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Speaker 4: This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. One
Speaker 4: place that it is happening right now is Washington, d C,
Speaker 4: where Trump has undergone a quasi military takeover of the city.
Speaker 4: And to discuss this, I'm joined by bridget Todd, DC
Speaker 4: resident gare So.
Speaker 5: I was on the podcast a few months ago talking
Speaker 5: about Trump's history of threats to DC and that has
Speaker 5: really all come to a head. So I'm really happy
Speaker 5: to be sitting down with you to talk about it.
Speaker 6: It has been a rough few days here in DC.
Speaker 5: I mean if I am coming off like I sound
Speaker 5: tired or weird or stressed, it's because I do feel
Speaker 5: those things.
Speaker 6: That's been a lot of feelings. Most of it.
Speaker 5: I just hate watching Donald Trump get up in front
Speaker 5: of America and straight lie about my city and my home.
Speaker 5: A place like DC that you know where I'm from,
Speaker 5: It's where it's met most of my life. It's pretty
Speaker 5: difficult to have the national conversation be about what a
Speaker 5: bombed out shithole my home is. So I sort of
Speaker 5: wanted to get into the basics of what's going on
Speaker 5: and what I think it all means for everyone, not
Speaker 5: just people in DC. So by now you've probably seen that.
Speaker 5: On Monday, the Trump administration announced that they were federalizing
Speaker 5: DC's police force, the Metropolitan Police Department, or MPD. They
Speaker 5: also announced that they'd be sending national Guard to DC.
Speaker 5: Because DC is not a state, Trump actually and any
Speaker 5: president would actually have authority over DC's National Guard. So
Speaker 5: despite not being a state, DC does have a national Guard.
Speaker 5: The authority over it is just in the hands of
Speaker 5: the president, so with a stroke of a pen, he
Speaker 5: can just deploy DC's National Guard whenever he wants.
Speaker 6: He's also sending in national guard from other states.
Speaker 4: To do this.
Speaker 5: Trump evoked what's called Section seven forty of DC's Home
Speaker 5: Rule Act, which allows for the president to take over
Speaker 5: MPD for forty eight hours with possible extensions up to
Speaker 5: thirty days in times of emergencies. I'm kind of putting
Speaker 5: emergency in quotes because the emergency that he is saying
Speaker 5: is crime. But we'll get into why that doesn't really
Speaker 5: hold water in a moment. So I really can't overstate, like,
Speaker 5: how on precedented this is. No president has ever done
Speaker 5: this before.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I somewhat relate to your pain here of
Speaker 4: your city suddenly being thrust into national spotlight as Trump
Speaker 4: sends in you know, military style police, and I guess
Speaker 4: a version although with very different methods justifications happened to
Speaker 4: my density Portland, Oregon in twenty twenty, which I'm sure
Speaker 4: most people listening are familiar with. It's very similar reporting
Speaker 4: on how it's burned to the ground. It is only
Speaker 4: a husk remains. There's just one massive bonfire where downtown
Speaker 4: used to be, and of course it's fine, but the
Speaker 4: actual presence of the you know, groups like BORTAC actually
Speaker 4: create situations where there's massive amounts of violence being done
Speaker 4: by men in army fatigues. What's in DC is is
Speaker 4: I think notably different and like a semi extension of
Speaker 4: how he was testing out this type of thing in
Speaker 4: LA earlier this year, but with less of like an
Speaker 4: endpoint like at LA's stuff was more about trying to
Speaker 4: push forward these deportations and renditions as quickly as possible.
Speaker 4: So he's just like taking control of the whole city,
Speaker 4: like indefinitely, it seems now for DC.
Speaker 5: In some ways, yes, to be clear, because DC is
Speaker 5: not a state, it is unique from any other place
Speaker 5: in the country, and that the president kind of does
Speaker 5: have more authority over DC than he would have other places.
Speaker 5: And so yeah, he definitely this is definitely a federalization
Speaker 5: of our police department. In terms of it being a
Speaker 5: larger takeover of DC, We're not there yet. This is
Speaker 5: something that he has definitely threatened. This is something that
Speaker 5: he loves to talk about. That would include the president
Speaker 5: taking over pretty much every aspect of life in DC,
Speaker 5: so our public schools, our roads, our social services, all
Speaker 5: of that, provoking home rule, that's what that would be.
Speaker 5: He definitely that is definitely a threat. We should all
Speaker 5: be very aware of that. And like it really makes
Speaker 5: clear why DC needs full statehood yesterday, right, Like this
Speaker 5: is an issue that should have been solved forever ago,
Speaker 5: but right now we're talking about you know, specifically law
Speaker 5: enforcement and the police, which on its own is is
Speaker 5: like pretty bad.
Speaker 4: No, that's always the first step. Like, as soon as
Speaker 4: you take control of the enforcement mechanism, then no one
Speaker 4: really is able to stop you from doing other things.
Speaker 4: And that's why the first steps in all of these
Speaker 4: like you know, weird weird like far right Silicon Valley
Speaker 4: like plans for how they can fix quote unquote fix
Speaker 4: the government being able to take total control over the
Speaker 4: law enforcement apparatus is always the first step because then
Speaker 4: you can kind of do what you want from there
Speaker 4: and no one's going to stop you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in order to revoke home rule, it would take
Speaker 5: an Act of Congress, which this Congress seems more than
Speaker 5: willing to do whatever Trump wants.
Speaker 6: So that's something to keep in mind. Yeah, I think that.
Speaker 5: For residents of DC, I think the changes have been
Speaker 5: so stark in the last just couple of forty eight
Speaker 5: hours that I think it's very important to keep in
Speaker 5: mind what could be coming down the pike and definitely
Speaker 5: be aware of it. But you know, residents need to
Speaker 5: know what this means for them and US today. And
Speaker 5: I think that, like it's is really important to like
Speaker 5: highlight that. I think that because of the nature of
Speaker 5: DC being the nation's capital but also where more than
Speaker 5: half a million people live, I think it's really easy
Speaker 5: for people to forget that like the experience of like
Speaker 5: people who live here, like me, you know, And I
Speaker 5: think it's in this moment the people that I'm talking
Speaker 5: to on the ground really are like focused on making
Speaker 5: sure that folks know what's going on, have resources, you know,
Speaker 5: understand their rights, understand that their rights have not changed
Speaker 5: just because of this act this week. And so, I mean,
Speaker 5: the thing that I am emotionally and personally struggling with
Speaker 5: is this smear of my city being this like dangerous
Speaker 5: hell whole. How did you manage that? What was the
Speaker 5: experience of going through that, like like the dissonance of
Speaker 5: like your experience every day navigating the streets of this
Speaker 5: place where you live, and then hearing the national conversation
Speaker 5: about it be so different from how you were experiencing it.
Speaker 4: I think eventually it is kind of became like a
Speaker 4: point of pride and more like an absurd aspect which
Speaker 4: keeps like unwanted tourism down. I don't think it really
Speaker 4: in the end bothered people in the long run. And
Speaker 4: the reason why people had a big problem with it
Speaker 4: specifically was because of federal law enforcement who were taking
Speaker 4: over blocks in the city like that that was the
Speaker 4: actual like like crux, Like Republicans constantly talked about, how,
Speaker 4: you know, insert any city here is like falling apart,
Speaker 4: is overridden by crime, is you know, a fallen state?
Speaker 4: You can't go out, and like they just kind of
Speaker 4: pick a new one to put all the attention on,
Speaker 4: like once a week so we're kind of like used
Speaker 4: to this, to this rhetoric. It's more so the actual
Speaker 4: like physical presence of law enforcement and how that changes
Speaker 4: we're able to go throughout the city and the presence
Speaker 4: of like militarized federal law enforcement. That yeah, affects like
Speaker 4: just regular people. It's not just rhetoric. It actually changes
Speaker 4: how you get to interact with your city. And I
Speaker 4: guess that's the thing that actually caused people in Portland
Speaker 4: to be much more upset, which results in tens of
Speaker 4: thousands of people going out into the streets and saying no,
Speaker 4: we don't want you here. So I think more so
Speaker 4: than just like the rhetoric of how x y city
Speaker 4: is burned to the ground, it's more so they like
Speaker 4: the actual physical daily life that produces the actual tension
Speaker 4: within within the city and how they gets changed and
Speaker 4: altered with federal law enforcement exactly.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's pretty much what's happening on my streets
Speaker 5: in DC. So about eight hundred and fifty officers and
Speaker 5: agents took part in this what they called massive law
Speaker 5: enforcement surge across DC, where they had between one hundred
Speaker 5: and two hundred soldiers out patrolling the streets like beat
Speaker 5: coops at any given time. And so you know, some
Speaker 5: of the things that we've seen in the last couple
Speaker 5: of days just simply as a longtime resident, like just
Speaker 5: simply do not make sense, right, having federal agents patrol
Speaker 5: places like Georgetown, which is very safe at ten o'clock
Speaker 5: at night.
Speaker 6: That happened last night.
Speaker 4: Well, Georgetown actually might be the most dangerous place in
Speaker 4: the city well in some ways, right if you thinking.
Speaker 5: About like the kind of crime they're talking tough about, yes,
Speaker 5: or like the National Mall at qpm a weekday, places
Speaker 5: where it's like it don't even make sense for y'all
Speaker 5: to be posted up there. You know, there was a
Speaker 5: big display of force and arrests on my block just
Speaker 5: last night in the middle of the night, where we
Speaker 5: looked out the window and it was.
Speaker 4: Car after car after car, order patrol.
Speaker 5: They set up the lights, they made arrests, and my
Speaker 5: block is residential. So it's like places where it's like
Speaker 5: it doesn't even seem to be making sense. And that's
Speaker 5: why we know it's really not about crime. All of
Speaker 5: the stuff that Trump said about crime and his pressor,
Speaker 5: I mean, it was all just lies.
Speaker 4: Like I guess I don't you tell anybody listening to this.
Speaker 5: But like in case you are curious whether or not
Speaker 5: there's any credence to the fact, we're like, oh, well,
Speaker 5: is crime going up in DC?
Speaker 6: That is not true, right.
Speaker 4: So violent crebs have been going down the past two
Speaker 4: years in DC consistently.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, So, it is true that DC did have a
Speaker 5: spike in crime in twenty twenty three, but since then
Speaker 5: crime is going down. If you watched that press conference,
Speaker 5: he threw out a lot of stats about how crime
Speaker 5: is going in the wrong direction by every measure, that's
Speaker 5: simply not true. He said that in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: the murder rate in DC reached the highest rate. This
Speaker 5: is him, He said, probably ever going back twenty five years,
Speaker 5: but that they don't know what that means because the
Speaker 5: data just only goes back twenty five years, saying basically
Speaker 5: that they didn't collect crime statistics way back then. Think
Speaker 5: about that for a second. Twenty five years ago was
Speaker 5: the year two thousand. Do you really think that crime
Speaker 5: data was not being collected in the year two thousand?
Speaker 6: It absolutely was.
Speaker 5: We absolutely know what crime in DC looked like in
Speaker 5: the year two thousand and beyond. And so if There's
Speaker 5: one thing people might know about DC is that in
Speaker 5: the eighties and the nineties we were hit hard, but
Speaker 5: the crack epidemic crime was genuinely very high.
Speaker 6: The city's own crime statistics, which.
Speaker 5: We did collect from the seventies, eighties and nineties when
Speaker 5: the population in DC was smaller, show that there was
Speaker 5: much more higher numbers of homicides and murders.
Speaker 6: So that's not just a lie.
Speaker 5: It's also a weird, obvious lie, and one that when
Speaker 5: I watched the press or I almost didn't catch.
Speaker 7: It.
Speaker 5: Wasn't until I sat that and went through the notes
Speaker 5: and I was like, oh, this is not just a lie.
Speaker 5: This is like a weird, glaring lie. I can't believe.
Speaker 5: I like, I guess I said that to say, there
Speaker 5: are so many lies being thrown out in a short
Speaker 5: amount of time. When they're all washing over you, it's
Speaker 5: kind of hard to catch them one by one. But
Speaker 5: then when you actually sit down, you're like, wow, oh,
Speaker 5: this was just bullshit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the intention. That's the what Steve Bennen calls
Speaker 4: like muzzle velocity. You have to shoot out these things constantly,
Speaker 4: one after another, so that it's impossible to actually hone
Speaker 4: in and quote unquote debunk each and every one, because
Speaker 4: by the time you're doing that, they've already moved on
Speaker 4: to fifteen new things. You can never keep up with it.
Speaker 4: And that's like the whole intention. That's like how they
Speaker 4: craft literally like their sentences so that you can't just
Speaker 4: like debunk everything they say because they just throw it
Speaker 4: all out there and it creates this massive structure that
Speaker 4: even if you tried chipping away at the sides, it
Speaker 4: doesn't actually make any effect and it doesn't matter at all.
Speaker 4: And like's what's the real effect they're trying to do
Speaker 4: here with sending in National Guard, federalizing the police. It's
Speaker 4: to like scare black people, and it's to scare homeless people.
Speaker 4: And that's really what they actually mean when they say
Speaker 4: there's high crime. And I think DC is what like
Speaker 4: the has like the third third largest black population in
Speaker 4: the country.
Speaker 6: That's right. We formally called chocolate City.
Speaker 5: We're more like a latte city today, but yeah, we
Speaker 5: we have a heavily black and brown population here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's that's what Trump's actually like focusing on. That's
Speaker 4: actually what he's doing. I feel like that's that should
Speaker 4: be pretty clear to anyone who's like familiar with like
Speaker 4: crime panic narratives and how they've been strategically deployed throughout
Speaker 4: the past twenty five years and you know, thirty forty
Speaker 4: years of the country.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I don't see how somebody could see
Speaker 5: what's happening and see the way that he is clearly like,
Speaker 5: like even at that press or the list of cities
Speaker 5: he was planning on going to next, Chicago, Baltimore, It's like, okay,
Speaker 5: heavily black cities with black political leadership and black mayor.
Speaker 4: Oh, Oakland, this is very clear what's going on? Yeah? Interesting,
Speaker 4: interesting choice, buddy, Yeah, Like what do all these places
Speaker 4: have in common?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 5: One of the things I've seen people say is that
Speaker 5: this whole thing is about the attack on the former
Speaker 5: DOGE staffer known as big Balls.
Speaker 4: Big Ball I think it's that's his technical term. Yes,
Speaker 4: possibly to receive the Presidential Medal of I think freedom.
Speaker 6: I think he got a medal. I think it happened.
Speaker 4: It's quite possible, So we should show big Balls some
Speaker 4: respect for his.
Speaker 8: Struggles, I guess.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean it's I never thought I would see the
Speaker 5: day where I'd be like reporting on a story happening
Speaker 5: in the city and talking about somebody named Big Balls.
Speaker 4: But here we go. Really, you didn't see this coming.
Speaker 6: You didn't see.
Speaker 5: Someone of my being go cardcare. For a podcast that
Speaker 5: I host about local DC news and issues called City
Speaker 5: Cast DC, I interviewed Mark C. Graves, who was like
Speaker 5: a long time DC reporter, and I said, Oh, is
Speaker 5: there any truth to the idea that this attack on
Speaker 5: Big Balls is?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 4: What was the impetus to all this?
Speaker 5: That Elon Musk was like, Trump, you need to federalize
Speaker 5: DC's police department because of what happened to my former staffer.
Speaker 5: And I understand why people where that narrative was coming from.
Speaker 5: But he really pointed out something, which is that you know,
Speaker 5: Trump has been talking about taking over d police department
Speaker 5: for a very long time. He referenced it during his
Speaker 5: first administration a little bit a lot less than he
Speaker 5: did it the second time around. He really dialed it
Speaker 5: up in his second campaign. He began talking about it
Speaker 5: even in his first few months in office by threatening
Speaker 5: to take control over MPD if our Mayor Muriel Bowser
Speaker 5: did not make certain concessions like clearing homeless encampments near
Speaker 5: the White House and removing Black Lives Matter Plaza from
Speaker 5: outside the White House. He also threatened to take over
Speaker 5: MPD and DC in general when a former Trump administration staffer,
Speaker 5: Mike gil was shot and killed during a carjacking in
Speaker 5: DC back in February. So when that happened again, he
Speaker 5: was like, I'm taking over MPD, I'm taking over EMPT.
Speaker 4: So well, the Big Balls thing alleged carjacking of Big Balls,
Speaker 4: I will say this.
Speaker 5: You know those stories where you're like, we're gonna get
Speaker 5: more information about this, so it's best to just wait.
Speaker 5: A I don't know anything. I don't have any special details,
Speaker 5: but like my senses, this is one of those situations
Speaker 5: where it's like, you know, first the story was I
Speaker 5: was with a girlfriend in her car.
Speaker 6: We were carjacked by two unarmed teens.
Speaker 5: Then Elon Musk, super spreader of misinformation that he is,
Speaker 5: was like, oh, he was attacked while trying to rescue
Speaker 5: an elderly woman.
Speaker 6: Like I just have seen enough about crime and DC.
Speaker 6: I am.
Speaker 5: I'm looking forward to hearing more information about what actually
Speaker 5: went down there.
Speaker 6: I'll just put it that.
Speaker 4: Way if that makes sense with mister big Balls. With
Speaker 4: mister big Balls, I guess mister Balls. I guess big
Speaker 4: is the first Mister Balls. Please, mister Balls is my father.
Speaker 4: So yeah, Like, I think.
Speaker 5: The Big Balls thing might have been very convenient timing
Speaker 5: or like a good excuse to actually move forward. But
Speaker 5: I think narratives that Big Balls got attacked and now
Speaker 5: Trump is taking over MPDE, I think that like doesn't
Speaker 5: really tell the whole story, which is that this has
Speaker 5: been a long time coming. This has been something that
Speaker 5: Trump has been like obsessed with for quite some time,
Speaker 5: even going back from before his second administration.
Speaker 4: And there's there's been like a media campaign in the
Speaker 4: past few months of specifically taking like public trendsit robbery
Speaker 4: videos and making them super vi role of like teens
Speaker 4: who will like steal like designer clothes on public transit, Yeah,
Speaker 4: and turning turning this into like a national epidemic. And
Speaker 4: again you can look at look at look at the
Speaker 4: like the shoplifting videos from a few years ago, that
Speaker 4: even though crime was going down, there was videos that
Speaker 4: very visible videos of shoplifting that went super viral to
Speaker 4: help form this this crime wave narrative that the statistics
Speaker 4: don't necessarily support, to the point where you have Republicans
Speaker 4: actually like denying the FBI's own crime statistics. F the
Speaker 4: FBI famously soft on crime institution the FBI, but Republicans
Speaker 4: saying that these debts have to be wrong because we
Speaker 4: all know that there's crime everywhere, and like, how do
Speaker 4: we know that? Because you're seeing like a TikTok video
Speaker 4: about it, and that's your proof as you've seen, you
Speaker 4: saw one or two videos of like people robbing an
Speaker 4: apple store, and now you think that crime must be
Speaker 4: statistically higher everywhere, Okay, Yeah, And I think.
Speaker 5: That's why the big narrative continues to really be so sticky.
Speaker 4: Ooh, I don't like that. Yeah, I don't mean it
Speaker 4: how it sounds.
Speaker 5: But like, it doesn't matter if you have statistics from
Speaker 5: the FBI saying that crime is going down whatever, whatever,
Speaker 5: when you if you have a visceral image of like
Speaker 5: a bloodied big balls.
Speaker 4: Beaten on the street, right like and so I think
Speaker 4: that it's it's really.
Speaker 5: Interesting how and I guess I'll just say it, how
Speaker 5: easily manipulated people are, yeah, and how they're able to
Speaker 5: go against the facts when they are confronted with an
Speaker 5: image of like teens robbing a CVS or like oh,
Speaker 5: like yeah, like eluted out CBS totally because that is
Speaker 5: so visceral. And so that's something I've really struggled with,
Speaker 5: is like I don't know how to counter these emotionally charged,
Speaker 5: visceral TikTok videos and images that present one thing with facts,
Speaker 5: Like it's like very difficult to be like, well the
Speaker 5: data says this when people are being motivated by a
Speaker 5: different thing.
Speaker 4: No, and that's why it's almost kind of fruitless to
Speaker 4: go about that strategy at this point. And like, I
Speaker 4: don't know how to approach this, And I think it's
Speaker 4: also worth mentioning, like you're we are not immune to
Speaker 4: this either. We might get targeted with like different narratives
Speaker 4: may maybe a CVUS robbery doesn't do it for us,
Speaker 4: but no, like everyone's motivated by like emotional reactions to
Speaker 4: things that we see as like bad or often horrific,
Speaker 4: and that that does change the way that we understand
Speaker 4: like the physical aspects, like the statistical patterns of the
Speaker 4: world very clearly. Like we're emotional creatures. That's what drives us.
Speaker 4: The fact that the emotional plight of big Balls is
Speaker 4: driving the ruling party in the country right now is
Speaker 4: just a little bit more notable because it's one white
Speaker 4: guy named Big Balls.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's true, and it almost doesn't even make sense
Speaker 5: to like come back the idea that this is about crime.
Speaker 5: But I know it's not about crime because one, the
Speaker 5: Trump administration recently made very drastic cuts to DC security funding,
Speaker 5: and so if he was really very invested in crime
Speaker 5: and DC seems like something that his administration would not
Speaker 5: have done.
Speaker 6: Also, something that our mayor, who I do want.
Speaker 5: To talk about, has said is that, as you were
Speaker 5: sort of alluding to earlier, federal agents and military personnel
Speaker 5: are not the people who are going to be useful
Speaker 5: when it comes to DC like street crime. These are
Speaker 5: people who probably aren't even informed about DC's local ordinances
Speaker 5: and laws. Why would they be right, And so these
Speaker 5: are not people whose jobs it is to be out
Speaker 5: engaging with civilians about quality of life crimes like open
Speaker 5: containers or drinking on sidewalks.
Speaker 6: I saw a.
Speaker 5: Pretty viral video of the police going up and stopping
Speaker 5: somebody for he says, smoking a joint on his porch.
Speaker 6: In DC, you are allowed to possess marijuana.
Speaker 5: But he also was like, just so you know, Trump
Speaker 5: is cracking down on all of these quality of life crimes.
Speaker 5: So you can't drink a beer on your portion anymore,
Speaker 5: that's incorrect in the District of columb But you absolutely
Speaker 5: can drink alcohol on your private property outside.
Speaker 6: And it's like, well, how would he know. He's not
Speaker 6: even from here.
Speaker 5: He's a federal agent, So like, yeah, these are not
Speaker 5: people who are trained or skilled in combating the kind
Speaker 5: of civilian level street crime that we're seeing them do.
Speaker 6: This is just not an appropriate use of these people.
Speaker 5: And so the thing that kind of gets me is
Speaker 5: that for the amount of money that we are spending
Speaker 5: on having federal agents deal with low level street crime
Speaker 5: like per MPD and per the DOJ's own statistics, the
Speaker 5: kind of crimes that they have been combating this week
Speaker 5: are things like open container fair evasions. It was like, yeah,
Speaker 5: you need you need an FBI agent to deal with this.
Speaker 5: What are you talking about? But the money that we're spending,
Speaker 5: we probably could house every single unhoused person in the
Speaker 5: District of Columbia with the money that we are spending
Speaker 5: on this nonsense. It's like, that's the thing that makes
Speaker 5: me so angry. I don't want to live in a
Speaker 5: city that's full of crime. Luckily, I don't because crime
Speaker 5: is going down. But if you genuinely wanted to combat crime,
Speaker 5: there is a reasonable way to do this, and this
Speaker 5: is just a big show of force to freak everybody
Speaker 5: out and basically demonstrate that Trump can go into cities.
Speaker 6: And do this.
Speaker 4: It's not actually about lowering crime. The reason why they
Speaker 4: would never want to house people's because they don't actually
Speaker 4: want to. They don't want homeless people to live good lives.
Speaker 4: They want to exercise power. That's the primary motivator. And
Speaker 4: not only can bringing an out of state police be
Speaker 4: like inconvenient, it can have lethal consequences, right because they
Speaker 4: do not know the areas that they're policing, They do
Speaker 4: not know the people in those areas. They don't understand
Speaker 4: what it's actually like. When I was at the Republican
Speaker 4: National Conference Committee, I don't know. How do how do
Speaker 4: I not know what the RNC is? I think convention.
Speaker 5: It depends on if you're talking about the event or
Speaker 5: the like entity the entity.
Speaker 4: When I was at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee,
Speaker 4: Wisconsin last year, I responded to the scene of a
Speaker 4: police shooting where police from out of state who were
Speaker 4: brought in for the convention. We're policing outside of the
Speaker 4: area the convention and shot and killed a homeless black
Speaker 4: man because they did not understand where the homeless people
Speaker 4: have their encampments, how they solve disputes, how people can
Speaker 4: get in two fights. But that does not mean like
Speaker 4: you have to kill people who are having a fight.
Speaker 4: So no, this has drastic consequences. Something that the police
Speaker 4: in Milwaukee would have been aware of this encampment, would
Speaker 4: have possibly been aware of the normal way that homeless
Speaker 4: people can get into fights with each other but are
Speaker 4: not going to kill each other. Instead, you have an
Speaker 4: out of state cop from like Ohio or something get
Speaker 4: freaked out that two people are fighting and then shoot
Speaker 4: one of them and stuff like this is why like
Speaker 4: out of state police are so dangerous when they're being
Speaker 4: brought into communities that they really just don't understand exactly that.
Speaker 5: I did an interview with a local community organizer in
Speaker 5: DC and they told me pretty much the same thing,
Speaker 5: that there is an aspect of trust and relationship building
Speaker 5: that goes into not just like solving crimes, but combating
Speaker 5: crimes before they start, right, Like, there is a level
Speaker 5: of deep relationship building and trust building that has to
Speaker 5: be in effect there, and that is what actually can
Speaker 5: some time times make communities safer. But it comes to
Speaker 5: unhoused people and immigrants. These are not people who are
Speaker 5: committing crimes. These are people who are statistically more likely
Speaker 5: to be the victims of crimes. And so when you
Speaker 5: bring in outside forces who do not have trust, who
Speaker 5: do not who have not built that relationship, and they're
Speaker 5: terrorizing the communities that are statistically more likely to be
Speaker 5: the victims of crime, that's going to be the thing
Speaker 5: that results in the opposite of crime going down, right,
Speaker 5: because you are damaging whatever trust and whatever relationship and
Speaker 5: whatever understandings have been built with this community and law
Speaker 5: enforcement going forward.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: And so if we're genuinely interested in buildings are for communities,
Speaker 5: bringing in all of these outside military and federal personnel
Speaker 5: is simply not how you do it.
Speaker 6: That's how I know it's bullshit. They don't actually care about.
Speaker 5: Any of this, and like it is, it is sort
Speaker 5: of crazy making because I feel like they want us
Speaker 5: spinning out about all of this stuff, all of this
Speaker 5: bullshit that they're spinning, which fucking guilty is charged for
Speaker 5: me this week is all I've been doing. But you know,
Speaker 5: it's just it's this. They're so effective at the spin
Speaker 5: and the manipulation.
Speaker 4: No, I'm one of the for Fox News hosts who
Speaker 4: somehow has a position in government Heath. No, it was
Speaker 4: another one. No, No, there is another.
Speaker 6: This is which one?
Speaker 4: It was one of the ones who looks like you're evil?
Speaker 4: Aunt oh, Gnian Pierro, Yes, Oh my god, I'm glad
Speaker 4: that we could figure that out based on that description.
Speaker 5: That's all you had to say.
Speaker 4: But she was specifically asked like, what are you gonna
Speaker 4: do to address the root cause of crime? And she says,
Speaker 4: we don't want to. We're not going to. That's not
Speaker 4: what we're actually focusing on. We're focusing on just like
Speaker 4: eliminating crime through like force, through intimidation, and not even
Speaker 4: actually eliminating crime, just just just exercising power, which is
Speaker 4: what they're actually trying to say. And that's that's the
Speaker 4: whole point of this.
Speaker 5: Yes, and it's not just crime written large through force.
Speaker 5: It is crime in cities that are run by democrats
Speaker 5: and how are heavily black and brown populations, because you
Speaker 5: don't see them going into white commun unities.
Speaker 6: That have crime, which white communities do have crime.
Speaker 5: You don't see them going into like cities where they
Speaker 5: have Republican mayors where crime is also quite bad. No,
Speaker 5: that's not even that's not even like part of the conversation.
Speaker 5: It is very clear what they are saying. This is
Speaker 5: an attack.
Speaker 4: It's about power.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is a show of power to communities that
Speaker 5: we don't like. And I have to say something about this,
Speaker 5: which is that you know, when on this first happened,
Speaker 5: when I was interviewing that longtime reporter Mark Seagraves, something
Speaker 5: that he told me that really scared me was that
Speaker 5: the administration is doing this entirely legally and by the book.
Speaker 4: He was like, Oh, it's clear that they are following
Speaker 4: every letter of the law, to the.
Speaker 5: Point where the first statement out of our mayor's office
Speaker 5: was that they were not challenging this takeover of MPD
Speaker 5: because they did not feel like they had any kind
Speaker 5: of legal grounds to do so, which is grim That
Speaker 5: really tells me that they have got their act together.
Speaker 5: There was a time where people were like, Oh, they're
Speaker 5: just gonna do things and see what sticks and see what,
Speaker 5: you know, see what gets challenged in court, see what
Speaker 5: they can get away with. It really tells me a
Speaker 5: lot that in this instance, they're like, we're doing this
Speaker 5: by the book so that there is no legal challenge
Speaker 5: to what we are doing.
Speaker 4: What has the reaction been like from Lake City government?
Speaker 9: Ugh?
Speaker 5: I mean, I will say I came on this podcast
Speaker 5: a while ago, and I would say, like, I don't
Speaker 5: want to say I defended our mayor Muriel Bowser, but
Speaker 5: I did want to say, like, she is in a
Speaker 5: position that no other election official in the country is in,
Speaker 5: where she has to sort of play nice with a madman.
Speaker 5: I plame on the show and I said that she
Speaker 5: had this strategy of appeasement and making concessions, which, you know,
Speaker 5: say what you would look at it, I believe was
Speaker 5: grounded in an attempt to like work with Trump to
Speaker 5: avoid worse outcomes.
Speaker 4: To avoid this from happening, to avoid this from happening.
Speaker 5: So my point is now, I mean, it really shows
Speaker 5: you the futality of trying to make concession with a fascist.
Speaker 4: Right. What's the point.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because the thing that we were trying to avoid,
Speaker 5: the thing that all of these little appeasements and concessions.
Speaker 4: Were meant to avoid, has happened.
Speaker 5: To be clear, Trump has not taken over DC entirely,
Speaker 5: and home rules still stands, and so the very worst
Speaker 5: outcome has not happened yet. But this is pretty damn bad,
Speaker 5: and so part of me is like, what did all
Speaker 5: those concessions get you? And today, just this morning, she
Speaker 5: has totally flipped her tune on this. She actually flew
Speaker 5: to mar A Lago to see Trump yesterday and she
Speaker 5: came back saying, well, maybe having more law enforcement in
Speaker 5: communities in DC will make people safer. And I just
Speaker 5: cannot express to you how much it feels like I
Speaker 5: was speak for myself. It feels like we have been
Speaker 5: abandoned by leadership when we need it most. Right in DC,
Speaker 5: we have the mayor Muriel Bowser, who I just told
Speaker 5: you about. We have a congressional Representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton,
Speaker 5: who has a long time a history of being a
Speaker 5: fighter and protector of DC's autonomy. However, she can't vote,
Speaker 5: so she doesn't really have a lot of power, and
Speaker 5: a big conversation in DC has been the fact that
Speaker 5: she is really aging. She is, like, I think, the
Speaker 5: second oldest member of Congress in the United States, and
Speaker 5: it just we don't feel like we have anybody who
Speaker 5: can fight for us, who can speak up for us?
Speaker 5: And I will say this, like, I'm very disappointed in
Speaker 5: our mayor. I'm very disappointed in the fact that she
Speaker 5: has seems to have really been behind Trump on this.
Speaker 5: She does have a not terrible relationship with Trump, which
Speaker 5: in some ways can be good or bad depending on
Speaker 5: how you look at it. But I went into this
Speaker 5: having a sense that, oh, well, I think our mayor
Speaker 5: is going to fight for us, Our mayor is going
Speaker 5: to fight for DC's autonomy.
Speaker 6: And I'm coming out of it thinking I don't think that.
Speaker 5: She is fighting for us like the way that I
Speaker 5: would want her to be positioning herself in this moment, I'm.
Speaker 6: Not seeing her do.
Speaker 5: And the reality is, unfortunately the mayor of DC doesn't
Speaker 5: really have a lot of power and protection. She does
Speaker 5: when you when you compare that to somebody like Gavin Newsom,
Speaker 5: who when Trump sent the National Guard into LA knows
Speaker 5: that he has like the power of two senators behind him,
Speaker 5: right like our mayor doesn't have that. And it just
Speaker 5: really made clear when it comes to protecting DC.
Speaker 6: We're really on our own. We're really all we have.
Speaker 4: We don't really have a lot of power.
Speaker 6: We are really depending on folks like you.
Speaker 5: Care to get the word out to people who do
Speaker 5: have elected officials that they can call and advocate, because like.
Speaker 6: There's really nobody to call.
Speaker 5: And I will say I will say this, if the
Speaker 5: worst thing happens and DC's home Rule is overturned, which
Speaker 5: would be a disaster, Like I should come back on
Speaker 5: the show and talk about what that would look like.
Speaker 6: If that happens, DC will have no one.
Speaker 5: The only people who will be in charge of how
Speaker 5: DC is run is Trump and a small handful of
Speaker 5: people that he would personally appoint to be the commissioner
Speaker 5: of DC. So the last time that DC did not
Speaker 5: have home Rule, it was the only people who were
Speaker 5: in charge were the President and I think it was
Speaker 5: three commissioners that he personally appointed. None of these people
Speaker 5: lived in DC other than the President who lived in
Speaker 5: the White House. And so down to the smallest aspect
Speaker 5: of city life, I'm talking about social services, DC health,
Speaker 5: like unemployment, the streets, the schools, all of that would
Speaker 5: be run by President Trump. I cannot express to you
Speaker 5: what a disaster this would be. And the smallest thing
Speaker 5: getting done in DC, down to a pothole being be
Speaker 5: paved would take congressional oversight.
Speaker 6: So anybody who thinks that.
Speaker 5: That is a reasonable way to run a city, oh
Speaker 5: my god, wake up.
Speaker 4: Well I am not thrilled about the idea of commissioner
Speaker 4: big balls because that would happen. You know that, I know.
Speaker 4: And it's funny you mentioned Newsome, and Newsom was another
Speaker 4: guy who was trying to make concessions with Trump, specifically
Speaker 4: around like trans sports.
Speaker 6: Oh my god, don't even get me started.
Speaker 4: And he tried to, you know, make make those sort
Speaker 4: of like concessions and like roll back some aspects of
Speaker 4: supporting trans people in schools and trans kids. And then
Speaker 4: Trump's Department of Education still went after California schools, so like, yeah,
Speaker 4: no matter what concessions you give, they will still go
Speaker 4: after you. Earlier, you mentioned there was like a rest
Speaker 4: in your on your block last night, Like how how
Speaker 4: is this affected daily life for you and other are
Speaker 4: the residents of like DC?
Speaker 6: So far it has been grim.
Speaker 5: You know, we've seen border patrol, DA, FBI, National Guard
Speaker 5: just walking the streets. And again, like something about DC
Speaker 5: is that in August pretty much everybody leaves towns.
Speaker 6: What's a bit of a ghost town.
Speaker 5: There is nothing that justifies the massive disruption in city
Speaker 5: services that has happened.
Speaker 6: On my street last.
Speaker 5: Night they had a row of Border Patrol SUVs blocking
Speaker 5: traffic for genuinely no reason. Like The level to which
Speaker 5: to say are they are purposely disrupting the flow of
Speaker 5: city life cannot be overstated. And you know, I want
Speaker 5: to make it clear also, this is, as you said,
Speaker 5: a real attack on the unhoused community in DC. We
Speaker 5: have already seen very disturbing images of unhoused people being
Speaker 5: taken away by police yesterday in the White House at
Speaker 5: that they were going to be forcibly removing unhoused people,
Speaker 5: forcing them into show helter's, hospitals or jails, and if
Speaker 5: they didn't go, they would face five I mean, finding
Speaker 5: somebody who was living on the street, Like what are
Speaker 5: you doing?
Speaker 4: Yeah, finding someone who has no money?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And DC has a long history of having an issue
Speaker 5: with the unhoused community. We do not have enough shelters
Speaker 5: to accommodate people, and even if we did not, everybody's
Speaker 5: gonna want to go to a shelter. And so this
Speaker 5: has been an issue long before Trump was ever in DC.
Speaker 5: And it does take some complexity and thoughtfulness to solve it,
Speaker 5: not just going in and removing people by brute force,
Speaker 5: Like that is the absolute worst thing that you can
Speaker 5: be doing for this.
Speaker 4: No, I mean that that relates to Trump's like anti
Speaker 4: vagrancy executive order from a few weeks ago, where he
Speaker 4: wants to lock homeless people up in like mental hospitals
Speaker 4: and jails and like like like forcibly so and change
Speaker 4: change the rules for how how shelters work, how shelters
Speaker 4: can get funding mandatory like drug treatments, and yeah, really
Speaker 4: actually just trying to like involuntarily commit people into civil
Speaker 4: institutions exactly. I see parts of what he's doing in
Speaker 4: DC is trying to demonstrate his plan for that and
Speaker 4: how he wants that to spread across the country and
Speaker 4: just yeah, taking people off the street but then locking
Speaker 4: them either in a jail or onto like a hospital bed.
Speaker 5: Yes, and there was also an ice raid at the
Speaker 5: home Depot out in Northeast this week. Basically, I do
Speaker 5: think that first and foremost this is an attack on
Speaker 5: DC's black, brown, immigrant, and unhoused community. But you know,
Speaker 5: I've seen images of empty bars and empty restaurants where
Speaker 5: Ice and border patrol are inside the place.
Speaker 4: Yeah, why would you want to go out? So if
Speaker 4: there's a fucking like the military parading around.
Speaker 6: Yes, it's fucking up the vibes right, Like that's I
Speaker 6: will say.
Speaker 5: Like so in addition to the attacks on these vulnerable communities,
Speaker 5: like if you want to have a community where people
Speaker 5: feel safe to go out, they want to spend money,
Speaker 5: they want to like in joy of the.
Speaker 4: City, the vibes are terrible.
Speaker 5: This is this is just everything that makes DC great
Speaker 5: and a good place to live in a place that
Speaker 5: people want to come and spend time and and start
Speaker 5: their families. This kind of show of force goes against
Speaker 5: that and threatens that. It really does threat like DC
Speaker 5: is a particular place. It's like why this is my home.
Speaker 5: This kind of stuff really threatens our way of life
Speaker 5: in ways that are just.
Speaker 6: It really is just sad.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure if you have like examples like what
Speaker 4: people are trying to do to cope with this or
Speaker 4: try to like like stand their ground in their community.
Speaker 4: I guess, But like how are people like channeling their
Speaker 4: frustration right now?
Speaker 5: Well, there was a very viral video of somebody throwing
Speaker 5: a sub sandwich at a military personnel on us to eat.
Speaker 4: So well, that's a start. As long as we if
Speaker 4: we can get fifty thousand people with sub sandwiches, we
Speaker 4: might be onto something.
Speaker 6: Hero DC needs.
Speaker 4: So that's one literally the hero DC needs. Yeah, I
Speaker 4: see what you did there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I would say, so there are I feel grateful
Speaker 5: that there are organizations in DC, like local organizations that
Speaker 5: were preparing for this, and so organizations like Free DC.
Speaker 5: I spoke to one of their representatives earlier this week
Speaker 5: about what they're doing, and they're really focused on giving
Speaker 5: residents resources and so they're running cop watching trainings.
Speaker 4: That's good. That's good.
Speaker 6: They're making sure that.
Speaker 5: Folks know that their rights have not changed, know their
Speaker 5: rights if an agent comes up to you to talk
Speaker 5: to you. They're making sure people know what they do
Speaker 5: and don't have to say in those situations, which I
Speaker 5: think is important. People should definitely check out Free DC.
Speaker 5: They've been around since the sixties or they have been
Speaker 5: protecting DC's autonomy for a very long time. One of
Speaker 5: the things that they were telling folks to do was
Speaker 5: do you remember how in twenty twenty people would go
Speaker 5: outside and bang pots and pans to thank essential workers
Speaker 5: and medical personnel. They were telling folks because the streets
Speaker 5: feel so militarized. Not everybody's gonna feel like going out
Speaker 5: to a protest or going out to a march at
Speaker 5: eight o'clock at night. Make as much noise as you can,
Speaker 5: whether it's from your open window or from your block
Speaker 5: or from your do as a way to like demonstrate
Speaker 5: opposition to this. And so if you want more information
Speaker 5: about the kinds of that kind of organizing that they're
Speaker 5: trying to provide for folks, definitely check out Free DC.
Speaker 5: But I do think, I mean, the vibes are rage,
Speaker 5: and I hate that that rage feels so impotent that
Speaker 5: we that like this is just another a million examples
Speaker 5: of why we need full state that we've needed it
Speaker 5: for so long, because we are being disenfranchised. We have
Speaker 5: the possibility that people in power in DC could be
Speaker 5: people that nobody elected. Trump could appoint anybody as Commissioner
Speaker 5: of DC, and yeah, it could be big balls, right,
Speaker 5: And so we are in a situation that is so grim,
Speaker 5: and I think that shows, you know, people, people are
Speaker 5: really feeling that. And I guess one thing I want
Speaker 5: to I want to add is that I was talking
Speaker 5: earlier about how it's frustrating that I find that I'm
Speaker 5: often in this conversation like trying to combat Trump, and
Speaker 5: I feel I feel like I'm in a a stance
Speaker 5: that I hate, which is this reactive stance where he
Speaker 5: used bullshit, and I feel like it's my job to
Speaker 5: debunk it, and it's like, well, it's a bullshit I
Speaker 5: could be doing other things.
Speaker 6: I hate that.
Speaker 5: We have gotten this narrative that cities are bad, and
Speaker 5: that goes against our shared understanding of this country where
Speaker 5: cities are good. If you live in a city, don't
Speaker 5: let Trump turn you against city life. Don't let Trump
Speaker 5: turn you against cities. People want to be in cities.
Speaker 5: Cities are good, cities are safe, cities are cool to live,
Speaker 5: and people want to be in the city. If people
Speaker 5: didn't want to live in DC, my rent wouldn't be
Speaker 5: so goddamn high. Right, people want to be here for
Speaker 5: a reason. When Trump got up on that presser and
Speaker 5: talked about how tourists come to DC this and that
Speaker 5: he's right. If DC were truly a bombed out hell hole,
Speaker 5: Taurus wouldn't want to bring their families here. Cities are good,
Speaker 5: and I don't think that we should let Trump rewrite
Speaker 5: the narrative that our cities are bad. Cities are good,
Speaker 5: they are good places to be. We don't have to
Speaker 5: get caught up in his fake bullshit narrative of demonizing cities.
Speaker 4: So that's why I think everyone should travel to Let's
Speaker 4: all go to the capitol, put on some put on
Speaker 4: some masks, wave some flags, and just get in there
Speaker 4: to show could we could take it over, we can
Speaker 4: take the city back. Joe Biden, twenty twenty eight. Let's go.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, I did see this interview on News
Speaker 5: Nation where I think it was Mehdi Hassan was talking
Speaker 5: to some shithead and he was like, oh, if Trump
Speaker 5: cares about crime so much, why did he pardon a
Speaker 5: bunch of January sixth attackers who threatened and attacked law enforcement?
Speaker 6: And it's like, oh, he would be.
Speaker 5: The interviewer was just like, oh, come on, come on,
Speaker 5: you want to talk about that, come on.
Speaker 4: And it's like, okay, I.
Speaker 6: Thought tough on crime. Huh, tough on crime?
Speaker 4: Okay, No, it's it's it's crime with three ellipses, not
Speaker 4: the actual category of crime exactly crime wink wink.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's like we know what they're what they're trying to say,
Speaker 5: but Honestly, just talking to you about this has made
Speaker 5: me feel a lot better.
Speaker 4: I've been raging all week.
Speaker 5: So this is the first time that I feel like
Speaker 5: I've actually like gotten it all out.
Speaker 6: So thank you for talking to me about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, we will. We will certainly keep up with
Speaker 4: what's happening in d C with you know how long
Speaker 4: National Guard's going to be there, how long this this
Speaker 4: federalization lasts. Maybe they'll eliminate all crime within thirty days
Speaker 4: and things will go back to normal. Who knows.
Speaker 6: I mean the day that he took over there was over.
Speaker 5: There was a shooting like an hour or two later,
Speaker 5: So I was like, oh, at job, we're going.
Speaker 4: To handle this well, I guess not, but no, we will.
Speaker 4: We will keep up with this as well as Trump's
Speaker 4: promise is to go further and expand to five other cities.
Speaker 4: So thank you for sharing your your thoughts and experiences
Speaker 4: as a resident of d C.
Speaker 6: Bridget, Thank you for having me, and yeah, like, if
Speaker 6: you're out there in d C, stay safe, keep hope alive.
Speaker 4: We're all we got. Where else can people find you
Speaker 4: on the internet, Bridget? Besides, you know, on the on
Speaker 4: the steps of the Capitol waving an American flag.
Speaker 6: Yeah in a mask.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: You can find me at my podcast.
Speaker 5: I have a podcast on iHeartRadio called There Are No
Speaker 5: Girls on the Internet. I have a podcast about local
Speaker 5: DC news and issues called Citycast DC. You can also
Speaker 5: find me on Instagram at bridget rain d C, on
Speaker 5: TikTok at bridget rain DC, or on YouTube.
Speaker 6: And there Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 8: Cheers.
Speaker 11: I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a
Speaker 11: book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the
Speaker 11: co author of a recently published book about the eugenics
Speaker 11: movement in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
Speaker 12: And I'm Stephen Monicelli. I'm an investigator reporter in Dallas,
Speaker 12: where I contribute to a variety of publications as well
Speaker 12: as Cool Zone Media. I cover political extremism in Texas
Speaker 12: and beyond. Elon Musk has dominated the news since the
Speaker 12: twenty twenty four presidential campaign, and for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 12: There's a billionaire's flirtation with neo Nazi politics. There's his
Speaker 12: gutting of the social safety net through Doge. His soap
Speaker 12: opera estrangement from President Trump also grabbed much of the Spotlight.
Speaker 12: In the past two years, Musk has resuscitated in two
Speaker 12: Texas communities, one of the worst ideas from the robber
Speaker 12: baron age. In an effort to control his workers' lives
Speaker 12: on and off the clock, Musk is bringing the company
Speaker 12: town back to life.
Speaker 11: On May third of this year, on the South Texas
Speaker 11: coast of the Gulf of Mexico, people went to the
Speaker 11: voting booth on a peninsula called Boca Chica. They voted
Speaker 11: to turn their one and a half square mile patch
Speaker 11: of unincorporated land into a city called Starbase. Almost all
Speaker 11: of the voters were employees of musk SpaceX Rocket Company.
Speaker 11: So are the candidates elected to govern Texas newest city.
Speaker 11: But Musk is clearly the power behind the throne.
Speaker 12: Meanwhile, in Bastrup County near Austin in central Texas, Musk
Speaker 12: gobbled up local real estate in loosely governed unincorporated lands.
Speaker 12: That's where, in addition to Starbase, he's working to create
Speaker 12: another company town he calls Snailbrook. Many Bascht rep presidents
Speaker 12: say Musk's businesses are poisoning the water, air, and soil
Speaker 12: in their community. On this episode of It could Happen
Speaker 12: Here we'll discuss the unfortunate history of company towns in
Speaker 12: the United States, how company towns have always undermined democracy
Speaker 12: and workers' rights, and what these elon musk company towns
Speaker 12: may mean for the future of United States capitalism.
Speaker 11: Speaking of capitalism will be back after a few words
Speaker 11: from our sponsors. Roughly between eighteen eighty in the mid
Speaker 11: nineteen thirties, an astounding twenty five hundred company towns dotted
Speaker 11: the American landscape.
Speaker 4: A product of Gilded Age greed.
Speaker 11: At best, these corporate planned communities represented paternalistic experiments of
Speaker 11: mind control. At their worst, they became miniature police states.
Speaker 11: In Steinway Village in New York, where not surprisingly, workers
Speaker 11: manufactured Steinway pianos, Paulman, Illinois, where employees made train cars,
Speaker 11: and Hershey's Pennsylvania, which was, of course, a chocolate manufacturing center.
Speaker 11: Employers built the houses that the workers lived in, the
Speaker 11: stores where they shopped, the saloons where they drank, and
Speaker 11: the schools where their children learned.
Speaker 12: Chad Pearson is an historian of American labor at the
Speaker 12: University of North Texas, and he's the author of a
Speaker 12: noted book called Capitalism's Terrorists. Klansmen, lawmen, and employers in
Speaker 12: the long nineteenth century. We talked to him about the
Speaker 12: rise and fall of company towns in the mid eighteen
Speaker 12: hundreds to the early twentieth century. Could you explain how
Speaker 12: company towns got started in the United States and the
Speaker 12: motives of the businessmen who started them.
Speaker 13: Certainly, so, really, I think we can identify three periods,
Speaker 13: three phases. So the first phase would be we might
Speaker 13: associate with the so called Lowell Girls in Lowell, Massachusetts,
Speaker 13: which began in the eighteen twenties and continued into the
Speaker 13: subsequent decades. These were young women girls and basically, you know,
Speaker 13: they lived on the campus the town. The boss would
Speaker 13: decide when they would work and when they would eat,
Speaker 13: and that sort of thing. After that, we have another
Speaker 13: phase which we could identify with George Pullman and the
Speaker 13: Pullman Company just outside of Chicago in the late nineteenth century,
Speaker 13: really in the eighteen eighties. Again, these were very controlling
Speaker 13: environments in which you know, the employer had all to say,
Speaker 13: workers would live in company housing. Again, they'd go to
Speaker 13: the company church, and you know, we're really control both
Speaker 13: during and after the workday. And then we have a
Speaker 13: whole bunch of them, mostly in mining and textile lumber communities.
Speaker 13: By nineteen thirty nine, there were seventy planned industrial settlements
Speaker 13: built after nineteen hundred.
Speaker 10: So quite a few.
Speaker 13: So whatever period we're talking about, these places where infamous
Speaker 13: for management's use of surveillance and power. This is designed
Speaker 13: really to fundamentally control folks, which round expression again in homes, workplaces,
Speaker 13: and churches.
Speaker 6: You would have to sign contracts.
Speaker 13: So in a place like mining towns in West Virginia,
Speaker 13: you'd have to sign a contract that gave the boss
Speaker 13: the authority to evict labor activists or people, you know,
Speaker 13: workers who might be involved in trying to improve their
Speaker 13: conditions by fighting back, or they would be evicted for
Speaker 13: so called undesirable behavior, again that generally involved things like
Speaker 13: union organizing.
Speaker 12: Pearson described these company towns as many dictatorships in which
Speaker 12: fighting for better conditions could result in harsh retaliation, and
Speaker 12: in which ministers that were hired by the company and
Speaker 12: a church built by the company bosses fed workers a
Speaker 12: steady stream of propaganda.
Speaker 13: This happened in places like New England textile mills to
Speaker 13: coal mining areas in Alabama and West Virginia.
Speaker 10: Well might happened.
Speaker 13: You'll say you're you're active in a union, or you're
Speaker 13: resisting your boss. Right, the boss or his underlings might
Speaker 13: send in mind guards and say you and your family
Speaker 13: get out, throw the stuff, their furniture on the street,
Speaker 13: and there would be no no accountability, no way to
Speaker 13: you know, address that that problem. You'd also have company towns.
Speaker 13: You'd have a religious you'd have preachers who would preach
Speaker 13: the company line as well. Right, So that kind of
Speaker 13: pro business, pro capitalist and doctrination was expressed both in
Speaker 13: the workplace and from the pulpit.
Speaker 11: A key way that company towns control workers was by
Speaker 11: not paying them an actual American dollars paper certificates called script.
Speaker 11: They could only be spent at company owned stores. This
Speaker 11: gave the company monopoly power over what their workforce bought.
Speaker 13: A twenty five pounds sack of flower costs two fifty
Speaker 13: at the company's store. It costs only one ninety elsewhere. Right,
Speaker 13: So this was a way for companies to sort of
Speaker 13: corner the market, if you will, right, they could jack
Speaker 13: up prices.
Speaker 10: You were basically a slave to the system.
Speaker 12: George Pullman, who established the company that made luxury railroad cars,
Speaker 12: created a company town in Illinois in eighteen eighty one,
Speaker 12: Pullman presented his experiment to the world as a utopia.
Speaker 12: The workers' houses there had natural gas and running water,
Speaker 12: which was not the norm at the time. Some even
Speaker 12: had indoor plumbing. The town had retail shops and well
Speaker 12: supplied markets, and tourists visited it as a supposed ideal
Speaker 12: community of the future.
Speaker 11: In spite of the apparent shininess of Pullman Illinois, the
Speaker 11: relationship between Pullman and his employees turned violent in eighteen
Speaker 11: ninety four. A is doctor Pearson explains.
Speaker 13: So Pullman, George Pullman, began creating this utopian community in
Speaker 13: eighteen eighty Okay, that's shortly after this massive nationwide strike
Speaker 13: in eighteen seventy seven of railroad workers. So a lot
Speaker 13: of bosses in the aftermath of these massive confrontations were like, Okay,
Speaker 13: we've got to do something. We've got to do something
Speaker 13: to solve what they called the labor problem, the labor question.
Speaker 13: And one way they did that was through welfare work,
Speaker 13: trying to be more benevolent right parents as opposed to
Speaker 13: only six and so Pullman was established in eighteen eighty
Speaker 13: four just outside of Chicago, had about twelve thousand residents
Speaker 13: and it was at the time the largest, most famous.
Speaker 10: Company town in the nation.
Speaker 13: And he did, I mean, let's give credit where credit
Speaker 13: is due some things that did improve the conditions for employees.
Speaker 13: So he had a company doctor. He oversaw good school
Speaker 13: system funded athletic programs a company banned and he modeled
Speaker 13: this on a company town outside of Bradford, England. So
Speaker 13: what we see is, you know, the company towns do
Speaker 13: not originate in the United States. They are sort of
Speaker 13: a phenomenon that we see across the industrialized world. But
Speaker 13: of course there was also a darker side. He banned alcohol,
Speaker 13: he restricted tobacco use, He imposed a curfew, right, so
Speaker 13: you want to go out, you know, it's five o'clock somewhere.
Speaker 8: No, it's not right.
Speaker 13: And so it was also pretty expensive to live there.
Speaker 13: Residents had to spend something like thirty percent of their
Speaker 13: money on rent, and when they saved enough money an
Speaker 13: impossible thing to do. Often when they did save that money,
Speaker 13: they would they would get out.
Speaker 12: Pullman's experiment in welfare capitalism came crashing down when the
Speaker 12: United States sank into an economic depression that lasted from
Speaker 12: eighteen ninety three to eighteen ninety seven, at one point
Speaker 12: three million people, or about twenty percent of the country's workforce,
Speaker 12: could not find jobs. Hunger and suicide became rampant as
Speaker 12: hard times dragged on, and Pullman laid off hundreds of
Speaker 12: workers and slashed wages by thirty three percent.
Speaker 11: During this time, residents of the company town in Illinois
Speaker 11: struggled to pay rent at the Pullman owned housing, where
Speaker 11: management refused the lower prices. Eugene Debs, who would soon
Speaker 11: emerge as the leader of the Socialist Party of America
Speaker 11: and would served five times as that party's presidential nominee,
Speaker 11: led one hundred and fifty thousand member American Railway Union
Speaker 11: the ARU, stage a strike calling for a rollback in
Speaker 11: pay cuts in a reduction rents at the company housing.
Speaker 11: The strike spread nationwide, with railroad workers refusing to handle
Speaker 11: trains carrying Pullman cars.
Speaker 12: President Grover Cleveland dispatched twelve thousand troops to crush the
Speaker 12: uprising and reopen the rail lines. Federal marshalls shot two
Speaker 12: strikers to death in Kensington, Illinois, not far from Chicago,
Speaker 12: while authorities arrested Dabbs and put him in prison for
Speaker 12: defying the court order by continuing the strike in a
Speaker 12: stop to workers, the House and Senate unanimously passed a
Speaker 12: bill creating what we now know today as Labor Day.
Speaker 13: Later on, in jail, using depths becomes radicalized, reading marks
Speaker 13: runs for president. A few times after that, bottom line
Speaker 13: workers lost a strike, but Pullman's experiments soon ended. The
Speaker 13: Illinois Supreme Court rule that George Pullman's ownership of the
Speaker 13: community was in violation of its charter and dismantled the
Speaker 13: town in eighteen ninety eight. So a dramatic period in
Speaker 13: US history, one of the most important struggles in US
Speaker 13: labor history, and it really showed the way in which
Speaker 13: bosses the state came together to really fight labor.
Speaker 12: By around the end of the eighteen hundreds, about three
Speaker 12: percent of the American population lived under the almost complete
Speaker 12: control of their corporate masters. Meanwhile, an extensive network of
Speaker 12: spies filled company towns. These corporate agents posed as fellow workers, bartenders, mailmen,
Speaker 12: or just another customer at the store. They reported to
Speaker 12: management any e mail content who complained about working hours
Speaker 12: or wages. Fired workers were often placed on a blacklist
Speaker 12: that was widely distributed among corporations and made landing a
Speaker 12: new job even more difficult, Some mining towns resembled prison camps.
Speaker 12: Arm guards surrounded the towns to keep out union organizers
Speaker 12: in the corporate overlords in company towns use violent means
Speaker 12: to maintain tyrannical control. We asked doctor Pearson to explain this. Now,
Speaker 12: Doctor Pearson, you titled one of your books Capitalism's Terrorists.
Speaker 12: Then you were referring basically to the fact that corporations,
Speaker 12: including the ones that owned company towns, often used private armies,
Speaker 12: armed militias, or they basically hired outside violent groups to
Speaker 12: control labor. Did you go into that a little bit more?
Speaker 13: Let me read you an anecdote from Vandergriff, Pennsylvania. Vandergrift,
Speaker 13: Pennsylvania is a company pound not far from Pittsburgh. It's
Speaker 13: a steel town. And in July nineteen oh nine, during
Speaker 13: a strike against the American Sheet and Tinplay Company, the
Speaker 13: company's superintendent was a guy named Oscar Lindquist. He led
Speaker 13: a mob of hundreds to a hotel in the nearby
Speaker 13: town of Apollo, where the union organizers were staying. So
Speaker 13: there's an effort to build union membership in this company town.
Speaker 13: And Linquist was so pissed about their presence, so he
Speaker 13: informed the organizers that they had an hour to leave
Speaker 13: town and that he would burn the building down if
Speaker 13: they refused to comply. When they protested, insisting that they
Speaker 13: had free speech and assembly rights, Linquist claimed that quote
Speaker 13: his word was the law. A local town official, reinforcing
Speaker 13: linquist demand, gave the men until the next morning to leave.
Speaker 13: So we have threats of like burning places down, killing
Speaker 13: people right, and ultimately no accountability. I think it's fair
Speaker 13: to call these people terrorists.
Speaker 12: The harshness of company towns inspired worker resistance, including what
Speaker 12: came to be known as the Colorado Coalfield War. We'll
Speaker 12: hear more about that, and a tragedy that came to
Speaker 12: be known as the Ludlow Massacre. After this break sponsored
Speaker 12: by some companies, one of the bloodiest confrontations between a
Speaker 12: company militia and striking workers in American history took place
Speaker 12: in Ludlow, Colorado, in the early twentieth century. The Colorado
Speaker 12: Fuel and Iron Company controlled several coal mines, and it
Speaker 12: was owned by the world's richest man, John D. Rockefeller,
Speaker 12: who also owned the Standard Oil Company. The coal workers
Speaker 12: were unhappy with several things there were king twelve hour days,
Speaker 12: six days a week, sometimes seven. Through their union, the
Speaker 12: United Mine Workers, they asked for rays and for their
Speaker 12: workday to be no more than eight hours. They also
Speaker 12: demanded the right to live in housing that wasn't part
Speaker 12: of the company town controlled by Rockefeller, and to spend
Speaker 12: their hard earned money in stores that he didn't control.
Speaker 12: The relationship between the United Mineworkers and Rockefeller broke down
Speaker 12: when he refused to negotiate with them. Between September nineteen
Speaker 12: thirteen and December nineteen fourteen, the coal miners and Ludlow
Speaker 12: stage strikes against the richest man on the planet at
Speaker 12: the time.
Speaker 11: Instead of negotiating, Rockefeller assembled a private army of local sheriffs, deputies,
Speaker 11: and private detectives. The militia armed itself with a motorized
Speaker 11: gatling gun that Rockefeller's goons named the Death Special. The
Speaker 11: nation recoiled in horror when on April twentieth, nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 11: militia troops attacked a company miner's tent colony. They were
Speaker 11: living in the tent colony because that had been kicked
Speaker 11: out of company housing. During the armed assault, Rockefeller's troops
Speaker 11: killed sixty six men, women, and children. They doused the
Speaker 11: tents with kerosene, incinerating eleven hiding in a pit, including
Speaker 11: a pregnant woman.
Speaker 12: The folk singer Woody Guthrie immortalized the horrific scene at
Speaker 12: Ludlow in his ballad the Ludlow Massacre.
Speaker 4: You struck a man in the blaze it started.
Speaker 14: You pulled the triggers of your gabling guns.
Speaker 12: I made around for the children, for the farwells of me.
Speaker 9: Thirteen children died from your guns.
Speaker 12: About two hundred people in all died in what came
Speaker 12: to be called the Colorado Coalfield War. So we asked
Speaker 12: doctor Pearson about the long term impact of the Ludlow
Speaker 12: massacre and what happened to company towns in the subsequent years.
Speaker 13: So basically, on the morning of April twenty at nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 13: guardsmen who were aligned with the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company,
Speaker 13: which is owned by John D. Rockefeller, attacked this camp
Speaker 13: of strikers, mineworkers strikers, ultimately killing twenty one people, including
Speaker 13: eleven children. This brutality, this brutality lasted for fourteen hours.
Speaker 13: The guards torched the colony, and this came in the
Speaker 13: midst of a strike that had been going on for months,
Speaker 13: which started in September nineteen thirteen, and so this was
Speaker 13: a real struggle. It was a terrible public relations disaster.
Speaker 13: From the vantage point of Rockefeller in the company, the
Speaker 13: pressure to do something was great. And so what we
Speaker 13: see as we see government officials meeting and discussing this event,
Speaker 13: there are these various gatherings of business people and labor
Speaker 13: unions trying to resolve it. And in the aftermath of this,
Speaker 13: Rockefeller worked closely with what we might call industrial relations specialists,
Speaker 13: and he became a champion of welfare capitalism. Welfare capitalism,
Speaker 13: like company unions, they sort of top down initiatives designed
Speaker 13: to win, as I pointed out, factory solidarity instead of
Speaker 13: class solidarity. And so how successful that was probably not.
Speaker 13: These bosses continued to exploit, but they did so with
Speaker 13: smiley faces.
Speaker 12: As you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, company
Speaker 12: towns never completely died, and they're making a bit of
Speaker 12: a disturbing comeback via Rockefeller's successor as the world's richest man.
Speaker 12: South African native and Texas transplant Elon Musk. Texas Governor
Speaker 12: Greg Abbott has been a big ally of Musk at
Speaker 12: least until his nasty split with Trump over the president's
Speaker 12: tax and spending policies. But nonetheless, Musk is still popular
Speaker 12: in Texas, and the state and local governments, for instance,
Speaker 12: have given Musk sixty four million dollars worth of tax
Speaker 12: breaks to establish his Tesla factory called Giga Texas in
Speaker 12: Travis County, not far from the state capitol.
Speaker 11: COVID nineteen restrictions in California during the pandemic and rage,
Speaker 11: Musk for a time defied state law. He derided California
Speaker 11: as defined by quote overregulation, over litigation, and over taxation,
Speaker 11: poop on the sidewalk, and scorn. In contrast, Texas stood
Speaker 11: out for its lax environmental and labor standards. As Abbot
Speaker 11: bragged to the Fox Business Channel.
Speaker 4: A need that Elon had with speed.
Speaker 15: He does everything fast, and this would have taken five,
Speaker 15: maybe ten years to accomplish in California. I told him
Speaker 15: that Texas moves at the speed of business. He was
Speaker 15: able to complete a mal long gigafactory in a year
Speaker 15: and a half. That is unheard of, probably not replicable
Speaker 15: in any other state.
Speaker 12: Whether Bastor residents liked Musk or not, it soon became
Speaker 12: clear that he was making a very large local footprint.
Speaker 12: Bastrip County has always been as for its beauty. This
Speaker 12: is how Bastro sold itself to tourists, businesses, and potential
Speaker 12: residents in the early two thousands.
Speaker 1: Next time you're on the way between Houston and Austin
Speaker 1: or points in between, you want to stop here in Bastrov.
Speaker 1: We've got a pretty little place here along the Colorado River,
Speaker 1: a place with charm and great natural beauty. We're the
Speaker 1: home of the lost times. So cross the bridge into
Speaker 1: the old town and have a look. We've been growing
Speaker 1: here since eighteen thirty two, and growing in a good way,
Speaker 1: a way that looks to the future and that preserves
Speaker 1: the landmarks of the past. Bastrop has more than one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty homes and other commercial and public buildings
Speaker 1: on the National Register of Historic Places. Some people come
Speaker 1: here just to drive around town and see the pretty houses.
Speaker 11: There's a heavy price for moving at Greg Abbott's beat
Speaker 11: a business. However, chap Ambrose, a landowner in Bashtrop County,
Speaker 11: thirty three miles southeast of Austin, said that he admired
Speaker 11: Musk for being a high tech titan. He was excited
Speaker 11: when the billionaire announced he was going to move part
Speaker 11: of his business empire to the small, mostly agricultural county.
Speaker 11: Ambrose describes his feelings about musk arrival in his YouTube
Speaker 11: series Keep Bashstrop Boring.
Speaker 7: The weird part here is I'm actually an Elon Musk fan.
Speaker 7: I have my Tesla cybertruck reservation here from November of
Speaker 7: twenty nineteen, and SpaceX's Starlink, their satellite service. I've also
Speaker 7: signed up for last year.
Speaker 11: All of Bashtrop's natural and architectural splendor, however, is in
Speaker 11: danger since Musk came to town. In Texas counties have
Speaker 11: even less ability to protect the environment than these cities,
Speaker 11: and Musk, hat strategically places operation on land will face
Speaker 11: lax local oversight. He used his fortune to buy about
Speaker 11: thirty five thousand acres of what was once farmland in
Speaker 11: Bastrop County, which is now headquarters for the Boring Company.
Speaker 11: The Boring Company plans to build tunnels Musk hoops one
Speaker 11: day will provide high speed underground alternatives to our current
Speaker 11: web of interstates. Musk has secured permits to dig six
Speaker 11: test tunnels in Baschtup County, which is now also officially
Speaker 11: the headquarters of his social media platform X formerly known
Speaker 11: as Twitter. The Musk Industrial complex also includes a five
Speaker 11: hundred thousand square foot warehouse where the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation,
Speaker 11: more commonly known as SpaceX, builds terminals for another Musk
Speaker 11: business venture, the satellite company Starlink. Neuralink, which manufactures computer
Speaker 11: chips that have been experimentally implanted in test subjects brains
Speaker 11: and resulted in the deaths of many chimpanzees, is also nearby.
Speaker 11: The Tesla Gigafactory, which produces electronic cars, is just thirteen
Speaker 11: miles west on an unincorporated land neighboring Travis County. I've
Speaker 11: seen it driving down the highway. It's an abomination. Construction
Speaker 11: has also begun on a company town Musk has named Snailbrook.
Speaker 11: Plans for Snailbook eventually include one hundred and ten single
Speaker 11: family rental homes actually owned by Musk. So far, fewer
Speaker 11: than twenty modular homes have been completed. According to teen Vogue,
Speaker 11: plans are that rent for these houses will start at
Speaker 11: about eight hundred a month for two or three bedroom dwelling,
Speaker 11: which is well below the nineteen hundred and twenty five
Speaker 11: dollars median rent. In bashtrop County, a Montessori school called
Speaker 11: ad Astra, which from the Latin which means too the Stars,
Speaker 11: is open, along with the boring bodega, which the Austin
Speaker 11: American Statesman notes offers snacks, soda, coffee, beer, wine, a
Speaker 11: children's playground, lounge space complete with video games and beanbag toss,
Speaker 11: a pickleball court that can be rented for a dollar
Speaker 11: an hour, and of course, a variety of boring company merchandise,
Speaker 11: such as a T shirt that says tunnel Mars.
Speaker 12: This purported worker utopia already has a Gilded Age style catch.
Speaker 12: If workers get fired by Musk Long, famous for his
Speaker 12: volatility and mass layoffs at his companies, they will only
Speaker 12: have a month to vacate their homes. And, as with
Speaker 12: the Gilded Age, much under the Snailbrook glitter is not gold.
Speaker 12: The town's playground, for instance, lack shade from the broiling
Speaker 12: summertime Central Texas heat, and much of the equipment is
Speaker 12: broken and made of inferior materials. The Monastery school initially
Speaker 12: admitted fifty students, but the campus wasn't big enough. Only
Speaker 12: sixteen actually attended when classes first opened. Because the facilities
Speaker 12: were too small.
Speaker 11: Musk once marketed himself as an environmental savior. His electric
Speaker 11: cars would supposedly save the planet from climate change. However,
Speaker 11: in Bashstrop County, he's a major polluter. The Boring company
Speaker 11: petitioned Texas for the right to pour one hundred and
Speaker 11: forty three thousand gallons of treated wastewater into the Colorado
Speaker 11: River every single day. Meanwhile, the Texts Commission on Environmental
Speaker 11: Quality to date has cited SpaceX and the Boring Company
Speaker 11: thirteen times because the unauthorized discharge of water used to
Speaker 11: clean concrete trucks. The company also failed to meet state
Speaker 11: standards regarding erosion control and the release of toxic chemicals
Speaker 11: in the soil, As teen Vogue reported. However, the resulting
Speaker 11: fines represent mere pocket change for a man who earns
Speaker 11: an estimated one thousand dollars a second. The self professed
Speaker 11: Musk fan Chap Ambrose, who he heard from earlier, said
Speaker 11: he's disappointed about all this.
Speaker 7: There's a culture of secrecy and it seems they're actively
Speaker 7: trying to obscure the truth, not just from neighbors, but
Speaker 7: also are county officials. If you're going to prototype the
Speaker 7: world's fastest tunneling machine in minderborhood. Then I expect the
Speaker 7: most innovative and transparent safety systems to go alongside it.
Speaker 7: Why do they refuse to give direct answers? And why
Speaker 7: won't they put their promises in writing? Why do they
Speaker 7: refuse to follow the very minimal restrictions we have in
Speaker 7: Texas for development? And why do I have to go
Speaker 7: to Commissioner Court so that they put in a legal
Speaker 7: septic system. It seems to me that they only follow
Speaker 7: the rules and behave when they're being watched.
Speaker 11: Transparency may have disappeared forever for residents. Amost other company town,
Speaker 11: one of most most lucrative companies, SpaceX, launches its rockets
Speaker 11: about twenty miles outside of Brownsville on the Texas Gulf
Speaker 11: Coast near the Mexican border. Most of the residents near
Speaker 11: the launch site, known as Boka Chica Village or Tehano's
Speaker 11: and many struggle economically. Lands and beaches are considered sacred
Speaker 11: by members of the Carazou called Mekrudo tribe of Texas.
Speaker 11: The area residents were clearly invisible to us during a
Speaker 11: twenty eighteen press conference when he spoke of how test
Speaker 11: flights such as those as he planned at the Book
Speaker 11: at Chica site, were a necessary first step for exploration
Speaker 11: in the Moon and Mars. The subsequent controversy was reported
Speaker 11: by a local TV station KRGV.
Speaker 16: When asked how soon flights would be going to the
Speaker 16: Moon or Mars, must talked about the necessary test flights
Speaker 16: that would need to take place first.
Speaker 7: Most likely it's going to cover having at a Brownsvie location,
Speaker 7: because we've got a lot of land with nobody around,
Speaker 7: and so if it was.
Speaker 10: Up, it's cool.
Speaker 11: The people at Brownsville didn't agree that if a rocket
Speaker 11: ship blew up in their neighborhood it would be quote cool.
Speaker 16: His comment is not sitting well with Gail McConaughey.
Speaker 17: He's been out here before. He damn sure. I ought
Speaker 17: to know that he's seen the village. You gotta know
Speaker 17: that it's not a ghost home.
Speaker 16: McConaughey and his wife have been living at Bukachka Village
Speaker 16: every winter for the past eleven years. He says he's
Speaker 16: offended that he and the other residents are considered nobody.
Speaker 16: It also raises questions, he adds, about how safe the
Speaker 16: launches will be in.
Speaker 17: A rocket that size or any size that would go up,
Speaker 17: and who knows what might happen. It might start tipping
Speaker 17: the wrong direction. Who knows if something happened to the
Speaker 17: engines and explodes, that's cool when you're talking about there's
Speaker 17: lives here, that's a mile and a half away.
Speaker 12: Kane's words were prophetic. In subsequent years, Musk's rockets did
Speaker 12: blow up, such as in April twenty twenty three, when
Speaker 12: a SpaceX special obliterated the concrete launch pad, leaving behind
Speaker 12: a massive crater. As Scientific American reported, quote, particular debris
Speaker 12: as well as concrete and steel shrapnel from the bosched
Speaker 12: launch scattered far and wide across the surrounding landscape, igniting
Speaker 12: fires and slamming into protected habitats and public beaches. Ash,
Speaker 12: dust and sand grains hurled aloft by this first star
Speaker 12: ship test rained down as far as Port Isabelle, about
Speaker 12: five miles from the launch site end quote. Another Musk
Speaker 12: rocket launch, this time from Bokachika, exploded again this past
Speaker 12: June nineteenth, as reported by WTCHR, whoa in.
Speaker 14: The skies over South Texas overnight, A massive fireball after
Speaker 14: a SpaceX rocket exploded during a static rocket test.
Speaker 8: A ground test for an upcoming launch, the.
Speaker 4: Ship thirty sixers blew up.
Speaker 10: Ship thirty six ers blue up.
Speaker 14: SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, said the Starship Rocket experienced
Speaker 14: a major anomaly while preparing for its tenth flight test,
Speaker 14: adding that all personnel are safe and there are no
Speaker 14: hazards to residents in surrounding communities. The explosion rattled nearby
Speaker 14: residents who posted videos on social media, one telling my
Speaker 14: San Antonio News quote, our whole neighborhood felt it. It
Speaker 14: shook all of our houses.
Speaker 11: In spite of this record at Mayhem. On Saturday, May third,
Speaker 11: the Chika Village held an election on whether to incorporate
Speaker 11: as a city of Starbase. The proposal to create the
Speaker 11: state's newest city carried by a vote of two hundred
Speaker 11: and twelve to six. Nearly two thirds of the electorate
Speaker 11: lived near SpaceX's launch site. Overwhelmingly the voters were Musk employees.
Speaker 11: All three candidates elected to Starbas's New City Commission ran unopposed,
Speaker 11: and one without putting up a single campaign sign or
Speaker 11: hosting a single candidate forum. All three were employees of
Speaker 11: Musk and SpaceX.
Speaker 12: As The Texas Tribune has reported, the new city government
Speaker 12: increased control over the nearby public beach, revered by local
Speaker 12: indigenous people. Some local residents feel the creation of the
Speaker 12: company town gives them even less power to protect what's
Speaker 12: seen as a local treasure.
Speaker 18: Starbase is only about one and a half square miles. It's,
Speaker 18: of course, the home of SpaceX, and the main goal
Speaker 18: is sending humans to Mars. According to the FAA, Starbas
Speaker 18: is aiming for twenty five rocket launches a year. But
Speaker 18: this is all coming with a bit of controversy, especially
Speaker 18: over access to the popular.
Speaker 6: Boca Chica Beach.
Speaker 18: Any SpaceX rocket launcher engine test requires closing a local
Speaker 18: highway to the beach, and some say Starbase is giving
Speaker 18: Musk too much control. People gathered at the beach Saturday
Speaker 18: night to protest.
Speaker 7: They're just tearing it up and doing whatever they want
Speaker 7: because they want to gentrify. They want to be a
Speaker 7: city by themselves. When you gentify the land, you're gentrifying
Speaker 7: the soul of the people.
Speaker 11: Juan Massias, the protester you just heard, is the chair
Speaker 11: of the Carazau called the Crudeo tribe of Texas. He
Speaker 11: told the Texas Tribune quote, these hills are sacred to us.
Speaker 11: They don't know the history of the land, and they're
Speaker 11: trying to erase that. Of course, Musk has a history
Speaker 11: as well, is one characterized by labor abuses.
Speaker 12: Like the Robert Barons who ruled as emperors over their
Speaker 12: Gilded Age company towns. Musk has been accused of firing
Speaker 12: union organizers at his Austin gigafactory. Workers claim Musk either
Speaker 12: didn't pay them for overtime or shortchange them. Those same
Speaker 12: workers charged that records were faked to document their safety training,
Speaker 12: and according to the Texas Observer of Publication I'm glad
Speaker 12: to contribute to, one worker said he was forced to
Speaker 12: work in a flooded part of the factory and had
Speaker 12: to work on a metal roof at night without lights.
Speaker 12: These are clear POSHA violations.
Speaker 11: Is highly unlikely that the state of Texas will require Musk
Speaker 11: to provide any transparency about his business practices. Governor Abbott
Speaker 11: recently refused the request of a media outlet, the Texas Newsroom,
Speaker 11: to release emails between him and Musk, claiming the extensive
Speaker 11: communication between the pair was quote intimate and potentially quote
Speaker 11: embarrassing and therefore not a public interest. With so much
Speaker 11: a Musk enterprise in the state, operating in company towns
Speaker 11: he politically controls on county land with little oversight. Musk
Speaker 11: has become the lone star state. It's modern, unchecked robber
Speaker 11: baron extraordinaire, and with the aid of his on again
Speaker 11: off again allied Donald Trump, he has blazed a trail
Speaker 11: for other tech billionaires. When Trump ran for president last year,
Speaker 11: he floated a proposal to build what he called quote
Speaker 11: freedom cities across the country, pushed by oligarchs like Peter Thiel,
Speaker 11: Mark Andresen and Sam Altman, who ironically now has a
Speaker 11: bit of a fit and a fight with Elon Musk.
Speaker 11: They hate each other and it's really funny. These proposed
Speaker 11: fiefdoms would function as libertarian oasis. Coal miners were once
Speaker 11: paid in scrip, and the federal government banned script in
Speaker 11: nineteen thirty eight. But nevertheless, Jeff Bezos already uses something
Speaker 11: he calls quote swag bucks that are redeemable at Amazon
Speaker 11: to reward those in the company he deems his most
Speaker 11: productive workers. Workers in the freedom cities under discussion would
Speaker 11: not earn us legal tender, but would get cryptocurrency instead,
Speaker 11: the historically stay store of value that has never ripped
Speaker 11: off thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
Speaker 11: people in the municipal monstrosities imagined in the scheme. Workers
Speaker 11: would be paid not in US currency, but, as I
Speaker 11: just said, this insane highly volatile cryptocurrency. These corporate havens
Speaker 11: would operate with the barest nods to workplace safety, environmental protections,
Speaker 11: and job security, and god forbid, might even scam their
Speaker 11: workers by trading in that same highly volatile cryptocurrency that
Speaker 11: they're paying them in back in bash Stop. Chap Ambrose
Speaker 11: thinks we can still embrace the future with that surrendering
Speaker 11: a more old fashioned concept of community. He helps them
Speaker 11: must one day sees the light.
Speaker 7: I truly hope the borrowing company succeeds in its efforts.
Speaker 7: I think tunneling makes sense, and if they can improve
Speaker 7: traffic into Austin and around it, that'd be great. But
Speaker 7: you have to be better neighbors. Texas has strongly and
Speaker 7: owner rights and you can do pretty much what you
Speaker 7: want on your land. However, Texas law also says that
Speaker 7: we share the air and you share the groundwater with
Speaker 7: me and my one year old son. So if you're
Speaker 7: going to come to my neighborhood and build the fastest
Speaker 7: and most efficient tunneling operation, then I expect the most
Speaker 7: innovative and transparent safety systems to go alongside it.
Speaker 11: The struggle against the absolute power wielded by the rulers
Speaker 11: of the Gilded Age's company towns led to actual battles
Speaker 11: with literal casualties on American soil. Doctor Pearson reminded us
Speaker 11: that the hard life and the Gilded Era, the era
Speaker 11: of company towns, represented an American norm rather than an exception,
Speaker 11: and because of Musk Teal and other modern robber barons,
Speaker 11: the battles fought in Pullman, Illinois and Ludlow, Colorado might
Speaker 11: have to be fought once again.
Speaker 13: Some of you folks may be aware of Jefferson Cowie
Speaker 13: and Nick Salvatory's book, which he calls The Great Exception,
Speaker 13: and they argue that, you know, most of American history
Speaker 13: is like the guilded. Yeah, we had a forty to
Speaker 13: fifty year period from I don't know, the thirties the
Speaker 13: seventies when things were kind of better, right, you know
Speaker 13: what Blue Magas and Red magas alike like to celebrate,
Speaker 13: But the fact is, you know, there's things were pretty
Speaker 13: exploitative then as well. And so what kind of lessons
Speaker 13: can we learn from resistance to capitalism in its various forms?
Speaker 13: And I think the key one is to trust one another.
Speaker 13: There's no substitute for working class solidarity. Stop having illusions
Speaker 13: in the Democratic Party. They're not going to save you.
Speaker 13: And so to see, you know, where where there are
Speaker 13: victories when when workers are are united, and we see
Speaker 13: a little bit of that, you know, kicking ice agents
Speaker 13: out of towns, right, I mean, that's politicians aren't helping
Speaker 13: us there, that's you know, collective action of working class people.
Speaker 13: It's not formal unions, but it's something, you know, I
Speaker 13: see hope. I see hope in the mass mobilization of
Speaker 13: working class people irrespective of race, gender, class, and any
Speaker 13: other identity.
Speaker 11: I'm Michael Phillips, So you can find me on substack
Speaker 11: at doctor m Phillips two thousand and one, on Blue
Speaker 11: Sky and Facebook. Google my name and quote White Metropolis.
Speaker 12: And I'm Stephen Wana Charlie. You can find me on
Speaker 12: Blue Sky, and I've got a Patreon and all those
Speaker 12: other things. Thank you for listening, and we hope that
Speaker 12: you found this delightful topic about Elon Musk's desire to
Speaker 12: bring back company towns informative. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 10: Hello, hell helloo, and welcome to get up and here.
Speaker 10: I'm Andrew Siege otherwise doing this andresm on YouTube and
Speaker 10: I'm here.
Speaker 8: With James, just James, and have a YouTube.
Speaker 10: Well than just James, I mean, I love talking to you,
Speaker 10: so in more than just James to me.
Speaker 8: Oh, thank you, Andrew. It's very sweet. I enjoyed these two.
Speaker 8: It's the phone for me.
Speaker 10: Yeah, So I really I'd like to get into one
Speaker 10: of the hotter topics as of late. Not the heat,
Speaker 10: so that is a hot topic. But yeah, YEAHI Artificial intelligence.
Speaker 8: Oh good, Yeah, my favorite thing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and more specifically the ways in which AI has
Speaker 10: contributed to and accentuated alienation and the capitalism and the
Speaker 10: state in the twenty first century. So that's a mouthful,
Speaker 10: but it's obviously very important.
Speaker 8: Okay, Yeah, I like you so lot.
Speaker 10: In my opinion, alienation with all its meaning is really
Speaker 10: is one of those words that you could really use
Speaker 10: to describe the current side guys, the experience of separation
Speaker 10: from yourself, from your work, from the products of your work,
Speaker 10: from your community, all these things both philosophical and material
Speaker 10: get wrapped up into this concept of alienation because it's
Speaker 10: both an experience, it's something that people feel internally, it
Speaker 10: describes the way that they see their lives, and it's
Speaker 10: also just a fact of how people work into society.
Speaker 10: You're dispossessed of the products of a labor and you're
Speaker 10: disconnected from the process of aliable and the outcomes of ilabor.
Speaker 10: And this is of course all thanks to development of
Speaker 10: capitalism and industrialization and this development of a mass society
Speaker 10: quote unquote with all the apathy and loss of agency
Speaker 10: and weaken social fabric that generates.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's I think alienation is like something we don't
Speaker 8: talk about enough. It's like the thing that ties together
Speaker 8: that despare the loneliness. The loneliness is is maybe like
Speaker 8: it's a way that capitalism has come to talk about
Speaker 8: alienation without acknowledging the capitalism is creating alienation. Every sort
Speaker 8: of developed state in the colonial core have a knowledge
Speaker 8: loneliness is a problem. Right, I saw Gavin Newsome was
Speaker 8: with launching a loneliness campaign. But like the system is
Speaker 8: a problem. The alienation is created by the way that
Speaker 8: things are and like we can't fixate without changing the
Speaker 8: way those things.
Speaker 10: Are exactly exactly. It comes down to conditions. I mean,
Speaker 10: in particular, I think we see alienation manifest in most
Speaker 10: in our relationships, of course, and in our works. And
Speaker 10: it's been an issue for some decades now. And what
Speaker 10: I'm really intrigued by is, you know, this has been
Speaker 10: an issue for a while, but how is AI interacting
Speaker 10: with these issues? How is EI impacting the alienation that
Speaker 10: we already experience under the system.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm currently teaching a class at the
Speaker 8: community college to class about pre sixteen hundred history, and like,
Speaker 8: I teach a little bit every year, right, and every
Speaker 8: year I've seen what AI use. But this year this
Speaker 8: is fully blackpilled me, Like, I don't quite know how
Speaker 8: to describe the feelings I'm experiencing, I guess, but it's
Speaker 8: class I assigned like David Graeber, I assigned Jim Scott.
Speaker 8: I assigned Charles Tilly on state making and war making, right,
Speaker 8: like very basic left libertarian kind of text, right, which
Speaker 8: for many people will be the first time they encounter
Speaker 8: the concept of like what if no state? What if
Speaker 8: state bad? And I think they're all writing in a
Speaker 8: way that's very approachable to people who don't, you know,
Speaker 8: like dense academic writing is annoying and pretentious and I
Speaker 8: don't like it. Every time I do this, Couse, it
Speaker 8: used to be the case of like thirty to forty ten,
Speaker 8: the students would be like, holy fuck. Whether they like
Speaker 8: it or not, it's a new concept and it's cool,
Speaker 8: and they engage with it in like a passionate way,
Speaker 8: a human way. Every year it's got worse, and now,
Speaker 8: like I can think of two students out of one
Speaker 8: hundred who are like engaging with it in any human way,
Speaker 8: and I'm sure most of them, I would imagine they
Speaker 8: buy the AI, summarized the text, or in many cases
Speaker 8: they certainly have used AI to just respond. I let
Speaker 8: my students respond in ways that they feel appropriate, right,
Speaker 8: so that they could do videos or different things if
Speaker 8: they wanted to do like a they wanted to make
Speaker 8: a video about instead of doing an essay, That's fine
Speaker 8: with me. I don't care. I just want them to
Speaker 8: read the shit and think about it. But like, there's
Speaker 8: been no human reaction, and that's so sad to me.
Speaker 8: Like the reason they teach is to get young people
Speaker 8: to see the world differently. It certainly isn't for the
Speaker 8: fucking money, And that's just i'man capable of doing that now,
Speaker 8: or like I can't get through that alienation that like
Speaker 8: I can't get people to engage, and like, think about it. Obviously,
Speaker 8: I got to work that shit out, right, Like this
Speaker 8: generation of people who went through high school when AI
Speaker 8: with a thing and detecting AI, use in long form
Speaker 8: writing was not very well developed, so they were able
Speaker 8: to use it instead of doing long form writing and
Speaker 8: maybe even reading long form, And like, I have to
Speaker 8: work out how to get those people to engage, not
Speaker 8: to be so sort of alienated from the concept of
Speaker 8: reading and absorbing big ideas. But I haven't fuckly worked
Speaker 8: it out yet.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's a it's a really big issue, and it's
Speaker 10: only cruent, you know, as EI expands, I mean, it's
Speaker 10: not so much the focus of this episode, but it
Speaker 10: is something that I wanted to touch on. You know,
Speaker 10: people used to be doing fine without it, used to
Speaker 10: be able to function without it three years ago, and
Speaker 10: now you talk to them and they can't live without it.
Speaker 10: They have to run everything through AI. You know, people
Speaker 10: have offloaded most of their cognitive processes the yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 10: you know, and yeah, you know, we talk about the
Speaker 10: environmental impact of that, the way the data centers are
Speaker 10: damage in the environment, taking fresh water and taking vast
Speaker 10: amounts of any from the system. So we all rely
Speaker 10: upon to live and you know, we could, as we
Speaker 10: touched on, talk about called schools and the education systems
Speaker 10: pretty much falling apart. Yeah, I mean, I know you're
Speaker 10: one of those, you know, genuinely passionate professors. But I've
Speaker 10: noticed is this this whole fast now in many sections
Speaker 10: of the education system where you have students he I
Speaker 10: summarize in material if even doing that, you know, submit
Speaker 10: an EI generated essays or AI generated material, and the
Speaker 10: professors just heah, I created.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I've heard of this.
Speaker 10: So it's just one one big puppet schew, you know,
Speaker 10: one one big fast god.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, exactly, one big charade, which you know, to
Speaker 8: an extent, education has always just been that, right, one
Speaker 8: big fast. But there are things that are redeemable about it.
Speaker 8: And I'm just talking about teaching now, and I'll stop
Speaker 8: in a minute. There's very little demand for in person
Speaker 8: classes compared to online classes anymore, so like that makes
Speaker 8: it harder for us to break through that alienation, right,
Speaker 8: Like there's something special about sitting in a room and
Speaker 8: talking just just find it's just like being like we're
Speaker 8: going to be here for ninety minutes, none of us.
Speaker 10: That's a dynamic, yeah.
Speaker 8: And it's an important dynamic. Like the function of the
Speaker 8: university is to fucking turn out people with stem degrees
Speaker 8: who can go on and make shitty apps we don't need.
Speaker 8: It's to prepare us to be citizens in the community, exactly,
Speaker 8: and we are failing at that. And yes, intead, I'm
Speaker 8: just great and chet GPT all day know.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And that's that's a big piece of the puzzle
Speaker 10: that we end up missing. Because the way in which
Speaker 10: the sort of dynamics and the connections that you would
Speaker 10: get from the university class or I'm beyond just sort
Speaker 10: of connections in general is lacking in an alienated rule
Speaker 10: and it's worsened by you know, the instruction of the eye.
Speaker 10: I managed to complete most of my education, most of
Speaker 10: my bachelor's degree, that is, prior to the pandemic. Right,
Speaker 10: I was nearing the end of my third year when lockdown,
Speaker 10: you know, came into fourth and then it just I
Speaker 10: did my entire fourth year online And honestly, I'm so
Speaker 10: glad that I was able to do my classes in person,
Speaker 10: you know, And I'm so glad that I did my classes,
Speaker 10: you know, entirely on my own in a time where
Speaker 10: you know, yeah, I was not a thing. You know,
Speaker 10: there were times where you know, it probably feels like,
Speaker 10: oh my god, it's so stressful, like, but he just
Speaker 10: had a buckle alone. You had to buckle down and
Speaker 10: figure out a way to get it done. And because
Speaker 10: we could talk about the perverse incentives of breeding systems
Speaker 10: and schools and how that sort of pushes some students
Speaker 10: who you know, may have learning difficulties or time matgement
Speaker 10: difficulties or whatever to actually do their stuff, they end
Speaker 10: up going down the air route. But yeah, I mean,
Speaker 10: even just looking back at my experience, because lockdown hits
Speaker 10: during the semester, I had a writing class that I
Speaker 10: was a part of, and every time we went into class,
Speaker 10: it was so dynamic, was so lively, it was so engaging.
Speaker 10: All the ideas were just bouncing off for each other.
Speaker 10: After the lockdown, that class completely feels a lout. Everything
Speaker 10: that we were getting from it was just absent because
Speaker 10: we were entirely online and yeah, it's really a struggle.
Speaker 10: And I think social life, not just coming out of
Speaker 10: the education conversation, social life, community and connection all ends
Speaker 10: up lacking because of the aliineas and nature of the system,
Speaker 10: the way that things have been set up. But also
Speaker 10: AI is playing a major role too. AI in a
Speaker 10: sense as a category is you know, you can have
Speaker 10: a whole discussion about that quibbolo for definitions. But in
Speaker 10: a sense AI has already been playing a major role
Speaker 10: into how people socialize even before these large language models
Speaker 10: came to be in because you have a sort of
Speaker 10: official intelligence in the algorithms that people interact with on
Speaker 10: social media. You know, people have the content they consume
Speaker 10: being curated by algorithms. They end up in these sort
Speaker 10: of echo chambers, these reinforcement loops and outrage bait and
Speaker 10: then dopamine loops, and all those things have lended to
Speaker 10: people spending more and more time online because you know,
Speaker 10: it's hitting that part of the brain, and everybody is
Speaker 10: hyper connected and always online, and more and more of
Speaker 10: life takes place on the Internet, and that has left
Speaker 10: people feeling isolated. I think loneliness is obviously not entirely
Speaker 10: the result of social media and now AI. But the
Speaker 10: sort of irony is that loneliness has been a side
Speaker 10: effect of this digital hyper connection. They may look at
Speaker 10: some of the fact that are contributing to this, this
Speaker 10: already isolated nature of our world. Right, you know, people
Speaker 10: won't have as much free time. You know, there's in
Speaker 10: as much public space as there used to be. Some
Speaker 10: people have no public space available to them. Public spaces
Speaker 10: that do exist are not open in the times when
Speaker 10: people are available to go to them. Libraries are a
Speaker 10: famous example. A lot of them are you know, not
Speaker 10: open for working people pretty much. And then people who
Speaker 10: do want to go out and socialize and stuff. You know,
Speaker 10: you're dealing with the higher cost of living, so there's
Speaker 10: little resources that you can use to you know, go
Speaker 10: and put yourself out there because you have to spend
Speaker 10: money to go to places. And then it also just
Speaker 10: burnt out energy wise because of you know, the long
Speaker 10: work week, long work hours, just trying to make against
Speaker 10: meet psychological to all of that. Yeah, and so part
Speaker 10: of what AI has been doing is pushing these AI
Speaker 10: companions on people. And you know, I don't mean to
Speaker 10: fare Mongo anything because I know there are a lot
Speaker 10: of people who reject AI and who stand against AI.
Speaker 10: And of course that could just be the bubble that
Speaker 10: I'm in, but yeah, I also know somebody in person,
Speaker 10: or rather I knew somebody in person who spoke to
Speaker 10: chachipt like their partner and therapists. Yeah, they listen like, yeah,
Speaker 10: that's it's I mean, it's sad. Yeah, it's as you said,
Speaker 10: almost kind of black pillin you know, because these chat
Speaker 10: bots they listen in a simulated sense, they respond in
Speaker 10: a simulated sense, and they affume what the person is
Speaker 10: dealing with, is going through, is venting about. They're almost
Speaker 10: like a hug box because you don't really see chat
Speaker 10: bots disagree and with the people they're speaking to. Chat
Speaker 10: Bots are very much like you know, faming, you know,
Speaker 10: they try their best to affume everything that a person
Speaker 10: is telling them. So you have this kind of cuddle
Speaker 10: box for people's egos, which in two makes it even
Speaker 10: more difficult for them to connect to real people because
Speaker 10: you know, real people are going to call you out,
Speaker 10: you know they're going to disagree with you, You're going
Speaker 10: to have friction and conflict, but there's also a lot
Speaker 10: of joy that comes from interact with real people and
Speaker 10: Unfortunately a lot of people because they're not getting that,
Speaker 10: they're turned into this on demand affection, this on demand flirtation,
Speaker 10: this pseudo therapy, and it's it's brutal, you know, Lonliness
Speaker 10: is a brutal experience. Relationships are very hard and therapy
Speaker 10: is extremely expensive for a lot of people. So I
Speaker 10: understand that, you know, you can only put so much
Speaker 10: blame on individuals because the will is not really set
Speaker 10: up to support those kind of lasting connections. People live
Speaker 10: very spread out, They have few and fewer opportunities to
Speaker 10: interact with each other. In fact, a lot of times
Speaker 10: the last time a policon had extended exposure with other
Speaker 10: people was in school or in college. And outside of
Speaker 10: that you're just kind of on your own. Yeah, and
Speaker 10: places are increasingly not walkable, the more coccentric, the sourt
Speaker 10: of spontaneity and friction and interaction that would have made
Speaker 10: relationships blossom naturally and my religious possible, as messy and
Speaker 10: inconvenience as they can be, sometimes those things are lacking
Speaker 10: now and unfortunately some for action of people, And I
Speaker 10: don't know what the actual number will be because I
Speaker 10: could imagine a lot of people will not admit that
Speaker 10: they turned to a chat pot for companionship. But it
Speaker 10: is a frightening oman of what direction we're going in.
Speaker 10: And I also worry about the potential outcomes of you know,
Speaker 10: egoic behavior that my results from that sort of continue
Speaker 10: us interaction with something that is affirming in every belief
Speaker 10: and thought and conclusion. What kind of google are we
Speaker 10: going to be there for?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's the world that super rich people already live in.
Speaker 8: One of the reasons that the gulf between the rest
Speaker 8: of us and the super rich, like the really you know,
Speaker 8: incredibly wealthy people. Part of that is that no one
Speaker 8: says no to a lot of those people, and that's
Speaker 8: why they exclusively end up socializing with each other. Right,
Speaker 8: Like they're they're they're surrounded by nothing but affirmation.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: One of the things we see was Trump, right, is
Speaker 8: that like, if there is a reality that he doesn't like,
Speaker 8: he manifests his own reality. He just speaks things and
Speaker 8: expects them to be accepted as truths.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: Growing up, my dad worked for a lot of extremely
Speaker 8: wealthy people, and so I've interacted with them, and like,
Speaker 8: there's a lot of people who just aren't used to hearing, know,
Speaker 8: or why, but not a lot that there is a
Speaker 8: number of them, And like I think when you see
Speaker 8: I was just thinking about it. The behavior that you
Speaker 8: know Trump now asserting with the Epstein thing is like
Speaker 8: it is made up, right, and it's a hoax, and
Speaker 8: it just when we were talking about AI. It sort
Speaker 8: of reminds me of that, right that like constant affirmation,
Speaker 8: because what a I want you to do is to
Speaker 8: please you so that you spend more time on it,
Speaker 8: I assume, And it's some way that it attempts to
Speaker 8: monetize that, I'm sure, and it just wants you to
Speaker 8: keep interacting with it so it can get more information
Speaker 8: to take into its model. I guess.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 8: The dates are called rush yeah, right, And people are
Speaker 8: doing the same with with wealthy people, right, They just
Speaker 8: want to interact with them so so they can siphon
Speaker 8: off some of the resources that those people have accumulated.
Speaker 8: Like it's not maybe it's not the same. I think
Speaker 8: that still humans interacting with wealthy people is distinct from
Speaker 8: an AI interacting with humans, but it sort of gives
Speaker 8: us a window into what the impact of that being
Speaker 8: most of your human interaction over time.
Speaker 7: And.
Speaker 10: As we speak of wealthy people. I suppose we should
Speaker 10: look at the other way in which AI is intersecting
Speaker 10: with alienation, right, because you know, for the current narrative
Speaker 10: has been about you know, AI is taking jobs, and
Speaker 10: before then it's about automation was taking jobs. AI is
Speaker 10: you know, a form of automation, and before that it
Speaker 10: was just innovations in general, just steps in some technological
Speaker 10: direction would be eliminating jobs. But always marvel at stepping
Speaker 10: back and looking at the whole conversation about this has
Speaker 10: taken jobs, that has taken jobs is at the root
Speaker 10: of it is this dependence on employment, on jobs for
Speaker 10: people to have, you know, life, to be able to live,
Speaker 10: to have a quality of life. We have gotten more
Speaker 10: and more productive, and I mean that productivity has helped
Speaker 10: people in some ways, and it's harmed to the environment
Speaker 10: in a lot of ways. But we have a certain
Speaker 10: level of productivity now and we've produced so much now
Speaker 10: that in some sectors we have more of the enough
Speaker 10: for several decades to come. I think fashion is one
Speaker 10: of them where we have like quite the excess of
Speaker 10: clothing everybody. And of course you could talk about how
Speaker 10: that level of productivity is done damage to our creativity
Speaker 10: or craftsmanship. But it's all the worse when you think
Speaker 10: about how even with all our productivity, the work has
Speaker 10: hardly benefited. You know, more productivity doesn't necessarily mean more pay.
Speaker 10: And so even before AI came around, we were having
Speaker 10: issues with labor and alienation, right, people disconnected from their
Speaker 10: work from whether it be a service job, a factory job,
Speaker 10: or delivery job, whatever, any of these jobs that you
Speaker 10: look at, it's structured at the end of the day,
Speaker 10: not around providing a product or providing a service, but
Speaker 10: around profit, around the power dynamic between the owner, the
Speaker 10: capitalist and the worker. The worker who is not in
Speaker 10: control is alienated from their labor and from the products
Speaker 10: of their labor. And it's just what Famously spoke about,
Speaker 10: but he wasn't the only one to speak about it.
Speaker 10: The sort of alienated label that is compelled rather than creative,
Speaker 10: that has no control for work, and where workers are
Speaker 10: treated as commodities on a labor market. Samefully, I haven't
Speaker 10: had to look for a job in a while, but
Speaker 10: I've had to see my friends seeking jobs and it's
Speaker 10: not a nice experience. And you have to spend weeks
Speaker 10: months sometimes looking for a job. But you will most
Speaker 10: likely heed, but you need to survive, you know. And
Speaker 10: a lot of these jobs you end up looking for
Speaker 10: end up getting into and not even necessary jobs. There
Speaker 10: are a lot of bullshit jobs. And I don't contribute
Speaker 10: to a person's you know, development and fulfillment or they
Speaker 10: could have humanity in any way. Yeah, And then a
Speaker 10: lot of the benefits that people have fought for, even
Speaker 10: for these jobs have either been eroded you know, rolled
Speaker 10: back over time, or they've been loophole doubt. So you know,
Speaker 10: for example, you don't even get enough hours to qualify
Speaker 10: for benefits when you work at certain places, or you
Speaker 10: are an independent contractor instead of an employee, so they
Speaker 10: can get away from you know, giving me your due.
Speaker 10: And so then in this environment you have EI coming
Speaker 10: in now and taking certain rules varying levels of quality
Speaker 10: and writing and in art and coding and administrative work.
Speaker 10: And I don't know, I think for one, EI does
Speaker 10: a lot of these jobs very poorly. But then there's
Speaker 10: also cases where I don't like copyrighting, which is something
Speaker 10: I used to do. The EI copyrighting and the sort
Speaker 10: of copyrighting that I had to write is back in
Speaker 10: the days almost indistinguishable in terms of it feels you
Speaker 10: know generic, quite less, you know slop, like it's just
Speaker 10: you're pumping this out to pollute the waves in a sense.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's very like it has a very formulaic nature
Speaker 8: when a human does it. It's funny when I think
Speaker 8: about copywriting, right, Like you can see that people have
Speaker 8: identified the completely generic nature of it, because occasionally you'll
Speaker 8: have like brands who do it in a non formulaic
Speaker 8: way and briefly see success from it, like just by
Speaker 8: having some element of humanity in it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, like Wendy is when they did that for a
Speaker 10: little while. Then yeah, then every brand to copy that
Speaker 10: method and then it became steel and yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8: Someone wist sometimes like puncture it for a minute and
Speaker 8: then ye, like you say, everyone will run after it
Speaker 8: like a pit viper. Sunglasses, this one, I guess they're
Speaker 8: very popular with like right wing bigots. Every time like
Speaker 8: biggots are pictured in their sunglasses, they'll like donate money
Speaker 8: to LGBTQ affirming causes or like gender affirming care stuff
Speaker 8: or whatever depends what the people are being bigoted about.
Speaker 8: And like briefly I saw them have success with that
Speaker 8: just because like people are so accustomed to brands being
Speaker 8: a political rather just being like no, fuck you. So
Speaker 8: by doing the kind of basics of being a good person,
Speaker 8: it appears human and therefore not so generic, and people
Speaker 8: you know, briefly fall in love with it or.
Speaker 10: Well yeah, but I mean, at the end of the day,
Speaker 10: of the corporations are our persons. There are people behind corporations. Yeah,
Speaker 10: And I guess I sort of sort of wonder with
Speaker 10: these kinds of jobs that are all being build in
Speaker 10: at least in part by AI, what is the impact
Speaker 10: on a person self worse? Oh yeah, but their their
Speaker 10: skilled to be just sort of swapped out for a machine.
Speaker 10: You know, a lot of people have already felt that
Speaker 10: their work is non essential, and then you have a
Speaker 10: sense of being replaceable and unneeded. And in some cases
Speaker 10: the difference is negligible because, like I said, the work
Speaker 10: they was already being put out was the sort of
Speaker 10: generic stuff that it sort of fills people, yeah, and
Speaker 10: fill screens. But then you also have more necessary, the
Speaker 10: more creative work. It is also just being sort of
Speaker 10: funneled out. You know, I'm seeing billboards all over the
Speaker 10: place that just have like this nasty, smooth looking like
Speaker 10: AI generated pictures. Yeah, just a lot of slop you know,
Speaker 10: slop content, slop ad, slop emails, you know, even on
Speaker 10: YouTube now Like I like to listen to these sort
Speaker 10: of music mixes while I work sometimes, and most of
Speaker 10: the channels being recommended with music mixes on YouTube nowadays,
Speaker 10: at least to the genres that I would listen to,
Speaker 10: it's just like, yeah, I generated jazz chill. The thing
Speaker 10: is they were't title it that way. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 10: the titlet some some word and they probably haven't somewhat
Speaker 10: AI generated thumbnail and whatever. And then you just, you know,
Speaker 10: if you're unaware of the pattern of how those channels operate.
Speaker 10: My click on it, thinking oh, it's just like a
Speaker 10: music mix, like every other music mix, and then you
Speaker 10: listened to it for a while and listen to a
Speaker 10: few of them, when you realize, oh, this is just
Speaker 10: like a machine made this. It has no flavor, yeah,
Speaker 10: like no soul. There's also a lot of articles that
Speaker 10: just fill in the Internet. It's just like slow yeah, yeah,
Speaker 10: you know, just AI generated articles that feed into the
Speaker 10: AI pool of references, and it's the AI almost eats itself. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and it's sad, but I think it was like we
Speaker 10: always going in this direction in a sense, not to
Speaker 10: say it was entirely inevitable, but this was the trajectory
Speaker 10: that we appointed that this actually could have been changed.
Speaker 10: But now it hasn't been. So it's how we kind
Speaker 10: of got here. I don't know if it's just me,
Speaker 10: but I feel like there was a time when boy,
Speaker 10: it may it may still be true that still flus
Speaker 10: is not always a good thing. There's something to be
Speaker 10: said about the value that we impue to things when
Speaker 10: they are a bit rarer, you know, when it's you
Speaker 10: have to be more attentive and engaging with it.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 10: I was actually thinking about it earlier today when I
Speaker 10: was a child and I was watching TV. You know,
Speaker 10: if they didn't have anything on the TV that I
Speaker 10: wanted to watch, and I have to go and do
Speaker 10: something else, right, Yeah, And nowadays TV is pretty much
Speaker 10: unlimited because at any point in time, you couldn't have
Speaker 10: access to anything that an algorithm could see. If you're
Speaker 10: update is perfectly curated to your interests. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 10: auto play and everything. It's just one hits after the next.
Speaker 10: In that excess, I just feel like we've lost the
Speaker 10: sort of attentive curation of your tease, curation of and
Speaker 10: evaluation of things. Of the effort and energy and craft
Speaker 10: goes into making things. We just end up sort of
Speaker 10: taking things for granted, and.
Speaker 8: Like I think we kind of lower the standard that
Speaker 8: we will accept because it's just so much of it,
Speaker 8: so much volume of it. Yeah, Like, and you're not
Speaker 8: so attentive to it because it's always there that like
Speaker 8: slop becomes okay, it just kind of fills the gaps
Speaker 8: in this non stop stream of content.
Speaker 10: Yes, just filling feeling the noise. I have to catch
Speaker 10: myself sometimes, yeah, because I mean just like sometimes I
Speaker 10: just put something on because it was there, you know,
Speaker 10: and just feeling noise, Like sometimes I have to remind myself,
Speaker 10: you know, palls, just be with your thoughts for a bit,
Speaker 10: you know.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I try not to put too much blame
Speaker 10: on myself even as I try to work on it,
Speaker 10: because all of this, once again is high design.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: You know, these platforms and these algorithms have been set
Speaker 10: up to perfectly. They're perfectly hone into their abilities exploit
Speaker 10: the little shortcuts and weaknesses in the human mind to
Speaker 10: endy just for as long as possible. Yeah. Like so
Speaker 10: even if you feel like, oh my gosh, I want
Speaker 10: to get off those media, I want to quit this,
Speaker 10: that and the other, it's hard. Yeah, you know, even
Speaker 10: on you when you know in your mind that it's detrimental,
Speaker 10: that it's affecting your negatively, you still end up going
Speaker 10: back because again it's it's hacked into your brain in
Speaker 10: a sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: But so I'd just really frustrated by the way that
Speaker 10: AI has contributed to this sort of disconnect because I
Speaker 10: also think it makes the whole breath of human creativity
Speaker 10: a lot less valued, practiced and supported, you know, instead
Speaker 10: of people actually respecting and you know, supporting the craft
Speaker 10: and the effort that goes into into things, it's just like, oh,
Speaker 10: scroll toed the next thing, scrollted the next thing, or
Speaker 10: for some people who seem to love HI, it's just oh, yeah,
Speaker 10: you're you're you're obsolete. Now you could be replaced by
Speaker 10: this you know junk.
Speaker 8: Yeah, of just thinking about like like I see it
Speaker 8: so often in like like given in revolutionary spaces, I'll
Speaker 8: see it right like there, I guess sometimes is what
Speaker 8: it is actually is AI accounts that have no idea
Speaker 8: what a revolution is. There incapable of doing so because
Speaker 8: they're not human. But like I'm just designed to monetize clicks.
Speaker 8: You know, you'll see there's a bunch of fucking Israel
Speaker 8: stands with Kurtistan ads, which you'll just like AI generate
Speaker 8: pictures of yep as women like the women who fight
Speaker 8: for their anes, right, and like it's just I don't
Speaker 8: think these are not again, people are actually part of
Speaker 8: the revolution, right, there are people who just who want
Speaker 8: to in a sense objectify the revolution and the women
Speaker 8: who fought in it and continue to fight in it
Speaker 8: for financial benefit. But like it's the antithesis of the
Speaker 8: beautiful life that people are trying to build there, right,
Speaker 8: Like it is the opposite of everything that that revolution
Speaker 8: stands for.
Speaker 10: So you're seeing people are like AI generates and these
Speaker 10: human fighters.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yes, exactly, and then using that for some either
Speaker 8: just straight because you get paid per click on X
Speaker 8: now right, or for some nefarious propaganda bullshit, But like
Speaker 8: it's and then by contrast, right by friends in Memma,
Speaker 8: there's a group called Art Strike Collective who do these
Speaker 8: cul drawings of various individuals who have fought in the revolution,
Speaker 8: and like one is a beautiful thing that shows your
Speaker 8: respect for these people, many of whom have given their
Speaker 8: life for this revolution. And another is just complete fucking
Speaker 8: slop that is actively harming the thing it's supposed to
Speaker 8: be supporting.
Speaker 10: Yeah, unfortunately, and it's a cliche at this point, but
Speaker 10: many such cases.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I saw this short lecture on YouTube by a professor
Speaker 10: professor name as jam This just a short clip from
Speaker 10: I'm assuming a longer lecture, he said. The title of
Speaker 10: the video is really what captured me. It was something
Speaker 10: along the lines of consumerism is the perfection of slavery,
Speaker 10: and it was really speaking about how we are able
Speaker 10: to be so perfectly locked into our role as workers,
Speaker 10: as cogs in this machine to become, you know, so
Speaker 10: docile because of just how good the consumeristic system has
Speaker 10: gotten at keeping us chasing that next you know, dopamine,
Speaker 10: hit that next purchase, that next thing to consume.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 10: So we're still being exploited, We are still wage slaves
Speaker 10: in a sense, but we are either unaware of it
Speaker 10: or we accept that role just to chase after, you know,
Speaker 10: the next tie of consumption.
Speaker 8: H Yeah, Like when you think about a brave new
Speaker 8: world in nineteen eighty four, right, these two dystopian novels roughly,
Speaker 8: I mean briefly work came up before eight if nineteen
Speaker 8: eighty four.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 8: The difference is one is like a boot jamping on
Speaker 8: the human face forever, which is like nearly four in
Speaker 8: hux Leaves, Dystopia is based on people being essentially bought
Speaker 8: off through pleasure.
Speaker 10: Right. Yeah, it's like unlimited cookie in for every wine.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they call it. It's called sohmer. I think, right,
Speaker 8: we're in the unlimited Cane for everyone world, right, like
Speaker 8: it's it's stuf.
Speaker 10: I mean, I think we're in both. You know, it's
Speaker 10: a simultaneously a hux LEYA and all. Well, yeah, yeah dystopia.
Speaker 10: You know what's the fourth worlds?
Speaker 8: Yeah, you're right. I'm starting to read Jack London's Dystopia
Speaker 8: the Iron Heel. Now I've I've decided I want to
Speaker 8: work out who was best calling the dystopia. But yeah,
Speaker 8: we we have a little bit of both. Now we
Speaker 8: have the they'll get you at both ends, right, Like
Speaker 8: they'll try and give you things to keep you placid
Speaker 8: and then also things to keep you afraid. Yeah.
Speaker 10: So, I mean there's there's a lot of reasons to
Speaker 10: the spare. You know, people just blankly embracing eie and
Speaker 10: they don't see the problem with you was in the
Speaker 10: eye and all these different things. There's also, as I'd
Speaker 10: like to end things on reason to right, there are
Speaker 10: people who are willing to voycott it. Who are you know,
Speaker 10: maintaining a stigma around it? You know, people are not
Speaker 10: taking it lined down? Artists, why are not taking it
Speaker 10: lined down? Writers are taking it line doown? Designers? We're
Speaker 10: not taking it lined down. People are still craving the authenticity,
Speaker 10: connection and craft that comes from human people. And although
Speaker 10: there's little any individual can do to resist the alienation
Speaker 10: of this society, whether be at work or relationships by themselves,
Speaker 10: you know, it's very hard, there are things we can
Speaker 10: do together in tandem to make things a little bit
Speaker 10: easier as we sort of try and strive toward social revolution.
Speaker 10: You know, there's the classic you know, touch graphs, you know,
Speaker 10: log off and try and find where people are. There's
Speaker 10: also the individualist solution of reclaiming your agency by finding
Speaker 10: some version of digital minimalism that works for you, you know,
Speaker 10: taking a break, so now limiting your screen time here
Speaker 10: and there. But really it's gonna take system change. It's
Speaker 10: gonna take collective action. It's gonna take us boycotton both.
Speaker 10: You know, of course the AI products, there's a boycott
Speaker 10: already taking place with those. But then also just yeah,
Speaker 10: striking add the pressure points of the system and prefiguring
Speaker 10: about the world for everyone. Yeah, and you know, I
Speaker 10: hope that everybody is able to do what they can
Speaker 10: to take steps in that direction. And yeah, so please
Speaker 10: don't use the I.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I always like that Supermandante
Speaker 8: Marcos quote where he says, like, it's not necessary to
Speaker 8: conquer the world, it's sufficient to build a new one.
Speaker 8: I like that approach to this AI stuff. The way
Speaker 8: we make it so people in our community don't turn
Speaker 8: to AI to talk about things they want to talk
Speaker 8: about is to be there for them to talk to, right,
Speaker 8: to build community, to build real human interactions with each other,
Speaker 8: so people don't have real human conversations with the computer.
Speaker 10: Absolutely agreed. Yeah, and that's all they have for today.
Speaker 10: So all thought, it's all the people. This has been,
Speaker 10: It could happen here. I've been Andrew, this has been
Speaker 10: James and Lasst Yeah.
Speaker 8: Thanks. We had a very funny introduction.
Speaker 10: It was really good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it referenced our company sexual harassment protocols. It was hilarious.
Speaker 2: You're never going to hear it. We weren't recording.
Speaker 4: I was recording, so you can hear my seesh. Okay.
Speaker 8: Yeah, if you can just accept what Garrison said without
Speaker 8: contract and we'll open with that, that'll be great. Yeah.
Speaker 4: That is a classic Robert Evans intro. You just did it.
Speaker 4: I feel like it always comes from insight.
Speaker 2: Welcome to it could happen here a podcast about journalistic objectivity.
Speaker 2: That's right, a thing that we've just demonstrated perfectly.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, that's the professional media class. So let's have
Speaker 8: a little talk about media objectivity. Right. It's been a
Speaker 8: major tenor of traditional legacy media that they must remain unbiased.
Speaker 8: This hasn't always been the case in the United States.
Speaker 8: Right used to have explicitly partisan news sources, which we
Speaker 8: have now with Fox News, I guess. But that's why
Speaker 8: you have newspapers like I think Saint Louis has a
Speaker 8: Saint Louis Democrat or the SO and so Republican like
Speaker 8: that they would be very explicitly a partisan newspaper. It's
Speaker 8: only really when journalism sort of took on this strong
Speaker 8: professional and I mean professional here in terms of like
Speaker 8: the professions, right, like law, accounting, jobs that are associated
Speaker 8: with university education, and a class identity that it started
Speaker 8: to assert this kind of it's an attempt to appear
Speaker 8: rational and scientific in its methodologies, right. And one of
Speaker 8: the ways that journalism did this was to talk about objectivity.
Speaker 8: I should indicate here that objectivity is supposed to be
Speaker 8: a means of verifying information. I like that we should
Speaker 8: objectively check that what we have written is correct.
Speaker 2: The example I always give is that if I'm in
Speaker 2: a protest scene where there's a clash between crowd boys
Speaker 2: and you know, a group of leftists, and you know,
Speaker 2: someone on the left pulls out a can of mace
Speaker 2: and sprays it first, that's objectively what happened. Now, that
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that that's the only thing I report. For example,
Speaker 2: if the person they maye is somebody who has been
Speaker 2: like harassing those individuals online for weeks, or has been
Speaker 2: doxing them, or that as salted them at previous like,
Speaker 2: all of that is like relevant context, but it doesn't
Speaker 2: change objectively happened in that instant, right, Like, it's not
Speaker 2: on me to pretend that I think these sides are equal,
Speaker 2: but it is on me to accurately report like what happens. Yes,
Speaker 2: And I think one of the one of the areas
Speaker 2: in which a lot of people, especially when we were
Speaker 2: talking about, like, you know, situations like this, a lot
Speaker 2: of folks in kind of legacy media get stuff wrong.
Speaker 2: Is they think that all that matters and what is
Speaker 2: what happens in that moment, right, and what happened previously,
Speaker 2: what's happened in other engagements, what's happened like over you know,
Speaker 2: the last two or three years of however long the
Speaker 2: conflict has been going on that city is immaterial. Well,
Speaker 2: all that matters is what happened in that second when
Speaker 2: that reporter was Onseene. And if you're thinking that way,
Speaker 2: you're going to miss more than someone who comes in
Speaker 2: with just an outright bias, you know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And like I think very often it's seen as
Speaker 8: kind of instead of being like a value of the
Speaker 8: outlet and the way it verifies information, it seems being
Speaker 8: a personal kind of like quality that journalists should have
Speaker 8: in every aspect their lives. Yeah, Like, I'm aware that
Speaker 8: some of the big legacy broadsheets in the us, like,
Speaker 8: you can't attend to protest unless you are covering the protest, right.
Speaker 2: And there's even that famous case of the journalists being like,
Speaker 2: I don't vote because I think that that would be
Speaker 2: a violation of my objectivity.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that. I got have forgotten
Speaker 8: about that one.
Speaker 2: Like you're allowed to have opinions, that's just not supposed
Speaker 2: to be the entire basis of your reporting, you know exactly.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Like, and I think sometimes because people always do
Speaker 8: have opinions, right, but the opinions that are conceived of
Speaker 8: as neutral and the ones that are conceived of as
Speaker 8: being subjective are very telling, right, Like, the media for
Speaker 8: a long time has been the domain of educated, older
Speaker 8: white men, like people like me. I guess I'm not old,
Speaker 8: but getting that way. And it also has been the
Speaker 8: domain of like capital in the state, right, like Jeffrey
Speaker 8: Bezos owned several newspapers pro market biases, pro capitalism, biases,
Speaker 8: pro state by those are not really investigated much in
Speaker 8: the media in the way that other biases might be. Right,
Speaker 8: It's also created this idea that the media always needs
Speaker 8: to shoot for the middle in any given discussion, which
Speaker 8: I kind of want to investigate a bit when Donald
Speaker 8: Trump says something which is overt, like Donald Trump has
Speaker 8: said things which are nativists, right, Nativism is a form
Speaker 8: of racism. Donald Trump, therefore has said racist shit. The
Speaker 8: way that this is far too often treated in the
Speaker 8: legacy media is it's the racist shit that Donald Trump said, correct,
Speaker 8: or like, maybe we should consider this racist thing that
Speaker 8: so and so has said, right, rather than this shit
Speaker 8: is racist Donald Trump has said some shit that it's racist,
Speaker 8: or other members of the Republican Party. All this serves
Speaker 8: to do is when we have a topic and the
Speaker 8: people in Congress anchor themselves on very far right, what
Speaker 8: is acceptable discourse, The media then moves discourse to to
Speaker 8: write such so that position is in the center right,
Speaker 8: it serves to ratchet the Overton window to the right.
Speaker 8: I'm demonstrating this for my colleagues with hand signals, which,
Speaker 8: of course only two of the hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 8: people listening to me will be able to see the
Speaker 8: right way to our podcast.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was a very compelling mime of a ratchet
Speaker 4: like it looked like you basically were doing it. I
Speaker 4: could not tell.
Speaker 2: I couldn't tell the difference. No, that's why we call
Speaker 2: you ratchet straps out, got.
Speaker 8: Me a ratchet, Jimmy, Yeah, it's This podcast is sponsored
Speaker 8: by Invisible Ratchet. Now it's time to pivot to add.
Speaker 8: It's not time to pivot to add yet. I think
Speaker 8: we should talk about the way other professions concerned with
Speaker 8: the truths deal with this topic, right, because journalism is
Speaker 8: pretty much unique and considering objectivity something that we as
Speaker 8: individuals have to embody in every action that we take,
Speaker 8: and I guess the most relevant one will be academia,
Speaker 8: which is something else I am unfortunate enough to have
Speaker 8: participated in for far too much of my adult life.
Speaker 8: So academia still not great, But we have accepted that
Speaker 8: everyone is biased in academia.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 8: We rely on, among many other things, something called standpoint theory, right,
Speaker 8: which is a cornerstone of modern feminist thought. Most of
Speaker 8: you will be aware of it, even if you're not
Speaker 8: aware of it. Basically, it holds that we see the
Speaker 8: world differently based on where we see it from. Our gender, sexuality, raise, ethnicity, experience, age,
Speaker 8: and a million other things impact the truth we know
Speaker 8: in the world we experience, and standpoint theory posits that
Speaker 8: perhaps people not from a certain thretting may have valuable
Speaker 8: insights into it. Right, So sometimes the outsider perspective is
Speaker 8: a valuable one. But also people from that setting may
Speaker 8: see things outsiders may not see, and we have to
Speaker 8: acknowledge those biases, right, and then continue to tell the truth.
Speaker 8: How do we tell the truth in academia we do
Speaker 8: something called peer review. Peer review is bad. Peer review
Speaker 8: strongly reinforces the status quote right. I will give one example.
Speaker 8: I once had a journal article, right for a history journal,
Speaker 8: killed in peer review. The piece was about the nineteen
Speaker 8: oh nine tour of Catalonia that was a bicycle competition
Speaker 8: for those of you who aren't familiar. It was killed
Speaker 8: because my media analysis didn't mention television coverage. The television
Speaker 8: was kind of crudely invented in the nineteen twenties, and
Speaker 8: did it become widely available until the nineteen forties, Right, Like,
Speaker 8: this is not a reasonable objection. Nonetheless, someone was able
Speaker 8: to kill my piece because of it. Because that's how
Speaker 8: peer review works, right. The people who are established, the
Speaker 8: people who are in positions of power, can kill your
Speaker 8: shit if they want to, and they can give the
Speaker 8: most ludicrous region. That is how peer review. Among other
Speaker 8: things reinforces status quo. Right. The other thing that we
Speaker 8: do in academias we declare our conflicts of interest, and
Speaker 8: this is something we don't do in journalism, right, Like
Speaker 8: outlets may have a conflict of interest policy, but again,
Speaker 8: like conflicts of interest aren't explicitly declared in a piece
Speaker 8: like you wouldn't see sometimes NPR does its.
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, I mean a number of outlets do declare like,
Speaker 2: for example, this outlet is owned by someone who has
Speaker 2: a financial interest in the company we're reporting on, or
Speaker 2: something like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if the Washington Post is doing a story about
Speaker 4: Jeff Bezos or Amazon, Yeah, usually they will say in
Speaker 4: the bottom or the top that the paper is owned
Speaker 4: by said said figure.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Where it becomes more murky is like sometimes people
Speaker 8: have a financial interest or if something is your beat, right,
Speaker 8: you may have other financial interest within that beat.
Speaker 2: Well, and there's there's the very common case of people,
Speaker 2: especially now within kind of the sub stack journalism, being
Speaker 2: like friends and social with people that they are reporting
Speaker 2: on and not disclosing to their wider audience.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like access journalism more generally, right, Yeah, Like the
Speaker 8: way I got this piece was by being invited to
Speaker 8: the drinks party, and if I say anything, I'm kind
Speaker 8: about this person, I went invited to a drinks party. Yeah,
Speaker 8: or simply the conflict of interest and is presented by
Speaker 8: the more ludicrous my headline, the more people will click
Speaker 8: on this website, and the more time they will spend
Speaker 8: on the page, and the more addative you they might generate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's really the largest issue with modern journalism
Speaker 2: is that that kind of determines almost everything for an outlet.
Speaker 2: Is like, what's what's going to get clicks, what's going
Speaker 2: to rile people up as much as possible, And that
Speaker 2: doesn't count as financial interest, right, Like the fact that
Speaker 2: the outlet has a vested financial interest in keeping you
Speaker 2: on the page as often and as long as possible
Speaker 2: doesn't count as like a conflict of interest in any way.
Speaker 2: And that's kind of one of the fundamental issues, whereas,
Speaker 2: like a lot of times, a lot of outlets won't let,
Speaker 2: for example, a black journalist report on a black man
Speaker 2: being murdered by the police, right because they see that
Speaker 2: as like an inherent conflict of interest. And the gap
Speaker 2: between those two things is where a lot of the
Speaker 2: real problems, a lot of the worst problems in modern
Speaker 2: journalism arise.
Speaker 8: Yeah, problems we need to pay to adds. Sure, all right,
Speaker 8: we are back. Part of this also manifests in like
Speaker 8: journalists being supposed to not have any individual opinions about anything,
Speaker 8: even if it's irrelevant to their beat. This has been
Speaker 8: the case for a lot of people regarding the genocide
Speaker 8: of Palestinian people. Right, Like you could be the weekend editor,
Speaker 8: you could write about brunch, and if you work at
Speaker 8: certain outlets, you are like under pain of losing your job,
Speaker 8: not allowed to post to what is happening in Gaza
Speaker 8: is a genocide to take a stance on these issues, right,
Speaker 8: and that is bad. Like journalists are human beings too,
Speaker 8: and it's ridiculous to suggest that that we shouldn't or
Speaker 8: can't have opinions on these things and still do good reporting,
Speaker 8: right we can. We just have to make sure that
Speaker 8: they're reporting itself is accurate. Sometimes what this leads to
Speaker 8: is like like what I guess another like Rubbie, you
Speaker 8: spoke about it that like the inherent conflict of interests
Speaker 8: that like traffic on a website presents for journalism. Another
Speaker 8: like inherent issue is that like every source is seen
Speaker 8: as biased, right, Like you said, like black folks might
Speaker 8: not be allowed to report on black men being shown
Speaker 8: by the cops accept state sources, which are far too
Speaker 8: often seen as speaking the verbatim truth.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, this is what the police said.
Speaker 8: Yes, yeah, that is how we get I guess. A
Speaker 8: pretty good example of this, I'll link to it in
Speaker 8: the show notes is a piece I wrote five years
Speaker 8: ago I think about police officers overdosing on fentanyl. Some
Speaker 8: of you will be familiar with this, some of you
Speaker 8: will not, but it is not possible to overdose on
Speaker 8: fentanyl just from being in its presence, like in an
Speaker 8: outdoor area, next to a thing that has fental in it.
Speaker 8: The piece I wrote dealt with the San Diego Union Tribune,
Speaker 8: who this was a spectacular instance, I guess, of journalists
Speaker 8: like serving as police scenographers. What happened here is that
Speaker 8: the police had produced an edited video with like music
Speaker 8: and shit of this supposed overdose right of a of
Speaker 8: a young cop who was like, I don't know what
Speaker 8: they call it. He's like apprentice with an older cop,
Speaker 8: like with a more experienced cop. And they were going
Speaker 8: around doing cop stuff. They found some stuff. They tested
Speaker 8: it for fen andil, and this guy collapses the younger cop.
Speaker 8: The older cop gives him several knark Hans. He's not
Speaker 8: just wisteo. Yeah no, just like I think there was
Speaker 8: one instant where someone received seven Knarkans, which like that's
Speaker 8: a threat to your fucking nasal integrity of nothing else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if Knarkan doesn't work the first time, like I mean,
Speaker 2: people do sometimes often it's not especially like with serious ods.
Speaker 2: They'll often put people like in the hospital on drips,
Speaker 2: but you would have to take a mess of dose,
Speaker 2: not just be near fucking yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like be like I think this instance, I get
Speaker 8: they were outside testing it in like they're the boot
Speaker 8: of a car. Like it's ludicrist to think that you
Speaker 8: and like it would be good if they familiarize themselves
Speaker 8: with some of the what an overdose looks like, right, yeah,
Speaker 8: and I'm mixed.
Speaker 2: If they weren't cops, I'd respect the desire to like
Speaker 2: time theft from work, because I think that's what a
Speaker 2: lot of this is. It's like, oh shit, if I
Speaker 2: have an overdose, like I get to stay out of
Speaker 2: work a couple of days.
Speaker 8: With day that's a that's a that's a framing. I'm
Speaker 8: a medabal to you. Unfortunately they archives for if you're
Speaker 8: a reporter though, like it is absolutely on you to, oh,
Speaker 8: this person having an overdose, What are the symptoms of
Speaker 8: an overdose? What does an overdose look like? Should I
Speaker 8: talk to a medical professional or you could just ask
Speaker 8: the perlice information officer who shared this with you, how
Speaker 8: did you verify this as an overdose? With whom did
Speaker 8: you discuss the toxicology report in this case? That information
Speaker 8: wasn't available right the way I was able to obtain
Speaker 8: that just to do I guess clarity is, first of all,
Speaker 8: I saw the publication where they didn't mention any fact
Speaker 8: checking that they'd done. You can also pra the emails
Speaker 8: to the police as well as from the police, right,
Speaker 8: so you can see if other reporters have done fact
Speaker 8: checking that way or have asked any follow up questions
Speaker 8: that way I done, that they would have found out
Speaker 8: that you say that you can't overness in fentanyl this way,
Speaker 8: they didn't even try. And like both sides this, I
Speaker 8: guess like sometimes you'll see outlets doing that now, like
Speaker 8: this cop over dose from fentanyl, but doctors say they can't,
Speaker 8: Like it's a which I still think is an absolute
Speaker 8: ludicrous practice. Right. That's like saying this person tried to fly,
Speaker 8: but you know that people say gravity will make them
Speaker 8: fall to the ground. Like, what are these things we
Speaker 8: know to be true? So I guess what I would
Speaker 8: propose we do instead of this ludicrous practice of tending
Speaker 8: to be objective about everything all the time, is that
Speaker 8: we are honest about our biases, honest about our conflict
Speaker 8: of interest, We're honest about like our standpoint, and then
Speaker 8: we do reporting, which is obviously verifiable, right, And that means,
Speaker 8: like you'll see that at the end of these episodes, right,
Speaker 8: we share our sources that we used after we're try
Speaker 8: and communicate where we got information from and how we
Speaker 8: got it. And I think we should strive for moral
Speaker 8: clarity in the way we say things instead of striving
Speaker 8: to this middle ground. So, like, what do I mean
Speaker 8: by moral clarity? I mean saying the cops killed someone,
Speaker 8: not officer involved shooting. Right. If you work with fucking
Speaker 8: words and you find yourself writing something as convoluted as
Speaker 8: officer involved shooting, then you have strayed from the foundational
Speaker 8: reason for journalism existing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have gone beyond God's light.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, yeah, you live in the darkness. There is
Speaker 8: I think a place for fact checkers. I think people
Speaker 8: got to a bit carried away with fact checking. I
Speaker 8: don't quite know how to phrase this correctly. I had
Speaker 8: an experience once where I'd written a piece. The fact
Speaker 8: checking of that piece centered on the fact that I
Speaker 8: had used the noun beach chair to refer to this chair. Yes,
Speaker 8: the fact checker believed that it was a lawn chair.
Speaker 8: To me, did not impact the overall thrust of the piece,
Speaker 8: right like the nature of the chair. Unfortunately, that ended
Speaker 8: up killing the story. We ran out of time to
Speaker 8: go over to court documents because of the nature of
Speaker 8: the chair discussion. And I'm not sure that's what we
Speaker 8: need to do.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, and I think the other and probably
Speaker 2: the larger problem with fact checking is fact checking is
Speaker 2: an in in and of itself is ha ha.
Speaker 8: I showed that they were wrong.
Speaker 2: I checked the fact where it's like, yeah, but what
Speaker 2: they wrote got out to thirty million people and your
Speaker 2: fact check got out to like sixty So what you
Speaker 2: did didn't really matter. And what we should probably be
Speaker 2: doing is looking at an intervention higher up on the
Speaker 2: line to stop the bullshit from getting out rather than
Speaker 2: being obsessed with well, I've actchecked it, like, well but
Speaker 2: that didn't really help you know, yeah, right, Just at
Speaker 2: what point do we give that up as pointless?
Speaker 8: Yeah, like you are like not even a footnote to
Speaker 8: this other thing that this person.
Speaker 2: No, we need to the intervention needs to be happening
Speaker 2: earlier because the bullshit is still getting out.
Speaker 8: Yeah, absolutely, And this happens like we're in this bizarre
Speaker 8: situation where like writing outlets can say what the fuck
Speaker 8: they want, right like, like we have whole massive media
Speaker 8: empires going in on this idea that the twenty twenty
Speaker 8: election was stolen. Then we have like centrist outlets instead
Speaker 8: of being like, no, the election wasn't stolen. That that's bullshit,
Speaker 8: constantly trying to like investigate those claims as if they
Speaker 8: were credible and useful, rather than illustrating why they should
Speaker 8: be dismissed and then moving on, right like, instead of
Speaker 8: investigating this conspiracy is so important. We see that a
Speaker 8: lot with immigration right now, But we saw a ton
Speaker 8: in the presidential debates, right Like, It's a good example
Speaker 8: of what you were saying. Jd Vance can just lie
Speaker 8: and even Donald Trump actually can lie about people eating
Speaker 8: dogs and cats, and it doesn't hugely matter if an
Speaker 8: hour later and use outlet tweets, oh we fact check him,
Speaker 8: and it's not okay. Right, You're still broadcast to millions
Speaker 8: of people that Haitian migrants eat dogs and cats and
Speaker 8: that's not true. And I think we need to strive
Speaker 8: for something that it's closer to the truth, and it's
Speaker 8: closer to fairness, and it gives us moral clarity because
Speaker 8: what we're all doing right now, what the legacy media
Speaker 8: doing is doing right now, is like woefully inadequate to
Speaker 8: meet the moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I agree, Like I think, where I
Speaker 2: don't actually know how to solve things is the incentive structure, Yeah,
Speaker 2: is so broken. And to an extent, all of us
Speaker 2: talk about objectivity. And when I say that, I'm like,
Speaker 2: the talk that outlets and editors have about objectivity, is
Speaker 2: there more than anything to obscure the fact that the
Speaker 2: economics of journalism make it almost impossible for it to
Speaker 2: be anything but a willing agent of disinformation. That's the
Speaker 2: real issue is you can have the Washington Post and
Speaker 2: you can have the New York Times host good reporting,
Speaker 2: but a huge amount of their income will always come
Speaker 2: from having columnists whose entire job is to piss people
Speaker 2: off or to stoke the egos of people in power.
Speaker 2: And I don't know that the good work those outlets
Speaker 2: does outweighs the crap that they spill into the public discourse,
Speaker 2: because that's what's incentivized. And so I think to an extent,
Speaker 2: there's almost no point in actually engaging with the objectivity
Speaker 2: debate with the people who are pushing it, because they're
Speaker 2: not push it honestly, They're pushing it as a way
Speaker 2: to obscure the fact that they make their money the
Speaker 2: same way Mark Zuckerberg makes his money, which is by
Speaker 2: spreading fear, anger, and doubt.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah, that's the bad op ed industrial complex. Like
Speaker 8: I've been guilty of that. Right, you see a fucking
Speaker 8: headline on social media and you're like, that's bullshit, and
Speaker 8: then you click and read.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 8: I used to, like when I was a little baby,
Speaker 8: journalist's engage with this and be like that's bullshit because
Speaker 8: and either try and write about it somewhere or post
Speaker 8: you on social media. But I have come to realize
Speaker 8: and in doing that, I'm doing exactly what they want
Speaker 8: me to do, which is continue sending people to their
Speaker 8: website to click on adverts and to make the money.
Speaker 8: So I think it's better that we do not do that.
Speaker 8: But yeah, that is the fundamental conceit of journalism right now.
Speaker 8: How it pays the bills is keeping you on that page,
Speaker 8: and a way it keeps you on that page is
Speaker 8: making you angry. There is like a model, I think,
Speaker 8: And you see this like in community small community newspapers
Speaker 8: right now, like I guess outlets like Left Coast Right
Speaker 8: Watching in California and Oregon, where like people genuinely buy
Speaker 8: building trust and telling the truth, gain the support of
Speaker 8: their communities and financed by them. But I mean the
Speaker 8: orders of magnitude and income difference are like they're not
Speaker 8: making Washington Post money over at Left Coast Right Watch.
Speaker 8: I know this should be true. So yeah, pretty fucked,
Speaker 8: and it will only get worse. I think like as
Speaker 8: we as far as we continue to slide into like
Speaker 8: the post truth fascism world, I can't really see our
Speaker 8: legacy outlets doing much about it. If all they are
Speaker 8: ever going to do is strive for the middle ground
Speaker 8: on this.
Speaker 2: Well, all right, okay, everybody, all right, they got off
Speaker 2: a good day in that world.
Speaker 4: This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 4: news gaest covering what's happening in the White House, the
Speaker 4: crumbling world, what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis
Speaker 4: this episode, I'm joined by Robert Evans, James Stout, and
Speaker 4: Sophie Lichterman. Maybe maybe Sophie will decide to comment on
Speaker 4: some of this important important news we have today.
Speaker 2: To bless us, and maybe Robert will decide to forgive
Speaker 2: you for jumping into giving the title of this show
Speaker 2: and not letting me say electile dysfunction or something like that.
Speaker 2: We know I have not gotten over living. Let's talk
Speaker 2: about a pedophile. It's time for your Friday pedophile Update. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we call it the FREEO file minute. I don't like
Speaker 2: that it is free to callos SO. On August fifteenth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five, at eight thirty six Annoan that means
Speaker 2: in the morning, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Office
Speaker 2: of Public Information put up a press release with the
Speaker 2: title eight child sex predators arrested during undercover operation.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: This was a report on a multi agency operation going
Speaker 2: after child sex predators that was headed by the Nevada
Speaker 2: Internet Crimes Against Children or ICAC organization, which is a
Speaker 2: joint operation that involves a mix of There's some detectives
Speaker 2: from the Las Vegas Metropolitan to Police, there's some folks
Speaker 2: from the FBI Child Exploitation Task Force, and then I
Speaker 2: guess the ICAC has its own task force. I've never
Speaker 2: heard of this group before, but there's a number of
Speaker 2: other law enforcement agents involved, including North Las Vegas Police,
Speaker 2: Henderson Police who actually posted declaration of arrest for the
Speaker 2: person that we'll be talking about. That's the Henderson Nevada Police,
Speaker 2: Homeland Security Investigations, and the Nevada Attorney General's Office. This
Speaker 2: was your standard sting to try and catch people who
Speaker 2: are attempting to have sex with kids, where you have
Speaker 2: undercover agents who are online. In this case, they were
Speaker 2: using an app called Pure and on WhatsApp. It looks like,
Speaker 2: as a general rule, these guys met the person that
Speaker 2: they thought was a minor on Pure and then took
Speaker 2: the conversation to WhatsApp to plan for an in person
Speaker 2: meeting where they then they you know the whole what's
Speaker 2: that guy who used to do the TV show where
Speaker 2: he would bust pedophiles And there were some ethical problems
Speaker 2: with Chris Hansen. They'd have their Chris Hansen moment, right,
Speaker 2: I'm familiar with this. Oh man, it didn't go well.
Speaker 2: So the story that people have been hearing and that
Speaker 2: kind of went viral out of this is that one
Speaker 2: of these eight people arrested was tom Ardiam Alexandrovitch, who
Speaker 2: was a high ranking cybersecurity official. He was the director
Speaker 2: of one of the divisions of Israel's top cybersecurity agency.
Speaker 2: So you know in Israeli government official working in cybersecurity
Speaker 2: is one of the guys arrested. He was in town
Speaker 2: in Las Vegas for the black Hat convention, which is
Speaker 2: like a hacking convention, and like a lot of hacking conventions,
Speaker 2: over time it has turned from a bunch of guys
Speaker 2: who do not like the Feds to just Feds, right,
Speaker 2: Like I think that's why the guy guy from Israel
Speaker 2: cybersecurity agency is at this thing, hitten on so fed
Speaker 2: allegedly fifteen year olds. So this guy is arrested and
Speaker 2: then he posts bail at ten grand and he flies
Speaker 2: back to Israel, which gets a lot of people in
Speaker 2: an uproar. Obviously, anything involving officials of the Israeli government
Speaker 2: is receiving heightened scrutiny right now, what with the genocide,
Speaker 2: and also for a long time, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: evidence of special treatment being given to agents of the
Speaker 2: government of Israel by the United States government, and so
Speaker 2: people are like, is that what's going on here, because
Speaker 2: this seems pretty fucked up. And I guess the first
Speaker 2: thing I should say is that it doesn't seem like
Speaker 2: he's being treated differently from anyone else in this sting.
Speaker 2: This is per statements made by the local government and
Speaker 2: by the Attorney General's office. This is the standard bail
Speaker 2: amount for this crime. And when people post bail for
Speaker 2: this crime, which is the standard amount of ten grand,
Speaker 2: there aren't conditions usually on the bail, which means it
Speaker 2: would not be standard to stop him from traveling or
Speaker 2: returning home. He's due to return to the United States
Speaker 2: in several weeks for the court proceedings to go on.
Speaker 2: So the short answer to this seems to be that, like, no,
Speaker 2: this is just kind of how the system works, and
Speaker 2: that might not be great, But he doesn't seem to
Speaker 2: have been given special treatment because he was an official
Speaker 2: of the Israeli government. Now, does that mean that that's
Speaker 2: going to prove to be what happens in the long run, No, Because,
Speaker 2: among other things, he might just not come back to
Speaker 2: the US. And if the Israeli government is a party
Speaker 2: to that, and like there isn't any kind of like
Speaker 2: action taken to force him to return to go through
Speaker 2: the legal process, then I'd say, yeah, there's something to
Speaker 2: be particularly upset about here. But I think the broader
Speaker 2: thing to maybe be upset about here is that guys
Speaker 2: can get caught for this and then have a no
Speaker 2: condition bail that allows them to flee the country, which
Speaker 2: might be a flaw in the system.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 2: I'm a big innocent until proven guilty guy. I'm a
Speaker 2: big reasonable bail guy. But I'm also a big I
Speaker 2: don't know man. Maybe if the agent of a foreign
Speaker 2: government gets caught trying to fuck a child, they shouldn't
Speaker 2: be able to fly back home immediately.
Speaker 6: Do they bail out? I don't know.
Speaker 8: To seems that it's a reasonable objection.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So you know, this is a classic case.
Speaker 2: If you've got the story what actually happened here, then
Speaker 2: you've got how it's interpreted online, and then you've got
Speaker 2: how it's being interpreted online by the stupidest person on
Speaker 2: the world, on the planet, in the planet, and in
Speaker 2: that planet that didn't work.
Speaker 8: Oh, it'd be good if he was, wouldn't it in
Speaker 8: the molten cools? Yeah, that would be nice.
Speaker 2: You've got how this story is being interpreted by particularly
Speaker 2: bad journalists. Let's say that that's the nice way to
Speaker 2: put it. And I'm talking about Michael Tracy. If you're
Speaker 2: not familiar with Michael Tracy, he is ostensibly a leftist
Speaker 2: and anti authoritarian. He's the kind of guy who just
Speaker 2: sort of reflexibly if the US is involved, whatever is
Speaker 2: the worst case scenario for the US doing something is
Speaker 2: what's happening. During the invasion of Ukraine, he alleged that
Speaker 2: the US was sending troops into Ukraine. I think because
Speaker 2: he saw some guys outside of an embassy in Poland,
Speaker 2: some American soldier for.
Speaker 8: The marine details and some of the marine detail.
Speaker 6: It was like, we're getting ready to invade.
Speaker 8: That did not happen.
Speaker 2: Now, Michael Tracy has a sub stack, of course, many
Speaker 2: such cases. And he published an article titled was an
Speaker 2: Israeli pedophile really allowed to flee the United States? And
Speaker 2: I can't tell He starts with like a whole paragraph
Speaker 2: about Jeffrey Epstein, and I can't actually tell what his
Speaker 2: stance is on this, and I don't really want he's
Speaker 2: talking about how people are eager to prove him wrong
Speaker 2: about Jeffrey Epstein. I have no desire to know what
Speaker 2: this guy thinks about Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 4: This is probably a Jeffrey Epstein was a secret massad
Speaker 4: agent type thing.
Speaker 2: Well, except for his whole argument here is that there's
Speaker 2: people are being incredibly unreasonable to think that this guy
Speaker 2: is guilty or to think that he probably did anything wrong.
Speaker 2: And the reason Michael Tracy suggests that Alexandrovitch probably didn't
Speaker 2: do anything wrong is that the terms of the app pure,
Speaker 2: which is where the authorities say he first got in
Speaker 2: contact with the officer pretending to be a child, requires
Speaker 2: you to be eighteen years or older. And in this
Speaker 2: substack he posts post the terms of service to be
Speaker 2: like ce. There is even what appears to be a
Speaker 2: rigorous age verification process to ensure that no minor gains
Speaker 2: access to the app. Government issued documents must be submitted
Speaker 2: to ensure that only persons at least eighteen years of
Speaker 2: older allowed on the app. And he's like does this
Speaker 2: mean the government was faking documents, was pretending.
Speaker 8: To be a child to this app.
Speaker 2: Yet that's what they were doing, Well, they were pretending
Speaker 2: to be a child, Jeremary, Yeah, that's probably what they
Speaker 2: were doing. And the other thing what's really funny about
Speaker 2: this is like that's his whole point is that the
Speaker 2: app requires them to be eighteen, So it's you know,
Speaker 2: the authorities must have been doing something fucked up and
Speaker 2: lying to the app for this to have happened at all.
Speaker 2: And this is just an example of Michael Tracy not
Speaker 2: reading the declaration of arrest, which he links in his article,
Speaker 2: because the declaration of arrest does say that, yes, this
Speaker 2: person got in contact with the undercover agent bearing the
Speaker 2: peer up and then the same sentence says and later
Speaker 2: WhatsApp with phone number dot dot dot and says that
Speaker 2: on WhatsApp, this is where they talked about the person
Speaker 2: in this case being a minor, and this is where
Speaker 2: they set up like to arrange a meeting. This Israeli
Speaker 2: cybersecurity official was going to take them to circ the
Speaker 2: slat and had them bring a condom.
Speaker 8: Like that's all in the declaration of arrest.
Speaker 2: Now, obviously Alexandrovitch maintains his innocence, maintains he thought this
Speaker 2: person was eighteen all the entire time. All I've got
Speaker 2: here is the declaration of arrest. I don't have hard evidence,
Speaker 2: but per the source that Michael Tracy cites, like this
Speaker 2: is not just happening on pure This is as is
Speaker 2: often the case, by the way, when pedophiles go after kids,
Speaker 2: they meet them on whatever app and then take them
Speaker 2: to a second digital location, right, Like That's just the
Speaker 2: way these things work. And that's really all I have
Speaker 2: to say about this. You know this, This is the
Speaker 2: kind of I keep an eye on this in case
Speaker 2: this guy doesn't go back and the Israeli government does
Speaker 2: hide him. But it's entirely possible that this will go
Speaker 2: the way court cases and this sort of thing are
Speaker 2: supposed to go. There's one other funny thing, considering this
Speaker 2: guy is a high ranking Israeli cybersecurity official, there's just
Speaker 2: like a list of, you know, statements about like what
Speaker 2: Alexandrovitch said to detectives when he was being interrogated, you know,
Speaker 2: the stuff like Alexander Alexandrovitch stated he did not know
Speaker 2: the numbers for the Israeli government. Alexandrovitch stated his family
Speaker 2: was an Israel Alexandrovitch stated it was important he get
Speaker 2: numbers for his flight, and then Alexandrovitch stated his phone
Speaker 2: does not have a password but uses his right thumb print.
Speaker 9: No, a biometric user, cybersecurity expert for the histor government
Speaker 9: and not sending the best people. Oh my god, your
Speaker 9: fucking thumb print, dude, your fucking thumb print.
Speaker 8: Okay, yeah, it's just famous, most secure possible access code.
Speaker 2: Anyway, That's all I've got for peta Friday tune in
Speaker 2: next week we'll have another pedophile.
Speaker 8: I'm sure of it. Oh yeah, here's ads. All right,
Speaker 8: we're back, and it is a pedophile free will. We
Speaker 8: can't guarantee that, I suppose, but we're hoping Peter free
Speaker 8: zone from here on it. Talking of things which are
Speaker 8: incontrovertibly crimes, Israel has deliberately murdered for Al Jazeera journalists
Speaker 8: in Gaza. Among them was an us Our Sharif, a
Speaker 8: prominent correspondent for the network in Gaza. The IDF also
Speaker 8: killed correspondent Mohammed Karka, cameraman Ibrahim Zaiah and driver in cameeronman.
Speaker 8: Mohammed Nofal Al Jazeera has named all of these people.
Speaker 8: The strike also killed two freelancers. One of them was
Speaker 8: mom And Aliwa and al Shariff's nephew, who was a
Speaker 8: student studying journalism for weeks before the written pre meditated
Speaker 8: war crime to war crime under a Rome statue and
Speaker 8: also a violation of the Geneva Conventions because journalists are
Speaker 8: also civilians. The idea of engaged in manufacturing consent for
Speaker 8: the strike. They did this through unit that nine to
Speaker 8: seven two magazine has reported on called the quote legitimization cell.
Speaker 8: You're always doing great way when you have a unit
Speaker 8: called the legitimization cell. Yeah, that's yeah. It's pretty fucked
Speaker 8: to quote from the piece which are link below. It
Speaker 8: has been a signed to identify Gaza based journalist it
Speaker 8: could betray as undercover her mass operatives in an effort
Speaker 8: to blunt growing global outrage over Israel's killing of reporters.
Speaker 8: You should read this article like it goes through instances
Speaker 8: whether they have a very clear confirmation bias right, and
Speaker 8: the case of Alcherifhys is a pretty good example of
Speaker 8: how ridiculous this can be. They released this document. They
Speaker 8: tweeted it actually claiming he was in her masks from
Speaker 8: twenty thirteen to twenty seventeen. The document clearly wasn't original document,
Speaker 8: Like it was a PDF done up with like a
Speaker 8: navy blue background and stuff. It's laughable to think that
Speaker 8: they like captured this pdf somehow. It just doesn't line
Speaker 8: up even if we take that to be true, right,
Speaker 8: that he had been a member of her mass till
Speaker 8: twenty seventeen, that was eight years ago. Like, isn't the
Speaker 8: whole point of the thing that they're saying that they
Speaker 8: want people to stop being in her mass, like killing
Speaker 8: them because they wanted that, And I don't believe them.
Speaker 8: It still doesn't make sense, right. They've done this in
Speaker 8: other cases with other Juras, specifically other Al Jazeera journalists.
Speaker 8: In July this year, the CPJA that's a committee to
Speaker 8: protect journalists if you're not familiar, warned that they were
Speaker 8: worried about an attack on al Sharif due to the
Speaker 8: increasingly detached from reality smear campaign being pursued against him
Speaker 8: by IDs spokesman of Vich Adray. For example, on the
Speaker 8: twenties July Adray accused him of being quote part of
Speaker 8: a quote false her Mask campaign on Starvation as he
Speaker 8: played footage of Alcherif crying after seeing a woman collapse
Speaker 8: from hunger on camera. Speaking about the campaign, al Chherif
Speaker 8: said it is not only a media threat or an
Speaker 8: image destruction, it is a real life threat. He said
Speaker 8: it's in his interview with CPJ. He also said, I
Speaker 8: live with the feeling that I could be bombed and
Speaker 8: martyred at any moment. My family is also in danger,
Speaker 8: and his nephew was killed with him right in the
Speaker 8: earth strike. When I think about like, I have colleagues
Speaker 8: I've worked with through a Palestinian who work in Gaza.
Speaker 8: I remember twenty twenty three October tenth, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 8: I was in Syria and Rajaba specifically, and I was
Speaker 8: sitting in a t shop because the Wi Fi and
Speaker 8: my hotel was non existent, and I wanted to check
Speaker 8: in on my friends, right who worked there, And I
Speaker 8: remember this guy helping me translate one of these videos
Speaker 8: in which you see a dead person in the blue
Speaker 8: press vest, right, and I was concerned that it might
Speaker 8: be someone I've worked with before, so I was trying
Speaker 8: to work out it with them, and he saying in
Speaker 8: this video at the funeral, people were saying that another
Speaker 8: journalist would take up the dead journalist camera and the
Speaker 8: flag jacket and keep reporting, which is very touching for me.
Speaker 8: But journalists in Gaza have been targeted by the IDF
Speaker 8: for a very long time, and this is one of
Speaker 8: many examples, and it's disgusting and reprehensible. That's about all
Speaker 8: I have to say on it. Should we turn to
Speaker 8: immigration for something equally despondent and sad? Yeah, all right.
Speaker 8: USCIS US Citizenship and Immigration Services has issued a new
Speaker 8: guidance material to instruct offices in cases where they can
Speaker 8: use their discretion to look at whether the person has
Speaker 8: quote endorsed, promoted, or supported, or otherwise espouse the views
Speaker 8: of a terrorist organization or group, including those who support
Speaker 8: or promote anti American ideologies and activities, anti Semitic terrorism
Speaker 8: from skipping a bit here, and anti Semitic ideologies. This
Speaker 8: discretion can be used in extension of staycases, change of
Speaker 8: status cases, reinstatement or f or non immigrant status, and
Speaker 8: certain employment authorization requests, they say in the moment. The
Speaker 8: USCIS policy Manual also lists other instances where discretion could
Speaker 8: be used These include TPS, temporary protected status, humanitarian parole,
Speaker 8: partition to classify an alien as a fiancee of a
Speaker 8: US citizen, asylum and refugee status. So I looked up
Speaker 8: what the quote anti American activities were. There's a footnote right.
Speaker 8: The footnote links to IA three one three, a Immigration
Speaker 8: Naturalization Act. Most of the anti American activities are things
Speaker 8: which already had a bar to naturalization, and most of
Speaker 8: those pertain directly to being a member of the Communist Party,
Speaker 8: like a literal card carrying member of the literal Communist Party,
Speaker 8: right capital C, Capital P. The US who had a
Speaker 8: bar on naturalization for people who are members of the
Speaker 8: Communist Party for some time. I believe they still have
Speaker 8: a bar on naturalization for people who were members of
Speaker 8: the Nazi Party. Preview a waiver, I should say, not
Speaker 8: actually a visa. When people from Europe coming to United States,
Speaker 8: you'd have to answer a short questionnaire. One of the
Speaker 8: questions was about whether you or anyone related to you
Speaker 8: had been a member of the Nazi Party. I remember,
Speaker 8: like once being some German people in Europe and they
Speaker 8: were telling me they'd had to answer this question entering
Speaker 8: the United States. So the anti American activities is the
Speaker 8: one that's been getting the most attention, But it does
Speaker 8: specifically footnote to the communist stuff, which is again something
Speaker 8: that that has been US policy for a while. What
Speaker 8: I'm more worried about is stuff about anti Semitic terrorism.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because that means one, you've shared a pro Palestine
Speaker 4: post on social media.
Speaker 8: Yeah you said genocide bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that can mean so many things that as we've
Speaker 4: already seen, like we've seen some of this stuff already
Speaker 4: be enforced. This is new guidance material, but we've seen
Speaker 4: reports coming from people trying to enter the country or
Speaker 4: trying to get visas that show that this is happening
Speaker 4: for like months ever since, like you know, like March,
Speaker 4: I started to see a lot of stuff regarding either
Speaker 4: pro Palestinian statements or like posts or campus protests that
Speaker 4: sort of stuff.
Speaker 8: Yeah. The f visa I mentioned there is it's a
Speaker 8: non immigrant student visa right for full time students. So
Speaker 8: like that is the one where we've seen students having
Speaker 8: to turn over their social media handles or social media
Speaker 8: can't be locked. It's very easy to see how these
Speaker 8: two things lind up. Yeah, and as a guy said,
Speaker 8: like people. They have always been able to use their discretion.
Speaker 8: This is just guidance on how they should use it,
Speaker 8: but they have been using it for some time. The
Speaker 8: administration has also moved the goalpost for naturalization, so naturalization
Speaker 8: is becoming a citizen of the United States. Right, there
Speaker 8: is a requirement that people who naturalize as citizens have
Speaker 8: quote good moral character. Previously, the way they did this
Speaker 8: was there were bars for certain crimes, right murdered genocide,
Speaker 8: something called aggravated felony, which is something that only exists
Speaker 8: in immigration law. Going forward, their changing to I guess
Speaker 8: a more holistic idea of what a good moral character
Speaker 8: might be. I'm going to quote again. Going forward, USCIS
Speaker 8: officers must account for an alien's positive attributes and not
Speaker 8: simply the absence of misconduct in evaluating whether or not
Speaker 8: an alien has met the requirement for establishing GMC. That's
Speaker 8: a good moral character. The officer must take a holistic
Speaker 8: approach in evaluating whether or not an alien seeking naturalization
Speaker 8: has affirmatively established that he or she has met their
Speaker 8: burden of establishing that they are worthy of assuming the
Speaker 8: rights and responsibilities of United States citizenship.
Speaker 4: The worthy what does that mean? You have to prove
Speaker 4: to an officer that you're a good person.
Speaker 8: Yeah, how so.
Speaker 2: Yes, by the officer's definition, I'm assuming.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean this is guys for like discretionary enforcement.
Speaker 4: So I don't like the word holistic here.
Speaker 8: I don't. Yeah, there is literally asking him to take
Speaker 8: into account everything they know about this person and then
Speaker 8: just make a call. Is this someway you want to
Speaker 8: have as your neighbor, you know? Like, I don't know
Speaker 8: what the oh, I mean, I can guess how this
Speaker 8: might manifested. It's worth noting that as DHS goes, USCIS
Speaker 8: officers tend to be the least right wing right CBP
Speaker 8: and I so the much higher proportion of people who like,
Speaker 8: for instance, they had some issues with getting people vaccinated
Speaker 8: and CBP that kind of stuff right, indicators that people
Speaker 8: might be sort of down this conspiracy pipeline. We also
Speaker 8: learned this week that Todd Blanche directed federal cops to
Speaker 8: arrest Mayor rasp Baraka outside of a detention center in
Speaker 8: New Jersey in May. We noticed because of body cam footage,
Speaker 8: we don't have the footage, but the footage is reported
Speaker 8: on in court documents, and the footage a DHS official says, quote,
Speaker 8: we are resting the mayor right now, per the Deputy
Speaker 8: Attorney General of the United States. Anyone that gets in
Speaker 8: our way, I need you guys, give me a perimeter
Speaker 8: so I can cuff him. So that the agent talked
Speaker 8: on the phone and then gave this statement.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: So it seems that the deputy ag there with the
Speaker 8: one who gave the order to arrest rasp Baraka right,
Speaker 8: ice has also arrested a cop. This is our little
Speaker 8: moment of.
Speaker 4: Like harp pond cut violence, top pond cut violence.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 8: John Luke Evans was a reserve officer for the Old
Speaker 8: Orchard Beach Police Department in Maine. The police chief of
Speaker 8: Orchard Beach, who's called at least charred, said that the
Speaker 8: department had used Everify to check if you could work legally, right,
Speaker 8: which is the thing that you are supposed to do.
Speaker 8: E Verify. It's a database run by the Department of
Speaker 8: Homeland Security. I think it's also in combination with another
Speaker 8: department that allows you to verify if somebody can work
Speaker 8: legally in the United States.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 8: Tritian McLachlin characterized it as reckless, which is weird because
Speaker 8: dhs who she's speaking on behalf of the other ones
Speaker 8: who put that information into the database. It's possible that
Speaker 8: someone entered at something in wrong at some point right,
Speaker 8: someone put in a wrong number, they switched an O
Speaker 8: for a zero, or something like that. This came to
Speaker 8: light because Evans attempted to make a firearm purchase and
Speaker 8: he filled out his forty four to seventy three and
Speaker 8: the eighty f then notified ICE that a non citizen
Speaker 8: who wasn't eligible for firearms ownership had attempted to purchase
Speaker 8: a firearm, and that was how ICE came to detain him.
Speaker 8: He is being allowed to leave the USA voluntarily. He's
Speaker 8: not being deported. He's not being charged with attempting to
Speaker 8: make the firearm purchase, which he could be charged with,
Speaker 8: and the city of Orchard Beach is going pretty hard
Speaker 8: in his defense. They've released some elements of a personnel file,
Speaker 8: but none of them that pertained to his immigration status.
Speaker 8: They're sticking by their claim that they believe he was
Speaker 8: eligible to work in the USA. ICE are claiming, I
Speaker 8: guess DHS now are claiming that his visa expired in
Speaker 8: twenty twenty three, which was years before he began working
Speaker 8: at the police Department. He was a seasonal reserve officer
Speaker 8: and he had been working since earlier this year.
Speaker 4: Before we go on break, I want to do a
Speaker 4: quick update on the Texas Democrats who fled the state
Speaker 4: to delay or prevent the gerrymandering. And after their two
Speaker 4: week walkout, the Texas House has now reached quorum once
Speaker 4: again and a vote on the new redistricting map, which
Speaker 4: would add five Republican congressional seats, is slated for Wednesday,
Speaker 4: August twentieth, which is the day that we are recording.
Speaker 4: After Democrats returned to the Capitol from their walkout, they
Speaker 4: were subjected to twenty four to seven surveillance by the
Speaker 4: Texas Department of Public Safety, and in order to leave
Speaker 4: the House chamber, they had to sign what the Democrats
Speaker 4: are calling quote unquote permission slips, agreeing to surveillance in
Speaker 4: their just everyday life.
Speaker 3: Is that why I think it was a collier slept
Speaker 3: at her.
Speaker 4: Desk one person's I think a state senator refused to
Speaker 4: sign the slip and stayed in the Capitol overnight. There enough,
Speaker 4: the Texas House Minority Leader Jeen Wu made a statement saying, quote,
Speaker 4: we killed the corrupt special session was stood unprecedented surveillance
Speaker 4: and intimidation, and rallied Democrats nationwide to join this extential
Speaker 4: fight for fair representation, reshaping the entire twenty twenty sixth landscape. Unquote.
Speaker 4: There's a very celebratory tone here, which is slightly odd
Speaker 4: to me because this vote is still probably going through.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they kind of lose.
Speaker 4: This is going to get voted in.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Now, Wu has said that the Democrats are going to
Speaker 4: challenge the redistricting maps in court even if they are
Speaker 4: able to pass through this House vote, and as we know,
Speaker 4: the courts are the last bastion for democracy and will
Speaker 4: save us all. We suspected that this whole walkout is
Speaker 4: more performative than anything else and would not actually lead
Speaker 4: to than killing this map, and instead of remaining out
Speaker 4: of the state longer for an undeterminate amount of time,
Speaker 4: possibly until November, they have ret turned and quorum is
Speaker 4: in the chamber.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's it's like it's not nothing, but it's
Speaker 2: like the next just it's one step up from nothing.
Speaker 4: It's the most democrat thing to do.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, but why why only do half of what
Speaker 3: was necessary?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Sophie, you you're asking this question because you didn't
Speaker 2: grow up in Texas.
Speaker 3: I went to the Democratic National Convention. I understand the
Speaker 3: half effort.
Speaker 8: Here's the reality.
Speaker 2: Texas Democratic Party exists to disappoint you. That's why, that's
Speaker 2: why all this is happening.
Speaker 3: I just feel like the entire Texas Democratic Party is
Speaker 3: just like a Beto O'Rourke, like the not not literally,
Speaker 3: but the concept of Beto o'rour.
Speaker 8: Yeah, not wrong, Yeah, it's all.
Speaker 10: It's all there.
Speaker 2: Never never put your faith in Texas and any part
Speaker 2: of Texas, and you you'll be disappointed less. I've been
Speaker 2: telling people this for a long time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like the second thing you told me.
Speaker 11: Every year.
Speaker 2: Democrats in other parts of the country every couple of
Speaker 2: years get like excited. It's the Charlie Brown system where
Speaker 2: they're like, oh my god, Texas might be about to
Speaker 2: flip or something otherwise, good Ted Ted Cruz is going
Speaker 2: to get forced out. We're finally going to have something
Speaker 2: good happen in Texas politics. And every time, every time
Speaker 2: that football gets pulled away.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so it.
Speaker 4: Feels not great that the minority leaders kind of patting
Speaker 4: themselves on the back for taking basically a two week
Speaker 4: vacation to Illinoising California and then returning and having this
Speaker 4: go through. So I don't know, we'll see this develops.
Speaker 4: The California is promising to do their own redistricting to
Speaker 4: equal out the amount of like map changes, both adding
Speaker 4: five more seats for the respective parties.
Speaker 3: It's annoying.
Speaker 4: It's just annoying.
Speaker 8: It's just annoying, like a nice piece of performance. So
Speaker 8: I guess you know what else is annoying things?
Speaker 4: I don't think they're annoying at all. I value each
Speaker 4: and every advertiser.
Speaker 8: Garrison actually personally vets all of our advertisers so you
Speaker 8: can reach out to them.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, I I agree this is canon. Now,
Speaker 2: if you're ever unhappy with an advertiser, find Garrison's personal
Speaker 2: phone number and hit him up.
Speaker 4: No no, no, no, oh God, time to go into
Speaker 4: blocking spree.
Speaker 6: All right, we are back.
Speaker 4: Putin, I guess is a guy.
Speaker 3: That's actually how I would describe the meeting between a
Speaker 3: Trump and Putin and Alaska Putin.
Speaker 4: I guess, yeah, that's pretty much how it went. They had,
Speaker 4: they had a little meeting.
Speaker 3: There are some insane, cannspiracy theories that he sent a
Speaker 3: body double.
Speaker 4: Oh wow, yeah, yeah, it's one of my favorite things.
Speaker 4: There's always insane conspiracy theories supported from BBC News actually,
Speaker 4: which I find funny. Yeah, I'm glad that BBC's is
Speaker 4: on the is on the pulse of theories spreading online.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, no.
Speaker 2: And and people are just now figuring out again that
Speaker 2: whenever world leaders travel to foreign countries for summits at
Speaker 2: this level, they take their poop back with them. And yeah,
Speaker 2: I saw an article being like, is it true, did
Speaker 2: Putin really take his poop back? And yes, they all
Speaker 2: do because they don't want it to get analyzed to
Speaker 2: find evidence of health issues. Like the President has his
Speaker 2: poop taken home every time he goes overseas. This is
Speaker 2: just the way things are.
Speaker 4: Frankly. I think if we're able to get the Putin poop,
Speaker 4: you can make a clone of Putin and then that
Speaker 4: could be the body show we use. Yeah yeah, stuff
Speaker 4: that like the fifties of CIA still existed.
Speaker 8: As they still use. It'd be a lot more fun. Yeah,
Speaker 8: we would be doing would hoover.
Speaker 4: Really unethical human cloning project where you had this like
Speaker 4: shambling like undead corpse of that we can problem Christ.
Speaker 4: But that's basically how the meeting went. Sorry for derailing
Speaker 4: my bad, no, because the meeting is kind of a
Speaker 4: nothing burger. At this point. There was reports that Putin
Speaker 4: basically ranted to Trump about how Ukraine's always has been
Speaker 4: a part of Russia, and the meeting didn't really go anywhere.
Speaker 4: Putin ignored a question on if he would quote stop
Speaker 4: killing civilians. So yeah, that's basically how the whole how
Speaker 4: the whole debacle went. And I think it's really indicative
Speaker 4: that like a day or two after this happened, Trump
Speaker 4: had the Zelensky meeting two point zero in the White House,
Speaker 4: which went much better than the previous Zelinsky meeting, and
Speaker 4: Trump was a lot more friendly with Silinskily this time around.
Speaker 2: Apparently Zelensky has been going around other European leaders getting
Speaker 2: advice on how to like talk with it Trump.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he gave him, gave him a letter which which
Speaker 4: Trump Trump really appreciates and likes. S he uh started
Speaker 4: by thanking, uh, thanking the first Lady for a letter
Speaker 4: as well. So there's always like little polite gestures that
Speaker 4: Trump really enjoys.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he likes to be like honored and venerated.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Zelenski indulged in that war of of a
Speaker 4: fairly a fairly spiffy all black suits. I liked it.
Speaker 4: It's a good it was a good suit. So it's
Speaker 4: but it is. It is very indicative if you look
Speaker 4: at like how the last Selenski meeting went, and then
Speaker 4: after Trump was around Putin for like a few hours.
Speaker 4: How how how Trump's mood was noticeably different around Zelensky
Speaker 4: this time around. So we'll see. I don't think we're
Speaker 4: gonna have any conclusion to the conflict in Ukraine anytime
Speaker 4: soon based on how these two meetings went. There was
Speaker 4: there was reporting that they were trying to set up
Speaker 4: a meeting between Putin and Selensky, though that has since
Speaker 4: been denied. It sits this like back and forth like
Speaker 4: it has been the past, like two four years.
Speaker 2: But Trump is going to bring an end to the war.
Speaker 2: He's the peace president, kind of get a Nobel prize.
Speaker 4: Yeah, did you know that Trump's ended six wars? Six seven,
Speaker 4: six or seven? Wow?
Speaker 17: Wow?
Speaker 6: It's I love it.
Speaker 2: I love it when you can't keep track of how
Speaker 2: many wars you ended.
Speaker 4: I got one other story I would like to discuss.
Speaker 4: I'm sure James will have some comments sense as well
Speaker 4: on a series of unfortunate ICE actions, including the first
Speaker 4: instant that I'm aware of, where federal agents have shot
Speaker 4: their firearms during an enforcement operation, at least as of
Speaker 4: like the Trump administration two point zero. On Saturday morning,
Speaker 4: August sixteenth, in San Bernardino, a family is pulled over
Speaker 4: by massed federal agents in what DHS has since claimed
Speaker 4: was a quote unquote targeted enforcement operation. As Customs and
Speaker 4: Border Protection approached the vehicle, the family inside stread of
Speaker 4: recording on their cell phones and asked for identification. When
Speaker 4: the family refused to roll down the windows of the car,
Speaker 4: federal agents smashed windows on both sides of the vehicle
Speaker 4: and reached inside. At this point, the driver pulled the
Speaker 4: car forward, and federal agents shot at the vehicle three
Speaker 4: times before the car sped away. I'll play the video
Speaker 4: here for posterity.
Speaker 8: Yeah, do you want what do you want?
Speaker 4: Identification? So those three pops at the end were the
Speaker 4: three gunshots. Yeah, this is a wild one, the driver
Speaker 4: told NBC Los Angeles, quote I had to protect my
Speaker 4: life and my family en quote.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's worth and guess these agents like them more
Speaker 8: uniformed than some.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they have badges visible on plate carriers.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: They did not establish much communication between themselves and the
Speaker 4: family as they approached the vehicle. There's a lot of
Speaker 4: like yelling back and forth.
Speaker 8: Yeah. You can hear the man telling his son they
Speaker 8: don't open it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: The father's telling his kids in the car not to
Speaker 4: roll down the windows, not open the doors as the
Speaker 4: federal agents asked for the car to be opened, and
Speaker 4: then they initiate force.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The man here has lived in the US for twenty
Speaker 4: three years and does not have legal status as to
Speaker 4: adult sons who are in the vehicle are both US citizens,
Speaker 4: according to Javier or Hernandez, the executive director of the
Speaker 4: Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, who has spoken about this
Speaker 4: incident on behalf of the family to local press. DHS
Speaker 4: gave a statement to NBC Los Angeles. Quote, in the
Speaker 4: course of the incident, the suspect drove his car at
Speaker 4: the officers and struck two Customs of Voter Protection officers
Speaker 4: with his vehicle on quote, saying that because the driver
Speaker 4: tried to quote unquote run down the agent's a CPB
Speaker 4: officer was forced to quote discharge his firearm in self defense.
Speaker 4: Unquote Yeah, So that is the justification that they are using,
Speaker 4: is that this vehicle was moving in the direction of
Speaker 4: officers and officers acted in self defense by shooting at
Speaker 4: the car.
Speaker 8: That doesn't seem to line up with the video that
Speaker 8: we just saw.
Speaker 4: No, the cell phone footage from inside does not show
Speaker 4: officers being hit by the vehicle. It could be the
Speaker 4: case that you can see that one of the officers
Speaker 4: reaching into the car. You can see if the car
Speaker 4: was pulling away, his arm may have the door. Like
Speaker 4: the officers are standing next to the car in the video,
Speaker 4: it's not clear that there's any officers placed in front
Speaker 4: of the vehicle.
Speaker 8: So yeah, his foot could have got run over. Maybe
Speaker 8: if he's like leaning standing there close to the car.
Speaker 4: The car may have bumped office. It does not appear
Speaker 4: like this man I was trying to quote unquote run
Speaker 4: over the police.
Speaker 8: In fact, he was driving away from them. Yes.
Speaker 4: The family says that federal agents refused to identify themselves
Speaker 4: and did not provide a judicial warrant, that DHS has
Speaker 4: refused to answer whether agents had warrants, and after the shooting,
Speaker 4: the driver called the San Bernardino Police Department to report
Speaker 4: that massman pulled his car over, broke windows, and shot
Speaker 4: at him and his family. Police came to his house
Speaker 4: and spoke with the driver, but did not arrest the
Speaker 4: man because California police cannot legally assist federal agents with
Speaker 4: immigration enforcement. According to a statement from the police department,
Speaker 4: DHS made a statement criticizing the police for not taking
Speaker 4: the driver into custody. Quote. This reckless decision came despite
Speaker 4: the subjects outright refusal to comply, and his wounding of
Speaker 4: two federal officers has yet another tragic example of California's
Speaker 4: pro sanctuary policies that shield criminals instead of protecting communities. Unquote,
Speaker 4: this is what we're calling wounding. Yeah, The severity of
Speaker 4: the two officers alleged woundings has not been specified. Police
Speaker 4: later returned to the home along with ice and Homeland
Speaker 4: security investigations, but the family did not let them enter
Speaker 4: as they did not have a warrant, though police made
Speaker 4: one non immigration related arrest outside of the home as
Speaker 4: community members rallied together in support of the family. As
Speaker 4: of two days ago, the DHS has said that quote
Speaker 4: the suspect remains at large.
Speaker 8: JESU Christ, this is a needless escalation that put people
Speaker 8: in danger, Like, yeah, what.
Speaker 2: Else is there to say though, Like, it's bullshit. This
Speaker 2: is not an excuse to discharge a weapon. This isn't
Speaker 2: count as wounding. These people should never been pulled over
Speaker 2: in the first place. But you know what we are
Speaker 2: where we are, this is the way ice works.
Speaker 8: Yeah, then this will probably happen again. I guess, like,
Speaker 8: I'm mildly surprised if sam Benadina police did not detain
Speaker 8: the man on suspicion of assaulting a federal agent, which
Speaker 8: is something that they could detain him for. Right it's
Speaker 8: not immigration crime, Yeah, and that is an extremely broad
Speaker 8: defense and one doesn't have to know the person's a
Speaker 8: federal agent, for example.
Speaker 4: So I guess like, raere, We'll see how this develops. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's still unclear what's going to happen to this man. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I'll check for an update next week. A few days before,
Speaker 4: on Thursday, August fourteenth, a man fleeing an ice rate
Speaker 4: at a home depot in Monrovia, California, was hit and
Speaker 4: killed while attempting to cross the two to ten freeway
Speaker 4: on foot. Local activists say that during the same raid,
Speaker 4: ice hit someone in the leg with one of their vehicles,
Speaker 4: and that person was taken into custody.
Speaker 8: This is tragic, right, Yeah, the reckless use of vehicles
Speaker 8: in LA was remarkable, and I've covered a good deal
Speaker 8: of protests and a good deal of places. The use
Speaker 8: of vehicles in an extremely dangerous way by police was notable.
Speaker 8: When I was up there covering the protests, I think
Speaker 8: it was in June. It was something that in certainly
Speaker 8: was very concerning to me. So it would not shock
Speaker 8: me if people had been hit by anic vehicle. But yeah,
Speaker 8: this is a tragedy. And again, like because the stakes
Speaker 8: are taking everything in someone's life away from them, we're
Speaker 8: going to see this happen more often.
Speaker 4: Right, No, it can cause people to do brash, run
Speaker 4: safe things. They attempt to cross the busy freeway. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the two town is a very busy freeway always. Now
Speaker 4: it's extremely tragic.
Speaker 8: Yeah, this is yeah, really sad. So Ed Sauce reporting
Speaker 8: that a student out of California, Benjamin Guerrero Kruth, who
Speaker 8: had just turned eighteen to begin a senior year of
Speaker 8: high school, was detained by immigration authorities from walking his dog.
Speaker 8: One of his former teachers visited him and mentioned that
Speaker 8: he had overheard. He had told her that he had
Speaker 8: overheard ICE agent talking about receiving a fifteen hundred dollar
Speaker 8: bounty for making his arrest.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, like in some promotional videos from DHS and ICE,
Speaker 4: they've been boasting about bonuses not only for signing on
Speaker 4: for this recruitment dry that they're doing, but also like
Speaker 4: cash bonuses for immigrants getting arrested and deported. And there's
Speaker 4: been multiple clips of agents like talking about this or like,
Speaker 4: you know, talking about, I wonder how much of a
Speaker 4: bonus we're going to get for these batchel of arrests.
Speaker 4: So this is this has been something noticed in multiple states.
Speaker 4: I've heard of this in Florida, and this sounds like
Speaker 4: it's in California. You said, yeah, California. Yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 4: this is this is a pattern, and it's not even
Speaker 4: very glorified bounty hunting, because it's not really glorified, but
Speaker 4: it's essentially essentially bounty hunting.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that might be why we're seeing some of these
Speaker 8: like insane arrests right of people who would never normally
Speaker 8: expect to see.
Speaker 3: We reported the news here, We.
Speaker 4: Reported the new news.
Speaker 10: 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 3: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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