.
Speaker 3: And it destroyed them. And I don't know if this
Speaker 3: is that for Trump, but.
Speaker 2: I yeah, I don't know. I'm not that optimistic.
Speaker 4: But like the last time that someone tried to do
Speaker 4: this using the American state, they eventually hit a thing
Speaker 4: they couldn't swallow and it completely annihilated them. And that's
Speaker 4: the goal with us, right, Like we have to like
Speaker 4: find the thing where enough of the coalition is peeled
Speaker 4: off and where it just completely blows up in their
Speaker 4: fucking face. And hopefully it's not like the Iraq War
Speaker 4: three or something, but this ability to warp reality purely
Speaker 4: by like thought and speech and action of empire like
Speaker 4: has its limits, and we've seen them be destroyed before.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it took a lot of people dying into the
Speaker 12: first time.
Speaker 4: That's what it was horrible, Right, It's not easy to
Speaker 4: stop these people. But you know, like, where the fuck
Speaker 4: is George Bush right now?
Speaker 12: Yeah he's doing a painting, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, on his foreign painting. But he's not running the
Speaker 4: fucking country.
Speaker 11: Not far.
Speaker 2: He's like ten miles away from where I used to live.
Speaker 12: It down, God, he's at a rubbit's house.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know what else we got to say
Speaker 2: about our old friend Jepstein.
Speaker 4: I guess the one last thing that I have to
Speaker 4: say is I actually do think that, Like, look, if
Speaker 4: the thing that you've decided to do is you want
Speaker 4: to wage information warfare, like just continuing to spread this
Speaker 4: shit and like seating it in random right wing things
Speaker 4: is probably a fun thing to do with your time.
Speaker 3: It could work. Who knows it can't hurt?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it could, but probably won't. What really
Speaker 2: could hurt? Right now? Given where we are, this.
Speaker 12: Is like the biggest chink in the maga ama that
Speaker 12: we've seen. Like he's lost more people over this than
Speaker 12: tearing families apart. We've masked and identified men with guns.
Speaker 12: People are fine with that, James, unfortunate. Lots of them
Speaker 12: think it's.
Speaker 3: Cool, but someone them don't.
Speaker 4: And that's going to be our interview tomorrow or maybe yesterday.
Speaker 3: The whole country is governed by QAnon logic. Now, this
Speaker 3: is the only thing that truly gets Americans upset anymore.
Speaker 3: As like an entire political block. Yeah, this is it.
Speaker 3: Like QAnon as a cohesive conspiracy doesn't really exist anymore,
Speaker 3: but its logic has perforated every aspect of America, Democrats
Speaker 3: and Republicans included. Now, and that's the real people that's
Speaker 3: like survived survived the past ten years of politics. Is
Speaker 3: like the logic of QAnon.
Speaker 2: It's the only thing that matters.
Speaker 3: It cannot be killed anymore.
Speaker 2: All right, Well this has been It could happen here
Speaker 2: until next time. You know, may every day be another
Speaker 2: beautiful secret.
Speaker 3: Gold this is it could happen here. Executive Disorder our
Speaker 3: weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House,
Speaker 3: the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm
Speaker 3: Garson Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout,
Speaker 3: and Sophie Lichtermann. This episode, we are covering the week
Speaker 3: of July sixteenth to July twenty three. It has been
Speaker 3: six months since Trump has took office. How do we
Speaker 3: feel about that, folks?
Speaker 4: Yeah, wow, there can't be three and a half were years.
Speaker 4: It's like there just can't, like there will not be
Speaker 4: a country left.
Speaker 15: Yeah, six months feels like a lifetime and not like
Speaker 15: it feels like no time has passed at all.
Speaker 12: So yeah, sixpence of us doing this? She's wild? Was
Speaker 12: that forty two months left? Am I correctly auditioning? I
Speaker 12: don't do mar heye is six months?
Speaker 3: Welcome to Math cast with doctor James Stout.
Speaker 12: Yeah, a doctor of modern European history. So it does
Speaker 12: not involve arithmetic.
Speaker 3: Oh man, let's go straight to Epstein, which is also
Speaker 3: what Hillary Clinton's Black Ops Kills squad said after they
Speaker 3: broke into the jail.
Speaker 4: Wow, garrets, you are spreading disinformation. That is the one
Speaker 4: group of people we can and confirmed. Did I feel,
Speaker 4: Jeffrey Epstein?
Speaker 15: Harrison, just because Robert's not here, does it mean you
Speaker 15: have to go down to his level of humor?
Speaker 3: I think yesterday or two days ago, we released Epstein
Speaker 3: Update episode where we discussed the first Wall Street Journal
Speaker 3: story where they released this type written note given to
Speaker 3: Epstein on his fiftieth birthday from Trump, where he wrote
Speaker 3: this fake dialogue conversation between him and Epstein saying, among
Speaker 3: other things, we have certain things in common Jeffrey, Yes,
Speaker 3: we do. Come to think of it, Enigma's never age.
Speaker 3: Have you noticed that? As a matter of fact, it
Speaker 3: was clear to me last time I saw you, a
Speaker 3: pal is a wonderful thing. Happy birthday, and may every
Speaker 3: day be another wonderful secret quote, which is who you
Speaker 3: could have just wrote like a pedophile confession note and
Speaker 3: it would be less incriminating than whatever creepy shit you're
Speaker 3: doing with this. So if you want to listen to
Speaker 3: our full update episode on that, just pop over to
Speaker 3: the other episode after Executive Disorder is done. We do
Speaker 3: have some other updates to add on because the Epstein
Speaker 3: thing keeps being in the news despite the will of
Speaker 3: Donald Trump, who definitely wants this not in the news.
Speaker 3: In fact, he is trying out a number of distraction techniques,
Speaker 3: including releasing some files related to the death of Martin
Speaker 3: Luther King, which when everyone's asking to release the files,
Speaker 3: that's not the files they were talking about.
Speaker 1: Also, the family did not want that to happen.
Speaker 3: It's very disrespectful and has stated that for a while.
Speaker 3: This is a very cheap way to run some distraction.
Speaker 3: Last week, Pambondi sent a request to release the grand
Speaker 3: jury files on the Epstein investigation, and this was just
Speaker 3: a way to perform transparency because these types of files
Speaker 3: usually do not get released, like this was most likely
Speaker 3: going to get blocked by the judge. And they knew
Speaker 3: that when they sent this request. This was just to
Speaker 3: perform this like gesture of transparency, knowing that it wouldn't
Speaker 3: actually lead to anything. And all of this stuff goes
Speaker 3: against what Trump was saying, like a year ago. A
Speaker 3: year ago on Fox News, Trump said that he would
Speaker 3: release the files and then although he did kind of
Speaker 3: catch himself and realized that that might not be in
Speaker 3: his best interest because he kind of corrected and said
Speaker 3: that he would have to make sure there's not phony
Speaker 3: stuff in there. Let's play the clip.
Speaker 6: Would you declassify the nine to eleven files?
Speaker 11: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Would you declassified JFK files.
Speaker 11: Yeah, which I did. I did a lot of it.
Speaker 14: Would you declassify the Epstein files, Yeah?
Speaker 11: Yeah, I would I guess I would.
Speaker 16: I think that less so because you know, you don't
Speaker 16: know if you don't want to affect people's lives of
Speaker 16: its phony stuff in there, because there's a lot of
Speaker 16: phony stuff with that whole world.
Speaker 11: But I think I would.
Speaker 1: What does that fucking mean?
Speaker 3: That whole world? Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things
Speaker 3: in there. Notably, when Fox first aired this, they only
Speaker 3: played the first half of his answer where he said, yeah,
Speaker 3: I would, and did not air the part where we said, well,
Speaker 3: actually maybe not, because there's a lot of phony stuff
Speaker 3: in there.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 3: Eventually the full clip went online, but at first they
Speaker 3: released this shorter clip to make Trump look better, which
Speaker 3: there's a lot of similarity to Trump's lawsuit against sixty
Speaker 3: Minutes in Paramount, when they released two different clips of
Speaker 3: Kamala Harris answering a question in like the same week
Speaker 3: on two different shows, answering the same question like two
Speaker 3: halves of the answer. Trump said that this was done
Speaker 3: explicitly to change the outcome of the election and sued
Speaker 3: sixty Minutes for this and because Paramount, the parent company
Speaker 3: of CBS News, is trying to complete a merger with
Speaker 3: sky Dance, which needs to be approved by the Trump administration.
Speaker 3: Paramount had started interfering with the affairs of sixty minutes,
Speaker 3: had just canceled the Colbert A Late show, possibly in
Speaker 3: efforts to appease Trump, and just gave him this massive
Speaker 3: bribe as a way to get out of the lawsuit.
Speaker 3: So very similar situation where news companies are playing two
Speaker 3: different things from the same answer. I think the one
Speaker 3: that happened on Fox News is way more egregious than
Speaker 3: the one sixty Minutes did. I think this, even if
Speaker 3: it's one, makes sense. But that's just a whole tiny aside.
Speaker 3: Releasing Epstein files is something that Trump has still been
Speaker 3: talking about. Last week, on Wednesday, July sixteenth, in an
Speaker 3: Oval Office press conference, he was asked if you would
Speaker 3: get Pambondi to try to release more documents. He answered
Speaker 3: like this, will you ask a trade general Pambondi to
Speaker 3: release more documents to finally put this controversy to that, you.
Speaker 11: Know, whatever is credible she can release.
Speaker 16: If a document is credible, of the documents there that
Speaker 16: is credible, she can release.
Speaker 11: I think it's I.
Speaker 16: Think it's good, but it's just really it's just a subject.
Speaker 16: He's dead, he's gone, and all it is is the Republicans.
Speaker 16: Certain Republicans got duped by the Democrats and then following
Speaker 16: a Democrat playbooker.
Speaker 3: So after this, Pambondi sent a request to a judge
Speaker 3: to unseal the Epstein Maxwell grand jury transcripts, and again
Speaker 3: this is the move to feign transparency. Attorney Sarah Crissoff,
Speaker 3: assistant us A jtorney in Manhattan two s eight, twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one, told the AP that this move was a
Speaker 3: quote unquote distraction. Quote the president is trying to present
Speaker 3: himself as if he's doing something here and really it's
Speaker 3: nothing unquote. She estimates that these transcripts could be as
Speaker 3: little as sixty pages anyway, because it is standard practice
Speaker 3: for the Southern District of New York to put very
Speaker 3: little information in these transcripts compared to some other states.
Speaker 3: And as expected earlier this week, the judge denied this request,
Speaker 3: which the Trump admin knew was going to happen, because
Speaker 3: they don't release grand jury transcripts. The whole point of
Speaker 3: a grand jury is that it's secret that she did this. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so this was never gonna happen.
Speaker 1: I fear that's commonsense.
Speaker 3: But this was the move to make it look like
Speaker 3: they were having some level of transparency. Another tactic Trump
Speaker 3: has done to distract from the Epstein story is directing
Speaker 3: in Tulsa Gabbard to run this huge distraction campaign by
Speaker 3: talking about the Obama treeson investigation. Jesus Christ, Yeah, I'll
Speaker 3: play a clip here.
Speaker 17: There is irrefutable evidence that detail how President Obama and
Speaker 17: his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence
Speaker 17: community assessment that they knew was false.
Speaker 3: They knew it would.
Speaker 17: Promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the twenty
Speaker 17: sixteen election to help President Trump win, selling it to
Speaker 17: the American people as though it were true.
Speaker 2: It wasn't.
Speaker 17: The report that we released today shows in great detail
Speaker 17: how they carried this out. They manufactured findings from shoddy sources,
Speaker 17: They suppressed evidence and credible intelligence that disproved their false claims.
Speaker 17: They disobeyed traditional trade craft intelligence community standards, and withheld
Speaker 17: the truth from the American people.
Speaker 3: Very serious stuff.
Speaker 1: Just looks like a villain from the Orville.
Speaker 3: What they're talking about is, yeah, there was legitimate investigations
Speaker 3: into Russia's meddling in the twenty sixteen election. What they
Speaker 3: were unable to prove is conclusive evidence that Trump colluded
Speaker 3: with the Russians. But this meddling was real and was proven.
Speaker 3: This is stuff that they've found and Obama was president
Speaker 3: at the time, and yeah, he's gonna know about the investigation.
Speaker 3: So they're trying to turn that into this whole giant,
Speaker 3: giant hoax regarding Obama trying to steal the twenty sixteen election, again,
Speaker 3: an election that everyone knows Trump won. Trump was president
Speaker 3: from twenty seventeen to early twenty twenty one, something that
Speaker 3: some people have tried to forget, and they're trying to
Speaker 3: run like all of these distractions just to keep people
Speaker 3: from talking about Epstein. And this is something that Trump's
Speaker 3: really good at. All he needs to do is keep
Speaker 3: his base from turning on him, and the way he's
Speaker 3: going to do that is make them angry at other people.
Speaker 3: He has to find new targets to make his base
Speaker 3: upset at, and right now he's trying it out with Obama.
Speaker 3: Right He's done that with Biden for years, He's done
Speaker 3: that with Clinton for years. Obama is the new guy
Speaker 3: that he hasn't really targeted as much. So now he's
Speaker 3: trying to get his supporters really mad at Obama, and
Speaker 3: that is the whole way that he's trying to hold
Speaker 3: onto their support and hold onto their power. Because, yeah,
Speaker 3: some of the Epstein stuff may be a little bit weird,
Speaker 3: but did you see how Obama tried to steal the election?
Speaker 3: And this is his whole strategy. And he laid the
Speaker 3: strategy out at a press conference earlier this week where
Speaker 3: he's seen like coaching Republicans to respond to questions about
Speaker 3: Epstein by just talking about Obama and the Russian election
Speaker 3: interference investigation, the quote unquote Russia hopes.
Speaker 18: But remember this, Obama cheated on the election, and we
Speaker 18: have it called hard blue, and it's getting even more
Speaker 18: so because the stuff that's coming in is not even believable.
Speaker 18: So and you should mention that every time they give
Speaker 18: you a question that's not appropriate, just say, oh, by
Speaker 18: the way, Obama cheated on the election.
Speaker 11: You'll watch the camera turn off instantly.
Speaker 3: And this is the strategy he uses. Whenever he's asked
Speaker 3: about something, He'll talk about the Russia, Russia, Russia hope,
Speaker 3: the Hunter Biden laptop, things that aren't even real, things
Speaker 3: that he's like successfully syoped the country into believing are
Speaker 3: like real things. But whenever he's asked a question about Epstein,
Speaker 3: you can immediately pivot to that and have that control
Speaker 3: the conversation. And he's laying out the strategy here. This
Speaker 3: is what I was talking about last week in d
Speaker 3: about how Trump like dictates reality through speech, and he's
Speaker 3: trying to coach his fellow Republicans on how to do it.
Speaker 3: And they have to catch up on a lot of
Speaker 3: stuff because Trump's ties to Epstein have been known for
Speaker 3: a long long time. I'm going to play a very
Speaker 3: very gross clip from around the turn of the millennia
Speaker 3: talking about dating eighteen models.
Speaker 2: What did you do last night? For fun?
Speaker 16: I actually went to the Fashion Award show.
Speaker 2: Models working on.
Speaker 8: Big Donald.
Speaker 17: Do you worry because you have a daughter who's a model?
Speaker 16: I do, and I have a deal with her. She's
Speaker 16: just seventeen and she's doing great Ivanka, and she made
Speaker 16: me promised her swear to her that I would never
Speaker 16: dat a girl younger than her.
Speaker 8: So why did you grow with Howard?
Speaker 15: And she grows older?
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 3: The field is getting very limited for Dearly now that
Speaker 3: she's seventeen, His dating a field is getting very limited.
Speaker 3: I wonder what he could mean by that. Oh, I
Speaker 3: wonder what that could be, insinuating.
Speaker 1: Really fucking girls.
Speaker 11: Man.
Speaker 12: Yeah, this shit is actually deeply fucking still, like, yeah,
Speaker 12: it's hideous.
Speaker 4: And also like the fact that the Democrats didn't spend
Speaker 4: the entire election just calling him a pedophile and running
Speaker 4: ads that were just this man as a pedophile.
Speaker 3: Like, this is stuff we've known for a long time.
Speaker 12: Yeah, she's like in the public domain decades and decades.
Speaker 3: This is from a Guardian article in twenty twenty. At
Speaker 3: forty three years old, Donald Trump asked a seventeen year
Speaker 3: old girl on a date. Trump asked her out for
Speaker 3: dinner in the summer of nineteen eighty nine at an
Speaker 3: industry soiree. She recalls Trump asking how old she was.
Speaker 3: Quote I said seventeen, and he said, that's just great.
Speaker 3: You're not too old, not too young unquote legally speaking,
Speaker 3: too young. Outrageous, outrageous stuff. And we have some breaking
Speaker 3: news from just a few hours ago. We're recording this.
Speaker 3: On Wednesday, a second Wall Street Journal article has hit
Speaker 3: the Trump Towers. A new article talking about the Justice
Speaker 3: Department officials reviewing Attorney General Pam Bondi's quote unquote truckload
Speaker 3: of Jeffrey Epstein documents and discovering that Donald Trump's name
Speaker 3: appears multiple times, according to senior Administration officials. Bondy notified
Speaker 3: Trump about this in May, saying that a few other
Speaker 3: high profile names are also in the documents and that
Speaker 3: the DOJ would not be releasing these documents in order
Speaker 3: to quote unquote protect victims. As if you can't censor victims'
Speaker 3: names or censored hold sexual abast material, this is just
Speaker 3: a complete cover up.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Oh and by the way, in late break news, that's
Speaker 4: sure to make everyone considerably more normal. Epstein's defense lawyer,
Speaker 4: Roy Black, who's the guy who got him off from
Speaker 4: like going to prison for a billion years in two
Speaker 4: thousand and seven, just.
Speaker 3: Died like today, So okay, sure, Hillary Clinton kills squad.
Speaker 4: It's really really working working over time this point, Like
Speaker 4: Donald Trump kills squad questionable. Absolutely absolutely need to be
Speaker 4: retiring the Hillary Clinton kills squad jokes, because like, I
Speaker 4: think it's very likely that Epstein did kill himself. I
Speaker 4: do not think you need to believe in that sort
Speaker 4: of like conspiratorial thinking to also believe that there's documented
Speaker 4: evidence of Trump dating teenagers and wanting to date teenagers
Speaker 4: for the past like forty years, and that's something that
Speaker 4: everyone should be aware of.
Speaker 3: Like, that's not a conspiracy theory, and you don't need
Speaker 3: to believe in conspiratorial thinking to think that that's very likely.
Speaker 4: That said, I do want to establish there is at
Speaker 4: least one person on the podcast who thinks that he
Speaker 4: might not have I don't know, but every single time
Speaker 4: they do more weird shit about it, I'm like, maybe
Speaker 4: is this conspiracy brain thinking yes?
Speaker 12: But I mean, editing the video, did it make any
Speaker 12: one more certain that he killed himself?
Speaker 3: So as we enter the more than six month marker
Speaker 3: in the Trump administration, I think we should check in
Speaker 3: on how they youths feel about Donald Trump. Famously, there's
Speaker 3: a lot of reporting about how gen Z is, like,
Speaker 3: you know, swinging more conservative, how gen Z helped get
Speaker 3: Trump elected, and if you look at some February approval numbers,
Speaker 3: it does seem that between ages of eighteen and twenty nine.
Speaker 12: So too old. Using the aforementioned criteria.
Speaker 3: Trump did have a plus ten points approval, with fifty
Speaker 3: five percent approving only forty five percent disapproving of his performance. Now,
Speaker 3: come July things have changed dramatically in the youth bracket
Speaker 3: eighteen to twenty nine, with only twenty eight percent approval.
Speaker 3: It's a negative forty four points and seventy two percent disapproval,
Speaker 3: which is a net fifty four point negative swing. That's
Speaker 3: genuinely astonishing, Like.
Speaker 12: That's a huge jump. But it's not a jump, Garrison,
Speaker 12: it's a fall. That's you're right, You're right, it is
Speaker 12: going down. Yeah, Yeah, it's a plummet.
Speaker 3: This is according to CBS Newsballs again, and I do
Speaker 3: think me is right. I don't know if Trump's going
Speaker 3: to care about this very much because this does seem
Speaker 3: to be higher than his preferred dating bracket, So I
Speaker 3: don't think he's looking for the approval of people between
Speaker 3: eighteen to twenty nine, but this still might affect him culturally,
Speaker 3: I guess.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Talking of things that have gone down badly, Garrison, it's
Speaker 12: now our obligation to pivot to advertisements.
Speaker 3: Advertisements are doing just fine from what I hear, and
Speaker 3: we are back. Let's do an immigration segment for the
Speaker 3: middle of the show, and I guess I'll first start
Speaker 3: with ice watch. So the past few weeks, I've seen
Speaker 3: multiple videos of ice pulling over cars and sometimes not
Speaker 3: even like pulling over, just like blocking cars and narrow streets,
Speaker 3: like stopping them forcefully and then drawing guns as they
Speaker 3: get out of the car, like by the time they
Speaker 3: are like door open, feed on the ground, gun already drawn.
Speaker 3: And they then descend on activists doing ICE watch, basically
Speaker 3: people who follow ICE agents around to alert their community
Speaker 3: of where ICE currently is. Usually they're live streaming and
Speaker 3: this in particular video that I have sent to the
Speaker 3: team here very freaky. I think we should just watch
Speaker 3: it here.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, definitely, and we can try and describe it
Speaker 12: a little bit for listeners.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 14: If you know how I am, then why the fuck
Speaker 14: are you telling me to open the window, and why
Speaker 14: the hell are you pointing a gun a fucking taser
Speaker 14: on me?
Speaker 6: If you know who I am? Okay, And you guys
Speaker 6: follow everyone everyone.
Speaker 19: You guys stalk people all the fucking time.
Speaker 3: A very large man wearing a mask, a hoodie and
Speaker 3: a baseball cap, no obviously identification, not in a police uniform,
Speaker 3: not in like a order patrol uniform. It's just a
Speaker 3: guy who basically forces your car to stop and jumps
Speaker 3: out and points a gun at you.
Speaker 12: Yeah, he draws from Appendix Carrie, like, it's not in
Speaker 12: many states, this would be justification to start shooting at
Speaker 12: this man.
Speaker 18: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's I think reasons why they're not doing this
Speaker 3: in states through there's high levels of gun ownership because
Speaker 3: they're afraid of that happening. Because it's not clear at
Speaker 3: all as guy's a cop. No, it's a masked man
Speaker 3: has forced your car to a halt and is pulling
Speaker 3: a gun on you and is approaching you.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 12: I mean that happens in another country and you assume
Speaker 12: you're being roped, like right, another part of the world.
Speaker 12: Like Also, it's notable that the vehicle doesn't have lights.
Speaker 3: It's not a cop car.
Speaker 12: No, it's not even a US made car like sometimes
Speaker 12: cops will use like non marked cars, but they're normally
Speaker 12: US manufactured right for or US companies for Chevy, etc.
Speaker 12: This is a Kia. Everything apart from a lanyard hanging
Speaker 12: around the guy's neck which is not identifiable. It's a badge.
Speaker 12: Certainly not at this speed. Certainly not while he's drawing
Speaker 12: a gun. From appendix carry points to this being someone
Speaker 12: trying to rub.
Speaker 9: Or kill you.
Speaker 3: Very scary.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I will say, I think the fact that they're
Speaker 4: being forced to do this in some sense is a
Speaker 4: sign that this is really working.
Speaker 3: It's pissing them off. The fact that people are keeping
Speaker 3: tabs on where I see it. Yeah, yeah, it's working.
Speaker 3: And like I keep saying, this is like they're the
Speaker 3: ones who are being forced to operate, is if they're
Speaker 3: working in a police state, Like they're the ones who
Speaker 3: are having to deal with surveillance. They're the ones who
Speaker 3: are having to deal with the fact that like if
Speaker 3: they stay in a place too long, they'll be beast
Speaker 3: mobilizations and people will just like drop the hammer on them.
Speaker 4: It's a really interesting look at what happens when you
Speaker 4: try to do this police state shit in a society
Speaker 4: where everyone fucking hates you, which is that all you
Speaker 4: really have is speed and terror totally. And so you
Speaker 4: know they're doing this shit right, like they're just trying
Speaker 4: to terrorize people into letting them do their police state stuff.
Speaker 4: But if people keep doing it right, it seriously is
Speaker 4: like denting their effectiveness a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've seen multiple videos like this. Eventually the ICE
Speaker 3: agents will call over some like state trooper or like
Speaker 3: a DHS guy who does not work or ICE directly
Speaker 3: to diffuse this situation. I've seen most of these situations
Speaker 3: get eventually diffused, but it's something to I think draw
Speaker 3: attention to right now.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean, if this keeps happening, it's likely to
Speaker 12: end in violence somewhere, right, I mean.
Speaker 3: This is the same thing when they're kidnapping college students
Speaker 3: without any clear identification.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, notably doing that in like New England states where
Speaker 3: people do not conceal carry firearms like regularly, as like
Speaker 3: a regular thing that like people do.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean, firelarms are not the only means of
Speaker 12: violence available to people like that. Lady seem very calm
Speaker 12: and commendably so, but like she could a step on
Speaker 12: the gas pedal car and.
Speaker 3: Totally absolutely right. Yeah, And obviously this person knows that
Speaker 3: the guy is ICED, because that's why she's following him.
Speaker 3: But if ICE just starts getting paranoid about cars behind them,
Speaker 3: if they think someone's following them, they can pull us
Speaker 3: on someone who's not doing ICE.
Speaker 8: Watch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they could just pull us on anyone who they
Speaker 3: are like suspicious of, And I think that's when really
Speaker 3: dangerous situations could start breaking out between these like unmarked
Speaker 3: ICE agents and just regular citizens.
Speaker 4: And I think the odds of one of them just
Speaker 4: snapping and starting shooting is like not zero, because that's
Speaker 4: who these people are, and as they're increasingly put under stress.
Speaker 3: They're being trained to always be afraid of danger, like
Speaker 3: more so than even just like regular like cop stuff.
Speaker 3: Like they're talking about how like violence against ICE is
Speaker 3: up eight hundred percent, where the violence is like someone's
Speaker 3: head meets an ICE agent's fist, right, It's that sort
Speaker 3: of violence where it's like you're assaulting a cop by
Speaker 3: like partially resisting arrest in some way. But they are
Speaker 3: running those stats as if this is a real epidemic
Speaker 3: of violence against ICE agents right now. Another story I
Speaker 3: like to talk about is this deportation hoax story that
Speaker 3: I've seen going around social media. Seen it going around
Speaker 3: like our slash green card on Reddit, like TikTok, and
Speaker 3: even of local news stories across the country where ICE
Speaker 3: secretly deports an eighty two year old torture survivor and
Speaker 3: US legal resident for forty years. This man goes to
Speaker 3: an immigration office to replace a green card, and instead
Speaker 3: of that happening, ICE handcuffs him, detains him, denies access
Speaker 3: to a lawyer and deports him to Guatemala, a country
Speaker 3: where he is not from, with no official paperwork, and
Speaker 3: then is put into the hospital in Guatemala. This story
Speaker 3: got super viral the past week, and from what we
Speaker 3: can tell, this is not a real story. There was
Speaker 3: no immigration appointment in Philadelphia at the time of this
Speaker 3: spiral story. Guatemala says that the man is not in
Speaker 3: the country. The hospital he was alleged to be at.
Speaker 3: Doctors have said there's no man matching this description in
Speaker 3: the story, and the photos attached to this viral story
Speaker 3: of the man are not of this guy. The photos
Speaker 3: are of a guy who died three years ago. This is,
Speaker 3: from what we can tell, an entirely fabricated story that
Speaker 3: one local news outlet bought and then spread around from there.
Speaker 3: It's not even clear if, like the family members that
Speaker 3: were the original source of this even exist. It's not
Speaker 3: clear if this man even exists. So this is, from
Speaker 3: what we can tell right now, not real, not real
Speaker 3: at all, and this is something to keep him in mind.
Speaker 3: Just because a story is like scary and just because
Speaker 3: it's going viral does not necessarily mean it's true, and
Speaker 3: we don't need to be sharing fake stories of ICE
Speaker 3: deporting people or even going after Green card holders, because
Speaker 3: this is actually happening. This is happening in the country
Speaker 3: right now, and ICE is defying judicial orders.
Speaker 12: Yeah, So let's talk about one of those incidents, right.
Speaker 12: In this case, it's a man called Leonell Navaret Hernandez
Speaker 12: who filed a habeas suit in the Central District of
Speaker 12: California right against the Department of Home Lown Security. Let's
Speaker 12: get some background on his case first, and we can
Speaker 12: talk about this specific kind of not justifying court orders,
Speaker 12: but also the United States Constitution. So he fled to
Speaker 12: the United States in two thousand and nine after being
Speaker 12: pursued by the police and falsely accused of El Salvador
Speaker 12: and beaten by police several times. I'm going to quote
Speaker 12: from the court documents pretty extensively throughout this so quote
Speaker 12: including in one distance, beaten until he vomited blood, resulting
Speaker 12: in a cut on his head that scarred and a
Speaker 12: fractured finger. And quote in twenty twenty two, he was
Speaker 12: part of a targeted enforcement operation and he was issued
Speaker 12: a notice to appear and that he bonded out, right,
Speaker 12: So he posted like bail and he was out of detention. Right.
Speaker 12: In January twenty twenty four, he filed for his asylum.
Speaker 12: He didn't get asylum dus a timing of filing. He
Speaker 12: also asked for withholding of removal. I didn't get that
Speaker 12: because he quote failed to show that his proposed quote
Speaker 12: particular groups are cognizable or that his past harm was
Speaker 12: because of a protected ground.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 12: So regular listeners will know that there are certain grounds
Speaker 12: on which one can obtain asylum and what has to
Speaker 12: be part of these certain categories to obtain asylum. What
Speaker 12: he did get was protection of removal under a convention
Speaker 12: against torture because again quoting, it is more likely than
Speaker 12: not that their respondent will be detained and tortured in
Speaker 12: El Salvador. El Salvador has put out an inter poll
Speaker 12: read alert for him. For some reason, they deeply wanted
Speaker 12: him back. Doesn't seem to be any evidence that this
Speaker 12: person committed crimes. Ice appealed this protection for removal right,
Speaker 12: and then the same day they appealed it, they detained
Speaker 12: him when he appeared at his intensive supervision appearance program.
Speaker 12: Check it, so, Ice ap rate. It's one of these
Speaker 12: things where instead of being detained, you appear at ice
Speaker 12: office and check in every now and again, as opposed
Speaker 12: to than just locking you up for the entire time.
Speaker 12: His partner then testified to that quote. Lionel called me
Speaker 12: and told me that he was arrested, says immigration officers
Speaker 12: went up to him and his IYESAP check in and
Speaker 12: told him he was under arrest. Lionel said he asked
Speaker 12: the officers why and informed them he had an order
Speaker 12: from the judge. The officer said something like judges don't Judges'
Speaker 12: orders don't matter only the president.
Speaker 3: Judges orders don't matter only the president. This is a
Speaker 3: rogue law enforcement agency in service of a rogue president.
Speaker 3: Like yeah.
Speaker 12: Leonel then told me that he told the officers he
Speaker 12: had an attorney. I'm still quoting from his partner here,
Speaker 12: but the officer said that doesn't matter either.
Speaker 3: He has an order forbidding his deportation, and they're telling
Speaker 3: him that doesn't matter because the president wants you out
Speaker 3: of the country.
Speaker 12: Yeah, exactly, And that is what they have done. Right,
Speaker 12: That was the entire rendition of people to l Salbadol
Speaker 12: was an end run around that, right, attempting to They're
Speaker 12: just like saying this to people, Yeah, because that's what
Speaker 12: they're doing. That's Warren. That's what they said to the court. Right,
Speaker 12: we sneaked him out before you could stop it. Yeah,
Speaker 12: So just to update people in his case, he called
Speaker 12: from jail in Santa Anna and said he was in
Speaker 12: a small space and he heard people being taken to
Speaker 12: San Diego or Texas. Then he had to hang up.
Speaker 12: He was moved around significantly, right all around, including into Texas.
Speaker 12: When he showed up on the detainee locator, the judge
Speaker 12: in the case issued attentive restraining order to prevent them
Speaker 12: from removing him. In detention, he was only allowed to
Speaker 12: make phone calls for three minutes, and in one of
Speaker 12: those calls, he told his partner that detention officers, I guess,
Speaker 12: were telling detainees they were going to be removed whether
Speaker 12: or not they signed deportation papers. In his case, the
Speaker 12: court has issued an injunction to prevent his removal or
Speaker 12: his read attention. So shout out to this Central District
Speaker 12: of California. I guess this is wild, right, this is
Speaker 12: dictatorial regime.
Speaker 8: Shit.
Speaker 12: You have no rights other than those a president decides
Speaker 12: to give to you. It's the subtext here.
Speaker 4: It's explicitly the fascist thing of like there are people
Speaker 4: who exist outside the legal order in order to maintain it,
Speaker 4: and that person is the fear. Like that, that's just
Speaker 4: what this is, right, Like it it's really explicit.
Speaker 12: I don't really know what people expect on them and
Speaker 12: you know, the expected dress like they're in the sound
Speaker 12: of music. You know, like this is what fascism looks like.
Speaker 12: Let's talk about some more immigration cases.
Speaker 3: What other immigration updates do we have, James.
Speaker 12: Yeah, well none of them are great, to be honest.
Speaker 3: No, the immigration segment has been a bit of a
Speaker 3: bummer in the past. Let me check my watch six months.
Speaker 12: Yeah, it's hard on the soul. A New Jersey district
Speaker 12: court has struck down the state's law forbidding private immigration detention.
Speaker 12: This also happened in California. Right, they said it was
Speaker 12: stay overy. So this was an issue. It's federal detention
Speaker 12: instead of fed to get to decide basically, right. So
Speaker 12: New Jersey had tried to stop Geo Group cour Civic,
Speaker 12: these massive detention operations from operating private immigration detention in
Speaker 12: the state. Couldn't get down one through the court. Probably
Speaker 12: the bigger story this week is that the federal government
Speaker 12: has signed a contract for a huge five thousand bed
Speaker 12: tent camp facility for migration detention of Fort Bliss. So
Speaker 12: according to reporting in Bloomberg, Bloomberg has reported that the
Speaker 12: contract totals one point twenty six billion. The only tract
Speaker 12: I was able to actually find was a Department of
Speaker 12: Defense contract for two hundred and thirty one million, eight
Speaker 12: hundred and seventy eight thousand, two hundred and twenty nine
Speaker 12: dollars to be precise. What is not being reported on this?
Speaker 12: And I don't understand why other than nobody reported on
Speaker 12: immigration during the Biden admitt Apparently people are looking for
Speaker 12: like analogues. What will this be like? Well, the Department
Speaker 12: of Defense operated a tent facility at Fort Bliss under
Speaker 12: Operation Allies Welcome for Afghan people arriving in the United States.
Speaker 12: So after the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, right, I interviewed
Speaker 12: one of them. I was freelancing for the nation at
Speaker 12: that time, and there'll be a link in the show notes.
Speaker 12: But the Afghanswa Howls did a place called Donja Anna Range,
Speaker 12: which is in New Mexico. So Bliss spans Texas and
Speaker 12: New Mexico. Right, this New complex needs to be in
Speaker 12: a different place because it will be quote unquote soft sided,
Speaker 12: which just needs tents. Right, But this one is accessible
Speaker 12: from El Paso streets and it's accessible without entering the
Speaker 12: Fort Bliss main gate, right, so people don't have to
Speaker 12: have on base clearance. The Afghan site had ninety eight tenths,
Speaker 12: which each held about one hundred people. This one will
Speaker 12: house five thousand people, so we can assume about five
Speaker 12: hundred tenths. Right. This contract for one point two six billion,
Speaker 12: Operation Allies Welcome was larger.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 12: It did other things. For instance, all those people got
Speaker 12: their COVID vaccinations because they hadn't gotten them when they
Speaker 12: were in Afghanistan. A lot of other vaccinations too. That
Speaker 12: that spent three billion just in fiscal year twenty twenty
Speaker 12: two to give people a sense of the scale of
Speaker 12: these things. Right, So one point two six billion, it's
Speaker 12: not at all out of the question, and in fact
Speaker 12: brings me on to my next point, which is that
Speaker 12: it may be a bit low, given this company has
Speaker 12: no experience with this kind of operation.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 12: One of the questions we asked back in November when
Speaker 12: we did are like what could happen under Trump is
Speaker 12: how will they stand up these facilities. Who has the
Speaker 12: experience to do it well? This company does not have
Speaker 12: the experience to do it right. They've never done anything
Speaker 12: like this before. They have some logistic common practice DoD,
Speaker 12: but they do not have the capacity. At least they
Speaker 12: have not shown that they have the capacity to do
Speaker 12: anything on this scale. The DoD operation used a lot
Speaker 12: of contractors as well as defact dining facility for food.
Speaker 12: And I just want to quote some of the people
Speaker 12: I called a bull who I talked to, who was
Speaker 12: in that detention facility. Quote for the past month, nighttime
Speaker 12: was the most horrible time for us because every day
Speaker 12: it got colder. We didn't have enough warm clothes or
Speaker 12: any thick blankets to fight against the cold. They gave
Speaker 12: us a blanket that was so thin we could see
Speaker 12: through it. These are people who in some cases fought
Speaker 12: alongside United States soldiers right like, it's not going to
Speaker 12: be better for migrants. Ball also told me the food
Speaker 12: wasn't great. He said, quote it's not cooked enough or
Speaker 12: it's burned. He did say that he appreciated the quote.
Speaker 12: The guy doing the cooking was always asking for feedback.
Speaker 12: They tried to cook Afghan food, I guess, and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 12: he appreciated the effort to cook food that interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 12: I mean they ain't going to try that now this time, right,
Speaker 12: but not, for instance, provide halal food, which was a consideration.
Speaker 4: I'm assuming this time they're going to be getting the
Speaker 4: fucking boldy food from Florida.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean, the United States has a whole bunch
Speaker 12: of food should have gone out to many of the
Speaker 12: starving people around the world, right, but yet has been
Speaker 12: left to mold and warehouses. So yeah, they might be
Speaker 12: eating the high energy biscuits or the humrats. Talking of food,
Speaker 12: Human Rights Watch has reached a report detailing human rights
Speaker 12: abuses at detention centers. The report focuses on Chrome North
Speaker 12: Service Processing Center aka a Chrome, the Brower Transitional Center,
Speaker 12: and the Federal Detention Center. All of these are in Florida.
Speaker 3: Are those first two like privately owned better than being
Speaker 3: leased or like licensed out to the government.
Speaker 12: Yes, they're run by contractors for the government for immigration
Speaker 12: detencent We've talked about Chrome before. It was one that
Speaker 12: was already ever crowded, had two deaths.
Speaker 3: It's also the name that I would pick for like
Speaker 3: an evil agency who gets the private prison. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: it's chrome with a K with a K too, which
Speaker 3: makes it more evil.
Speaker 12: So the incidence detailed in this report pretty pretty bad.
Speaker 12: They include people being forced to eat like dogs with
Speaker 12: a hands tied behind their back. They include people being
Speaker 12: punished and put in solitary confinement for seeking medical or
Speaker 12: mental health help and having their hands tipped. I had
Speaker 12: and been forced to lay down on wet floors, as
Speaker 12: it's very common in ice facilities. The air conditioning was
Speaker 12: turned up very high to make it uncomfortably cold.
Speaker 3: Like the Florida bomb.
Speaker 12: Yeah, this is the case in every immigration detention to
Speaker 12: the facility that I've heard about. Right, the Spanish word
Speaker 12: is it translates to ice box. Is the word that
Speaker 12: people used to refer That's the colloquial term for these facilities. Right.
Speaker 12: The FDC staff also used stun grenades and physical force
Speaker 12: against detainees protesting denial of food, water, medical attention. The
Speaker 12: report details people being detained in crowdedge cells with no
Speaker 12: beds or bedding and denied essential medications. Really a couple
Speaker 12: of quotes from people interviewed in the report here quote,
Speaker 12: you could not fall asleep because it was so cold,
Speaker 12: I thought I was going to experience hypothermia. One said,
Speaker 12: it's like psychological abuse. You feel like your life is over,
Speaker 12: said another.
Speaker 3: All right, we're back. This past week, the World Food
Speaker 3: Program released a new report on food scarcity in Gaza
Speaker 3: enforced through the Israeli military, and also discussed a quote
Speaker 3: unquote deadly incident this past Sunday in which dozens of
Speaker 3: civilians were killed and injured while waiting to access food
Speaker 3: as a World Food Program convoy was entering northern Gaza.
Speaker 3: The Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response, Ross Smith said,
Speaker 3: quote yesterday's incident is one of the greatest tragedies we've
Speaker 3: seen for our operations in Gaza and elsewhere while we're
Speaker 3: trying to work, and it's completely avoidable, and it's an
Speaker 3: absolute tragedy. Currently, food safety experts warned that one in
Speaker 3: five people in Gaza face enforced starvation. I'm going to
Speaker 3: quote from the un here, quote, mister Smith said. World
Speaker 3: Food Program assessments show that a quarter of the population
Speaker 3: is facing famine like conditions. Almost one hundred thousand women
Speaker 3: and children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and need
Speaker 3: treatment as soon as possible, pointing to reports. He said, quote,
Speaker 3: people are dying from a lack of humanitarian assistance every day,
Speaker 3: and we are seeing this escalate day by day, saying
Speaker 3: that food and humanitarian assistance are quote the only solution
Speaker 3: at the moment for Gaza unquote.
Speaker 4: And it's worth emphasizing with this that like, the food
Speaker 4: is there, it is literally just sitting and warehouses, like
Speaker 4: they can bring it in the moment the blockade lifts,
Speaker 4: but the Israelis don't.
Speaker 3: Worry bombing people bringing food into Gaza at this point.
Speaker 4: Then they keep on doing this thing where they'll be like, oh,
Speaker 4: we have food, and then they shoot everyone who shows food.
Speaker 3: So this is something that World Food Program has been saying, quote.
Speaker 3: We also need to have no armed actors near food
Speaker 3: and distribution points, near our convoys, and near the movement
Speaker 3: of those convoys from one place to another.
Speaker 12: This is basic humanitarian agient. This is like one oh
Speaker 12: one fucking operating humanitarian resources in a conflict zone.
Speaker 4: Stuff.
Speaker 12: This isn't new stuff, right. This is asking the IDF
Speaker 12: to do what you would expect any reasonable actor to
Speaker 12: do in one of these situations. Obviously, the IDF not
Speaker 12: a particularly reasonable actor.
Speaker 3: Rain speaking of things they don't like, Oh.
Speaker 12: Garrison, you cannot compare the work of Joe drama to
Speaker 12: the ideas unreasonable Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: If I don't like Jesus Christ, all right, welcome to
Speaker 3: tariff talk thing where I had no role in the
Speaker 3: prior transition to it.
Speaker 4: So we've gotten a few teriff deals over the week.
Speaker 4: We got one with the Philippines where Trump was negotiated
Speaker 4: a deal for a nineteen percent on all goods in
Speaker 4: the Philippines coming to the US. There's also been a
Speaker 4: deal established with Japan where we're out of terriforate of
Speaker 4: fifteen percent. This one also has and there's been a
Speaker 4: few of these deals that have things like this where
Speaker 4: Japan also had to agree to invest five hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty billion dollars in the US. It's really unclear how
Speaker 4: that's going to work, like it might just be loans.
Speaker 3: That's the part.
Speaker 4: I don't even know if it's going to happen, because
Speaker 4: it's so staggeringly fuzzy and unclear as to what any
Speaker 4: of that means. Trump has been talking about how there's
Speaker 4: going to be like a ninety ten profit split where
Speaker 4: Americans take home ninety percent of the profits in Japan
Speaker 4: takes on tempers very weird, very weird. This is also look,
Speaker 4: it's worth noting that the last time we deliberately decaped
Speaker 4: Japan's export manufacturing economy, dreading the Plaza Accords, it kicked
Speaker 4: off in economic crisis that Japan has literally never recovered from.
Speaker 4: Like people used to talk about the Japanese economy in
Speaker 4: the way that we talk about the Chinese economy now
Speaker 4: is like emerging rising on stoppable force that was going
Speaker 4: to like become the world's greatest manufacturing power, and we
Speaker 4: don't do that anymore, partially because of like Japan hit
Speaker 4: like structural overcapacity in the market blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: Listen to me on every other episode where I talk
Speaker 4: about the Plosa Accords and structural global manufacturing overcapacity. But again,
Speaker 4: the second thing is we also made their manufacturing less
Speaker 4: competitive and it destroyed the entire global economy. Like it's
Speaker 4: the reason two thousand and eight happened is because we
Speaker 4: did that, and we're doing it again. Like twenty eight
Speaker 4: percent of the Japanese economy is based on like car exports,
Speaker 4: so that's great, that's fun. There's also been reports that
Speaker 4: there's a deal with the EU coming. I don't know
Speaker 4: who knows. I'm not gonna say what's in it because
Speaker 4: we don't know if this is going to happen. There's
Speaker 4: that one in particular. There's a lot of things that
Speaker 4: can torpedo it, but it's not great. Also, these terrorists,
Speaker 4: by the way, are replacing the ones that are scheduled
Speaker 4: to go into effect on August first. Trump is still
Speaker 4: promising to put out tariff things for one hundred and
Speaker 4: twenty countries or something like that. I don't know then
Speaker 4: what the number is exactly right now. It keeps changing.
Speaker 4: He's also not writing those letters, so who knows.
Speaker 3: Silky Doki.
Speaker 4: Yeah, great way to have terrorist policy, say is that
Speaker 4: Trump says something on truth social and then doesn't do it.
Speaker 3: And sometimes he does, yes, sometimes he does.
Speaker 12: It's good. It's a good way to do things.
Speaker 3: It's okay.
Speaker 4: So speaking of things being done badly, we need to
Speaker 4: talk about NPR and PBS because Republic has just cut
Speaker 4: one point one billion dollars from public broadcasting, which is
Speaker 4: like all.
Speaker 3: Again, we were reported on what Elmo said last week.
Speaker 3: It's not a surprise that PBS is getting cut after this.
Speaker 4: I actually language hold on, we have not on this
Speaker 4: show talked about the fact that PBS like sold Sesame Street.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's true. This is so ghoulish, like it does
Speaker 3: Jenny whyee? Sesame Street was like one.
Speaker 4: Of the few, like really truly great triumphs of American
Speaker 4: state media, Like it was specifically designed to teach kids
Speaker 4: in underprivileged backgrounds.
Speaker 3: How to Now it's on like like HBO, Max or
Speaker 3: Netflix or something. I think some posites are still available
Speaker 3: on public podcasting.
Speaker 12: Some of it's in a public domain, like it's probably
Speaker 12: on youtubecause it's been out for SOTI.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But like the problem is, like, this is Jenni Wineley,
Speaker 4: one of the greatest public goods the US ever created,
Speaker 4: and it was fucking looted and privatized. And now as
Speaker 4: all of this funding is being cut, Trump has basically
Speaker 4: been pissed off at public podcasting for ages.
Speaker 3: Actually, hilariously a lot of this.
Speaker 4: One of the big origin points of this was that
Speaker 4: they had friend of the show, Vicky Osterweil on NPR
Speaker 4: to do an interview about her book in Defensive Looting
Speaker 4: and Republican's been mad ever since.
Speaker 3: Like a few months ago, Trump sign an executive order
Speaker 3: to quote unquote end taxpayer subsidation of biased media, which
Speaker 3: specifically sought to defund MPR and PBS through ending contributions
Speaker 3: through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the order of saying,
Speaker 3: quote government funding of news media in this environment is
Speaker 3: not only outdated and unnecessary, but corrosive to the appearance
Speaker 3: of journalistic independence. And instead they replaced the role of
Speaker 3: PVS and NPR with One American News, the super far
Speaker 3: right mode in sending like American News overseas. Instead of
Speaker 3: promoting things like the Voice of America, they are explicitly
Speaker 3: entering a partnership with oa N which is of the.
Speaker 12: Certain stuff like Voice of American News and the Cuban
Speaker 12: Broadcasting Office right like where they which are explicitly like
Speaker 12: these are things the US government goes to to advance
Speaker 12: its a gender abroad like this isn't.
Speaker 3: And now the way that they're doing that is with
Speaker 3: One America.
Speaker 4: Which is really funny because that probably does make it
Speaker 4: less effective. I do want to circle back a little
Speaker 4: bit to what this is going to do to NPR
Speaker 4: and PPS because like the main central NPR, I mean,
Speaker 4: obviously it's a disaster for even like the National MPR,
Speaker 4: but like this is going to just annihilate any semplages
Speaker 4: of like local news, right, like yeah, because they rely
Speaker 4: on public broadcasting and NPR massively around the country.
Speaker 3: Especially in rural areas.
Speaker 4: Like one of the portsoyz ridicle was talking about how
Speaker 4: like Texas was expecting to lose half of their like
Speaker 4: NPR stations and like rural areas. This is just like
Speaker 4: the apocalypse for any kind of like rural local news.
Speaker 4: And you know, obviously, like this is a part of
Speaker 4: trust attempt to just consolidate all of the American media
Speaker 4: under his control through a combination of destroying this kind
Speaker 4: of stuff and then doing lawsuits. And also, and this
Speaker 4: is another thing we need to talk about is like Garrison,
Speaker 4: you talked about this Guidiance merger and how that you know,
Speaker 4: is being used as leverage to like just destroy the
Speaker 4: gut CBS, loot it and turn it into just like
Speaker 4: a pro Trumpet outlet, right.
Speaker 3: Like allegedly entering in a cooperation deal with the Free
Speaker 3: Press from Barry Weiss to exert editorial control over CBS News,
Speaker 3: which we'll just take the outlet destroy. Sixty minutes, one
Speaker 3: of the most respectable, longstanding television news programs in the
Speaker 3: history of the country.
Speaker 4: I think there's a very good argument that this is
Speaker 4: what Bezos is doing to the Washington Post. Right, is
Speaker 4: better for these people that news outlets don't exist or
Speaker 4: like seven people read the like unhandedbar right things, than
Speaker 4: it is for like anything to actually exist. This is
Speaker 4: all again like media consolidation of a diictorial regime, being
Speaker 4: accelerated by the fact that all of these things are
Speaker 4: owned either by corporations or individual billionaires.
Speaker 3: So that's bad.
Speaker 4: Speaking of bad, the EPA's Office of Research has just
Speaker 4: been eliminated.
Speaker 3: This is a unbelievable.
Speaker 4: Catastrophe because the EPA's Office of Research does all of
Speaker 4: the basic research about like is this chemical dangerous? What
Speaker 4: does this chemical do to the environment, what does like
Speaker 4: what do these pollution levels do? This is the part
Speaker 4: of the EPA that undergirds like basically all environmental regulations
Speaker 4: and all regulations on things like chemical protection. Right, it
Speaker 4: comes out of this Office of Research. That's where the
Speaker 4: standards are set. That's where the science has done that
Speaker 4: is used in basically like all like regulatory policy that
Speaker 4: the EPA does that other agencies used to and they're
Speaker 4: just destroying it. Trump has said that they're going to
Speaker 4: move some of it to other offices, but they've already
Speaker 4: been massively downsizing the EPA. Every day we edge closer
Speaker 4: and closers who are just like, this is the country
Speaker 4: with no environmental regulations.
Speaker 3: We're seeing it more and more.
Speaker 4: At some point on the show, we're going to cover
Speaker 4: all of the unhinged shit that's been happening with the
Speaker 4: power stations and like generators set up to power AI stuff.
Speaker 4: I also want to specifically mention one of the things
Speaker 4: that the New York Times reported on, which is that
Speaker 4: the people who are running the destruction of the EPA
Speaker 4: have been trying to get rid of the integrated risk
Speaker 4: information system, which, if you've ever dealt with dangerous chemicals,
Speaker 4: the integrated risk information system is the system that tells
Speaker 4: you what the effects of it are. Every chemical has
Speaker 4: one right and these fucking people like there's a guy
Speaker 4: who's now in the American First Policy Institute, which like
Speaker 4: Trump pulls a lot of shit from, who is literally
Speaker 4: talking about just getting rid of it because quote, IRIS
Speaker 4: evaluations often rely on worst case scenario hazard assumptions that
Speaker 4: fail to consider real world exposure.
Speaker 12: That's kind of the situation with these things, isn't you
Speaker 12: don't want to look at the worst case scenario.
Speaker 4: Yes, And when you don't look at the worst case scenario.
Speaker 4: One of the other agencies that's been like just destroyed
Speaker 4: is the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which
Speaker 4: is very famous for doing a bunch of very very
Speaker 4: good YouTube videos about like plant disasters and like how
Speaker 4: safety violations and safety lapse has caused like fucking plants
Speaker 4: to explode.
Speaker 3: And that's just like gone now.
Speaker 4: And this is, you know, the world that these people
Speaker 4: want you to live in is a world in which
Speaker 4: you don't know what all of these corporations are pumping
Speaker 4: into the environment around you. And even if you can
Speaker 4: figure out what the chemicals they're pumping, like into the
Speaker 4: groundwater that you're drinking is, you're not supposed to know
Speaker 4: what it does. This is just like the basic infrastructure
Speaker 4: for how all American like chemical operations work, and they're
Speaker 4: just trying to destroy it.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 3: Great, speaking of chemicals.
Speaker 4: Yeah, speaking of chemicals and the gun trying to destroy it.
Speaker 4: The government of Puerto Rico has passed a bill that
Speaker 4: bans gender affirming care of all kinds for anyone under
Speaker 4: the age of twenty one, because twenty one is the age,
Speaker 4: the highest that we've seen. So what's happening here is
Speaker 4: twenty one is the age which become a legal adult
Speaker 4: in Puerto Rico, which is unhinged. Yeah, this is the
Speaker 4: highest band we've seen. We've seen a couple of other
Speaker 4: places try to do it to nineteen. This also includes
Speaker 4: what's basically a high amendment for transcare, like all transcare
Speaker 4: of all ages that says that like state money cannot
Speaker 4: be used, so state insurance stuff like that in Puerto
Speaker 4: Rico cannot be used to pay for any gender affirming
Speaker 4: care at all, which is fucking hideous. This is basically
Speaker 4: the thing we were trying to stop with medicaid, where
Speaker 4: we did stop Medicaid the Lost Budget bill, but they've
Speaker 4: passed a local version of it. This bill promises us.
Speaker 4: I think it's up to five years in prison and
Speaker 4: fifteen thousand dollars in fines for anyone who gives trans
Speaker 4: healthcare to anyone under the age of twenty one.
Speaker 3: So if you never planned to visit Puerto Rico, it's
Speaker 3: time to start mailing gender firm and care services to
Speaker 3: people in Puerto Rico.
Speaker 4: The fun part too, is this law is worded so
Speaker 4: loosely that there is genuine concern that it could apply
Speaker 4: to Like if you are a parent and you try
Speaker 4: to get your kid gender firman care, this could apply
Speaker 4: to you.
Speaker 3: There's I will say, I think that aspect of it
Speaker 3: is still a little bit unclear. I don't want to
Speaker 3: inspire too much panic in that sense. I think a
Speaker 3: lot of it is directed at people who work in
Speaker 3: the medical industry. But still I think if you do
Speaker 3: not ever want to visit Puerto Rico and you want
Speaker 3: to help trans people, because presumably.
Speaker 12: Like no ban on like the import of these products, right,
Speaker 12: I guess some products themselves controlled.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean in chal law, they don't start doing that.
Speaker 3: But because famously there's never illegal drugs mailed in the
Speaker 3: United States, they can't stop us US. We're getting the
Speaker 3: HRT one way or another. But this sucks, and it
Speaker 3: will force people to adapt, and it's a really unfortunate
Speaker 3: to see. But I do believe in the ability which
Speaker 3: tries people to overcome the state's attacks against us. Before
Speaker 3: we close, there's actually one other piece of important news
Speaker 3: that we need to discuss. We're turning once again to
Speaker 3: the Stinky Musky segment, because the Tesla Diner has finally opened.
Speaker 3: I know we've been waiting for this for a long time.
Speaker 3: It is open in La, right right, yeah, so James,
Speaker 3: you need to get up there and go to the
Speaker 3: Tesla Diner. They have cyber truck food containers, so that's cool. Cool.
Speaker 3: They have Tesla robots helping to serve food and drinks.
Speaker 3: It's what they're calling retro futurist style. I would never
Speaker 3: say that. And most importantly, if you want to spend
Speaker 3: twelve dollars, you can get yourself a single serving of
Speaker 3: epic bacon that's on the menu. It's called epic Bacon
Speaker 3: for twelve dollars. Twelve dollars epic bacon at the Tesla
Speaker 3: Dinars twelve oh. They also opened it at four twenty.
Speaker 12: I saw that they also have avocato toast, which is
Speaker 12: great for those of us who will never afford a home.
Speaker 3: I can't support the Tesla Diners serving this lib cock
Speaker 3: avocado toes. It needs to be beef tallow fries.
Speaker 12: Well, unfortunately, they did put buttermilk bread with avocado toes,
Speaker 12: so just so like vegan people can't eat there. I
Speaker 12: guess there you go. Yeah, and again I cannot go
Speaker 12: to the testa diner. I don't have to return to
Speaker 12: Buffalo wild Wings at two am like I did when
Speaker 12: I was up in LA covering the protest a few
Speaker 12: weeks ago.
Speaker 1: Four wild Wings open that late.
Speaker 12: Let me tell you it was no time.
Speaker 3: What other time are you going to be eating Buffalo
Speaker 3: wild wings?
Speaker 12: Are you launching there like a fucking psycho.
Speaker 1: In college?
Speaker 12: But it was a good time back in the This
Speaker 12: is a great time. God, no one looked to be
Speaker 12: weird for wearing a fucking plate carrier with press.
Speaker 3: Buffalo is a war zone. It's basically one step removed
Speaker 3: from like waffle house.
Speaker 12: Yeah yeah, which is in turn wanted to removed from Falujah.
Speaker 3: So James, I thought that you wanted to plug.
Speaker 12: Well that's right, Okay. So we do have an email address.
Speaker 12: It's a encrypted email address, and you can send us
Speaker 12: emails there. It is cool Zone tips at proton dot me.
Speaker 12: What's it going to include? A fundraiser this week? We're
Speaker 12: trying to do one of these every week if there's
Speaker 12: someone in your community, Like we're trying to focus on
Speaker 12: micro fundraisers, people who are raising money for legal a
Speaker 12: people who need representation. I know immigration lawyers are either
Speaker 12: overworked or overpriced. It seems to be like like two
Speaker 12: brackets that they've gone into.
Speaker 3: Hit me up.
Speaker 12: You can send that to me at that email address
Speaker 12: and we'll try and include more of them. This week
Speaker 12: we are fundraising for Primrose and you can find her
Speaker 12: go fundme page at www dot GoFundMe dot com, slash
Speaker 12: f slash immigration hyphen lawyer hyphen for hyphen Primos at
Speaker 12: Primos Who's out of detention right now, which is great,
Speaker 12: but I know she still has a lot of significant
Speaker 12: expense is and legal expenses coming up. So if you
Speaker 12: would like to donate, if you'd like to help, this
Speaker 12: is a concrete thing you can do to help someone.
Speaker 3: We reported the news, We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 1: It could happen.
Speaker 19: Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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Speaker 19: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 19: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 19: now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly
Speaker 19: in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,