Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to it
Speaker 2: could happen here, a podcast about it happening here, it
Speaker 2: in this case being an incredibly political shooting, and the
Speaker 2: thing that's happening Garrison and I wading through a river
Speaker 2: of disinformation and fever dreams to try and pull out
Speaker 2: some degree of truth. And what is a very truth
Speaker 2: light environment right now? Garrison, how are you doing?
Speaker 3: Truth fluid? Certainly truth fluid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a better way to phrase it.
Speaker 3: I have a growing headache that I think grows larger
Speaker 3: by the second.
Speaker 2: Yeah, will not cease.
Speaker 3: I guess you should first discuss how the shooter has
Speaker 3: been identified and arrested. Yes, we are recording this Friday
Speaker 3: evening for context.
Speaker 2: Yes, early evening there will be more information on the
Speaker 2: shooter and on the shooting. By the time you listen
Speaker 2: to this, we may include an update at the end,
Speaker 2: but we will be talking about stuff that is timeless,
Speaker 2: as in things that we know are false or true
Speaker 2: at the moment, and just generally our ethics on when
Speaker 2: do we feel confident saying a shooting or other kind
Speaker 2: of attack was left wing or right wing or something else,
Speaker 2: like when do we feel confident in making those judgments
Speaker 2: and why? Because those are really relevant topics and a
Speaker 2: lot of people just kind of go with what seems
Speaker 2: right based on the flow of info there hearing, which
Speaker 2: is how disinformation spreads. So the last time we would
Speaker 2: have talked about this would be the ed episode that
Speaker 2: came out. What was that Friday, Yeah, Thursday night, Friday morning,
Speaker 2: And basically right after we covered that early in the
Speaker 2: morning on Friday, President Trump was doing a media appearance
Speaker 2: on Fox News and he was the person who announced
Speaker 2: that they had a suspect in custody. Who were pretty
Speaker 2: sure was it Obviously, since the FBI had given the
Speaker 2: wrong accused the wrong person at least twice of doing this,
Speaker 2: people weren't sure if that meant anything. But it did
Speaker 2: come out very soon after that that a young man
Speaker 2: had essentially confessed to his father, who negotiated him turning
Speaker 2: himself into the authorities. This young man is Tyler Robinson.
Speaker 2: He was born and raised in Utah. I think, as
Speaker 2: far as we know, I woke up in the middle
Speaker 2: of the night, right as his name came out. I
Speaker 2: don't know why. It was weird, and so I just
Speaker 2: immediately started looking at the social media for his family,
Speaker 2: because I was able to find his mom and his
Speaker 2: dad's Facebook.
Speaker 3: The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Speaker 2: So I can tell you, and this is something you'll
Speaker 2: find in the reporting. He came from a pretty normal
Speaker 2: Utah family, politically conservative. That's based on articles I've seen,
Speaker 2: we interviewing people who know the family, and just based
Speaker 2: on publicly available information.
Speaker 3: Grunt style T shirt wearing father right.
Speaker 2: He dressed as Donald Trump. It's seemingly in a positive
Speaker 2: fashion for Halloween one year. His family were pretty a
Speaker 2: very normal Utah family. I found posts where they took
Speaker 2: pictures of them camping with their RVs, going out hunting.
Speaker 2: He was hunting from a young age. He had access
Speaker 2: to firearms from a young age, including assault style weapons
Speaker 2: from a young age. Again, very common for Utah, and yeah,
Speaker 2: his family hunted and fished, and he seems to have
Speaker 2: been a very normal kid in that regard. Kind of
Speaker 2: the thing that I found when I was doing my
Speaker 2: first dive into this that I thought was worthwhile, and
Speaker 2: the one thing that I really pulled out of that
Speaker 2: to share with people was in twenty eighteen, he dressed
Speaker 2: as a meme for Halloween, and the specific meme was
Speaker 2: this meme that is not inherently political, but is one
Speaker 2: that this group of far right people who follow a
Speaker 2: guy named Nick Fuint has called the groupers like, which
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that he was signaling to that, because again,
Speaker 2: like all of this stuff, it's not just the gropers
Speaker 2: who like this squatting slav guy meme. That's what he
Speaker 2: dressed as. If you've seen this meme of like the
Speaker 2: squatting Slavic guy in a tracksuit with a cigarette and
Speaker 2: a beer, he dressed like that for Halloween. There's a
Speaker 2: groper version of that squatting slav guy.
Speaker 3: Well, no, there's a Pepe version.
Speaker 2: You're right, You're right, I need to be precise. There's
Speaker 2: a Pepe version, and it is a meme that you
Speaker 2: can find shared in groper spaces, which again does not
Speaker 2: mean it's a groper meme, and I've seen that mistakenly
Speaker 2: and really tried to push back on This does not
Speaker 2: mean he definitely was, but it doesn't mean that he was.
Speaker 2: He was a very online kid, and he traveled in
Speaker 2: spaces where he would have had access and would have
Speaker 2: been aware of grouper's and that would have been one
Speaker 2: chunk of the online fever swamps that he would have
Speaker 2: been connected to and he would have had access to.
Speaker 2: We don't yet know at the time we're recording this
Speaker 2: what he believed or what his motivation was. The rething
Speaker 2: I thought was relevant to publisher this is that, like, okay,
Speaker 2: we are dealing with an extremely online weirdo.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And immediately after that it came out exactly what was
Speaker 2: carved onto the bullets that he had shot. And this
Speaker 2: was relevant in part because yesterday, the first day of
Speaker 2: news that we had about the bullets, the immediate claim
Speaker 2: that was leaked to Stephen Crowder through a source of
Speaker 2: his in the ATF was that transgender symbols had been
Speaker 2: carved onto the bullets. That was not accurate. If you
Speaker 2: want some levity from this whole scene, listening to the sheriff,
Speaker 2: Oh God giving the press conference, read the things he
Speaker 2: carved onto these bullets.
Speaker 3: We should just include some of those clips here.
Speaker 2: We'll put it in here.
Speaker 4: Inscriptions on a fired casing read notices bulge's capital owo,
Speaker 4: what's this question mark. Inscriptions on the three unfired casings
Speaker 4: read hey fascist, exclamation point, catch exclamation point, up arrow symbol,
Speaker 4: right arrow and symbol, and three down arrow symbols. A
Speaker 4: second unfired casing red, oh belichow, belichow, belichow chow chow.
Speaker 4: And a third on fired casing red. If you read this,
Speaker 4: you are gay, lmao.
Speaker 2: Just absolutely outstanding stuff. I mean, hearing a law enforcement
Speaker 2: officer say that is beautiful. It reminds me of having
Speaker 2: to explain bitcoin to all of the elderly detectives in
Speaker 2: West LA when I got a death threat against me.
Speaker 2: But this is like extremely online gamer nonsense, gay right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, average white male over the online gamer at this point,
Speaker 3: that's what it looks like. It could have developed in
Speaker 3: a far right direction, could be developed in a far
Speaker 3: left direction. Could be an ironic centrist. It could be
Speaker 3: any number of things. There's no single clear indication.
Speaker 2: Could be someone who doesn't map easily onto any of
Speaker 2: these traditional political compasses, Like, we don't know at this point.
Speaker 2: And what's kind of important that and the reason what
Speaker 2: I thought was really important to get out to people
Speaker 2: is that there will always be terrorist attacks from a
Speaker 2: wh It's never even if you want it to just
Speaker 2: be right wingers. It's never just right wingers who do
Speaker 2: domestic terrorism. That's never been the case, and it never
Speaker 2: will be the case. And one of the things that
Speaker 2: we're seeing and we will increasingly see, is that even
Speaker 2: while there will be varying political motivations behind different attacks,
Speaker 2: the language that people who are carrying out attacks like
Speaker 2: this use is all kind of coming to a point together. Right,
Speaker 2: They all have more in common with the way they message.
Speaker 2: The christ Church shooter and this kid both found the
Speaker 2: need to put memes onto the weapons they were using.
Speaker 3: Inscribe the internet exactly onto tools of killing, mechanisms of death.
Speaker 2: But literally inscribing the Internet onto tools of death. That
Speaker 2: is a thing both of them did. Yeah, maybe for
Speaker 2: wildly different reasons. Maybe this guy was coming from a
Speaker 2: left wing perspective, right, we just don't know.
Speaker 3: But this is where it's all coalescing around.
Speaker 2: And I think that is really important to note, right,
Speaker 2: the way that that happens. Now again, we wanted to
Speaker 2: talk about the thing that we can definitely say is disinformation.
Speaker 2: And one of the first counters to the whole transgender
Speaker 2: symbols carved onto bullets that came out was people putting
Speaker 2: up pictures of there's a Turkish manufacturer called Turan and
Speaker 2: they make bullets and their logo on the back of
Speaker 2: a bullet. If you're not a gun person, every bullet
Speaker 2: has the logo of the manufacturer and the name of
Speaker 2: the caliber stamped onto the back, right, I mean, just
Speaker 2: for basic safety reasons, right, or nearly every bullet twenty
Speaker 2: two is a little too small. But like if you've
Speaker 2: got like a round a nine millimeter or around a
Speaker 2: five five six or around a thirty at six, which
Speaker 2: was the caliber he used, apparently on the back of it,
Speaker 2: you'll see the name of the manufacturer and then the
Speaker 2: caliber stamped in there, right, and so on. The back
Speaker 2: of Turan bullets is stamped tr in. And so people
Speaker 2: started posting online this must be why they thought what
Speaker 2: they thought was transgender, that like they saw a Turan
Speaker 2: bullet and assumed it was trans and We know that
Speaker 2: wasn't the case because this was a thirty out six
Speaker 2: and Taran does not make thirty out six ammunition. We
Speaker 2: also know this was the case because they have now
Speaker 2: come out and said what was written on the bullet
Speaker 2: and what was mistaken for transgender air routs and the
Speaker 2: thing that was mistaken for transgender arrows was a reference
Speaker 2: to the video game hell Divers.
Speaker 3: A fucking hell Divers meme. Yes again, very gamer online kid.
Speaker 3: Side note, it's not completely clear which bullet casing was
Speaker 3: attributed to transgender ideology. It could be an interpretation of
Speaker 3: the arrows, or it could be the notices bulge oh
Speaker 3: woe casing and on that note, notices bulge oh Woe
Speaker 3: is not a groper meme. It's a meme making fun
Speaker 3: of furry sex role playing, which predates the existence of
Speaker 3: gropers by years, and as a meme has since been
Speaker 3: reclaimed by furries and trans shit posters online or trans
Speaker 3: only fans creators, or just trans people in general on
Speaker 3: the Internet, many of which are also furries. But now
Speaker 3: we have various types of opposing or overlapping groups of
Speaker 3: people who use this meme online. It's not a right
Speaker 3: wing meme just making fun of furries. It is also
Speaker 3: a meme used by people on the left and furries
Speaker 3: on the left, and probably furries on the right too,
Speaker 3: and non furries. It's just a general internet meme. It's
Speaker 3: a Reddit tiar joke. Now, I will say the hell
Speaker 3: Diver's meme also gives us kind of our not a
Speaker 3: clear look, but a look at a possible political motivation. Now,
Speaker 3: it could be ironic in use, it could be just
Speaker 3: referential in use. But the full hell Diver's referenced bullet
Speaker 3: reads hey fascist catch, followed by the hell Diver's dpad
Speaker 3: input for the five hundred kilogram bomb right, which is
Speaker 3: the arrows.
Speaker 2: That's the down arrows.
Speaker 3: I think up arrow side arrow, down down down arrow,
Speaker 3: which some ADS agent or someone initially thought could have
Speaker 3: been a reference to the transgender symbol or the three
Speaker 3: arrows symbol. Coupled with the hey fascist section of that reference.
Speaker 3: The hell Diver's video game does used fascist as a term,
Speaker 3: but this also could be a more general political reference,
Speaker 3: either ironic or sincere. By referring to Charlie Kirk as
Speaker 3: a fascist. We do not know the actual and intentionality
Speaker 3: behind this reference. Yet One thing that's possibly tied it
Speaker 3: to anti fascism is that another bullet reads bella Chow,
Speaker 3: bella Chow, Chow Chow, misspelling bella Chow, which is a
Speaker 3: popular anti fascist anthem, though the song has more recently
Speaker 3: also been used by groipers and fans of Hearts of
Speaker 3: Iron four, a diverse political budge. One could say we
Speaker 3: have talked about bella Chow on this show before. In fact,
Speaker 3: we've used bella Chow on multiple cool Zone media shows.
Speaker 3: It was originally an Italian anti fascist song that has
Speaker 3: since been adopted by anarchists and anti fascists all around
Speaker 3: the globe. I've heard Bellachow get played on loudspeakers countless
Speaker 3: times at anti fascist events on the West Coast as
Speaker 3: well as anarchist events on the East Coast. Though the
Speaker 3: song has since gained a whole other life through pop
Speaker 3: culture popularization, with EDM and like dubstep style remixes going viral.
Speaker 3: Most normi's probably first heard it on the Netflix show
Speaker 3: Money Heist and has been adopted into gamer culture via
Speaker 3: its use in Far Cry six and Hearts of Iron four. Again.
Speaker 2: Could be an anti fascist reference, could be video game shit,
Speaker 2: could be graper shit. There's just not enough to say
Speaker 2: at this point.
Speaker 3: Or it could be could be a centrist, a political
Speaker 3: hodgepodge of that has resulted in this nihilistic outburst of violence,
Speaker 3: similar to some of these like TCC school shootings. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we don't know, but there's currently a lot of people
Speaker 3: on the right who thinks it's an ANTIFA super soldier leftist,
Speaker 3: a lot of people on the left who think this
Speaker 3: is a Nick Fuentes piled groper. And either of those
Speaker 3: could be true, but neither could be true. It could
Speaker 3: be a much weirder third. We don't have direct evidence
Speaker 3: to support a full reading of either of those things yet.
Speaker 2: And this is when I have seen people get kind
Speaker 2: of heated about being corrected on particularly the bullet thing.
Speaker 2: And I think the reason why is that it seems
Speaker 2: it seems like such a smoking gotcha. Of course they'd
Speaker 2: be this stupid you really want it to be true.
Speaker 2: And it's when you feel like that about a case
Speaker 2: like this, about an attack like this, that like, oh,
Speaker 2: I really want this to be true. It would be
Speaker 2: really satisfying if this was the thing that had happened.
Speaker 2: That you need to be most hesitant to embrace that,
Speaker 2: right I think that's that's what I'd say.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, if it's too good to be true or it
Speaker 3: feels too convenient, you should introspect greatly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Robert and Garrison will be right back. But first
Speaker 2: here's some ads and we're back.
Speaker 3: There's been other things that is kind of influencing this
Speaker 3: political uncertainty. A reporter for the Young Turks only the
Speaker 3: most reparatable news outlet, has claimed on Twitter on Friday afternoon. Quote,
Speaker 3: according to Utah officials and police interviews with his family,
Speaker 3: Tyler Robinson hated Charlie Kirk because Kirk wasn't conservative enough.
Speaker 3: Robinson reportedly admired Nick Fuentes. G O piers are now
Speaker 3: scrubbing ex posts about DEM's faster than doj eRASS Trump's
Speaker 3: name from in Epstein files. Unquote. Yeah, this claim from
Speaker 3: David Schuster the report of the Young Turks unsubstantiated. Yes,
Speaker 3: but it's being spread as as exact fact, and it
Speaker 3: seems like this claim is most likely misquoting and editorializing
Speaker 3: from a statement a family member gave to police, which
Speaker 3: has been described by the governor as a family member
Speaker 3: and the shooter discussing Charlie Kirk's upcoming visit to UVU campus.
Speaker 3: They talked about why they didn't like him and viewpoints
Speaker 3: he held. The family member also stated Kirk was full
Speaker 3: of hate and spreading hate unquote, So that has been
Speaker 3: altered and shifted and interpreted in a lot of different
Speaker 3: ways to say that the shooter stated Kirk was full
Speaker 3: of hate and spreading hate, even though that's not what
Speaker 3: this interview segment necessarily means. Just that quote unquote, they
Speaker 3: meaning the family member and the shooter didn't like Kirk,
Speaker 3: And that's really all you can extrapolate from that piece
Speaker 3: of this police statement. But it's been spreading editorialized to
Speaker 3: me in a wild collection of different things. Yeah, including
Speaker 3: by people on the right who are interpreting this statement
Speaker 3: as evidence that the shooter has said that Kirk was
Speaker 3: spreading hate, even though that's not actually clear from this
Speaker 3: interview either. No, it says the family member stated Charlie
Speaker 3: Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate, not the shooter.
Speaker 2: And likewise, one of the things I'm seeing spread a
Speaker 2: lot is a claimed voter registration for Robinson.
Speaker 3: A Tyler Robinson in Utah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, again, there's a lot of them, a.
Speaker 3: Lot of Tyler Robinsonson in Utah.
Speaker 2: The one that is spreading the most, has a voter
Speaker 2: registration date of one to one two thousand and one,
Speaker 2: which he just simply couldn't have. Now that said, people
Speaker 2: pointed out that Utah's voter registration shit is bad, and
Speaker 2: this does seem like a placeholder that someone put in.
Speaker 2: But also the county's not right because he didn't live
Speaker 2: in Lehigh, Utah, and that's where this is listed for.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying this guy definitely wasn't. He may have
Speaker 2: been a registered Republican, but it looks like we don't
Speaker 2: have the information to say that yet. Likewise, there's an
Speaker 2: article that was published recently in The Guardian where they
Speaker 2: talked to someone who was a friend of his in
Speaker 2: high school who said that he was like the only
Speaker 2: leftist in a family of Republicans and was angry about it.
Speaker 3: The exact quote was that Robinson was quote pretty left
Speaker 3: on everything, the only member of his family that was
Speaker 3: really leftist. The rest of his family was very hard
Speaker 3: Republican yep. And that Robinson would quote always just be
Speaker 3: renting and arguing about them.
Speaker 2: And it does look CNN is saying that they have
Speaker 2: found Tyler Robbinson's actual voter registration data, and CNN says
Speaker 2: he's registered as unaffiliated with a political party and is
Speaker 2: listed as an active, which means he has not voted
Speaker 2: in either of the two last general elections. Sure, so again,
Speaker 2: there's just nothing clear we can.
Speaker 3: Say, right, Yeah, it's hard to take both this young
Speaker 3: Turks reporter and a high school friend from four years ago.
Speaker 3: Not great sources for someone's current political outlook, absolutely not
Speaker 3: and contradictory. So it's really really unclear. Also, this is
Speaker 3: just one friend. You would want more than one source
Speaker 3: to substantiate this claim. And perhaps by Sunday night, when
Speaker 3: this airs, there will will be more information. Quick update
Speaker 3: on this. Literally minutes after Robert and I recorded, the
Speaker 3: Guardian retracted those quotes from the shooter's alleged high school estimate,
Speaker 3: which described the shooter as a leftist. The source contacted
Speaker 3: the Guardian again and said that they could not accurately
Speaker 3: remember the details of their relationship in high school. So
Speaker 3: the Guardian has pulled those quotes. But certainly right now,
Speaker 3: the way people have latched on to narratives to satisfy
Speaker 3: the current emotional turmoil that people are in because of
Speaker 3: the hyper reality around this shooting and the possible consequences
Speaker 3: it could mean for the fate of this whole country.
Speaker 3: I understand why people are quick to really hook their
Speaker 3: version of reality onto these claims. Yes, but currently there
Speaker 3: is no clear version of reality.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I just want to caution people if you
Speaker 2: care about knowing reality yourself. And there's two different questions here, right,
Speaker 2: what is useful, what is valuable, what like protects people?
Speaker 2: And then what gets us closer to the truth. Right.
Speaker 2: Part of why as soon as I found that photo
Speaker 2: of him dressed as a meme for Halloween and recognize
Speaker 2: the implications of it, I put it up there is
Speaker 2: because I thought it was relevant that it said something
Speaker 2: about his background, but also it got discussion and just
Speaker 2: people bringing up how complicated this guy's background. Is it
Speaker 2: a positive thing? Which was a got discussion away from
Speaker 2: absolutely baseless allegations that this was a transgender terrorist attack
Speaker 2: and all sorts, all the kind of shit that had
Speaker 2: been spreading on the right, right, and that was valuable. However,
Speaker 2: I've been really careful about not saying this guy is
Speaker 2: a groy Berth, even though that sure would be convenient,
Speaker 2: because again, at the time we're recording this. There's just
Speaker 2: not that evidence. Every new fact that comes out about
Speaker 2: this guy right now is wavering in this gray area
Speaker 2: where you know, like I one of the other things
Speaker 2: when I posted correcting the voter registration card, somebody posted like, okay,
Speaker 2: but he donated to Trump's campaign. No, he did.
Speaker 5: Not.
Speaker 2: A different guy with his name donated to Donald Trump,
Speaker 2: the Tyler Robinson, who is currently in custody for shooting
Speaker 2: Charlie Kirk, has no record of federal election donations, per CNN. Right,
Speaker 2: these are very convincing when you see them just sort
Speaker 2: of sliding across your feed, and if you're not checking
Speaker 2: up on every new thing you see, it feels like, obviously,
Speaker 2: this guy's a right winger. Obviously he's a groper. I've
Speaker 2: seen so many pieces of evidence when you actually haven't
Speaker 2: seen any evidence at.
Speaker 3: All, and even those two things can get compleated. Right,
Speaker 3: Saying he's a groper is different than saying a right winger.
Speaker 3: Right Like a groper is a very specific branch of
Speaker 3: alt right slash far right community slash ideology revolving around
Speaker 3: the America First streamer Nick Fuentes and a collection of
Speaker 3: memes associated with this movement, which have historically beef with
Speaker 3: Charlie Kirk for not being sufficiently to the right as
Speaker 3: some more openly white premisest neo Nazis have been. This
Speaker 3: beef between Fuentes and Kirk was largely dissolved after Kirk
Speaker 3: started adopting more and more far I believes, and adopted
Speaker 3: the great Replacement theory, which settled down the quote unquote
Speaker 3: Groper war, which many people are assuming that this shooting
Speaker 3: is a part of, with some groper Nick Fuentes fan
Speaker 3: killing Charlie Kirk, possibly as a legitimate part of the
Speaker 3: quote unquote Graper war, but also maybe just has like
Speaker 3: an ironic mimetic act. So when you say Graper, that
Speaker 3: should refer to a very specific thing, not necessarily just
Speaker 3: this guy used right wing memes or these memes aren't
Speaker 3: even right wing, but.
Speaker 2: Like, no, it could be, but they're not inherently This.
Speaker 3: Man could be, but they're not inherently nor are they
Speaker 3: really the main use of this saying Haha, if you
Speaker 3: read this, you are gay, could just be an average
Speaker 3: overly online male right or on the internet. A lot
Speaker 3: of people talk like that. A lot of gay people
Speaker 3: talk like that. A lot of fashions people talk about
Speaker 3: that is.
Speaker 2: This homophobia or a twenty year old Right, it could
Speaker 2: be either or Yeah, And we don't need to just
Speaker 2: jump to one specific thing to build a singular narrative
Speaker 2: when a fluid situation is still rapidly unfolding.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Not if again, you want to feel like and you
Speaker 2: want to really be better than the other side, who
Speaker 2: don't give a shit about the truth, who just care
Speaker 2: about what's convenient and how many people they can get
Speaker 2: to believe a convenient fact. Right, If you don't want
Speaker 2: to be that kind of person, if you think that's bad,
Speaker 2: and I do, and you do, and we all do
Speaker 2: here at cool Zone, then you do kind of it
Speaker 2: to yourself to care about stuff like this, even if
Speaker 2: it's less convenient. By the way, if you're not an investigator,
Speaker 2: you don't have to be delving into all this. It's
Speaker 2: enough to just know the fact that I saw something
Speaker 2: that looked like evidence this guy donated to a campaign.
Speaker 2: Do I know that that's him? Do I absolutely know
Speaker 2: that's him? Because it's possible multiple people have the same
Speaker 2: name and some of them may have made a donation
Speaker 2: or not. Right, don't just pash your eyes over stuff
Speaker 2: like this and be like, all right, I've done all
Speaker 2: I need to do, but do purchase from these advertisers
Speaker 2: and we're back.
Speaker 3: One other aspects that people's reaction to the shooting is demonstrating,
Speaker 3: and we've seen this with other major events, major political events,
Speaker 3: violent political events, past few years, is how this shows
Speaker 3: a new fracturing of reality, because what eventually gets proven
Speaker 3: about the shooter will probably be insignificant to the narratives
Speaker 3: that people have already latched onto and have baked into
Speaker 3: reality so far. And this conceptual splitting of reality is
Speaker 3: going to fall squarely along some partisan in political lines.
Speaker 3: Right conservatives will have a conception of the shooting which
Speaker 3: differs heavily from the conception of the shooting held by
Speaker 3: people on the left. Many people on the left are
Speaker 3: going to believe that this shooter was a groper forever,
Speaker 3: no matter what comes out in the next few weeks
Speaker 3: to months, they will have in their version of reality
Speaker 3: the idea that this guy was a groper. Similarly, people
Speaker 3: on the right are going to believe, to the fullest
Speaker 3: and truest except of their hearts, that this guy was Antifa.
Speaker 3: The actual reality is going to matter very little compared
Speaker 3: to these two beliefs, and the killing of Charlie Kirk
Speaker 3: has mimetic potential for several large, discreete and overlapping online groups.
Speaker 3: Many different online communities or groups could have encouraged or
Speaker 3: influenced this killing. Anti fascists certainly could have Leftists, the
Speaker 3: Groper right could have the four Chan right could have
Speaker 3: terror Graham could have Yeah. All different and possibly overlapping
Speaker 3: communities in cell culture, Yeah, irony, poisoned centrists, j ragg, nihilists, accelerationists.
Speaker 2: A normal garden variety Trumpist Republican who got angry over
Speaker 2: Epstein stuff could have done this. There's no evidence of that.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying, but I'm just saying, like there we
Speaker 2: literally like it could be so many things at this point.
Speaker 3: And as satisfying as it is to just collapse this
Speaker 3: guy down to Antifa or Graper, it's very likely it
Speaker 3: could just be of third, weirder option, be the weirder option, right,
Speaker 3: especially if you look at the nihilist trend of violence
Speaker 3: that we've covered on this show, from TCC with ties
Speaker 3: to other extremist groups, the multiple school shootings that have
Speaker 3: used nostalgia and online references and references to previous shootings.
Speaker 3: This could also line up with that framework. As Robert said,
Speaker 3: the inscription of memes onto tools of death is a
Speaker 3: commonality across many of these gruesome acts of violence, from
Speaker 3: christ Church to the Minneapolis school shooting just a month
Speaker 3: ago to this assassination in September. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, I think it is worth talking about how gropers
Speaker 2: and how Nick Quintees himself has responded to this, because
Speaker 2: that is telling, right totally, whether or not this guy
Speaker 2: is a grower. A lot of gropers have publicly speculated
Speaker 2: that he is their guy.
Speaker 3: Or people on four Chan have speculated that he is
Speaker 3: a graper, not your average four Chan user necessarily he's
Speaker 3: a groper. I think this distinction is also important.
Speaker 2: That is valid.
Speaker 3: Yes, but yeah, you have seen a lot of people
Speaker 3: on the right suspected this guy could be a groper. Certainly,
Speaker 3: some gropers have themselves as well as four Chan users.
Speaker 3: And Nick Fuintes does see a little bit nervous, but
Speaker 3: he could be nervous for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 2: But he put out a video.
Speaker 3: I watched the entire Nick Fuentez stream last night.
Speaker 2: Oh good, thank god, he was.
Speaker 3: Acting a little bizarre, talking very philosophical, almost as if
Speaker 3: he was like doing ketamine beforehand. Like he was talking
Speaker 3: about how the structure of society, and like a spiritual
Speaker 3: structure as well, will influence society to cause events to
Speaker 3: happen which kind of stress test and demonstrate the direction
Speaker 3: of society going. And he basically talked about the assassination
Speaker 3: as one of these events of society unfolding itself to
Speaker 3: determine what path is going to get taken. Our thing
Speaker 3: is going to get more violent and more divisive, or
Speaker 3: will this event alter reality's course in a more positive direction.
Speaker 3: It was very interesting. He was talking about how he
Speaker 3: feels some responsibility for the arc that this country has
Speaker 3: gone on, how he's made a lot of mistakes when
Speaker 3: he's younger. You could interpret this as trying to pick
Speaker 3: up new supporters and try to fill in the Charlie
Speaker 3: Kirk sized hole in the American right, but it's unclear.
Speaker 3: He was talking quite emotionally about what the past few
Speaker 3: years of his life have been.
Speaker 2: And again making that comment that I want all of
Speaker 2: my fans to stand down, etc. It's noteworthy of where Fuintes'
Speaker 2: head is right yeah, and of the media environment. He
Speaker 2: must exist in terms of like personally what comes to him.
Speaker 2: And I'm very curious if I could, if I could
Speaker 2: somehow know everything Nick Fuintees has been texted and been
Speaker 2: texting over the last seventy two hours. God, that would
Speaker 2: be fascinating.
Speaker 3: He said. The people on the left were telling him
Speaker 3: it's his responsibility to try to turn things down, and
Speaker 3: he was kind of upset about that. And during the stream,
Speaker 3: Fuintes was not discussing the shooter as if the shooter
Speaker 3: was a groper, or even suspecting the shooter was a groper.
Speaker 3: Nick telling his audience or whoever listening, to put down
Speaker 3: your arms and not jump to quick emotional violence was
Speaker 3: in reference to retaliatory violence against the left for their
Speaker 3: killing of Charlie Kirk. That was the way Tuentes was
Speaker 3: talking about the shooting through the course of this hour
Speaker 3: long stream. It did not seem to me that he
Speaker 3: was trying to cover his bases in case the shooter
Speaker 3: was a groper. That wasn't how he was discussing it.
Speaker 3: He certainly laid a lot of blame on the left,
Speaker 3: and he seemed very scared about the direction of the country.
Speaker 3: Someone showed up with a weapon to his house less
Speaker 3: than a year ago, and I think some of his
Speaker 3: fear is absolutely genuine. It's not just trying to cover
Speaker 3: his ass in case this guy turns out to be
Speaker 3: a groper.
Speaker 2: No, he's in danger because of the things he did.
Speaker 2: He invited the danger into his life by being Nick Quintes,
Speaker 2: but he is in danger.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, it was. It was a very
Speaker 3: odd stream. I tuned into nck Quentez every once in
Speaker 3: a while just to keep track of what he was doing.
Speaker 2: Like a healthy person.
Speaker 3: It's my job. I know.
Speaker 2: I woke up at four am to stock a murderer's
Speaker 2: family on Facebook. Gearson.
Speaker 3: So it was in the first fifteen minutes of the
Speaker 3: stream where Nick discussed these more theoretical elements, how spiritual
Speaker 3: or societal forces kind of use people as puppets, not
Speaker 3: in a like fully NPC way, but as an evolutionary
Speaker 3: method of charting the path of society. Nick then wents
Speaker 3: to go on to discuss Charlie Kirk, how he's beefed
Speaker 3: with Charlie in the past, how they've disagreed on nearly everything,
Speaker 3: but goes on to say some nice things about Charlie
Speaker 3: for the first time and then calls for everyone to
Speaker 3: lay down their arms and now is not the time
Speaker 3: to jump to quick action, We should reflect, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera. But in those first fifteen minutes, he talks
Speaker 3: about like what this shooting means for American culture. And
Speaker 3: I've been watching some of his other recent streams where
Speaker 3: he's kind of been going after some of his fans
Speaker 3: for just being completely like brain dead, just repeating racist
Speaker 3: tropes with no real thought, just talking about Hitler in
Speaker 3: this memified way, and it feels like he's sort of
Speaker 3: reflecting on both what he's done with his life ever
Speaker 3: since he's been a teenager and the world that he
Speaker 3: has helped bring into being. He talks about never having
Speaker 3: much of a actual sincere or participation in politics, how
Speaker 3: it's always been so bombastic and mimetic, and it appears
Speaker 3: as if he's kind of stuck doing this bit forever,
Speaker 3: like he decided that this is what his life was
Speaker 3: going to be as a teenager, and now he's in
Speaker 3: his mid twenties, and from these other recent streams, it
Speaker 3: feels like he's kind of fed up with how his
Speaker 3: audience is just appearing completely mindless, very Larpee, endlessly repeating
Speaker 3: Hitler references reflectionive racism, and how he's trapped himself in
Speaker 3: this political game. And a quote he said is that
Speaker 3: this is not a game. This is life and death.
Speaker 3: And as we've just seen, like this is literally life
Speaker 3: and death. This is not just online memes anymore. We
Speaker 3: can't treat politics as an online meme game anymore because
Speaker 3: these real life characters are getting killed. They framed a
Speaker 3: lot of this in very spiritual warfare language, like they
Speaker 3: killed Charlie for being Christian or talking about Jesus though
Speaker 3: stressing to his listeners like Jesus not actually pick up
Speaker 3: arms and fight. Yeah, and people should calm down and
Speaker 3: reflect because how the country handles this event will be
Speaker 3: heavily deterministic, yes, in what the country looks like going forwards.
Speaker 3: And that's what he was expressing.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, And I think that that's that's a really
Speaker 2: important point for people to get across that, like there's
Speaker 2: there's the immediate battle in front of us, right, which
Speaker 2: is why it's so tempting sometimes to take the easy
Speaker 2: Oh that's this guy was one of theirs. That that
Speaker 2: means we don't have to keep thinking about it, or
Speaker 2: it means that we can kind of just like move
Speaker 2: forward with this as another right wing attack. And there's
Speaker 2: a degree to which you know, it's good just for
Speaker 2: the right's narrative machine to get upset by the fact
Speaker 2: that even if it turns out this guy at left
Speaker 2: wing motivation, he's weirder and more confusing than they want
Speaker 2: him to be, and he's not you know, the transgender
Speaker 2: terrorists they were hoping he would.
Speaker 3: Be certainly not trans right to give.
Speaker 2: Them permission to do all the fucked up shit they
Speaker 2: wanted to do. You know, if they need permission, I mean,
Speaker 2: they seem to feel like they need an excuse.
Speaker 3: I do think, hey, Trump creates permission. Some of his
Speaker 3: followers might appreciate permission.
Speaker 6: I guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One thing that is undeniable is there was an extreme
Speaker 2: desire from a lot of these guys for this to
Speaker 2: be tied in with their ongoing attacks on trans people
Speaker 2: in the left totally right, and so I understand even
Speaker 2: the argument that, like anything that disrupts their narrative train, there,
Speaker 2: even if it winds up not being accurate, there's a
Speaker 2: value in it. I do understand that argument, But on
Speaker 2: a larger thing if we just care about terrorism and
Speaker 2: like why people get radicalized to do things and how
Speaker 2: and understanding these phenomenons.
Speaker 3: Like actually understanding how our country is unfolding.
Speaker 2: Right, that influenced all of our lives, right, And usually
Speaker 2: usually what happens is not a single guy getting shot
Speaker 2: for a specific reason, usually a bunch of people who
Speaker 2: had nothing to do with the grievances expressed getting shot.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: That's usually when somebody decides to pick up a gun
Speaker 2: and go into public because the inner they they got radicalized.
Speaker 2: Usually a bunch of random, innocent people die, which is
Speaker 2: again why it's just really important to try to understand
Speaker 2: the underlying dynamics, even in a specific case like this,
Speaker 2: and why I actually do care about the truth here,
Speaker 2: even though that that's not as convenient maybe as we'd
Speaker 2: like it to be. I don't know what else? What
Speaker 2: else do we want to talk about here?
Speaker 3: No, I mean, like, I think this event will be
Speaker 3: extremely important. Yeah, something that that fwene has talked about
Speaker 3: is how even if you've never met Kirk, you, whether
Speaker 3: you hate Kirk or whether you love Kirk, Kirk has
Speaker 3: been a parasocial force in probably everyone who's listening to this. Yeah,
Speaker 3: their lives for years, and watching him bleed out gruesomely
Speaker 3: is massively affecting. I think the reason why people are
Speaker 3: reacting to this so much more strongly than the murder
Speaker 3: of a state senator and her husband is that we
Speaker 3: did not have a personal relationship with that state senator,
Speaker 3: nor was there a video of them gruesomely bleeding out.
Speaker 3: And people's emotions affect how they understand reality, and the
Speaker 3: Charlie Kirk murder has been emotionally affecting for a lot
Speaker 3: of people, both positively and negatively. And it was very graphic,
Speaker 3: and it's spread around like watching someone who you know,
Speaker 3: whether personally or parasocially, die on video through the medium
Speaker 3: in which they gained their fame, is going to be
Speaker 3: a very large, to use a really bad pun, a
Speaker 3: turning point for the USA. And I think that's part
Speaker 3: of why everyone's so volatile around this issue, because I
Speaker 3: think everyone realizes how important this moment will be. Despite
Speaker 3: the deaths of Palestinian children vastly, vastly outnumbered the deaths
Speaker 3: of one conservative commentator.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, like logically we could all say
Speaker 2: that that's wrong and fucked up, but like you just
Speaker 2: you know, that's how people work, right, how people work.
Speaker 2: We all know that's how people work. I'm not saying
Speaker 2: that's okay, I just you know.
Speaker 3: No, but it's it's it's the way, it's the way
Speaker 3: things work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I don't know, like because again we again
Speaker 2: still cannot say at this point that there was just
Speaker 2: a Vanity Fair article came out that's kind of repeating
Speaker 2: some of the Groper stuff. But I looked in my
Speaker 2: post is their source on that? So they don't have
Speaker 2: anything new on the Groper front.
Speaker 3: So no, they're just thinking that the squatting slav meme
Speaker 3: is evidence, yeah, tied to the Pepe version of the meme,
Speaker 3: which is then linked to Groyper, which is a specific
Speaker 3: type of pepe, not the skinny pepe. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm so tired, Robert, I'm really tired. I don't know
Speaker 2: if this guy liked Nick Flintes. I will say he
Speaker 2: probably had an opinion about Nick Flintes. He was aware
Speaker 2: of them, the dude right, like he was that level
Speaker 2: of online for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, which twenty two year old gamer mail doesn't.
Speaker 3: And that's the thing, right exactly.
Speaker 2: Again, It's like I was talking about when before we
Speaker 2: knew who it was when we just had the video,
Speaker 2: because I did accurately anticipate that it was someone who
Speaker 2: learned how to shoot through hunting with a bolt action rifle.
Speaker 2: That's just what the shot looked like to me when
Speaker 2: I saw it, Yeah, which wound up being accurate. And
Speaker 2: there were a lot of people who were like questioning
Speaker 2: that on the grounds of like, well, though, this had
Speaker 2: to be like a trained sniper or something like that,
Speaker 2: and it's like.
Speaker 3: This looks like a professional hit to me, Robert, or no,
Speaker 3: a massad agent either.
Speaker 2: Or yeah, like no, Literally, all we knew is that
Speaker 2: it was somebody who was able to like competent with
Speaker 2: a firearm.
Speaker 3: That's all you could say.
Speaker 2: And probably it was not a semi automatic because people
Speaker 2: in stressful situations, if they can usually keep shooting right.
Speaker 3: They would have hired more than one shot.
Speaker 2: And was like, yeah, yeah, that's all that's all we
Speaker 2: could say, which narrowed it down to everyone in Utah,
Speaker 2: Like like that's when I try to emphasize this that
Speaker 2: like what I can say from this is that anyone
Speaker 2: in Utah could have shot Charlie Kirk at that point,
Speaker 2: and sure enough, it turned out being almost.
Speaker 3: Like average twenty two year old Utonian.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you.
Speaker 2: Positive, normal Utah kid, that's what this guy looks like
Speaker 2: so far.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and yeah, there's a lot of like semi racist
Speaker 3: or semi misogynist gamers out there. They're not necessarily gropers, right,
Speaker 3: And we don't even know how racist this guy was.
Speaker 3: There's no indication one way or another. He certainly had
Speaker 3: an awareness of online culture. But everyone who makes a
Speaker 3: hell Diver's two reference is going to have a pretty
Speaker 3: large awareness of online culture. And that does not indicate
Speaker 3: what his quote unquote beliefs are, just an awareness and
Speaker 3: an existence within that culture.
Speaker 7: Yep.
Speaker 2: Well, I can't think of anything else to say at
Speaker 2: the moment about this. It's unclear to me the degree
Speaker 2: to which this has shifted the national discourse on it.
Speaker 2: I have seen it looks like the way in which
Speaker 2: the conservatives are talking about this guy in the shooting,
Speaker 2: it looks like they have changed sae, at least some
Speaker 2: of them, because it's less clear at least the number
Speaker 2: of people right we're seeing.
Speaker 3: The groper counter narrative has introduced doubt, which will influence
Speaker 3: some conservatives understanding of the shooting. Others will keep keep
Speaker 3: hitting that that, that, and that leftist Antifa line. I
Speaker 3: have seen certain people claim that the Groper narrative is
Speaker 3: even changing the way Trump talks about the shooting because
Speaker 3: Trump is not referencing Charlie Kirk as much or is
Speaker 3: avoiding questions about how he's feeling in regards to to
Speaker 3: Kirk's death. Yea, Trump has never cared about Charlie Kirk. Okay,
Speaker 3: Vance certainly has. He's like closer to like Vance's orbit.
Speaker 3: But Donald Trump doesn't give a single fuck about Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 3: Absolutely not this little, this little puny man, Like, no,
Speaker 3: Trump does not care. It makes sense that one asked
Speaker 3: how Trump feels about about about Charlie Kirk's and and
Speaker 3: and if he's feeling okay, He's like, yeah, I feel fine.
Speaker 3: What I'm really excited about is that we're constructing the
Speaker 3: new White House ball right. Yeah, Like that's not indication
Speaker 3: that Trump's been told that this guy's actually a rightist
Speaker 3: and now has to not talk about how the left
Speaker 3: is ruining the country. Now, it's that Trump does not
Speaker 3: care about target Tark that much. And it's been a
Speaker 3: few days, so yeah, he's gonna move on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's you know, if you're wanting to game
Speaker 2: theory this out of the ethics of just muddying the
Speaker 2: waters to disrupt their momentum, Well, there's an argument to
Speaker 2: be made there.
Speaker 3: I can see the utility in that. Yeah, My utility is,
Speaker 3: I would say, at the very least equal to that, right,
Speaker 3: And that's having an accurate understanding. I want to know
Speaker 3: what happens to the world to predict future trends and
Speaker 3: like understand the trajectory of political violence in the United States.
Speaker 3: And that's what my interest in stressing evidentiary standards for
Speaker 3: understanding the motivations behind this attack and the online communities
Speaker 3: and cultures that this attack has emerged from.
Speaker 2: Right, And I would say, if you're looking in your
Speaker 2: own life, how can I tell which side of things
Speaker 2: I'm on? Just imagine everything was reversed in the case
Speaker 2: where like you think, this is really clear evidence that
Speaker 2: this person was motivated by whoever you hate the most,
Speaker 2: and that whatever ideology you hate is why they did it.
Speaker 2: If it were the opposite and this same level of
Speaker 2: evidence was being used to accuse someone who was on
Speaker 2: your side of things, would you consider the evidence presented enough, right,
Speaker 2: And That's where what I'm looking at is, I have
Speaker 2: not seen enough evidence to buy into either side fully yet.
Speaker 2: I can make a case in my head that he's
Speaker 2: a groper, and there's some pieces of evidence that fit
Speaker 2: with that. And I can make a case in my
Speaker 2: head that he's a guy who hates Charlie Kirk, and
Speaker 2: there's quotes from some interviews that would back that up,
Speaker 2: but neither of them is a solid at the moment
Speaker 2: that we're recording. This is a solid hypothesis to me.
Speaker 3: Or just a vaguely right wing board gamer right or
Speaker 3: just a right wing word who has zoomer angst and
Speaker 3: it manifested this way as many other people have manifested
Speaker 3: there are zoomer anks through an act of political violence. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like groper, a very specific term means a specific thing.
Speaker 3: It doesn't just mean a gen z conservative.
Speaker 2: Yep, No, it does not. And I think that's where
Speaker 2: we're going to have to and leave you for the day.
Speaker 2: We may have appenned an update to this, depending on
Speaker 2: what else is out. I do think that most of
Speaker 2: what we're talking about is pretty even though there will
Speaker 2: be more information at the time you listen to it,
Speaker 2: pretty timeless. In terms of how you should think about
Speaker 2: shit like this.
Speaker 3: How you react to whatever the next assassination is going
Speaker 3: to be, because this is an increasing trend in American politics.
Speaker 2: Look, if you care, and if your stance, if your
Speaker 2: principled stance with all the evidence is I don't care.
Speaker 2: All that matters is defeating the right. So all I
Speaker 2: care about is what's convenient in terms of disrupting their narratives,
Speaker 2: Then go on and live your life. But that's not
Speaker 2: the way we're going to do things here. When we
Speaker 2: look at these tacks, we are going to try to
Speaker 2: figure out what happened, even if it's inconvenient, and it
Speaker 2: may be, you know, we don't know what this guy yet.
Speaker 3: Touch some fucking grass before you touch grass, I'm recording
Speaker 3: one more update Sunday morning. Yesterday, right wing out let's
Speaker 3: and then Axios and now even more mainstream out let's
Speaker 3: started reporting that the shooter, Tyler Robinson, had a transgender
Speaker 3: room mate, and that investigators believe the two had some
Speaker 3: sort of romantic relationship. Some information from law enforcement officials
Speaker 3: about this investigation has been shown to be dubious at best,
Speaker 3: but it is true that the shooter had a roommate
Speaker 3: who does appear to be transgender. The roommate's TikTok can
Speaker 3: be traced to a Reddit account where they post about
Speaker 3: being trans and post on r slash trans r slash
Speaker 3: trans Diy, as well as r slash four Tran, and
Speaker 3: also posts on our slash Green Text and r slash
Speaker 3: four Chan. Also active in a variety of video games subreddits,
Speaker 3: magic the Gathering Memes subreddits, r slash Distressing Memes, r
Speaker 3: slash Reddit Moment, r slash Unpopular Opinion, r slash Lord
Speaker 3: of the Rings Memes, r slash Prehistoric Memes, r slash
Speaker 3: dank Meme, r slash nothing Ever Happens. Also post on
Speaker 3: our slash by Irl, r slash Anarcho Capitalism, r slash
Speaker 3: Jordan Peterson, as well as the four Chan themed subreddits.
Speaker 3: I should also note that scrolling these subredits is not
Speaker 3: necessarily indicative of someone's political orientation. I myself scroll many
Speaker 3: of these subredits, as do largely a political friends of
Speaker 3: mine who check out these subreddits regularly just for shits
Speaker 3: and giggles. This is politics as meme subredits like Political
Speaker 3: Compass and TPUSA are popular political subredits with explicitly comedic purpose,
Speaker 3: including making fun of Charlie Kirk in a memified fashion.
Speaker 3: And I don't know if the roommate visited those two
Speaker 3: specific subreddits, but I'm just using them as an example.
Speaker 3: Utah Governor Spencer Cox says that the roommate did not
Speaker 3: have any knowledge of Tyler Robinson's planned attack and has
Speaker 3: been incredibly cooperative throughout the course of the investigation. Sources
Speaker 3: have told Axios that investigators initially wanted information about the
Speaker 3: roommates gender identity to not be publicly reported. The right
Speaker 3: is certainly eager to make any sort of transgender connection
Speaker 3: to this shooting. The New York Post has referred to
Speaker 3: this shooting as another shooting by trans people and their advocates.
Speaker 3: The actual motivation of the shooter is still currently unknown.
Speaker 3: Governor Cox has described his ideology as leftist, while also
Speaker 3: noting quote there was a lot of gaming going on.
Speaker 3: Friends have confirmed that there was that deep dark internet
Speaker 3: Reddit culture and other dark places of the Internet where
Speaker 3: this person was going deep. You saw that on the casings.
Speaker 3: I didn't have any idea what those inscriptions meant, but
Speaker 3: they are certainly the memification that is happening in our society.
Speaker 3: Today unquote, that's pretty much all we know so far.
Speaker 8: Now go touch some grass.
Speaker 9: Here. The last time that you and I spoke was
Speaker 9: about twelve hours after Trump announced the takeover of DC's
Speaker 9: police force. It had really just happened, so I didn't
Speaker 9: really have a ton of clarity about how things were
Speaker 9: going to be taking shape and what resistance or pushback
Speaker 9: would look like. Now today that we're speaking Friday, September twelfth,
Speaker 9: it's been a little over about thirty days since all
Speaker 9: of this went down, and I feel like we're due
Speaker 9: for an update from my hometown, the District of Columbia.
Speaker 3: What do you say? Absolutely, we're at the deadline. So
Speaker 3: now Trump can no longer do anything. The city's back. God,
Speaker 3: I wish you're free once again. Oh my God, from
Speaker 3: your lips to God's ears. So I did want to
Speaker 3: set the stage a little bit up top. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm a journalist, but I am also an advocate for
Speaker 3: DC statehood first and foremost. I feel like I need
Speaker 3: to make sure something is super clear, which is that
Speaker 3: how entwined all of this.
Speaker 10: Is to DC's lack of statehood.
Speaker 9: After the last time that you and I spoke, there
Speaker 9: a listener said, oh, why is she making this whole
Speaker 9: thing about statehood? How would DC being a state change anything?
Speaker 9: How would two more democratic senators change anything? Why are
Speaker 9: you making it about that? And I thought, oop, I
Speaker 9: did not do a good enough job of making clear
Speaker 9: why the takeover in DC could happen at all, and
Speaker 9: the ways that DC's lack of statehood is at the
Speaker 9: heart of that issue. This is just sort of the
Speaker 9: soup that I swim in all day, every day, So
Speaker 9: I forget. That's not true for everybody. For some of you,
Speaker 9: this might be a refresher, and you might know this already,
Speaker 9: But the reason why Trump started all of this in
Speaker 9: DC is because DC is not a state. You know,
Speaker 9: as president, Trump has a lot more authority over DC
Speaker 9: than he has over any other place in the country.
Speaker 9: While Trump talking about sending the National Guard into other
Speaker 9: cities is awful.
Speaker 3: He wants to do it to Chicago's so bad, so bad,
Speaker 3: but he doesn't have the ability to. And he's really
Speaker 3: upset about that, so much so that he's probably going
Speaker 3: to cancel a degree of the plans for National Guard
Speaker 3: diploma to Chicago instead going to cooperate with Louisiana because
Speaker 3: the governor is okay with working with Trump on that
Speaker 3: in Louisiana.
Speaker 9: Yes, exactly exactly did you see this is like a
Speaker 9: non secorder. But the tweet that he put out, like
Speaker 9: the AI generated tweet that's they're gonna find out why
Speaker 9: we call it's the Department of War. Then it was like, oh,
Speaker 9: we were just just kidding and just.
Speaker 10: Yes, delete that tweet now the most just that was
Speaker 10: just a.
Speaker 3: Joke, which is into like downplay, like the amount of
Speaker 3: federal resources currently in Chicago. ICE in DHS have been
Speaker 3: very busy in Chicago, and I believe Friday morning, the
Speaker 3: day that we recorded this, ICE killed somebody in Chicago
Speaker 3: during an enforcement action. So this isn't to say, you know,
Speaker 3: Chicago's freed from Trump's federal force. His ICE is still
Speaker 3: operating in Chicago as they have been, but at least
Speaker 3: the National Guard deployment like mass military style occupation is
Speaker 3: unlikely in the near future.
Speaker 9: Yes, that is great context, and I think it also
Speaker 9: illustrates why what's happening in DC is so unique and
Speaker 9: could not happen anywhere else in the country. So while
Speaker 9: Trump is talking about wanting to send the National Guard
Speaker 9: to other cities, he does not have the broad authority
Speaker 9: to take over local police forces in those cities the
Speaker 9: way that he did in DC. And even if he did,
Speaker 9: let's say, exercise what authority he could have over local
Speaker 9: police and other cities, say like in an emergency situation,
Speaker 9: it still wouldn't be the attempt to take over the
Speaker 9: police force like we saw in DC. Like when this
Speaker 9: first happened, Pam Bondi was literally trying to replace DC's
Speaker 9: chief of police briefly successfully until DC's Attorney General, Brian
Speaker 9: Schwab sued. Right, And so yeah, Trump does not have
Speaker 9: the authority to oust local leaders and other cities and states.
Speaker 9: Even if sent the National Guard to Memphis, Memphis still
Speaker 9: has a mayor, Tennessee has a governor, there's senators, this
Speaker 9: congressional representation. Because DC is not a state, Trump working
Speaker 9: with Congress could take over our city, elset, our mayor,
Speaker 9: and our city council. He has been talking about doing
Speaker 9: that as recently as this morning. I want to play
Speaker 9: a quick clip. He does lie in this clip because
Speaker 9: technically he doesn't have the authority. It has to go
Speaker 9: through Congress. But you know, I don't see our Congress
Speaker 9: really standing up to whatever Trump wants anytime soon, and
Speaker 9: so if Congress were to provoke DC's home rule, then
Speaker 9: Trump would be able to appoint whoever he wanted to
Speaker 9: run d C. So I want to play a clip
Speaker 9: of him talking about this, weirdly in Oppressor about that
Speaker 9: Charlie Kirk murder. Here's what he had to say.
Speaker 11: Well, the mayor's asked us to say, you know, we
Speaker 11: have a Democrat mayor. He was asked us today, and
Speaker 11: DC's a little bit different because I could federalize it
Speaker 11: if I want. You know, DC's a little bit different.
Speaker 11: So we have a lot of a lot.
Speaker 7: We have actually more.
Speaker 11: Power in DC because it's you know, I can change
Speaker 11: the mayor if I want, I can do whatever I want.
Speaker 3: I haven't had to.
Speaker 11: We've had a great relationship with the mayor. We've had
Speaker 11: a great relationship. Everybody's happy, and the mayor was not
Speaker 11: in favor of it at first. We forced and then
Speaker 11: she saw the results and everyone's going up the thank
Speaker 11: you her.
Speaker 7: We have no crime anymore.
Speaker 9: Ugh, Okay, I gotta stop it because I can't even
Speaker 9: I can't even listen to him bloviate on that.
Speaker 10: But again he's kind of lying here.
Speaker 9: But there is a reality where Trump single handedly is
Speaker 9: in control of DC. So it would have to take
Speaker 9: Congress overturning DC's home rule. But I don't think that
Speaker 9: would be terribly difficult for him to achieve. And if
Speaker 9: that does happen, he is right that he could appoint
Speaker 9: whoever he wanted to be in control of DC. And
Speaker 9: so the GOP has already introduced legislation that would revoke
Speaker 9: DC's home rule entirely, something that Trump says that he
Speaker 9: wants to do. To be super clear, this would mean
Speaker 9: that all of the little things that you rely on
Speaker 9: and probably take for granted about your day to day
Speaker 9: local life, your social services, your trash pickup, how your
Speaker 9: streets are run, your public transport, Trump would be in
Speaker 9: charge of literally all of that. For me, it's important
Speaker 9: to me that people understand how bad of a situation
Speaker 9: that would be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that would be unprecedented.
Speaker 10: So just to put a pin in that.
Speaker 9: Even though Trump is talking about setting the National Guard
Speaker 9: to other cities, DC's lack of statehood really makes what's
Speaker 9: happening here unlike any other place in the country, DC
Speaker 9: is uniquely vulnerable. In addition to all of the racial
Speaker 9: equity and democracy implications for statehood. The reality is everyday
Speaker 9: lives of more than a half a million people who
Speaker 9: live here like me are made more vulnerable by DC's
Speaker 9: lack of statehood. So when I am on my statehood soapbox,
Speaker 9: that is why, because the lack of statehood in DC
Speaker 9: just makes us very vulnerable to having somebody like Trump
Speaker 9: really exercise an unprecedented amount of control that we will
Speaker 9: not see anywhere else in the United States. So just
Speaker 9: wanted to make that clear. Okay, So now I have
Speaker 9: some updates about the situation. As you said, Garrison, the
Speaker 9: crime emergency in DC, which sort of kicked all of
Speaker 9: this off, has come to an end.
Speaker 10: Free that's over. Mission accomplished.
Speaker 9: We did its accomplished, so it lasted thirty days and
Speaker 9: it's come to an end. However, there is no guarantee
Speaker 9: that Trump couldn't just declare another one. The optics of
Speaker 9: that would be a little weird because he's been talking,
Speaker 9: as we just heard in that clip, he's been talking
Speaker 9: about how crime is down to zero in DC except
Speaker 9: for domestic violence, which everybody knows isn't really a crime, right, Like,
Speaker 9: he made it very clear that he feels like crime
Speaker 9: has gone to zero, so will be pretty weird to
Speaker 9: then institute another crime emergency in DC.
Speaker 3: He kind of got what he wanted to with the
Speaker 3: mayor agreeing to cooperate with him.
Speaker 10: Someone m hmmm exactly.
Speaker 9: So to be super clear, even with the crime emergency
Speaker 9: in DC, ending that in no way means an end
Speaker 9: to things like the National Guard in our streets or
Speaker 9: checkpoints which have just been horrifying, and the surge that
Speaker 9: we're seeing in federal law enforcement, because those are two
Speaker 9: distinct things. And in the last few weeks of this,
Speaker 9: what's really become just abundantly clear is that this whole
Speaker 9: thing was about immigration. Even after all the talk of
Speaker 9: crime and DC, it became very clear that this is
Speaker 9: less about crime and more about enforcing Trump's immigration agenda.
Speaker 9: As you sort of alluded to early on, before she
Speaker 9: really changed her tune about Tukes into the takeover, our
Speaker 9: mayor Muriel Bowser held a press conference where she said, well,
Speaker 9: if Trump's goal was to deport migrants and bring an ice,
Speaker 9: you know, he didn't have to take over MPD to
Speaker 9: do that. He should have just outright said that's what
Speaker 9: he wanted to do, instead of making it this whole
Speaker 9: thing about crime. Don't ask her to repeat that sentiment now,
Speaker 9: because I don't think that she would. She's really really
Speaker 9: changed her tune, which we'll talk about.
Speaker 10: In a moment.
Speaker 9: And so one of the things that makes it complicated
Speaker 9: is that when you're talking about immigration detention versus other
Speaker 9: kinds of arrests, it just becomes a lot harder to
Speaker 9: have transparency into what's going on. But the Associated Press
Speaker 9: reported that dated from the federal operation, analyzed by the
Speaker 9: AP shows that more than forty percent of the arrests
Speaker 9: made over the month long operation were related to immigration.
Speaker 9: They spoke to Austin Rose, a managing attorney for the
Speaker 9: AMICA Center for Immigrant Rights, who said the federal takeover
Speaker 9: has been a cover to do federal immigration enforcement. It
Speaker 9: became pretty clear early on that this was a major
Speaker 9: campaign of immigration enforcement, and that's just it's really hard
Speaker 9: to deny that this was just another increasing plank of
Speaker 9: the president's agenda on immigration.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think you can certainly look at the
Speaker 3: anti crime narratives getting a lot of traction on the
Speaker 3: right with that pretty gruesome murder in North Carolina last
Speaker 3: week as well, and like, absolutely the crime angle is
Speaker 3: part of the rhetorical strategy Trump is using. And yeah,
Speaker 3: a right wing populast president doing a crime crackdown. Oh,
Speaker 3: this is unheard of, This is unprecedented. No, like, of
Speaker 3: course they're going to use that angle. But yeah, the
Speaker 3: under discussed element of this is how much this has
Speaker 3: just been a cover to do a rapid increase in
Speaker 3: the number of immigration actions around DC. Will like you said,
Speaker 3: that was like forty percent, so still another sixty percent
Speaker 3: of arrests is just affecting the other DC residents, and
Speaker 3: a lot of that is tying to this national crime
Speaker 3: wave narratives that these people are also pushing. I think
Speaker 3: these things work together. They're not necessarily like oppositional analyzes
Speaker 3: of what's going on. But the immigration angle has been
Speaker 3: very underdiscussed in the DC occupation.
Speaker 9: I agree it's hard to discuss because I think we
Speaker 9: have to really have some honest conversations. It is true
Speaker 9: that DC experienced a surge in violent crime in twenty
Speaker 9: twenty three. That surge thankfully went down, But I think
Speaker 9: that crime is just one of those issues where people
Speaker 9: who other rise are invested in telling nuanced, thoughtful stories
Speaker 9: about complex issues. I see a lot of that nuance
Speaker 9: and thoughtfulness go right out out the window when we're
Speaker 9: talking about crime. And I think that we really let
Speaker 9: the right dominate the conversation about crime in our cities
Speaker 9: and in some ways hijack that conversation. And I do
Speaker 9: think that dynamic is part and parcel to how we
Speaker 9: got here. Now, I have a b in my bonnet
Speaker 9: about some of the sloppy journalism, like local journalism, people
Speaker 9: who really should know better about crime.
Speaker 10: You know, we had a wave.
Speaker 9: Of businesses shut and they would say, oh, we're shutting
Speaker 9: because of crime, and it's like, yeah, look you actually
Speaker 9: look and you're thinking, oh, well, this is a cash
Speaker 9: less business.
Speaker 10: What kind of crime were you experiencing?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no way. Using crime as this excuse in
Speaker 3: post COVID economic decline has been extremely convenient for a
Speaker 3: lot of corporations. And yeah, I guess like the degree
Speaker 3: to which we've seeded territory on that same way, you know,
Speaker 3: we see a territory on like the border and immigration,
Speaker 3: but specifically sitting territory on discussion of crime allowed operating
Speaker 3: space for Trump to deploy this narrative, which then was
Speaker 3: used to hurt a lot of.
Speaker 9: Immigrants exactly, and in DC, we saw much tighter coordination
Speaker 9: with immigration officials with our local police force, especially at
Speaker 9: checkpoints where police would work with ICE even if someone
Speaker 9: was not otherwise detained or in custody. I did an
Speaker 9: interview with the Washington Posts Tayu Armis, who covers immigrant
Speaker 9: communities here in DC, and he told me that this
Speaker 9: whole thing was essentially an attack on the policies that
Speaker 9: make a city like DC what is commonly thought of
Speaker 9: as a sanctuary city. I don't love the phrase sanctuary city,
Speaker 9: but you know what I mean, you know laws that
Speaker 9: do not require police departments to coordinate with immigration officials.
Speaker 9: Really that it was an attack.
Speaker 3: On those Yeah, totally.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, and I think that it's important that
Speaker 9: we call that out for what it is. And this
Speaker 9: is difficult for me personally, but not get lost in
Speaker 9: debating what Trump is laying out about crime, because when
Speaker 9: you understand that it's not really about crime, then you
Speaker 9: don't have to do that debating, right, And it's like, well,
Speaker 9: the it's not really about crime, so let's not waste
Speaker 9: time debating what we both can plainly see this is
Speaker 9: not really about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, because DC is just faking all crime stats anyway,
Speaker 3: right bridget.
Speaker 10: Oh gosh, don't even get me started, gare.
Speaker 9: And so, something that Tayu told me in our interview
Speaker 9: that I found very troubling is that, again, when someone
Speaker 9: is detained because of a suspected immigration related issue, we
Speaker 9: just have a lot less information and transparency than if
Speaker 9: they were being arrested for another kind of crime. He
Speaker 9: described it as a black box that is difficult to penetrate,
Speaker 9: which is obviously heightened when you have masked agents pulling
Speaker 9: people out of cars at checkpoints and doing things like
Speaker 9: literally hitting delivery drivers with vehicles right like, it becomes
Speaker 9: very difficult to really even understand what's going on, and
Speaker 9: that's by design.
Speaker 3: It's hard to find them in the system because these
Speaker 3: people often aren't even charged with their crime. Remaining in
Speaker 3: the country past. The expression of a visa isn't a
Speaker 3: crime exactly. So though these people are brained as quote
Speaker 3: unquote criminal migrants, that that often is factually incorrect, if
Speaker 3: factually incorrect even matters anymore, which it increasingly does not,
Speaker 3: it seems.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And I mean, as you said, we know that
Speaker 9: immigrant communities are not committing more crime than the rest
Speaker 9: of the population, and.
Speaker 3: So estimates would show less actually exactly because they don't
Speaker 3: want to get deported.
Speaker 9: And you know, again, I feel myself getting pulled back
Speaker 9: into Trump's he he gets me go like circling the
Speaker 9: drain with this, where it's like, well, if you really
Speaker 9: cared about crime, you would want immigrant communities to feel
Speaker 9: comfortable talking to believes with the understanding that they weren't
Speaker 9: going to be deported if they reported a crime, or
Speaker 9: if they witnessed a crime, or if they saw crime.
Speaker 10: But again, it's.
Speaker 9: Not really about crime, so I don't have to I
Speaker 9: don't have to get myself pulled into.
Speaker 3: That, no, because it's entirely racialized. That's like the big
Speaker 3: common denominator here, even with the anti crime narrative and
Speaker 3: the immigration stuff, is that it's all racialized violence.
Speaker 9: Yes, And I mean, I'm glad that you brought that up,
Speaker 9: just as a personal I live in Columbia Heights, which
Speaker 9: is a heavily black and brown neighborhood, a very thriving
Speaker 9: Latino population, and it really just has been awful.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 9: I live on a very busy street that runs right
Speaker 9: through the city, and like checkpoints on either side of
Speaker 9: my street, and I was listening to. I think it
Speaker 9: was a Kara Swisher podcast, and she also lives in DC,
Speaker 9: and she was saying, oh, well, I haven't really noticed
Speaker 9: any big changes, and I'm thinking.
Speaker 3: Kara, Yeah, yeah, I bet, I bet you aren't noticing
Speaker 3: many changes.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I bet you haven't noticed any changes. And yeah.
Speaker 10: I mean I've lived in DC most of my whole life.
Speaker 9: I've never seen checkpoints where people are physically dragged out
Speaker 9: of cars and in this way. So I mean, if
Speaker 9: you don't live in a neighborhood like this, you might
Speaker 9: be able to get away with saying, oh, I haven't
Speaker 9: seen any big changes, or nothing's really changed, or maybe
Speaker 9: I just see the National Guard when I leave my house.
Speaker 9: But in neighborhoods like mine, the change is very real,
Speaker 9: I'll put it that way.
Speaker 10: So you brought up.
Speaker 9: The mayor, which I did want to briefly touch on.
Speaker 9: I have been called out on this very podcast for
Speaker 9: being too sympathetic to our mayor, which is actually funny
Speaker 9: to me because on my other podcast, all we do
Speaker 9: is call her out. But the point that I have
Speaker 9: tried to make, and I think this is the nature
Speaker 9: of that critique, is that I do think it is
Speaker 9: important that people understand that our lack of statehood in
Speaker 9: DC does put our mayor in a position where her
Speaker 9: authority is just realistically a lot more limited than other
Speaker 9: elected officials. But even in that situation with realistically limited authority,
Speaker 9: her play here has been cozying up to Trump. And
Speaker 9: that is one hundred percent a choice. Yeah, that is
Speaker 9: not something that other elected officials in DC have done.
Speaker 9: That is one hundred percent a choice.
Speaker 3: And it's a choice in an attempt in some ways
Speaker 3: to diffuse the situation to not have Trump escalate, to
Speaker 3: not go into a even more like legally uncharted territory,
Speaker 3: right to accelerate the conflict. And I think a lot
Speaker 3: of people who are critiquing this move actually would be
Speaker 3: very interested in this point, in accelerating this conflict, seeing
Speaker 3: what Trump will actually do stress tests even more of
Speaker 3: our democracy, and a lot of people are interested in
Speaker 3: watching the results of that happen. And I can see
Speaker 3: how someone like Bowser doesn't want to do that, but
Speaker 3: that opens her up for a lot of critique. And
Speaker 3: I'm interested in what you said about like other city officials,
Speaker 3: That's not something I've heard as much about, is her
Speaker 3: kind of cooperating with Trump compared to the stance of
Speaker 3: other city officials.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, look at DC's Attorney General Brian Schwab,
Speaker 9: who has been out here suing the Trump administration somewhat
Speaker 9: successfully and has been a much more obvious fighter for DC. Right, So, like,
Speaker 9: he is certainly not playing nice. He's like, Oh, we're
Speaker 9: gonna fight this in the courts. If you want to
Speaker 9: try to take over our city, we will see you
Speaker 9: in court. I'm so curious what the conversations are like
Speaker 9: between Bowser and Schwab, But it just reveals to me
Speaker 9: that capitulating and cozying up. I'm not gonna say it's
Speaker 9: not a strategy, but it's certainly a choice. And to
Speaker 9: your point earlier, there are definitely people who say, hey,
Speaker 9: she's playing nice with Trump. D C still has home rule,
Speaker 9: DC still has a mayor, and the crime emergency has ended.
Speaker 9: Those are all good things, And being a resident of DC,
Speaker 9: I will happily say I don't want to see how
Speaker 9: far Trump will go on this. I want this to end.
Speaker 9: I want you know, I'm not someone who was like, yeah, like,
Speaker 9: let the chips fall.
Speaker 3: Where they may.
Speaker 9: I want my trash picked up, I want my you know,
Speaker 9: my neighbors' kids to be able to go to school.
Speaker 9: All of that, I'm not that's understandable. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 9: the complex thing. I do think that, you know, early
Speaker 9: on in this, Bowser was talking about how crime in
Speaker 9: DC was down, and then Trump said on social media, oh,
Speaker 9: Bowser better get her story straight on the crime numbers
Speaker 9: or things are gonna get worse. And days later she
Speaker 9: was taking in a very different tune. She did a
Speaker 9: press conference where she thanked the federal government. She did
Speaker 9: stop short of thanking Trump specifically, but thanking the federal
Speaker 9: government for helping DC.
Speaker 10: With the crime issue.
Speaker 9: And I guess to somebody who's been following Bowser for
Speaker 9: as long as I have, it wasn't terribly surprising in
Speaker 9: an episode I did of it could happen here. I
Speaker 9: think back in January we talked about how her stance
Speaker 9: with Trump this time around was like concession after concession
Speaker 9: after concession, So it wasn't surprising.
Speaker 3: This falls in line with that, I guess.
Speaker 9: Correct, And I do think that people need to understand
Speaker 9: that in a lot of ways Bowser and I don't
Speaker 9: mean this in the way that it's going to sound,
Speaker 9: but like I do think that there is alignment between
Speaker 9: Bowser and Trump on a lot of issues, crime potentially
Speaker 9: being one of them. Right, when we were talking about
Speaker 9: how Trump wanted Bowser to dismantle encampments in DC, it
Speaker 9: wasn't like Bowser as some friend to the homeless.
Speaker 3: No no, no, no.
Speaker 10: Yeah, like the.
Speaker 9: Specific encampment in question already had plans to demolish, just
Speaker 9: later on on a slower timeline.
Speaker 3: There is a class alignment among people in the political
Speaker 3: quote unquote elite.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 3: You can look at Gavin Newsom's extreme anti homeless policies
Speaker 3: and compare that to Trump's extreme anti homeless policies, and yeah,
Speaker 3: they have class alignment on that issue, even if Gavin
Speaker 3: might be against Trump on some other issues, though he
Speaker 3: has his own fair share of concessions to Trump.
Speaker 10: Oh you said it, friend.
Speaker 3: Also, I like that I'm on a first name basis
Speaker 3: with Gavin.
Speaker 10: I know, gab.
Speaker 3: Podcaster solidarity and as we've seen the past week, podcaster
Speaker 3: solidarity most important thing.
Speaker 9: Ooh yes, oh yes, Also, fellow, iHeart podcaster.
Speaker 3: I believe for Gavin. Yeah, yeah, I hope he joins
Speaker 3: the union.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Same.
Speaker 9: And I guess I should say to your point about
Speaker 9: the complexities about you know, the way that Bowser, our
Speaker 9: mayor is playing this. It's true that it's good that
Speaker 9: the crime emergency has ended, that DC still has home rule,
Speaker 9: we still have a mayor, we saw the city council
Speaker 9: as of today. And even if you will say, like,
Speaker 9: well that's you know, the mayor CosIng up with Trump,
Speaker 9: like you have that to thank that's why that's happening.
Speaker 9: Our mayor is really making no friends with other black
Speaker 9: mayors in cities like Chicago and Baltimore.
Speaker 6: I have to assume.
Speaker 9: Yeah, when she does press conferences where she talks about
Speaker 9: how having federal troops in DC has been good for
Speaker 9: the city, how crime has gone down, when you have
Speaker 9: these other cities that are currently trying to fend off
Speaker 9: federal takeovers from Trump. So even if her CosIng up
Speaker 9: with Trump has led to d C specifically being able
Speaker 9: to enjoy home rule for another day, at what cost
Speaker 9: if it enables Trump's actions in other cities.
Speaker 3: You know, me putting on my skull mask as I
Speaker 3: bring out my chess spoarding the accelerationist collapse of DC
Speaker 3: and how that affects a larger political situation in the
Speaker 3: United States. Yes, how much how much of DC am
Speaker 3: I willing to sacrifice to see how far Trump will go.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's tough.
Speaker 9: It's complicated because obviously, as a DC resident, I want
Speaker 9: to have a safe and peaceful existence for myself here
Speaker 9: in DC. But it's not happening in a vacuum, and
Speaker 9: so I also have to think about, you know, the
Speaker 9: national implications for other cities.
Speaker 10: And you know, I don't envy our mayor.
Speaker 3: I guess I don't envy many mayors. Oh.
Speaker 9: I am firmly believe if you want to become the
Speaker 9: mayor of a city like DC, Baltimore, Chicago, something has
Speaker 9: to be wrong with you.
Speaker 3: And Bridget Todd has come out against Zorn Mamdani officially
Speaker 3: could happen here podcast?
Speaker 9: No, no, no, I'm just saying I mean, yeah, I'll say it.
Speaker 3: Who wants a job like that though? It sounds like
Speaker 3: a nightmare. Yeah.
Speaker 9: I and a friend who was like vying to be
Speaker 9: the head of comms for the Baltimore Police Department, and
Speaker 9: I was like, wow, you are a massacre.
Speaker 3: That's even weirder, that's even weirder.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's like the I.
Speaker 9: Can't imagine to never know peace and not get into heaven.
Speaker 10: Listening and thinking, oh, why she's talking shit about me?
Speaker 9: And so it is complicated, and I do think it's
Speaker 9: important as important as much as I want DC to
Speaker 9: be a safe place where I can walk outside and
Speaker 9: not see people getting dragged out of cars and federal
Speaker 9: checkpoints and all of that, we do need to think
Speaker 9: about the larger picture here. And people that I've talked
Speaker 9: to with regards to the mayor, they tell me that, oh,
Speaker 9: it seems like she is just not interested in the
Speaker 9: like the polling of these decisions, because the conversations that
Speaker 9: I am having, people are not happy with her. In
Speaker 9: the spaces I am in. The conversation is like, how
Speaker 9: do we recall this mayor? Like, even though we might
Speaker 9: have these sort of things that you consider victories, DC
Speaker 9: enjoying home rule, still having a mayor, a city council,
Speaker 9: all of that, people are really really really not happy
Speaker 9: with our mayor. Yeah, so looking head at what's coming
Speaker 9: up next. Even though the crime emergency is ending, this
Speaker 9: whole thing is very far from over. The fight for
Speaker 9: the self determination of DC is far from over in
Speaker 9: ways that have in a lot of ways nothing to
Speaker 9: do with Trump. There are thirteen bills in the House
Speaker 9: aimed at directly taking action at DC. Many of them
Speaker 9: are direct assaults on DC's home rules. There are provisions
Speaker 9: that would make it easier for Congress to overturn DC
Speaker 9: home rule. There are provisions that lower the age of
Speaker 9: when you can be tried as an adult for crimes
Speaker 9: from sixteen to fourteen. There is a provision that would
Speaker 9: give Congress longer time to review DC's laws. Right now,
Speaker 9: it's thirty days. They would change it to sixty days.
Speaker 9: All of DC's laws have to go through Congress. It
Speaker 9: is a nightmare, Like it is a whole thing. The
Speaker 9: biggest of these bills in the House right now is
Speaker 9: of course, wanting to overturn DC's ability for district residents
Speaker 9: to elect our own attorney general instead of having an
Speaker 9: attorney general appointed by Trump. If that bill were to
Speaker 9: become law, it would mean that our current attorney general,
Speaker 9: the person who I would argue, has sort of emerged
Speaker 9: as the If there was a single person that you
Speaker 9: could look at and be like, oh, this person is
Speaker 9: trying to fight for DC's home rule and authority, Brian Schwab,
Speaker 9: he would be fired immediately and Trump would be able
Speaker 9: to replace him with whoever he chose, not somebody that
Speaker 9: district residents elected or voted for or campaigned for, just
Speaker 9: whoever Trump wanted, and that term would run concurrent with
Speaker 9: the president of the United States.
Speaker 10: So obviously, you know, some of these pieces.
Speaker 9: Are not overturning home rule entirely, but they are clearly
Speaker 9: attacks on DC's ability to govern itself and the self
Speaker 9: determination of folks here in the district.
Speaker 3: Are you going to discuss what's going to happen with
Speaker 3: the Safe and Beautiful Task Force? Oh no, but I
Speaker 3: can has passed the expiration of the order, Bowser's establishment
Speaker 3: of the task force to continue federal cooperation. Yes, I
Speaker 3: guess it's like one of the most immediate, like continuing
Speaker 3: aspects of this story. And it's like unclear how much
Speaker 3: this heightened fedral presence will last past the expiration of
Speaker 3: the order.
Speaker 10: So in a.
Speaker 9: Press conference, I have to say, Bowser was pretty tight
Speaker 9: lipped when asked directly about all of that, and so
Speaker 9: a lot of it sounds like wade and see, like
Speaker 9: she really did not give clear answers, and so yeah,
Speaker 9: I walked away from that presser being just disconfused, as
Speaker 9: you probably are, just disconfused as listeners are. I do
Speaker 9: think in part that speaks to the unprecedented nature of
Speaker 9: the way that Trump is dealing with DC right now.
Speaker 9: Of like they might genuinely not know, but the fact
Speaker 9: that the way that she has been so tight lipped.
Speaker 9: I hate giving this answer, but I think it's a
Speaker 9: wad and see kind of situation. Yeah, fair, Hi, this
Speaker 9: is Future Bridget coming in on Monday night to say
Speaker 9: that we actually got more clarity on the question of
Speaker 9: whether or not police in DC would continue working with
Speaker 9: federal immigration officials after DC's crime emergency ended. DC's Mayor
Speaker 9: Muriel Bowser was still being pretty tight lipped about this
Speaker 9: when Gary and I were speaking about it on Friday,
Speaker 9: but on Monday, September fifteenth, it was reported that Bowser
Speaker 9: had announced that d C's Police Department MPD would no
Speaker 9: longer be assisting immigration officials with immigration enforcement the way
Speaker 9: they had been during the crime emergency. Bowser said immigration
Speaker 9: enforcement is not what MPD does, and with the end
Speaker 9: of the emergency, it won't be what MPD does. Trump
Speaker 9: did not like this, and on Monday, Trump renewed threats
Speaker 9: to federalize DC's police again if the Department does not
Speaker 9: cooperate with ICE, saying, quote under pressure from the radical
Speaker 9: left Democrats, Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has presided over this violent,
Speaker 9: criminal takeover of our capital for years, has informed the
Speaker 9: federal government that the Metropolitan Police Department will no longer
Speaker 9: cooperate with ICE in removing and relocating dangerous illegal aliens.
Speaker 9: If I allowed this to happen, all Caps crime would
Speaker 9: come roaring back to the people and businesses of Washington
Speaker 9: d All caps.
Speaker 3: Don't worry.
Speaker 10: I am with you and won't allow this to happen.
Speaker 9: I'll call a national emergency and federalize if necessary.
Speaker 10: Three exclamation points.
Speaker 9: And so I guess one of the big questions that
Speaker 9: I've been wrestling with is what does all of this
Speaker 9: mean for the future of DC. There was a time
Speaker 9: where it felt like lawmakers had DC's back, but it's
Speaker 9: really become clear that the days of DC being able
Speaker 9: to count on the Senate and Congress are over. I
Speaker 9: did an interview with a long time journalist here in DC,
Speaker 9: Marxy Graves, and he reminded me that DC has really
Speaker 9: been the most reliable jurisdiction in the country there is
Speaker 9: for Democrats. There's no other place that has given more
Speaker 9: electoral votes for president to Democrats every single election.
Speaker 3: It's extremely consistent extreme.
Speaker 10: I mean, have you seen that map where it's the
Speaker 10: election for.
Speaker 9: Reagan and it's a whole big splotch of red and
Speaker 9: only I think Minnesota and DC are the only splotch
Speaker 9: of blue. Like nobody backs Democrats like DC backs Democrats
Speaker 9: every single time. California can't say that, Massachusetts can't say that.
Speaker 9: And in return, the party has essentially abandoned us. They
Speaker 9: circulated messaging nationally telling Democrats to tread carefully about how
Speaker 9: to talk about what is clearly an attempt at a
Speaker 9: fascist takeover of our city. DC has given Democrats this
Speaker 9: unwavering support since we had the ability to vote in
Speaker 9: presidential elections, which it hasn't been that long since, only
Speaker 9: since the sixties, but still right like, and this is
Speaker 9: how they do us. And we have known for years
Speaker 9: that Republicans like Mike Lee and others have had their
Speaker 9: eye on DC. They want to overturn DC rules, overturn
Speaker 9: DC laws, even things that have nothing to do with
Speaker 9: crime and public safety, things like abortion.
Speaker 10: It is so clearly about control.
Speaker 9: They have been eyeing control of DC for many many many,
Speaker 9: many years, and now we have this big, wide, open,
Speaker 9: breezy window allowing them to do that.
Speaker 3: Is DC spiritually Midwestern? Because like it's sorry, that's an
Speaker 3: insane question.
Speaker 10: Tell me more about what you mean by.
Speaker 3: This, because like, in some ways, you know, it is
Speaker 3: like a coastal, elite place and it's like the you know,
Speaker 3: the heart of political power. But DC to be always
Speaker 3: has kind of had Midwest vibes. I don't I don't
Speaker 3: know how to express it any other way. Maybe to
Speaker 3: because so many people from the Midwest move to d
Speaker 3: C to do politics work. But I'm sure people from
Speaker 3: all over move to DC to do politics work. But
Speaker 3: like DC and like Minneapolis feel like very similar cities
Speaker 3: to me in some ways.
Speaker 10: I have said this before.
Speaker 3: See that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I have.
Speaker 9: Said this before, Like I think there is something to
Speaker 9: this where And in that interview I did with Mark C.
Speaker 10: Graves, he kind of he kind of gets at it
Speaker 10: a little bit.
Speaker 9: But I do think that DC is the kind of
Speaker 9: place where you can just sort of take for granted
Speaker 9: that I will always live in this sort of progressive city.
Speaker 10: I will always sort of live in this.
Speaker 9: Like I think it's easy to take things like home
Speaker 9: rule in DC, for granted, And I think DC the
Speaker 9: nature of DC is a little bit weird that, as
Speaker 9: you kind of alluded to, it's a very transient city.
Speaker 9: And so there are people living in DC who have
Speaker 9: only known one Mayor Bowser because she's been mayor for
Speaker 9: like ten years.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 9: They don't know Mayor Gray, they don't know Mayor Fenti,
Speaker 9: they don't know how kind of tenuous a lot of
Speaker 9: what holds DC together actually is. And it can be
Speaker 9: really easy when you're living in a city the historically
Speaker 9: has enjoyed low unemployment, has been pretty moneyed, is pretty progressive.
Speaker 9: The kinds of fights that we were having in DC
Speaker 9: before all this started, they seem so quaint now, bike
Speaker 9: lanes tipped minimum wage, like all of these you know,
Speaker 9: it is it is sort of like Minneapolis in a
Speaker 9: kind of way.
Speaker 10: You're not You're not wrong.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm glad, I'm glad my vibes meter is still
Speaker 3: accurately attute.
Speaker 9: Yes, And I did want to spend a little bit
Speaker 9: of time talking about to protests and pushback that we've
Speaker 9: seen because DC has not taken this quietly. There was
Speaker 9: a massive protest in March that I will say, I'm
Speaker 9: a little sad that it didn't get.
Speaker 10: More national coverage.
Speaker 9: Weirdly, it got a lot of international coverage, but not
Speaker 9: a ton of national coverage, which is sort of part
Speaker 9: and parcel for DC. So many national outlets only think
Speaker 9: about DC when it comes to federal implications, and when
Speaker 9: it comes to what's happening locally in our streets and
Speaker 9: at Malcolm X Park and all of that, they're like DC,
Speaker 9: who we don't know her? So like that protest was
Speaker 9: quite moving. We also have local groups like Harriet's Wildest
Speaker 9: Dreams and Free DC who are great resources. Free DC
Speaker 9: a lot of their work has been at the community level,
Speaker 9: leading things like cop watching trainings, like training residents to
Speaker 9: film enforcement stops, which when you consider what Kayu Armis
Speaker 9: told me from the Washington Post about how these immigration
Speaker 9: detensions and arrests are often just a black box. We've
Speaker 9: seen video where a resident is being detail by immigration
Speaker 9: officials and they are speaking to the person recording like
Speaker 9: please record this, please record this, you know, And so
Speaker 9: I do think like things like that are super important
Speaker 9: when you're dealing with, you know, this black box dynamic
Speaker 9: of immigration detensions and arrests.
Speaker 10: We also have things like educating residents on their legal rights.
Speaker 10: And this is like a weird saying in DC.
Speaker 9: DC has a ton of parks, actually more parks than
Speaker 9: any other part of the country. We're consistently voted the
Speaker 9: number one city in the country for parks, and so
Speaker 9: because DC is just a wonky place, sometimes you don't
Speaker 9: know if you're on federal versus city property. So you
Speaker 9: can find yourself in a park that's just a tiny
Speaker 9: little triangle of grass. Oh no, you're actually on federal property.
Speaker 9: So if you get arrested there, you're actually in a
Speaker 9: federal jurisdiction, even though you're miles from the White House
Speaker 9: and you thought like, oh, I'm just hanging on in
Speaker 9: a public park. So we have seen local activist groups
Speaker 9: and organized in groups really try to educate folks on
Speaker 9: their rights and some of those distinctions of like, hey,
Speaker 9: if you commit a crime here, you're technically on federal
Speaker 9: property and you should understand that. And I wanted to
Speaker 9: mention this because I do think it's easier to think
Speaker 9: of resistance as this big, loud, visible thing happening in
Speaker 9: the streets and as moving and powerful as that big
Speaker 9: protest was so far. I think a lot of the
Speaker 9: powerful resistance has been community oriented.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 9: It's not as exciting as you know, being out on
Speaker 9: the streets necessarily, but it is no less important.
Speaker 3: Yeah, The non flashy stuff often goes under recognized.
Speaker 9: Yeah. And I will also say that folks might know
Speaker 9: DC has its own style of music called go go,
Speaker 9: which is sort of a fitty local artistic expression of
Speaker 9: music here. And I've even seen groups like Harriots and
Speaker 9: Wildest Dreams trying to organize joyful go go jams in
Speaker 9: public spaces just to remind folks that joy is also
Speaker 9: part of brasils, Just so that the only thing that
Speaker 9: we're talking about is not defending our cities and being
Speaker 9: on the defense, but also reconnecting to the things that
Speaker 9: make our cities joyful and exciting and and and lovely
Speaker 9: places to be. And I think it has been important
Speaker 9: to me, when you're sick to death of reporting about
Speaker 9: all of this, also getting to remember that.
Speaker 10: Joy is part of it.
Speaker 9: That's like why we're doing this, so that we can
Speaker 9: experience joy in our cities.
Speaker 3: Yes, I agree, we will allow a little bit of joy,
Speaker 3: I suppose in this stace. Yeah, semi joyful time.
Speaker 10: Yeah, a tiny bit.
Speaker 9: I will speaking of joy I wanted to end on
Speaker 9: one last teeny tiny little tidbit about resistance, which is
Speaker 9: that when I when we were talking last time, Gare,
Speaker 9: I told you I think this was like the day
Speaker 9: that the takeover was announced, there was that guy who
Speaker 9: threw a sandwich at the Yes, yes, well they popped
Speaker 9: this dude on felony charges, but DC's grand jury failed
Speaker 9: to indict, and now he's down to a misdemeanor, so
Speaker 9: he pled not guilty I think, just a couple of
Speaker 9: days ago to just a misdemeanor.
Speaker 10: So yeah, I mean grand jury's they used to say.
Speaker 9: Like, oh, you could get a grand jury ton byte
Speaker 9: a ham sandwich, I guess not if it's thrown at
Speaker 9: a federal office, or you can't not in DC.
Speaker 3: It's just like the only good piece of grand jury
Speaker 3: news I have kind of ever heard in my life.
Speaker 3: Whenever I hear news of it a grand jury, it's
Speaker 3: always like terrible, like, oh no, that sounds awful. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this is uh the first, the first based grand jury
Speaker 3: I've ever seen.
Speaker 10: Yes, yes, I.
Speaker 9: Mean if you're listening in if you're listening in DC
Speaker 9: and you're on a grand jury, you know what to
Speaker 9: do well?
Speaker 10: Does Souths put it that way? But yeah, that's all
Speaker 10: I have really.
Speaker 9: I would just say, you know, if you happen to
Speaker 9: be listening in a place that is not the district,
Speaker 9: we really need your voice. You know, when stuff happens,
Speaker 9: there's not really anybody I can call. We have a
Speaker 9: congressional representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 10: She has been a.
Speaker 9: Lifelong fighter for d C and d c's self determination
Speaker 9: and civil rights. She is also i think the second
Speaker 9: oldest person in Congress, And I'll just say it's showing
Speaker 9: I think, you know, we don't really have a lot
Speaker 9: of people who are fighting for us and being a
Speaker 9: voice for us. And so yeah, stay checked in to
Speaker 9: d C. Even if Trump moves to you know, deploy
Speaker 9: national guards in other places, other kinds of takeovers. What's
Speaker 9: happening in DC is unique. It cannot happen in any
Speaker 9: other place in the country. And we're so often overlooked
Speaker 9: and ignored. And so if there are bills moving through Congress,
Speaker 9: call your Congress people and please advocate for the self
Speaker 9: determination of DC residents because we have no one to
Speaker 9: advocate for on our behalf, so please be our voice.
Speaker 3: Thank you for talking about DC once again. Bridget. Where
Speaker 3: can people find you online and your other shows?
Speaker 9: You can check me out on my podcast. There are
Speaker 9: no girls on the internet. On iHeartRadio, a co host
Speaker 9: a podcast called Citycast DC about local happenings and politics
Speaker 9: and news and DC. You can check that out. I'm
Speaker 9: on Instagram at Bridget Marie DC. I'm on TikTok at
Speaker 9: Bridget Marie DC, and I'm on YouTube. There are no
Speaker 9: girls on the internet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right, Okay, cool, I'm glad we figured that out,
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 9: No, I just YouTube is is like a sesspool. I'm
Speaker 9: bringing my best out there.
Speaker 14: So true?
Speaker 3: What up?
Speaker 15: It could happen here? It's your favorite cousin prop. Y'all
Speaker 15: already know what it is. I'm about to black this
Speaker 15: mug up because y'all don't be blacking it up enough anyway.
Speaker 15: All over our country there's this sort of nar around crime,
Speaker 15: which is verifiably false. We also understand that a lot
Speaker 15: of times the feeling of crime and safety is a
Speaker 15: lot of times it's a vibe like it's kind of
Speaker 15: how it feels. You could tell me the crime rates
Speaker 15: is down across America, but in my city, if I
Speaker 15: still feel like you know I'm saying not safe or safe,
Speaker 15: you know your perception of that. Anyway, what I'm trying
Speaker 15: to make is there are truly verifiable, data driven ways
Speaker 15: to actually create safety and reduce harm in a city,
Speaker 15: and a lot of that is around trust and services.
Speaker 15: So what I decided to do, y'all is to bring
Speaker 15: y'all who I lovingly called the nipsey hustle of Saint Louis,
Speaker 15: Ladies and gentleman. Can I introduce you to the homeboy
Speaker 15: thistle with the red shirt on? Well, look, man, you
Speaker 15: already flamed up.
Speaker 3: I wasn't going to bring up the flame of it all.
Speaker 7: I'm like, gotta throw the red shirt off of problem.
Speaker 7: Oh man, happy to.
Speaker 3: Be here, Man, We happy to have you.
Speaker 8: Bro.
Speaker 15: That was the one that's funny because that's the one
Speaker 15: asterisk next to your name with me?
Speaker 7: Is all that red you beware?
Speaker 3: Hey man?
Speaker 15: He'd be like, Yeah, I know, you gotta be who
Speaker 15: you're I would not respect you were you to not
Speaker 15: be flying your whoop.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 7: So I appreciate retired.
Speaker 3: He said, Look, that's what I love it. We're gonna
Speaker 3: get into it. So we're gonna get into it. So
Speaker 3: this is like I said, the nipsey Elsa was Saint Louis.
Speaker 15: When we first met, I had no idea people out
Speaker 15: there really actually said yes.
Speaker 3: I thought that was a joke. I thought y'all was
Speaker 3: doing too much.
Speaker 15: And then I met this and he was like, oh,
Speaker 15: it's over there right thor her. I was like, wait,
Speaker 15: y'all really say.
Speaker 7: That, no joke at all, that's really y'all.
Speaker 5: That's really how we talked. We really talk. And the
Speaker 5: crazy thing is I slowed down talking.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: Sometimes it'd be like here in there. But if I
Speaker 5: get to go away and be like her, I heard
Speaker 5: heard yo.
Speaker 3: Yup, yup?
Speaker 7: Call switch? All right? Perfect.
Speaker 15: So first of all, let's tell them what you do now,
Speaker 15: so kind of give them the brief introduction who you are,
Speaker 15: what you're doing, and then we'll go to the origin story.
Speaker 5: So, like you said, my name this Travis Tyler. That's
Speaker 5: what my mama named me from Saint Louis, Missouri. And man,
Speaker 5: I'll be trying to figure out what am I sometimes
Speaker 5: like for real, even when I was doing music, I
Speaker 5: never felt like I was a rapper.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I felt like I was an artist, you know.
Speaker 5: And I still feel like I'm an artist in the
Speaker 5: sense of the word now because I create things, yeah,
Speaker 5: from inspiration, you know, alchemy, I create from the mind.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: But I'm not what you would consider an activist. I'm
Speaker 5: not a politician, but like I'm always in the middle
Speaker 5: of something that's happening. Yeah, And that's how I've always been.
Speaker 5: And I have a passion for the youth of urban community,
Speaker 5: especially black youth. I have a passion for black men,
Speaker 5: especially black men that are either trying to escape the
Speaker 5: reality of street life or black men that are being
Speaker 5: re entered into society from prison. I have a passion
Speaker 5: for the rebuilding of the black community. So my whole life,
Speaker 5: that's pretty much been my thing, no matter what space
Speaker 5: I've landed in, it's always been my thing when it
Speaker 5: comes to community.
Speaker 7: And so that's it, man, Like I'm wearing.
Speaker 5: The shirt is actually like one hundred from my mentoring program,
Speaker 5: my mentor inner city youth ages teen to seventeen, not
Speaker 5: just setting up some of the mentor them, but creating
Speaker 5: the rights of passage, creating a pathway intentional pathway. I
Speaker 5: think a lot of time with inner city youth, well,
Speaker 5: I ain't even gonna say inner city youth, especially with
Speaker 5: fatherless yes young men, whether wherever they're in the world,
Speaker 5: whether it's the suburban nameghborhood or the inner city or
Speaker 5: rural or third world country. With fatherless young men, they
Speaker 5: tend to lack, some of us, a passage way of oh,
Speaker 5: this is who you can become, this is what you
Speaker 5: need to do to become it, because there's no one
Speaker 5: to really guide them. So with our mentor program, that's
Speaker 5: my goal, not just the mentor young men and send
Speaker 5: them home and try to keep them out of trouble,
Speaker 5: but help them identify who they are and who they
Speaker 5: were born to be and help them get to that place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you still got that group home joint, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so the group home. It's funny we're going to
Speaker 5: interview now. I just stepped down from their Friday Okay.
Speaker 5: But it was a good thing. It wasn't a negative.
Speaker 5: So I ran it for like a year and a half,
Speaker 5: helped rebuild the program, brought it up to the modern age, staffed,
Speaker 5: creating new things for the boys. Learned a lot myself
Speaker 5: in the process and now I'm going full throttle into
Speaker 5: shape out my Flight one hundred program. Yeah, because the
Speaker 5: end goal, like one of my end goals is to
Speaker 5: build a school. Yeah, Flight one hundred Academy all boys,
Speaker 5: keep the same voys from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Wow,
Speaker 5: that's my mission.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 15: What I truly enjoyed about what you're doing is at
Speaker 15: least with the group form and the mentoring thing is
Speaker 15: the trust factor in the sense that you know, when
Speaker 15: you get involved, especially in the juvenile system, like they
Speaker 15: tell you that your record sealed, they say.
Speaker 3: That, Yeah, yeah, you know what I'm saying, But like
Speaker 3: in practice, it's not the thing.
Speaker 15: So like I think oftentimes if there's a step between
Speaker 15: getting into juvie or into central, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 15: if there's an in between step, if somebody could come
Speaker 15: in the middle of that and stay look, let little
Speaker 15: homie stay with us, you know what I'm saying. Or
Speaker 15: you know, let's say you caught a case and then
Speaker 15: every once in a while, like obviously both of us
Speaker 15: can say this from like per and experience, every once
Speaker 15: in a while you might score a judge on a
Speaker 15: good day, you know, you score a judge on a
Speaker 15: good day and they say, I'll tell you what I
Speaker 15: heard of this program over on the other side of town.
Speaker 15: You could either do this, you have said, or you
Speaker 15: could go to Camp Rocket, you know out here, that's.
Speaker 3: What it was like.
Speaker 15: You can go to Rocky or you can go to
Speaker 15: this program, and like ten out of ten, I'm gonna
Speaker 15: be like, let's go to this program. But yeah, sometimes
Speaker 15: that program be just as bad, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 15: But if it's ran by somebody who has been through
Speaker 15: the system, who understands it and knows that, like, here
Speaker 15: are the traps, Here's are the ways for which I
Speaker 15: know I was taking advantage of I was abused, And
Speaker 15: this is what we're not gonna do here.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying. The goal is for you
Speaker 3: to never come back to this.
Speaker 7: You make a valid point.
Speaker 5: One of the reasons I believe God allowed me to
Speaker 5: go back into the space with the group home was
Speaker 5: bro Honestly, you will be surprised how I'm trying to
Speaker 5: word this in a good way, but I don't think it.
Speaker 16: Is one you say however you want, you will be
Speaker 16: surprised how messed up the foster curs system is yeah, yeah,
Speaker 16: a lot of these.
Speaker 7: Kids get pulled out of their homes.
Speaker 5: So the group home that I was at mostly all
Speaker 5: of our boys they came from environments where they have
Speaker 5: been taken from their parents, and so I was run
Speaker 5: of the transition to living group home.
Speaker 7: So my objective, my daily task.
Speaker 5: Was to teach a group of young men how to
Speaker 5: transition into manhood, how to go out.
Speaker 3: On their own, pay their bills, live on their own.
Speaker 3: All this.
Speaker 7: You'll be surprised though.
Speaker 5: These kids get pulled from their homes and their parents
Speaker 5: and they're saying to them, oh, we're going to send
Speaker 5: you somewhere better, better, yeah, yeah, yeah, and the places
Speaker 5: that they send them to do more harm to them
Speaker 5: than their home.
Speaker 7: Like they're sitting in there with people that are worse than.
Speaker 5: Their parents and one day don't have a voice to
Speaker 5: advocate for them.
Speaker 7: So here I am right now. It's crazy.
Speaker 5: A few months back, I was like, I'm gonna talk
Speaker 5: about this at every chance I get, which is crazy.
Speaker 5: They don't have nobody to advocate for them, because I'm
Speaker 5: sure there are people that have been through the foster
Speaker 5: care system, but for some reason, people see that stigma.
Speaker 5: They're probably celebrities that have been through foster curve, but
Speaker 5: they see it as a stigma, like, oh, they didn't
Speaker 5: want to talk about that part all my parent gave
Speaker 5: me up. I don't know who my parent is. I
Speaker 5: was in you know, whatever the case is. They don't
Speaker 5: have nobody to advocate. Yeah, these kids, a lot of
Speaker 5: these kids are treated so poorly in these places that
Speaker 5: the loss should step in. People tend to not understand
Speaker 5: why they act the way they act.
Speaker 7: But you got to.
Speaker 5: Think, ultimately, you are walking into a child's hole and
Speaker 5: you're kidnapping them.
Speaker 7: That's what you're doing. Really.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, So if I come to your house at
Speaker 5: eight nine o'clock at night. When I was fourteen, me,
Speaker 5: my cousins, my brother, a bunch of my siblings were
Speaker 5: taken from my mom and my aunt right from across
Speaker 5: the street because I was over my friend's house. Holye
Speaker 5: swooped up. Social workers swooped up. It's nighttime. You go
Speaker 5: into somebody's house, you take their child. They don't know
Speaker 5: where you're taking their child to. The child doesn't know
Speaker 5: where they're going, and then they get to the residential
Speaker 5: or the group home and they acting a fool, and
Speaker 5: you got a bunch of unqualified, untrained staff members there.
Speaker 5: They don't know how to deal with them neither. That's
Speaker 5: just looking for a job. And when they get there,
Speaker 5: they talking about why they acting like this. Come on, man,
Speaker 5: if somebody just came to your house and took you
Speaker 5: from your parent, you would be acting the same way.
Speaker 5: And if you weren't, you saw it. Basically, let's just
Speaker 5: be rial. Yeah, yeah, you just saw. You're gonna sit
Speaker 5: there and fall like these kids. They acting out because
Speaker 5: they've been abducted basically in their mind, and even.
Speaker 3: Pat way beyond that point.
Speaker 5: I know most people have seen if you hadn't the
Speaker 5: movie Don't Sit where they talk about the Shackling family
Speaker 5: and how they basically met dough fans out of the
Speaker 5: whole West Virginia with oxy coote you know oxy code
Speaker 5: ain't how do you want to pronounce it? And they
Speaker 5: showing the movie how these doctors were getting these kickbacks
Speaker 5: for introducing the drugs to the patients in West Virginia.
Speaker 7: Bro, who better to prack.
Speaker 3: Them on with drugs than children?
Speaker 7: We ain't got no parents that nobody cares them out.
Speaker 17: Yeah, bro, they take these kids and they put them
Speaker 17: into the system three four, five years old, and they
Speaker 17: start doping them from day one man.
Speaker 5: Five dose dough over and over and over. Switch them out,
Speaker 5: put them on something else. Well, let me see how
Speaker 5: they don't work. Switch them out, put them on something else.
Speaker 5: By the time they got to me at eighteen years old,
Speaker 5: they like bro frime, yeah, fried, and then you got
Speaker 5: you got case workers. They don't care about the kids.
Speaker 5: They don't call, they don't come see them, they don't
Speaker 5: pick them up, they don't do none of these things.
Speaker 7: And the kids sitting there feeling like they don't got
Speaker 7: nobody in nowhere.
Speaker 5: So my main space that I function in right now,
Speaker 5: especially for them, is to be an advocate. Every chance
Speaker 5: that I get, I'm gonna talk about it so people
Speaker 5: could put eyes on it. But also that's one of
Speaker 5: the reasons that I'm building the things that I'm building,
Speaker 5: so that we can have a space where it's like now,
Speaker 5: you don't have to go to because there are a
Speaker 5: lot of people I already have the good ideas they have.
Speaker 5: There are some good programs. Yeah, like there are good programs.
Speaker 5: Program that I was at it's been around four hundred
Speaker 5: and sixty eight years. It's a decent program So there
Speaker 5: are good programs that are out here, but the whole
Speaker 5: system as a hall, it needs an overhall. So when
Speaker 5: I had an opportunity to peep behind the veil, I
Speaker 5: was like, you know, you know me, I go and
Speaker 5: get the talking.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I think obviously you talking that talk. But like
Speaker 15: one of the things that you know, in the humanitarian
Speaker 15: space that I like I serve in, they have a
Speaker 15: saying that says peace works at the speed of trust,
Speaker 15: you know. So like, even with all these good programs
Speaker 15: in different places, it's like, if these kids don't trust you, Yeah,
Speaker 15: you brought up being removed from your family's house when
Speaker 15: you was real young. I love to talk a little
Speaker 15: bit about about the origin story because obviously you wasn't
Speaker 15: always talking like this, you know what I'm saying, Yeah,
Speaker 15: And I think that that legitimacy, you know, or that
Speaker 15: realness that I'm sure no matter how doped up or
Speaker 15: how painful them kids are like they can look behind
Speaker 15: your eyes.
Speaker 3: And say, okay, but he knows.
Speaker 15: Yeah, So give me a little bit of that, get
Speaker 15: a little bit of the retired whooping all that.
Speaker 5: Oh it's funny. I got this video on my page
Speaker 5: that I posted. I started off saying, ain't nobody coming
Speaker 5: to save you? Yeah, And at the end of it,
Speaker 5: I go through this story about being in the group
Speaker 5: home and all of that, and I say, have y'all
Speaker 5: ever seen the Marvel movies where they like, it's your
Speaker 5: origin story.
Speaker 3: I'm like, that's my origin story. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So for me, that part of the group home was
Speaker 5: significant in my life, real, real significant. So before I
Speaker 5: went to the group home, I was already outside, like
Speaker 5: there are a lot of things that I've experienced in
Speaker 5: this world that when I look back, I just be like, Man,
Speaker 5: that's crazy.
Speaker 3: Bro.
Speaker 5: When I was fourteen years old, me and my girlfriend
Speaker 5: were living together.
Speaker 7: Crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, I slept in the beg fourteen every night.
Speaker 5: Yeah, with my girlfriend at fourteen, Like we basically lived together,
Speaker 5: me and her in a room, her mom in the
Speaker 5: next room. And so I was because of my mom's issues,
Speaker 5: like I've been at this point, I've been my sole provider,
Speaker 5: you know, minus a short period of time her and
Speaker 5: her Whether it's like I went to live with my
Speaker 5: daddy and he sent me back off with my grandma
Speaker 5: for a short period time. My grandfather, all of those
Speaker 5: were short periods of time. But since I was like twelve,
Speaker 5: I've been taking care of myself. So I was outside early,
Speaker 5: like hustling making money so I can professional myself. Yeah, fourteen,
Speaker 5: Like I said, I was living with my girlfriend. We
Speaker 5: were sleeping in the same bed. When I went to
Speaker 5: the group home, my mom, the caseworker and the police
Speaker 5: came and got me from her house and put me
Speaker 5: in a car. Drove me two hours out of Saint
Speaker 5: Louis to a wrench little house out in the woods.
Speaker 7: Yeah, town full of white people, Like I was a
Speaker 7: hoodie kid.
Speaker 5: Like when they got me, true story, I had on
Speaker 5: Dickey overalls like the zip of the brown boy, yeah,
Speaker 5: and some boots like a bey Yeah.
Speaker 15: The Saint Louis like I don't know, like the influence
Speaker 15: of like West Coast culture, and it was very big
Speaker 15: out there. So when he was like, yo, I'm zipped
Speaker 15: up and the beanie and the dickies, it's like you
Speaker 15: would think you was in South Central Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So I had on a beie, the zip up
Speaker 5: Dickey boy like yeah boot. So they took me out
Speaker 5: to the woods and man, I got there and when
Speaker 5: I got there, it was the first time in my life,
Speaker 5: I think I feel that level of desperation and hopelessness
Speaker 5: because I was supposed to stay there until I was
Speaker 5: eighteen or twenty one. Those were their words based off
Speaker 5: my behavior. I'm fourteen, so I'm in my head like
Speaker 5: I'm frona beer six years Like. So I'm meeting all
Speaker 5: these kids. They like, I'm been here since I was
Speaker 5: this age, and I've been in the system since I
Speaker 5: was this and they moved me here and they so
Speaker 5: I'm hearing all these different stories from different people.
Speaker 7: And I'm just like, dang, it's crazy, you know.
Speaker 5: And then one day, it was right after Christmas, I'm
Speaker 5: sitting in her hindsight, I got a different perspective of it. Now.
Speaker 7: It's this kid I never forget him. His name was Roger.
Speaker 5: When I first met him the very first day that
Speaker 5: I came, he sat down beside me and he said, Man,
Speaker 5: if my granddaddy was hurt, he wouldn't want me talking
Speaker 5: to you. And I was like why, He said, because
Speaker 5: he didn't like black people. So I turned right to
Speaker 5: him and said, why did you feel the need to
Speaker 5: tell me that?
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 7: Why you tell me that? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Like I was like, you could have kept that to yourself.
Speaker 5: He like I don't got nothing against black people. I'm
Speaker 5: just saying my grandfather don't like black people. So I'm
Speaker 5: like whatever, I'm okay, cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's like right after Christmas, Christmas Day, I was sitting
Speaker 5: in the group home. Nobody called, Like, I was watching
Speaker 5: all the other kids. They getting gifts, they opening their
Speaker 5: presents and yeah, depending on their program, some of them
Speaker 5: they get to go home. Like so I'm sitting there,
Speaker 5: ain't nobody called me on, got no gifts, I don't
Speaker 5: got nothing, and I'm just sitting in the chart like
Speaker 5: just pissed all day basically.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and uh, one of my workers came in later
Speaker 7: that day.
Speaker 3: I seen her.
Speaker 7: She was talking to the lady. The other lady was
Speaker 7: about to get off.
Speaker 5: They was behind me and I heard her talk and
Speaker 5: she said, he just sitting there all day. She was
Speaker 5: like yeah, she like, did anybody call them or anything?
Speaker 5: She was like no, She's like nobody. So I'm and
Speaker 5: it's crazy now that I've been back in that space
Speaker 5: more than once. Yeah, I've experienced that with kids, seeing
Speaker 5: them nothing and I know what to do, like I
Speaker 5: got you know what I'm saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 7: So I'm sitting there.
Speaker 5: At that point, she like, nah, he's just sitting there
Speaker 5: all day, and so she went came out. She's like, hell,
Speaker 5: what you doing. This lady played a significant role in
Speaker 5: my life. I wish I could remember her name.
Speaker 3: Bro Like.
Speaker 5: So she was like, what you're doing. I'm like nothing.
Speaker 5: She was like, you want to go to the store.
Speaker 5: I'm like to do what She like her, I got
Speaker 5: something for you. So the state gave each kid one
Speaker 5: hundred dollars Walmart gift card.
Speaker 13: Wow.
Speaker 7: So she like, you got a gift card the Walmart
Speaker 7: for one hundred dollars.
Speaker 3: Bore.
Speaker 5: I had never been to Walmart before. I ain't know
Speaker 5: what Walmart was. So I'm like, all right, man, let's go.
Speaker 5: We go to Walmart. I'm walking around.
Speaker 7: He ain't never been to Walmart.
Speaker 5: I had never been to Walmart. Broke walking around. I'm
Speaker 5: looking around the store. I got this hundred full Guess
Speaker 5: what I buy?
Speaker 3: No lie?
Speaker 7: True story. White t shirt is some Dickies.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, yes, white t shirt is some Dikies out
Speaker 5: of Walmoart in the country.
Speaker 3: You're I love it.
Speaker 7: So I grabbed these dickeys, white tea. Go back to
Speaker 7: the group home.
Speaker 5: I'm still mad because ain't nobody called me, Nobody came
Speaker 5: to see me, you know, none of that. And so
Speaker 5: the next few days, man, me and dude we always
Speaker 5: ended up in the living room at the same time.
Speaker 5: And I'm I'm I'm mad.
Speaker 7: Yeah. So fourteen.
Speaker 5: You gotta think when I was fourteen, bro, I was
Speaker 5: like probably six six foot six one. Yeah, like one
Speaker 5: hundred and eighty two hundred pounds when I was fourteen.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And so while I'm married, they had some little weights.
Speaker 5: I had started lifting weights every thing.
Speaker 7: Oh man, I'm programming.
Speaker 3: I'm a big old kid. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So dude gets to talking crazy to me. We sit
Speaker 5: in the living room. He like, man, what you doing, boy?
Speaker 5: So my conversation goes back to the first time.
Speaker 3: Like god he racist?
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, now I know, now I know.
Speaker 3: I'm like what you mean? Boy? He like, you heard me?
Speaker 8: Boy?
Speaker 7: I'm like boys in kid or boy as in racist.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: He like, boy, you heard me. Now we're fighting.
Speaker 5: I said, hey, bro, I'm gonna tell you this one
Speaker 5: more time. Don't call me a boy again.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: He said, what you gonna do?
Speaker 3: Boy? Lit that fool up?
Speaker 7: Yup, yup?
Speaker 3: I'm talking about right now?
Speaker 5: They style locked in big night night.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So by the time they come in, I got him
Speaker 5: by the back of the neck. Yeah, and I'm rubbing
Speaker 5: his face across the carpet. Yeah, I'm like, what you
Speaker 5: call me again? He stayed in saying, you know, he's like, boy,
Speaker 5: you hurt. So now hindsight though, when I look back,
Speaker 5: I had to think and say, yeah, dangn me and
Speaker 5: him was sitting there at the same time. I thought
Speaker 5: back and said, oh, he ain't had no visitors on
Speaker 5: Christmas steeven. Yeah, oh he man like me. He just
Speaker 5: as hurt as you.
Speaker 3: He was hurt.
Speaker 7: He ain't even know how the process.
Speaker 15: You the craziest storyteller ever, like, cause I'm like, you
Speaker 15: can get to the point, and I.
Speaker 3: See it right there now. I know like he ain't
Speaker 3: know how the process. So I rushed him up forever.
Speaker 5: So when the people come in and they see me,
Speaker 5: you know, they like, grab me up cause I'm.
Speaker 7: Six foot yeah yeah, yeah, it's on your.
Speaker 3: Kid from the city. Yeah, you know, everybody record and
Speaker 3: story they're coming here, so they know like he a
Speaker 3: gang man, but he did he did.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I'm no bressing. They snatched me up, throw
Speaker 5: me in the room. They took me in this room
Speaker 5: called an isolation room. This room is like an eight mychin.
Speaker 5: All the walls were metal.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The door was like this stick wood with a little
Speaker 5: bitty wondering the thing on it. No way out unless
Speaker 5: they let you out in carpet on the floor.
Speaker 3: Bro.
Speaker 7: When they shut that door, I just lost it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: My brain said, you finna died in her, Ain't no
Speaker 5: way out. Yeah, And I got to kick in the door.
Speaker 5: I got to yelling, and I'm talking about Bro. I
Speaker 5: just was wilding in that. But they just they paid
Speaker 5: me no mind. They didn't even come to the door.
Speaker 3: It don't make no difference until you calm down.
Speaker 7: They like, he can't get out.
Speaker 5: And so this girl that I knew to her, she
Speaker 5: came and sat down by the bottom of the door
Speaker 5: and talked under the thing, and she was like, hey,
Speaker 5: you gotta come around down. She's like, come down here.
Speaker 5: So I laid down on the floor. I'm breathing through
Speaker 5: the crack like I'm breathing under the door. She like,
Speaker 5: you gotta calm down, Like they never gonna let you
Speaker 5: out of her.
Speaker 7: They scurried.
Speaker 5: She like, I'm out here, like you gotta. So I'm
Speaker 5: just laying there regulating, and I go to sleep. Wow,
Speaker 5: and I wake up in the middle of the night.
Speaker 5: I knocked on the door. They let me out to
Speaker 5: use the bath on the dude like it was a
Speaker 5: big white dude used to be overnight. He was like,
Speaker 5: if I let you out or you're gonna get the trip.
Speaker 5: And I said, nah, man, I just got to use
Speaker 5: the bathroom. I already didn used it there once. I'm like,
Speaker 5: I just want to go to the tarlet.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: So he's like, all right, come on, he let me out.
Speaker 5: I went back in and he locked the door. When
Speaker 5: I went back in there, bro, I said to myself,
Speaker 5: this was my one of my origins. I said to myself,
Speaker 5: I said, when they let me out of her fourteen
Speaker 5: years old, I.
Speaker 3: Said, I'm gonna be different. Yeah, I'm be in control.
Speaker 7: I'm gonna show the world.
Speaker 3: Who I am.
Speaker 5: Yeah, when they let me out, I played the game
Speaker 5: after that every since. And so I went to another
Speaker 5: group home. I stayed there. I was supposed to be
Speaker 5: there for a while. And I got to that group
Speaker 5: home and I asked the people. I said, how do
Speaker 5: the program work? As soon as I got there, Yeah,
Speaker 5: they said, well, if you do this and then you
Speaker 5: go to level this, and you go to this level,
Speaker 5: you go to that level. I said, how long do
Speaker 5: it take that? They said probably like ninety days. I said,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna do it. Are sixty?
Speaker 3: I love it?
Speaker 7: They said okay and shown up sixty days later. Bro
Speaker 7: leics than sixty I was done.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: They called my mama. My case had been dropped because
Speaker 5: my mama was doing what she's supposed to.
Speaker 7: Do, and they like, you can go home.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So now I go home two days before I'm
Speaker 5: turning fifteen. I get back home, though my mama was
Speaker 5: on the same mission. And I've been outside ever since.
Speaker 5: Beautiful man, and I think one thing I feel another
Speaker 5: to just shape me into who I am.
Speaker 3: But the hero.
Speaker 15: Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say that that authenticity of
Speaker 15: like even having the a wherewithal to know that, like
Speaker 15: you know, at the end of the day, love Homie was.
Speaker 3: Scared, right, Yeah, he was hurt too, Like he was
Speaker 3: just hurting.
Speaker 15: So when you have that sort of like level of
Speaker 15: empathy and you know when you were outside, like the
Speaker 15: reasons for which you were outside, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 15: and having those connections, it's so clear to me how
Speaker 15: that fuels the direction you're in, and it rus to
Speaker 15: me the cornerstone premise of my whole movement here, which
Speaker 15: is like, yo, if you understand the hood, you understand politics.
Speaker 15: You walked in there and said, what's the game? What's
Speaker 15: the play? Okay, what's the play? How does this work?
Speaker 5: This?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 15: Now, know how to work it. Here's a way to
Speaker 15: make it better. I know how it, I know how
Speaker 15: I felt in it. So if somebody else has to
Speaker 15: be in there just the way it needs to be done,
Speaker 15: because I know I would have succeeded had this this
Speaker 15: and this happened. So let me let me let me
Speaker 15: push you forward to now and then to more like
Speaker 15: sort of the bigger like national conversation now, so like
Speaker 15: the national conversation all of us we lived through, you know,
Speaker 15: in the time that you were there, and the time
Speaker 15: was going on in La too, like this this hyper
Speaker 15: policing where you know, for us probably saying for y'all,
Speaker 15: the cops were just another gang to us, you know
Speaker 15: what I'm saying, Like y'all just as violent, as bad
Speaker 15: and as dangerous as everybody else in these streets.
Speaker 3: Like you ain't make no difference to us.
Speaker 15: And sure, yeah, like in the same way that you know,
Speaker 15: if you were having a rodent infestation at your house,
Speaker 15: I mean sure you could bomb the house, right, and yes,
Speaker 15: the rodents are gone. You're see what I'm saying, But
Speaker 15: you've killed everything, you know.
Speaker 3: What I'm saying.
Speaker 15: But then you get to say, like you know, as
Speaker 15: a metaphor, it's like, oh, look, we were tough on crime,
Speaker 15: we ended crime, you know what I'm saying. It's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 15: but that's what you locked us all up. Like it
Speaker 15: didn't This didn't really help us. But you know, we're
Speaker 15: seeing sort of across the country despite all of these
Speaker 15: efforts and proof that like the streets are different, and
Speaker 15: it's not because of any invading forts. It's because of
Speaker 15: people like you, people like JB and OKC that are
Speaker 15: like truly from the city, who really care and move
Speaker 15: at the speed of trust, like I said, moving at
Speaker 15: the speed of trust and like and are saying, Look,
Speaker 15: it's one kid at a time, it's one program at
Speaker 15: a time, it's one advocate at a time that like
Speaker 15: says incremental slow door knock build true us one kid,
Speaker 15: you know what I'm saying. That's like it's not fun.
Speaker 15: It's not a movie. It ain't sexy. It ain't sexy. Bro,
Speaker 15: you gotta be outside. You know, I'm gonna breeze through.
Speaker 15: When you caught one to the leg. But like, even
Speaker 15: in the process of doing the good you were doing,
Speaker 15: there was a moment where like I knew of like
Speaker 15: you're like you were in neighborhoods, like you know, doing
Speaker 15: backpack drives and back to school things, you know what
Speaker 15: I'm saying.
Speaker 3: But these are like in these are in active areas.
Speaker 15: Like you know, everybody can just walk in to this
Speaker 15: park and be like I'm gonna do a fundraiser.
Speaker 3: It's like, like, no, we rob it, all of you,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying. So like, after years of.
Speaker 15: Doing this, you know, one little Waiian didn't know who
Speaker 15: he was dealing with, you know what I'm saying, caught
Speaker 15: you slipping, you know what I'm saying. You had to
Speaker 15: rebuild and I've seen even health journey from that moment
Speaker 15: sort of change to bring you into the position you're
Speaker 15: in sort of now, which is like, obviously it's somebody
Speaker 15: we could deeply admire. Can you talk a little bit
Speaker 15: about obviously without getting personal, without sharing anybody's like personal information.
Speaker 15: But some of the sort of like things that you've
Speaker 15: seen with some of the young homies who've been able
Speaker 15: to maybe like calm some stuff down, you know what
Speaker 15: I'm saying, like maybe actually like this working, you know
Speaker 15: what I mean?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, so I think you nailed it as a whole.
Speaker 5: It takes a person that people trust to bring a
Speaker 5: level of com So even when I got shot, when
Speaker 5: I got shot, or I had dudes in my inbox where.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah that be outside ready to slide?
Speaker 3: Oh, ready to they ready to slide? Yeah, Yeah, that's like, hey,
Speaker 3: who got you? You know it? Let's go.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I'm like, nah, I'm cool. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: you know.
Speaker 5: And so sometimes when things like that, I think people
Speaker 5: take things into their own hands. Yeah, that you don't
Speaker 5: know nothing about. And so after that, they were like,
Speaker 5: do you want to do this news interview? I was
Speaker 5: still broke up. I couldn't get out the bed. I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 5: you know, but my reason for doing the news interview
Speaker 5: was so people could hear my heart. Yeah, and you
Speaker 5: have a thistle in every neighborhood around America.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So here's the thing about police.
Speaker 5: Police are reactive Yeah, when by the time police on
Speaker 5: a word of things, a crime has happened. Yeah, the
Speaker 5: murder has already taken place, the shooting has already happened,
Speaker 5: the robbery has already happened. The person that's stopping the
Speaker 5: crime is miscathy that live on the block. Yes, that's say,
Speaker 5: hey can murder. Yeah, where are you going? I could
Speaker 5: tell you frustrate. We had this lady in our neighborhood
Speaker 5: and name was miss a Miss Alexander. How many times
Speaker 5: as a kid I be walking past her house on
Speaker 5: my way to do something stupid. Yeah, and she'll say,
Speaker 5: come murder yep, and you go sit there on the
Speaker 5: porch with her and talk for like fifteen minutes.
Speaker 7: Respect is you have to respect her? Yeah, and you done.
Speaker 7: Or the dude that used to be in the street.
Speaker 7: It's a dude her in Saint Louis.
Speaker 5: I don't really know him, like personally personally, but his saying,
Speaker 5: uh he goes by the name Yo Bangda uh huh.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying. Yeah, x street dude. Everybody
Speaker 3: love him.
Speaker 5: You're me yeah, yeah, bro be outside like politicket, Yeah,
Speaker 5: running programs, you know, doing stuff like that. So those
Speaker 5: are the people that calls change in every community. Let
Speaker 5: me tell you a place while we're on this subject,
Speaker 5: where I think we fail it, especially with organizations. Organizations
Speaker 5: that typically come into our neighborhood. They come for agenda, yeah,
Speaker 5: and politics, And what they don't understand is what you're saying,
Speaker 5: if you understand the hood, you want to staying politics.
Speaker 5: So when they pull up on us in the hood
Speaker 5: and they got this big organization with all this money
Speaker 5: and they're like, this is what we want to do. No,
Speaker 5: you're telling me that because you're trying to build an
Speaker 5: army of people to fight for your calls. And what
Speaker 5: they do is they come into our spaces and they
Speaker 5: don't empower those people right there.
Speaker 3: I've said this to people one hundred times.
Speaker 7: If you really really really want to see.
Speaker 5: Impact and see change, you need to go to the
Speaker 5: community and see the people that are already leading it.
Speaker 7: There you go the people that you're talking about.
Speaker 5: The reason I'm able to go into park in that
Speaker 5: neighborhood is because I'm a leader over there.
Speaker 3: At one point, I was one of the leaders actively. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So people don't know me, they respect me, they understand
Speaker 5: my journey and my transition, and that rapport is what
Speaker 5: get the work done.
Speaker 7: Police a reactor. Bro By the said, the police come somebody.
Speaker 3: Dead, It's already done. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's people like me on the phone when Brok like, man, bro,
Speaker 5: I'm about the snap.
Speaker 3: It's like, nah, bro, where you at? Like you know
Speaker 3: what we're doing?
Speaker 5: And so I think those people need to be empowered more.
Speaker 5: For any organization that's listening or that possibly here, it is.
Speaker 5: We don't need you to come out our community and
Speaker 5: build a hub. We don't need you to put an
Speaker 5: office there. And I'm just gonna be candidate and bring
Speaker 5: a whole lot of white people.
Speaker 7: Facts and gentrify a program.
Speaker 3: We don't need that.
Speaker 5: What is needed is if you have resources, you have money,
Speaker 5: you have things you could bring structure, you could bring system,
Speaker 5: but bring it to empower the person that's already in
Speaker 5: that space. It's gonna take you thirty years to get
Speaker 5: to kind of respect that person.
Speaker 3: Get over there already, Jims.
Speaker 5: And you know why they can't be fully involved because
Speaker 5: they still got to work, They still gotta do thing.
Speaker 7: You still yes, you still yes, man.
Speaker 5: So if you want to really empower the community, take
Speaker 5: that forty fifty sixty seventy thousand, one hundred thousand that
Speaker 5: you're about to run on this campaign against whoever else
Speaker 5: you don't like. Yeah, and take some of that money,
Speaker 5: take about seventy five k that and give it to
Speaker 5: somebody like Yo Bang.
Speaker 15: Yo bang a missad. Yeah, but it was Alex Carrasco.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Get the people like that, yup.
Speaker 15: Because we lived in the Mexican hoods. You know, he
Speaker 15: had his to despoon thos Like we already knew. He
Speaker 15: was like, what what the people like that? Give it
Speaker 15: to him? You know what I'm saying, he'd looked that man.
Speaker 15: Took me camping for the first time with with Alex Carrasco.
Speaker 7: You know what I'm saying, Like, believe it or not,
Speaker 7: believe it or not.
Speaker 5: Part of the reason that you turned out the way
Speaker 5: you did is because of siege that people like him
Speaker 5: playing it. Yep, no facts, It was the difference between
Speaker 5: you and the other dudes on the.
Speaker 7: Block that didn't go.
Speaker 5: That's exactly like exposure, bro, is she what you're exposed
Speaker 5: to right now? One of my missions I'm working on
Speaker 5: over the next couple of years, Well, I'm gonna take
Speaker 5: a group of kids from the.
Speaker 3: Hood to Africa. They have to see it, bro, that's
Speaker 3: one of my missions.
Speaker 5: They have to Yes, Yeah, I'm gonna take a bunch
Speaker 5: of kids from the hood to Africa, like so they
Speaker 5: can get over there and see what it really look like.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but also just taking them other places.
Speaker 3: They could also go to, like Denver, Like.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I took a group of kids to Kaa a
Speaker 5: few years back, like in the city kids, Yeah, and.
Speaker 3: They were blown away. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Like like you said, going camping, you get to see
Speaker 5: water and boats.
Speaker 15: When I used to teach, I taught in the city
Speaker 15: called Pomona. It's in the Inland Empire. It's kids from
Speaker 15: La I've never seen the beach, Like you've never seen
Speaker 15: the ocean and you're from Los Angeles, you know what
Speaker 15: I'm saying. So like, yeah, that exposure changes everything. Have
Speaker 15: you set up some sort of like fundraising things so
Speaker 15: we can see if we could get our listeners to
Speaker 15: maybe like fund this Africa drip.
Speaker 7: So if you go to my page, just like one
Speaker 7: hundred foundation dot or.
Speaker 3: Like one hundred foundation dot org.
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, it's a donation tab, it'll go to the
Speaker 5: give but.
Speaker 15: A page, Okay, we will link to that. Yes, see
Speaker 15: that's all I needed. Yeah, listen, bro, I want to
Speaker 15: thank you for your time.
Speaker 8: Man.
Speaker 15: Some of y'all know, like I've known this man for
Speaker 15: a long time. We've we've ran ran into many A
Speaker 15: cities and many A shows.
Speaker 3: And always appreciated you too.
Speaker 15: Yes, sirry Man, I think there was a little bit
Speaker 15: of like we've been sitting in green rooms that both
Speaker 15: of us know good and well that we just why
Speaker 15: are we here, Like we have no reason to be
Speaker 15: in this room, but we are. It just has very
Speaker 15: much a very much like a real recognized real with
Speaker 15: somebody like this man. And like you said, Bro, like
Speaker 15: there's thistles in every city man, and I appreciate the
Speaker 15: fact that, like, and that's part of what makes you
Speaker 15: what you are, is that, like it's the things that
Speaker 15: happen that when there's no cameras on that for us
Speaker 15: that we're mostly proud of. It's not the stuff that
Speaker 15: like everybody sees, it's what's happened, like you said, it's
Speaker 15: when it's the phone calls you have to have, you know,
Speaker 15: the meetings you have to set up, you know what
Speaker 15: I'm saying, And like the like those things are are
Speaker 15: are the things that really keep a city safe.
Speaker 5: I want to say before we go, we talked about
Speaker 5: something before you start recording. Yeah, and I want to
Speaker 5: point it out because I think it's important too. We
Speaker 5: were talking about how resources prevent violence. Yeah, so everybody
Speaker 5: know where there's no hope, there's violence, there is desperate right. Yes,
Speaker 5: So right now in Saint Louis, we have been informed
Speaker 5: that the senator who's a Republican centater.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's linked.
Speaker 7: Up with pjt Okay, okay, and there you are.
Speaker 5: They're building an FBI base here and they're bringing in
Speaker 5: more FBI agents to divert violence.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah.
Speaker 5: One again, law enforcement is a reaction to crime. They
Speaker 5: don't prevent it. Yeah, here's the reality that everybody that
Speaker 5: has a brain to think should be aware of. I
Speaker 5: don't care how many FBI you bring, how many police
Speaker 5: you hire. There are not enough law enforcement to govern
Speaker 5: the earth.
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, period, there's too many of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's not there's too many of us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you can't govern the earth.
Speaker 7: Yeah, like that's that's that's a no go.
Speaker 3: Right. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Most cases, when I see people make these arguments about this,
Speaker 5: I'm a person I like to use facts.
Speaker 3: I get straight to the facts, like we get the points.
Speaker 5: So in Saint Lewis, right, from twenty twenty to twenty
Speaker 5: twenty four, the murder rate in Saint Louis has dropped
Speaker 5: by one hundred and thirteen.
Speaker 15: Come on, man, yeah, one hundred and thirteen, bro, that's
Speaker 15: a lot of lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So in twenty twenty, the number of homicides at Saint
Speaker 5: Louis was two hundred and sixty three. The number in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty four were one hundred and fifty. See, there
Speaker 5: are certain things that I'm not gonna say they are
Speaker 5: the exclusive reason. But there are certain things that I
Speaker 5: know have contribute today. And it's not law enforcement because
Speaker 5: our police force is short right now.
Speaker 3: They gone, they don't do too much and nothing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there are a few things I know they have
Speaker 5: contributed to that. The magic thing is resources, yeah, and compassion.
Speaker 7: But they are few. Through a certain few things that
Speaker 7: I want to shout out.
Speaker 5: One of them is an organization called FCCY Freedom Center
Speaker 5: Saint Louis. My hoomie Mike Milton. The other one is
Speaker 5: Action Saint Louis. The other one is Missus Saint Louis.
Speaker 5: The other one is we Power Saint Louis. We power STL.
Speaker 5: They fund early childhood development. Word like crucially important for
Speaker 5: our community. Wow, you got mcc action Saint Louis, missus,
Speaker 5: Saint Louis Black Men, Bill, We power STL.
Speaker 3: Just to name a few people like your bangor.
Speaker 5: These are the people that have been actively in the community.
Speaker 7: For the past four years. A past mayor to Charlotte Jones.
Speaker 5: She probably got a lot of things wrong in people asked,
Speaker 5: but she was directing certain things and empowering people in
Speaker 5: a certain way.
Speaker 7: These organizations have thrived.
Speaker 5: Over the past four years and as a result, you
Speaker 5: see the number of homicides in the city. D Chris, So,
Speaker 5: why do we need to bring more FBI agents?
Speaker 3: What is that for? Show?
Speaker 5: Shouldn't we be throwing more money into these organizations if
Speaker 5: they are out here the turn trying they got the
Speaker 5: FCC has data, Yeah, they have data of reconciliation. I'm
Speaker 5: talking about my boy, Mike Milton. He's stepping into roles.
Speaker 5: With one case in particular, a young man was driving
Speaker 5: in the car with another young man.
Speaker 7: He was drunk.
Speaker 3: The young man died.
Speaker 7: He reconciled him with the mother.
Speaker 5: The mother in return went to the judge and was like,
Speaker 5: he don't need to go to jail here either, gonna treatment.
Speaker 3: Wow, Like why is he going to prison? Wow? Damn man.
Speaker 5: And then when they get when they get rid of justice, yeah,
Speaker 5: with sort of justice. When they get released from prison,
Speaker 5: they go to SCC and they spend time with them
Speaker 5: and they learn.
Speaker 3: The storative justice. They take accountability. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 5: So if we go if we need anything in Saint Louis,
Speaker 5: in DC, in Chicago, if we need anything in these cities,
Speaker 5: what we need or people to be realistic about what's
Speaker 5: happening and if you want to do something, say some
Speaker 5: of the funds you're gonna use to have more law
Speaker 5: enforcement into these places where you know people are already
Speaker 5: doing things. Because let me tell you something else, it's
Speaker 5: twenty twenty six almost, it's twenty twenty five. Ain't nobody
Speaker 5: scared of the police like they used to be. This
Speaker 5: ain't nineteen sixty.
Speaker 3: Two, bro, sir.
Speaker 5: Don't nobody's seen the police and be like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 5: you'll go to police these grown men just like another
Speaker 5: grown man.
Speaker 7: Ain't nobody scared of police no more? That ain't a
Speaker 7: thing lead like the rest of us. That's not a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 7: you belied like the rest of us. Mumble with the police. Bro,
Speaker 7: they dangerous right now, straight spirt up. That's what I'm
Speaker 7: trying to say.
Speaker 15: Look, we can talk about this right because that's the
Speaker 15: way we are with these ice agents.
Speaker 3: It's like, you think I'm scared.
Speaker 7: Of you, bro, You think I'm scared.
Speaker 3: Of you homie.
Speaker 15: Yeah, anyway, thank you this, Thank you for it, for
Speaker 15: like bringing it back to the data and shining the
Speaker 15: light on like people actually doing the work. You can
Speaker 15: follow you on Instagram. It's I am thiszle.
Speaker 5: Right, it's th hi is l this yeah, th h
Speaker 5: I s l fl like one hundred foundation dot org
Speaker 5: is the website social media.
Speaker 3: You've been found all that stuff there.
Speaker 15: You'll find all that all right, It can happen here.
Speaker 15: Cool zone media. We appreciate y'all.
Speaker 7: Appreciate you.
Speaker 5: Bro.
Speaker 3: Yes, sir, I'm not Robert Evans. I'm not going to
Speaker 3: start this episode with a horrible noise. Welcome to it
Speaker 3: could happen to hear a show about things falling apart
Speaker 3: with me today, Mio Wong, James Stout, I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 18: We have never as a society been this Year's of
Speaker 18: Lead paint as we are now, Oh my god.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's not great.
Speaker 3: Speaking of things falling apart, the lead paint in my
Speaker 3: room is crumbling. It's probably great things to my brain, wonderful,
Speaker 3: love this, love this, so okay. Most a lot of
Speaker 3: this episode is going to be about the Charlie Kirk
Speaker 3: assassination and everyone's reaction to it, and everyone's sort of
Speaker 3: losing their minds. But I think that the place that
Speaker 3: we want to start is with a little bit about
Speaker 3: the concept of the years of Lead Paint, which is
Speaker 3: develop by friend of the show, Vicky Osterwall to explain
Speaker 3: something I feel like almost everyone's forgotten about, which was
Speaker 3: right after Trump got elected, there was that car bomb
Speaker 3: outside of a Trump hotel that was like a tesla
Speaker 3: that was a right winger who was trying to get
Speaker 3: everyone to like do the purge.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the cyber trek, former Green Beret guy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 18: And this is the kind of thing that you would
Speaker 18: have seen during the original Years of Lead.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 18: So for people who don't know what the original Years
Speaker 18: of Lead was, because this is becoming a thing that
Speaker 18: people are using to understand what's going on now. And
Speaker 18: I think there are problems with that that we'll get to.
Speaker 18: But the original years of lead are this period from
Speaker 18: I mean that there's you know, you can you can
Speaker 18: start in a couple different places, but like roughly sort
Speaker 18: of like the sixties or the eighties, like early mid
Speaker 18: eighties in Italy that are this period of really really
Speaker 18: intensifies in the seventies. It's really really intense period of
Speaker 18: political violence in Italy. It is largely a right wing
Speaker 18: reaction to this massive series of uprisings in Italy. I mean,
Speaker 18: the whole the whole sixties in Italy are a time
Speaker 18: of incredible sort of turmoil and left wing uprising. There's
Speaker 18: I mean, I think there's first factory occupations are like
Speaker 18: sixty five, but there's the fact there's the massive factory
Speaker 18: occupations in nineteen sixty eight, which are sort of a
Speaker 18: global phenomena. But then also the next year there is
Speaker 18: an evance called and this is literally the term for it,
Speaker 18: the Hot Autumn of sixty nine, which.
Speaker 3: I'm not even gonna really a.
Speaker 18: Nice great yeah, which which was this massive like a
Speaker 18: second series of like you know, workers taking over factories
Speaker 18: and starting like factory councils, and like there are so
Speaker 18: many communist factions that, like the communist faction that's doing
Speaker 18: this stuff, they have mutated to a point where they're
Speaker 18: almost effectively anarchists. This is what's called the autonomists. And
Speaker 18: this becomes like a major influence on like American anarchism
Speaker 18: later and in response to the fact that these people
Speaker 18: very nearly on multiple occasions, like very nearly take Italy,
Speaker 18: a combination of rut wing fascist groups and organizations inside
Speaker 18: of and sort of parallel to the Italian government developed
Speaker 18: this thing called the strategy of tension, which and I
Speaker 18: think this will to some extent sound familiar in terms
Speaker 18: of what's happening right now, which is this strategy of
Speaker 18: using terrorist attacks and using political violence to show this
Speaker 18: like fear and panic and chaos that would cause people
Speaker 18: to turn to the state for safety and cause people
Speaker 18: to turn specifically to like a stronger, like more fascist
Speaker 18: and then eventually just a straight up fascist state that
Speaker 18: would permanently destroy the left and you know, like restore
Speaker 18: the power of the Nazis, et cetera, et cetera. Well,
Speaker 18: I mean not Muslin, these people Italian fascists, the og
Speaker 18: fascists well, and also neo fascists too, because they're these
Speaker 18: people are very weird Italians.
Speaker 6: Yeah, these people are Italians. Yeah, Yeah, many such cases.
Speaker 18: One of the big opening things is that the Piazza
Speaker 18: Fontana bombing, which is this massive bombing that kills nineteen
Speaker 18: people Injures, an unbelievable number of people, and it is
Speaker 18: immediately blamed on anarchists. There's an anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli
Speaker 18: who he's among like eighty anarchists who arrested almost immediately,
Speaker 18: he like somehow falls out of a four story window
Speaker 18: of a police building while he was being interrogated.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The Italian state, which will go on to admit a
Speaker 3: lot of the shit that it did, maintains to this
Speaker 3: day that he just got tired and fell out the
Speaker 3: window himself. I'm gonna let you.
Speaker 6: Try your archductions.
Speaker 3: I think this guy died. I mean a lot of
Speaker 3: a lot of anarchists are lazy.
Speaker 6: I can see, I.
Speaker 3: Can see that happening. Yeah.
Speaker 6: There is a good a play that I took part
Speaker 6: in during high school called Accidental Death of an Anarchist
Speaker 6: by Dario Foe, Yeah, which you can enjoy.
Speaker 3: This is the most like James backstory moment seen before.
Speaker 3: This is wild. Yeah, whoa someone someone update the icy
Speaker 3: HH wiki page. James backstory. This is great.
Speaker 6: Yeah my theater era.
Speaker 3: Who did you play?
Speaker 6: I can't remember? It was tragic twenty years ago.
Speaker 3: You should you should have remembered.
Speaker 6: Oh, I know. It was very fun. We had a
Speaker 6: good soundtrack. It was very enjoyable for me and my friends,
Speaker 6: and I'm sure all eight people who watched it also
Speaker 6: had a wonderful time.
Speaker 18: So in less fun times, So this bombing was actually
Speaker 18: carried out by a group called Ordine Nouvo, which is
Speaker 18: it's literally new order. Fascist groups only have four names.
Speaker 18: And this is a group that was aided by a
Speaker 18: combination of Italian intelligence and this thing called Gladio, which
Speaker 18: was this American netwill sort of stayed behind networking case
Speaker 18: of Soviet invasion that had all of these weapons cashes
Speaker 18: placed around the country that's eventually sort of repurposed into
Speaker 18: these fascist terror cells. And they do a lot of these, right,
Speaker 18: They do a lot of bombings and they and they
Speaker 18: mostly blame the left for them. Probably the most famous
Speaker 18: one is the Bologna train bombing, which killed like eighty
Speaker 18: people injured a huge number of other people, was done
Speaker 18: by a kind of like like another fascist group. Right,
Speaker 18: this is also a period where like there is real
Speaker 18: left wing violence. Right, the left is doing like like well,
Speaker 18: one of the things they kidnap bosses and have like
Speaker 18: show trials of bosses all the time. They love doing
Speaker 18: this factory bosses.
Speaker 3: Just like in The Dark Knight Rises by Marxist historian
Speaker 3: Christopher Nolan. God.
Speaker 18: I see, I thought you were gonna say, just like
Speaker 18: cancel culture, but.
Speaker 3: Just like just like what the right's doing right now
Speaker 3: for anyone who posts about Charlie Kirk, you know.
Speaker 18: But but there was also stuff like, for example, Lota Continua,
Speaker 18: which is a leftist group of staggering complexity, I like
Speaker 18: killed the police officer who was interrogating Guiseppe Pinelli. So
Speaker 18: you know, like there are left wing assassinations. A group
Speaker 18: called the Red Brigades kidnaps the former Prime Minister of Italy,
Speaker 18: Aldo Moro. See every other episode where I've yelled about this.
Speaker 18: They had been heavily infiltrated and were sort of being
Speaker 18: manipulated by a number of intelligence organizations that if I
Speaker 18: started listening to them right now, you would think I
Speaker 18: was insane. Yeah, But the important thing about this period, right,
Speaker 18: and this eventually works, it does destroy the left. But
Speaker 18: the important thing about the structure of this in the
Speaker 18: actual years of lead is that these are concrete groups, right.
Speaker 18: They are shifting, they are flowing, people move between.
Speaker 3: Them, but actual organized factions any a legitimate armed struggle,
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 6: The Red Brigades are literally organized in a military fashion, right,
Speaker 6: with like units and command structure.
Speaker 18: But this is also true of like, this is also
Speaker 18: true of the fascists, right, yeah, and it's also true
Speaker 18: of group I mean, you know, like obviously like autonomia
Speaker 18: and the sort of like anarchistic communist factions are looser,
Speaker 18: but like they're still they still are like organized, and
Speaker 18: they're rooted in a whole bunch of different kinds of struggles.
Speaker 18: And the strategy of tension is being deliberately managed by
Speaker 18: by Italian intelligence and by American intelligence, and by a
Speaker 18: bunch of other sort of like state groups. And this
Speaker 18: is not at all what we're dealing with right now,
Speaker 18: not even close yet. The Charlie Kirk assassination is neither
Speaker 18: a guy who was part of like some Marxist group,
Speaker 18: nor was it a guy who's like a CIA agent
Speaker 18: or something.
Speaker 6: Right, like just a guy it's a guy who got.
Speaker 3: Reddit gamer and discord political violence.
Speaker 18: Yeah, these are these are these these are decentralized acts
Speaker 18: being fueled by sort of radicalization. But they're not like
Speaker 18: active intelligence operations.
Speaker 3: I mean some of them aren't even fueled by radical
Speaker 3: Like even even the word radicalization here is sometimes in
Speaker 3: miss This one in particular is like not that really
Speaker 3: a degree. It seems like a degree of like personal
Speaker 3: motivation based on his relationship with his roommate as well
Speaker 3: as this general like gen Z sort of nihilism that
Speaker 3: allows you to do a pretty wild act like this,
Speaker 3: I think specifically in this case, you know, it's like
Speaker 3: existential violence manifesting an incredibly political action from someone who
Speaker 3: otherwise isn't like overtly political. This guy's not a leftist.
Speaker 3: It's definitely not a groper, as I've been trying to
Speaker 3: argue for days now. Yeah, but I mean what he
Speaker 3: did certainly is is political, even though he's not you know,
Speaker 3: card carrying, you know, communist or you know, an anti imperialist,
Speaker 3: like the guy who assassinated the to Israel embassy staffers
Speaker 3: was right, which is kind of the only arguably like
Speaker 3: left wing assassin we've like seen in the past, I
Speaker 3: don't know, ten years in the United States, is the
Speaker 3: guy who killed the two Israeli embassy staffers. Yeah, every
Speaker 3: other assassin or attended assassin would not accurately be described
Speaker 3: as like left wing in orientation, including someone like Luigi Mangioni,
Speaker 3: who are very much not basically a teapot gray tribe libertarian. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 18: And it's also worth noting that like from the state end,
Speaker 18: these like this is not something that was like deliberately
Speaker 18: unleashed by the state, except in the sense of like,
Speaker 18: well some.
Speaker 3: People would argue otherwise, Yeah, but wrong right there.
Speaker 18: If that's the issue, you know, like like if like
Speaker 18: the last time we saw something that you could argue
Speaker 18: even sort of look like that is like there is
Speaker 18: genuinely something kind of suspicious about the way that a
Speaker 18: whole bunch of the most famous Black Lives Matter activists
Speaker 18: who weren't the ones in the NGO suddenly turned up dead.
Speaker 18: That's the closest thing, right, And that's not even a
Speaker 18: like we know they did this, that's a like and
Speaker 18: that was and that was over a decade ago, yeah, right,
Speaker 18: that this is this is a long time ago, and
Speaker 18: you know, and and I would argue it's important in
Speaker 18: that it's part of the same series of uprisings that
Speaker 18: like all of this fascist stuff is a response to right,
Speaker 18: it's a response to Ferguson, it's response to twenty twenty.
Speaker 18: But that structure, which is the structure that a lot
Speaker 18: of people are using to analyze this of just purely
Speaker 18: in American years of lead doesn't really work because we're
Speaker 18: dealing with something way weirder, yeah, and way less concrete.
Speaker 3: Which is why we're calling it something else, the years
Speaker 3: of lead paint, because these people are just like because
Speaker 3: it is not the result of this large scale like
Speaker 3: deep state orchestration, nor these legitimate organized fashions. Everyone is
Speaker 3: simply brain rotted. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6: To contrast, right in the twentieth century that the prevailing
Speaker 6: concept of how the left would change the world was
Speaker 6: through the violent capture of state institutions or in the
Speaker 6: case of the anarchists, I guess less. So that you know,
Speaker 6: if we look at like this communist ideal of revolution.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how's that anarchist revolution going, buddy?
Speaker 6: Well, I mean, these guys are thirty years after the
Speaker 6: Spanish Revolution, rights some of them have seen anarchists hold
Speaker 6: whole cities and hold off the country's army. It's not
Speaker 6: out of the out of the realm of possibility for them.
Speaker 6: That concept of revolution, I mean, it does exist. It
Speaker 6: exists with people with like anime Twitter avatars still, but
Speaker 6: like for the most part, that concept of revolution is
Speaker 6: not that relevant in twenty first century leftist political organizing
Speaker 6: and so like it cannot be the same because the
Speaker 6: nature of the thing that that's the struggle, it's not
Speaker 6: the same on the left.
Speaker 3: There isn't even illegitimate left in the United States, like
Speaker 3: in any meaningful sense.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean that there exists, Like I guess it's
Speaker 6: like I don't want to call it incoherent, but like
Speaker 6: a lot of the left exists. The people going hardest
Speaker 6: on the left are going hardest on the internet. I guess,
Speaker 6: this is what I want to say. And like, this
Speaker 6: is nothing like post sixty eight Italy.
Speaker 3: We've seen a nice, nice like resurgence, stuff like union
Speaker 3: organizing and that's like the most realistic manifestation of the left.
Speaker 6: But mutual aid organizing.
Speaker 18: And I will also say we did have this band
Speaker 18: from twenty eleven to twenty twenty was like a really
Speaker 18: massive period of like really large scale street movement in
Speaker 18: a way that really terrified these people, Like twenty fourteen
Speaker 18: petificlarly Ferguson and twenty twenty like really truly rattled the
Speaker 18: psychology of all of the people who who are like
Speaker 18: currently running this country in that it demonstrated that like,
Speaker 18: oh damn, there could.
Speaker 10: Be a world.
Speaker 18: We're like, we're not automatically the superior race and we're
Speaker 18: not like treated like that because it's betting bullshit and
Speaker 18: people were willing to fight for that. But also like, yeah, no,
Speaker 18: like we don't have the kind of like organization or
Speaker 18: logistical capacity that like any of these things had, and
Speaker 18: it's not clear to me that you like, you won't
Speaker 18: get things that look like that anymore.
Speaker 6: Yeah, as much much is like the right wing YouTube
Speaker 6: podcast Sphear wants to make it the case. First of all,
Speaker 6: there is not like an organized revolutionary left in the US,
Speaker 6: not as not a serious one. And secondly, like the
Speaker 6: organized revolutionary left that existed in twentieth century relied on
Speaker 6: a network that was international and that sometimes and not
Speaker 6: always had its roots in Soviet I guess foreign policy
Speaker 6: right that also does not like as much as a
Speaker 6: YouTube world wished to be the case. China is not
Speaker 6: sending people little yellow hard hats to go out in
Speaker 6: Portland and get mad at the Feds being there. That
Speaker 6: is not the case. Here's an advert for hard hats,
Speaker 6: which you have to buy in your own because China
Speaker 6: is not sending them to you.
Speaker 3: We're back talking lead paint, King of lead paint, and
Speaker 3: in some ways the conspiratorial elements of the years of lead.
Speaker 3: There is no shortage of conspiratorial thought permeating across the
Speaker 3: entire spectrum of American politics in ways that I've never
Speaker 3: really seen at this scale before, which isn't saying much
Speaker 3: because you know, I'm not, however, old James Is, but
Speaker 3: I have been Gris who fuck me, but I have
Speaker 3: been monitor industream was politics was a decent section of time,
Speaker 3: mainly the past like seven years, the past like five
Speaker 3: or so years.
Speaker 6: Professionally, We're gonna have to watch another video because of
Speaker 6: this whole second of the scarison. I have you known.
Speaker 3: I'm actually multiple months later for my workplace harassment training.
Speaker 6: I can see why, My god.
Speaker 3: But it's it's it's it's pretty bad. Just the the
Speaker 3: total rejection of reality in the separation of truth and
Speaker 3: reality as coherent concepts. And we've seen this and some
Speaker 3: of people's responses across the political spectrum to the release
Speaker 3: of alleged text messages between the alleged shooter of Charlie
Speaker 3: Kirk and their roommate, which was released in the indictment
Speaker 3: that dropped on Monday, which shows the a lled shooter
Speaker 3: explaining to their roommate what they did and like how
Speaker 3: they did it and in part why we'll talk more
Speaker 3: about this in Executive Disorder. These actual messages and like
Speaker 3: what they contain, but people's reaction to them, both on
Speaker 3: the left and right, have been pretty wild. Matt Walsh
Speaker 3: is arguing that these messages were scripted between the roommate
Speaker 3: and the shooter as a way to absolve the transgender roommate,
Speaker 3: referring to this strategy as being influenced by Breaking Bad.
Speaker 3: What a Breaking Bad is a television show, an American
Speaker 3: television show released around two thousand and eight. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to explain Breaking Bad.
Speaker 6: Garretson do you remember that?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, you were like Matt Walsh's. Matt Walsh
Speaker 3: is comparing this to to something that Walter White did
Speaker 3: during during Breaking Bad, saying that this feels like a
Speaker 3: strategy that these two people cooked up by watching too
Speaker 3: much TV, which in fact just shows that it is
Speaker 3: Matt Walsh who watches too much TV, by the fact
Speaker 3: that this is the first thing he thinks of. But
Speaker 3: it's not just Walsh. Communists, anti imperialists, people on the
Speaker 3: left are spreading a completely unfounded assertion that this text
Speaker 3: exchange between the roommate and the alleged shooter was quote
Speaker 3: unquote obviously written by an FBI agent. Posts like this
Speaker 3: are receiving tens of thousands of likes cross platforms. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's such a misunderstanding of how state craft works and
Speaker 3: how like the legal system works that people communists really
Speaker 3: think that this state of Utah could could orchest straight
Speaker 3: and convincingly, convincingly orchestrate completely faked text exchanges Like that's
Speaker 3: just simply not how our legal system works. And you
Speaker 3: have people like Hassan spreading this sort of stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Quote half of the right thinks the messages are fake
Speaker 3: because it doesn't implicate the transperson. The other half thinks
Speaker 3: the shooter is a patsy because it was Israel that
Speaker 3: killed Charlie Kirk. I will say the text messages are
Speaker 3: too perfectly plugging holes for the investigators. Unnatural, Like come on,
Speaker 3: come on, come on, guys. This is like I don't
Speaker 3: even know what to like argue with, Like there's no
Speaker 3: way to argue against people who believe in this in
Speaker 3: any kind of real way.
Speaker 6: Yeah, right, Like, how do you someone who has rejected facts? Like,
Speaker 6: how do you bring them back?
Speaker 3: They have to argue in court that the led shooter
Speaker 3: actually did the shooting, right, That's what they're trying to establish. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this is the evidence that will be agreed upon as
Speaker 3: as evidence. To introduce the text messages in court, the
Speaker 3: DA will have to prove their authenticity through chain of
Speaker 3: custody and metadata. The reason why they were released now
Speaker 3: is because they were included in the indictment laying out
Speaker 3: the charges against Tyler Robinson. Robinson might use some odd words,
Speaker 3: but he was raised Mormon and all this just tracks
Speaker 3: at a face level to me. He's explaining his actions
Speaker 3: to the person that he loves and instructs them to
Speaker 3: delete the messages. He doesn't think that these are going
Speaker 3: to come back to hurt him. And this isn't just
Speaker 3: Betel's FBI saying this, This is the work of local
Speaker 3: police and State of Utah police in the State of
Speaker 3: Utah court, and this rejection of evidence, not what the
Speaker 3: evidence argues, just the base evidence itself. Follows a week
Speaker 3: of debate regarding this shooter's political orientation, which me and
Speaker 3: Robert already discussed in an episode earlier this week. And
Speaker 3: I understand people's intensity around this issue, especially framing it
Speaker 3: in this years of led concept right of the right
Speaker 3: using this to major crackdown on trans people and on
Speaker 3: the left, which yeah, they're going to try to do.
Speaker 3: But trying to argue at this point that he's a
Speaker 3: groyper is just so faulty, and trying to argue that
Speaker 3: these text messages are faked somehow, similarly, is just so
Speaker 3: faulty and is so detached from how this situation actually
Speaker 3: happened and how it fits in to the current dynamic
Speaker 3: of political violence in the United States. On that topic,
Speaker 3: a few days ago, Fox News is the Five was
Speaker 3: debating if they needed more information to definitively say that
Speaker 3: the shooter was on quote unquote the left. Greg Gutfield
Speaker 3: went on about how high profile liberal and left wing
Speaker 3: figures aren't being assassinated by people on the right and
Speaker 3: wrote off the murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hartman
Speaker 3: and her husband.
Speaker 19: We don't need more information, really, yes, we don't need it.
Speaker 19: What is interesting here is why is only this happening
Speaker 19: on the left and not the right.
Speaker 3: That's all we need to know about that.
Speaker 18: There was absolutely no cos you want to.
Speaker 19: Talk about Meliss Horseman. Did you know her name before
Speaker 19: it happened? None of us did. None of us were
Speaker 19: spending every single day talking about missus Hortman. I never
Speaker 19: heard of her until after she died. The matter, And
Speaker 19: don't play that bullshit with me.
Speaker 7: You know what I'm talking.
Speaker 19: What I'm saying is there was no demonization amplification about
Speaker 19: that woman before she died. It was a specific crime
Speaker 19: against her by somebody.
Speaker 3: Who knew her, the same thing.
Speaker 19: You can bring up, Joshua Piro, but then you will
Speaker 19: not bring up, for example, that that was a pro
Speaker 19: Palestine person.
Speaker 7: So don't use your what about this.
Speaker 3: The fact, the.
Speaker 19: Fact of the matter is the both sides argument not
Speaker 19: only doesn't fly.
Speaker 3: We don't care. We don't care.
Speaker 19: About your both sides argument that shit is dead. For
Speaker 19: one thing, there is no cognitive dissonance on our.
Speaker 2: Side on your side.
Speaker 19: Your beliefs do not match reality, so you're coming up
Speaker 19: with these rationalizations like what about this or what about that.
Speaker 19: We're not doing that because we saw it happen. We
Speaker 19: saw a young bright man assassinated, and we.
Speaker 3: Know who did it. So if you look at like
Speaker 3: left wing violence or violence targeting right wing figures, even
Speaker 3: just like the past two years, right, there's the two
Speaker 3: attempted Trump assassinations, which the right frames as left wing violence.
Speaker 3: Though the first Trump shooter did not have left wing politics.
Speaker 3: They had more of the psychological profile of a school
Speaker 3: shooter who was looking to do something to get into
Speaker 3: history books and came from a conservative upbringing. This person
Speaker 3: was on a leftist right. But this is still targeting
Speaker 3: a right wing figure, so it's framed in this same conversation.
Speaker 3: The United Healthcare assassination similarly right, this wasn't a left
Speaker 3: wing person who did this, but targeting a CEO on
Speaker 3: a healthcare topic associates it with the left or with
Speaker 3: progressive stances around healthcare. There's the arson against Jo Shapiro's home.
Speaker 3: The guy who did this had a mixture of like
Speaker 3: a pro Trump background but with pro Palestine motivations. The
Speaker 3: most clear example would be the murder of two Israeli
Speaker 3: Empacy staffers, and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 6: With the healthcare stuff, like we should probably point out
Speaker 6: the Trump also ran on like medicine is too expensive, right,
Speaker 6: it would cost too much to get the pills you
Speaker 6: need to stay alive. Like that has been a cornerstone
Speaker 6: of his platform too. It can be framed as like
Speaker 6: a populist sentiment of populist stance, yeah, yeah, not necessarily
Speaker 6: a leftist one.
Speaker 3: So that's the political background that these people on the
Speaker 3: right are like coming from right, Like that's how they
Speaker 3: see see this that that's like this spike and left
Speaker 3: being violence that they're seeing refers to this collection of acts.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 3: For Media has reported that a few days after Charliekirk's assassination,
Speaker 3: the Department of Justice removed from their website a National
Speaker 3: Institute of Justice research study showing a white supremacist and
Speaker 3: far right violence far outweighs any other type of terrorism
Speaker 3: or domestic violent extremism. Quote. Since nineteen ninety, far right
Speaker 3: extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far
Speaker 3: left or radical Islamist extremists, including two hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: seven events that took more than five hundred and twenty lives.
Speaker 3: In the same period, far left extremists committed forty two
Speaker 3: ideologically motivated attacks that took seventy eight lives. So this
Speaker 3: study has been scrubbed from the website to follow in
Speaker 3: line with Trump and the right's general talking points about
Speaker 3: this spike in left wing violence. I think in part,
Speaker 3: the right would view explicit white supremacist, neo Nazi linked
Speaker 3: violence as like separate from like, you know, conservative even
Speaker 3: some like far right violence. They don't understand the linkage
Speaker 3: from you know, explicit white supremacist mass shootings and you know,
Speaker 3: make America great again. Right, That's something that they would
Speaker 3: like reject as a legitimate coupling.
Speaker 6: In Congress today, cash Betel that claimed to have no
Speaker 6: idea who did, then Rufe was for example, correct and
Speaker 6: like what he was about a.
Speaker 3: Lot of them just aren't aware of this stuff. And
Speaker 3: it's not just this National Institute Justice study. These findings
Speaker 3: are incredibly consistent across multiple studies. The notably not left
Speaker 3: wing Cato Institute found very similar results in their analysis
Speaker 3: of six hundred and twenty politically motivated murders since nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy five, excluding nine to eleven, most political violence comes
Speaker 3: from the right. They counted three hundred and ninety one
Speaker 3: murders from the right and sixty five from the left.
Speaker 3: Can link that below to get a better look at
Speaker 3: their actual methodology and what they count as right wing
Speaker 3: what they count as left wing violence. Yeah, but these
Speaker 3: stats simply don't matter to the right. In a lot
Speaker 3: of cases, many average rightis will just reject these results altogether,
Speaker 3: say that the study is faked or had faulty methodology.
Speaker 3: But others might frame it as even if this data
Speaker 3: is true, it doesn't match the current trend of escalating
Speaker 3: left wing violence, specifically targeted left wing violence, not just
Speaker 3: mass shootings. Here's another clip from Fox's The Five.
Speaker 19: I understand why people are saying what about.
Speaker 3: This and what about this?
Speaker 19: Because if you have to face the underlying fact to this,
Speaker 19: your life is going to fall apart, because you're going
Speaker 19: to realize you're not the good guys. If you sat
Speaker 19: around and you defended the mutilation of children, you're not
Speaker 19: the good guys. If you sat six hundred seven hundred
Speaker 19: cases of harassment against Republicans and you said, but what
Speaker 19: about this?
Speaker 3: What about this?
Speaker 19: And then you see this murder after calling somebody a
Speaker 19: fashion you fascist, you realize maybe I'm not the good guy.
Speaker 19: That is a hell of a realization to deal with.
Speaker 3: So therefore, therefore you.
Speaker 19: Have to grasp at rationalizations. You don't have to do that, Jessica.
Speaker 3: They do. I don't believe you're part of that group.
Speaker 3: But why the hell do.
Speaker 19: You have to mimic an echo that crap?
Speaker 3: To us? He was a patsy. That guy was a patsy.
Speaker 19: He was under the hypnot expel of a direct to
Speaker 19: consumer nihilism, the trans cult. And you know that if
Speaker 19: you can decide that biology is false, you can agree
Speaker 19: that that murder is okay and that humanity is expendable.
Speaker 19: How you cannot see that alone and see that for
Speaker 19: what the evil it is without having to attach all
Speaker 19: of these other things is beyond me.
Speaker 6: His explicit claim that we should just like flag is
Speaker 6: that it's not. He's not necessarily talking about leftists as
Speaker 6: a whole. He's specifically talking about people who accept the
Speaker 6: trans people are people being and like that the existence
Speaker 6: of trans people leads to this nihilism. I guess, well, yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean they see the existent trans people as like
Speaker 3: a result of this nihilist culture, right, Yeah, Well, he.
Speaker 6: Seemed to put the cause all hour the other way though,
Speaker 6: in that he seemed to suggest that the nihilism comes
Speaker 6: from accepting trans people.
Speaker 3: I guess I don't fully agree that that's how he's
Speaker 3: saying it. I think they view it as it's both
Speaker 3: causal but also a symptom. I think they play it
Speaker 3: kind of both ways and showing how it's it's more
Speaker 3: so just like the result of this like breakdown in
Speaker 3: like a moral fabric, right, which is then breaking down
Speaker 3: like notion of reality, which is right, like, you know,
Speaker 3: transness is such an existential threat to the right wing
Speaker 3: worldviewing like many senses. But that's another topic. I do
Speaker 3: find it interesting how quick these people are just completely
Speaker 3: discount right wing mass shootings, right. And I think one
Speaker 3: key difference in talking about, you know, left wing violence
Speaker 3: is right ring violence, it seems, and almost all their
Speaker 3: examples here they're talking about assassinations targeted against specific people.
Speaker 3: Most right wing violence in these like statistics from like
Speaker 3: CATO and the National Institute of Justice, are are mass shootings,
Speaker 3: right that the number of individual people might not be
Speaker 3: that different, but the kill count or right wing and
Speaker 3: specifically like white supremacist attacks are so much higher. I
Speaker 3: don't think it's the actual numbers that matter to these people,
Speaker 3: it's their proximity to being the recipient of such violence
Speaker 3: that really freaks them out. For these commentators, the likelihood
Speaker 3: of them being in a black church when a white
Speaker 3: supremacist mass shooting happens is slimton'on right, Like, that's never
Speaker 3: gonna happen to these people, But being the victim of
Speaker 3: targeted violence against a high profile figure is to them,
Speaker 3: it seems like an increasing possibility, and that really freaks
Speaker 3: them out. Like obviously this type of attack directly affects
Speaker 3: their political class in a way that a far right
Speaker 3: mass shooting does not. I think that is influencing the
Speaker 3: way that they're talking about this, you know, quote unquote
Speaker 3: spike in left wing violence. We're gonna go on an
Speaker 3: ad break and then return to talk about Jed Vance's
Speaker 3: temporary takeover of the Charlie Kirk Show and how his
Speaker 3: rhetoric is affecting this general debate on political violence. Okay,
Speaker 3: we are back on Monday, September fifteenth, Vice President j.
Speaker 3: D Vance hosted The Charlie Kirk Show from his office
Speaker 3: in the White House Complex, the Vice President sitting down
Speaker 3: hosting a private citizens radio talk show. The show's intro
Speaker 3: has clips from Charlie's studio with signs that read big
Speaker 3: Gov socks warning does not play well with liberals. To
Speaker 3: introduce the show, Jade Vance says that, quote, we have
Speaker 3: to talk about this incredibly destructive moment of left wing
Speaker 3: extremism that has grown up over the last few years.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about how to dismantle that and
Speaker 3: how to bring real unity unquote. His first guest was
Speaker 3: Stephen Miller. Ben said he wanted to talk to Miller
Speaker 3: about quote all the ways we're trying to figure out
Speaker 3: how to prevent this festering violence that you can see
Speaker 3: from the far left becoming even more and more mainstream.
Speaker 7: You have the crazies on the far left.
Speaker 13: You are saying, Oh, Stephen Miller and jd Vance, they're
Speaker 13: going to go after constitutionally protected speech, and we're going
Speaker 13: to go after the NGO network that fomens, facilitates, and
Speaker 13: engages in violence that's not okay. Violence is not okay
Speaker 13: in our system, and we want to make it less
Speaker 13: likely that that happens.
Speaker 7: Walk me through at a high level, like what you.
Speaker 13: And I have been working on, what the whole administration
Speaker 13: has been working on to try to make sure that
Speaker 13: we don't reward and promote this craziness.
Speaker 12: Yes, so it's an excellent question. I've said this before,
Speaker 12: but there's repeating. The last message that Charlie sent me
Speaker 12: was I think it was just the day before we
Speaker 12: lost him, which is that we need to have an
Speaker 12: organized strategy to go after the lefting organizations that are
Speaker 12: promoting violence in this country. And I will write those
Speaker 12: words onto my heart and I will carry them.
Speaker 3: Out the NGO network. Yep.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this has been a thing with them for a while.
Speaker 3: Yes, there was supposed to be a series of executive
Speaker 3: orders that were drafted earlier this year, specifically targeting Democrat
Speaker 3: funding platforms like Act Blue and environmental NGOs, that it
Speaker 3: was reported that Trump was about to sign, and then
Speaker 3: they kind of disappeared. This was around like April to May,
Speaker 3: and this has been something that they obviously have been
Speaker 3: wanting to do but for one reason or another haven't
Speaker 3: followed through on yet. But now are talking about this
Speaker 3: as an impending policy that the Trump administration is going
Speaker 3: to enact.
Speaker 6: I think some of their fascination with NGOs comes from
Speaker 6: the Trump administration's first term, when NGOs were very successful
Speaker 6: in bringing suits that delayed or prevented some of the
Speaker 6: policies that the mill of faction of the Trump administration
Speaker 6: would have liked to implement.
Speaker 18: Yeah, and then I think the other angle of this
Speaker 18: is just pueriety, Semitism, mango with that. Partly when they're
Speaker 18: saying NGOs, they mean NGOs, and partly when they're saying
Speaker 18: NGOs they mean Jews.
Speaker 3: And it's great.
Speaker 6: It's very often this specific focus is on he s
Speaker 6: right highest Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Who I mean, we
Speaker 6: see this in the Tree of Life shooting for instance
Speaker 6: in twenty eighteen. Right, this has been with us for
Speaker 6: some time on the right.
Speaker 3: I'm going to play another clip where they outline more
Speaker 3: strategies for clamping down on left wing violence.
Speaker 12: And we are going to channel all of the anger
Speaker 12: that we have over the organized campaign that led to
Speaker 12: this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.
Speaker 7: So let me explain a bit what that means. So
Speaker 7: thirty seconds, it'll be quick Stephen the organized.
Speaker 12: Docs and campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence,
Speaker 12: the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, Combining
Speaker 12: that with messaging, this design trying to trigger inside violence,
Speaker 12: and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate
Speaker 12: the violence.
Speaker 3: It is a vast domestic terror movement.
Speaker 12: But with the Goddess my witness, we are going to
Speaker 12: use every resource we have at the Department of Justice,
Speaker 12: Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle,
Speaker 12: and destroy these networks and make America safe again for
Speaker 12: the American people. It will happen, and we will do
Speaker 12: it in Charlie's name.
Speaker 3: So in their discussion of taking down this big doxing network,
Speaker 3: they also inadvertently and ironically describe the doxing campaign that
Speaker 3: the right is currently doing at a far larger scale
Speaker 3: and with way more institutional backing than any antif for
Speaker 3: left being, doxing has looked like targeting people making posts
Speaker 3: in support of Charlie Kirk's assassination or people making jokes
Speaker 3: about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination, with
Speaker 3: a doxing website listing thousands of quote unquote Charlie's murderers,
Speaker 3: which are actually just people who have made posts about
Speaker 3: the death of Charlie Kirk. This is building off the
Speaker 3: Canary Mission strategy used against pro Palestinian activists, which has
Speaker 3: been adopted by the State Department for Immigration Enforcement and
Speaker 3: judging visa applications. This is the actual, like organized state backed,
Speaker 3: institutionally backed doxing campaign that exists right now in this country.
Speaker 3: It's not your average torch Antifa chapter doing this at scale. Now,
Speaker 3: it's the right with the mechanism of state encouraging them,
Speaker 3: backing them, and tons of money being funneled into an
Speaker 3: organized operation to actually impact state policy on who gets
Speaker 3: allowed in the country. On that note, Mark Rubio has
Speaker 3: talked about denying visa applications for people who celebrate the
Speaker 3: death of Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 20: We are not in the business of inviting people to
Speaker 20: visit our country who are going to be involved in
Speaker 20: negative and destructive behavior. Okay, so why should if I
Speaker 20: invite someone? If we invite someone to visit the United
Speaker 20: States of America as a student, as a tourist, has whatever,
Speaker 20: then they have a different The standard they should be
Speaker 20: held to is very high. We shouldn't be bringing people
Speaker 20: into this country. We should not be giving visas to
Speaker 20: people who are going to come to the United States
Speaker 20: and do things like celebrate the murder, the execution, the
Speaker 20: assassination of a political figure. We should not, And if
Speaker 20: they're already here, we should be revoking their visa.
Speaker 3: So now there's an organized campaign to not only try
Speaker 3: to deport and revoke visas or deny visas to people
Speaker 3: quote unquote celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, but also
Speaker 3: get citizens here fired from their jobs and disrupt their life.
Speaker 3: Just two years ago, Elon Musk tweeted, quote, if you
Speaker 3: were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or
Speaker 3: liking something on this platform Twitter, we will fund your
Speaker 3: legal bill, no limit. Please let us know unquote. What's
Speaker 3: different about the right's use of these tactics is the
Speaker 3: merger of like the right wing non government organization like
Speaker 3: Activist Apparatus with the ruling conservative government. Like the Dems
Speaker 3: in the left have never done this before. There's never
Speaker 3: been this coordination between the actual democratic establishment and like
Speaker 3: the far left. That's never happened, Like Palestine crackdowns started
Speaker 3: under Biden. Biden's DOJ prosecuted many twenty twenty George Floyd
Speaker 3: uprising cases. Federal assistance in the domestic terrorists investigation into
Speaker 3: Cop City started under Biden. As for quote unquote organized
Speaker 3: riots and street violence. Right wing street violence has been
Speaker 3: encouraged and coordinated with Trump and the Trump administration stand
Speaker 3: back and stand by to stop the steal protests leading
Speaker 3: to January sixth, which Trump played a large part in
Speaker 3: making happen, and then Trump pardoned all the participants.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's it's pretty clear.
Speaker 3: The mayor of Minneapolis taking a knee is not on
Speaker 3: the same level as Trump pardoning all the January sixth
Speaker 3: quote unquote insurrectionists. At the end of Vance's two hour
Speaker 3: long episode, he reiterated on the topic of doxing and
Speaker 3: harassment campaigns and political violence. Here's another clip.
Speaker 13: I wrote a story in The Nation magazine about my
Speaker 13: dear friend Charlie Kirk. Now The Nation is in a
Speaker 13: fringe blog. It's a well funded, well respected magazine whose
Speaker 13: publishing history goes back to the American Civil War.
Speaker 7: George Soros's Open.
Speaker 13: Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation
Speaker 13: and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.
Speaker 7: The writer accuses Charlie.
Speaker 13: Of saying, and I quote, black women do not have
Speaker 13: brain processing power to be taken seriously. But if you
Speaker 13: go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to,
Speaker 13: you realize he never said anything like that. He never
Speaker 13: uttered those words. He made an argument against affirmative action
Speaker 13: as a policy, He criticized a specific Supreme Court justice
Speaker 13: as an individual. He never said anything about black women
Speaker 13: as a group. He made an argument for judging people
Speaker 13: of all races and backgrounds by their own individual merits.
Speaker 13: The very evidence she provides this hack of a writer
Speaker 13: shows that she lied about a dead man, and yet
Speaker 13: she wrote it, an esteemed magazine published it, it made
Speaker 13: it through the editors, and of course liberal billionaires rewarded
Speaker 13: that attack.
Speaker 7: Now, of course, even.
Speaker 13: If Charlie had uttered those words, it wouldn't mean that
Speaker 13: he deserved his fate. But consider the level of propaganda
Speaker 13: at work. Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and
Speaker 13: well funded institutions of the left lied about what he
Speaker 13: said so as to justify his murder. This is soulless
Speaker 13: and evil. But I was struck not just by the
Speaker 13: dishonesty of this smear, but by the glee over a
Speaker 13: young husband's and young father's death quote, she says he
Speaker 13: was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist. The Nation wrote,
Speaker 13: who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses.
Speaker 3: There's a lot to break down there.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: First of all, the president of the Nation, not the
Speaker 3: country the magazine. The Nation magazine has stated that they,
Speaker 3: in fact, do not receive money from George Soros or
Speaker 3: the Open Society Foundation. Vance's gesturing two left wing billionaires
Speaker 3: carries three parentheses around that term. Second of all, let's
Speaker 3: play the actual clip of Charlie talking about brain processing power.
Speaker 21: Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Shila Jackson Lee and
Speaker 21: Catangi Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks. We would have
Speaker 21: been called theis. But now they're coming out and they're
Speaker 21: saying it for us. They're coming out and they're saying,
Speaker 21: I'm only here because affirmative action. Yeah, we know, you
Speaker 21: do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be
Speaker 21: taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white
Speaker 21: person slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
Speaker 3: So he just happens to be talking about three black
Speaker 3: women and state that they do not have the brain
Speaker 3: processing power to do their jobs and that they stole
Speaker 3: a white man's spot. Yet in the position they are
Speaker 3: in now. An opinion writer for The Washington Post was
Speaker 3: fired this week for sharing this quote on Twitter, which
Speaker 3: replaced the names of the three women's talking about with
Speaker 3: just black women.
Speaker 6: Did she share it like in between quotation monks if
Speaker 6: it was a direct quotation.
Speaker 3: She did share it as if it was a direct quotation.
Speaker 18: Okay, I see, so I'm going to read this from
Speaker 18: the email that they sent this writer firing her. This
Speaker 18: writer is a black woman. Among other requirements, the company
Speaker 18: wide social media policy mandates that all employees social media
Speaker 18: postings be respectful and prohibits postings that disparage people on
Speaker 18: their race, gender, or other protected characteristics. The policy also
Speaker 18: reminds employees that everything they post is reflective on the
Speaker 18: company and should not affect the integrity of the post journalism.
Speaker 18: You're posting some blue sky which identify you as a
Speaker 18: post columnist about white men in response to the killing
Speaker 18: of Charlie Kirk do not comply with our policy. For example,
Speaker 18: you posted refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes
Speaker 18: on my face and performative morning for a white man
Speaker 18: that espoused violence is not the same thing as violence.
Speaker 18: And part of what keeps America violent is the insistence
Speaker 18: that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white
Speaker 18: men who espoused hatred and violence. So this is explicitly
Speaker 18: a they think that reverse racism is real, and that's
Speaker 18: saying that and talking about white people as a class
Speaker 18: of people in the US that are responsible for things
Speaker 18: is in fact racism. Is that is the argument that
Speaker 18: the Post, the Washington Post is making in the email
Speaker 18: where they fire her, which is like that River's racism shit,
Speaker 18: even like three years ago was like a pretty fringe
Speaker 18: right wing like like that was a not it was
Speaker 18: originally like a Nazi thing, right And this is now
Speaker 18: being used by like the Washington Post to fire their
Speaker 18: own writers for writing really incredibly reasonable things about Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 3: To close Charlie Kirk's episode and to close our episode,
Speaker 3: jd Vance talked about before we can have any national unity,
Speaker 3: we must, like Charlie, tell the truth. Unity.
Speaker 13: Real unity can be found only after climbing the mountain
Speaker 13: of truth. And there are difficult truths we must confront
Speaker 13: in our country. One truth is that twenty four percent
Speaker 13: of self described quote very liberals believe it is acceptable
Speaker 13: to be happy about the death of a political opponent,
Speaker 13: while only three percent of self described very conservatives agree.
Speaker 13: Three percent is too many, of course. Another truth is
Speaker 13: that twenty six percent of young liberals believe political violence
Speaker 13: is sometimes justified, and only seven percent of young conservatives
Speaker 13: say the same. Again, too high a number in a
Speaker 13: country of three hundred and thirty million people. You can,
Speaker 13: of course find one person of a given political persuasion
Speaker 13: justifying this or that, or almost anything, but the data
Speaker 13: is clear people on the left are much likelier to
Speaker 13: defend and celebrate political violence.
Speaker 7: This is not a both sides problem.
Speaker 13: If both sides have a problem, one side has a
Speaker 13: much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth.
Speaker 7: We must be told.
Speaker 3: So. These stats are from a recent you gov survey,
Speaker 3: where twenty four percent of very liberals to say it's
Speaker 3: okay to be happy with the murder of a political
Speaker 3: opponent and twenty six percent of young liberals to say
Speaker 3: some times political bolence is justified for two seven percent
Speaker 3: of young conservatives. This study also found that Democrats and
Speaker 3: Republicans are more likely to say that political violence is
Speaker 3: a big problem after attacks on members of their own party.
Speaker 3: Of course, this polling is going to be heavily influenced
Speaker 3: by whatever recent events just happened. That's going to change
Speaker 3: people's stated opinion on these questions. After the assassination of
Speaker 3: Charlie Kirk, sixty seven percent of Republicans said that political
Speaker 3: violence is a very big problem. Fifty eight percent of
Speaker 3: Democrats agreed. After the assassination of Melissa Hartman, fifty six
Speaker 3: percent of Democrats said it's a very big problem, only
Speaker 3: forty four percent of Republicans agreed. After the assassination attempt
Speaker 3: on Jos Shapiro, forty four percent of Democrats, thirty seven
Speaker 3: percent of Republicans.
Speaker 6: Wait, just Shapiro wasn't assassinated, right, they tried to ban
Speaker 6: his houseing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're counting that an attempted assassination.
Speaker 6: Oh, okay.
Speaker 4: See.
Speaker 3: After the attended assassination on Donald Trump, fifty one percent
Speaker 3: of Republicans said political balance is a very big problem
Speaker 3: forty six percent of democrats, And after the attacks on
Speaker 3: Paul Pelosi, fifty three percent of Democrats said political balance
Speaker 3: is a very big problem compared to thirty one percent
Speaker 3: of Republicans. These stats are very fluid and absolutely changed
Speaker 3: depending on whatever current events were current at the time,
Speaker 3: whatever just happened. We're going to talk about this more
Speaker 3: in a bit, but I think the way that we
Speaker 3: frame cheering on political violence also massively varies based on
Speaker 3: what you count as political violence. Is a police killing
Speaker 3: count as political violence? If so, that's going to majorly
Speaker 3: affect the way we think about this question. Here's Vance
Speaker 3: again talking about Trump's assassination and the pyramid that supports
Speaker 3: political violence.
Speaker 13: Now, any political movement, violent or not violent.
Speaker 7: Is a collection of forces.
Speaker 13: It's like a pyramid that stacks on top one support
Speaker 13: on top of the other. That Peermid's got a foundation
Speaker 13: of donors, of activists, of journalists, now social media influencers,
Speaker 13: and of course of politicians. Not every member of that
Speaker 13: pyramid would commit a murder. In fact, over ninety nine
Speaker 13: percent I'm sure would not. But by celebrating that murder,
Speaker 13: apologizing for it, and emphasizing not Charlie's innocence, but the
Speaker 13: fact that he said things some didn't like, even to
Speaker 13: the point of lying about what he actually said, many
Speaker 13: of these people are creating an environment where things like
Speaker 13: this are inevitably going to happen.
Speaker 3: Benson goes on to talk about how people yelled at
Speaker 3: him and his family when he visited Disneyland, and discusses
Speaker 3: how after Charlie's death, one of his friends and a
Speaker 3: senior White House staffer had left leaning operatives in his neighborhood,
Speaker 3: passing out leaflets telling people what he looked like and
Speaker 3: where he'd lived and quote, encouraging neighbors to harass him
Speaker 3: or God forbid to do worse. While he was mourning
Speaker 3: his dead friend, he and his wife had to worry
Speaker 3: about the political terrorists drawing a big target on his home.
Speaker 3: He shares with his own children. Are these people violent?
Speaker 3: I hope not? But are they guilty of encouraging violence?
Speaker 3: You damn well better believe it. We can thank God
Speaker 3: that most Democrats don't share these attitudes, and I do.
Speaker 3: While acknowledging that something has gone very wrong with a
Speaker 3: lunatic fringe, a minority, but a growing and powerful minority
Speaker 3: on the far left, Vansk goes on to state that
Speaker 3: he seeks no unity with the far left.
Speaker 13: There is no unity with people who scream at children
Speaker 13: over their parents' politics.
Speaker 7: There is no unity with.
Speaker 13: Someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order
Speaker 13: to excuse his murder.
Speaker 7: There is no.
Speaker 13: Unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day
Speaker 13: after the father of that family lost a dear friend.
Speaker 13: There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie
Speaker 13: Kirk's assassination.
Speaker 7: And there is no unity with the people who fund.
Speaker 13: These articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers,
Speaker 13: who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father,
Speaker 13: deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words
Speaker 13: with which they disagree.
Speaker 7: Did you know that the George Soros.
Speaker 13: Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who
Speaker 13: funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, Do you know
Speaker 13: they benefit from generous tax treatment. They are literally subsidized
Speaker 13: by you and me, the American taxpayer. And how do
Speaker 13: they reward us by setting fire to the house built
Speaker 13: by the American family over two hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 3: On September thirteenth, Fox and News Morning host Brian Kilmeade
Speaker 3: endorsed youthanizing homeless people with quote involuntary lethal injection or something,
Speaker 3: just kill them.
Speaker 5: Billions of dollars some mental health and the homeless population.
Speaker 3: A lot of them don't want to take the programs.
Speaker 3: A lot of them don't want to get the help
Speaker 3: that is necessary. You can't give him a choice.
Speaker 2: Either you take the resources that we're going to.
Speaker 3: Give you and or you decide that you got to
Speaker 3: be locked up in jail. That's the way it has
Speaker 3: to be now, or involuntary lethal injection or something. I
Speaker 3: just kill them, Kim Brian. Why did it have to
Speaker 3: get to this point right?
Speaker 11: I would say this, we're not voting for the right
Speaker 11: people in North Carolina.
Speaker 3: Wake up. Just kill them. Geez, the Fox News host
Speaker 3: advocating the killing of homeless people. And he didn't get
Speaker 3: fired from this. He apologized a few days later, but
Speaker 3: he's not getting fired from his job for this, openly
Speaker 3: advocating the death of homeless people. Yeah, murder.
Speaker 18: And I think it's worth noting whenever we're having a
Speaker 18: discussion about political violence that two days after Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 3: Was shot, Ice just killed a guy.
Speaker 18: In Chicago who was driving away from their attempt to
Speaker 18: detain him. He was driving away pretty slowly, and there's
Speaker 18: video of it. Now, they pulled out their guns and
Speaker 18: they killed him. And you know, all of these people
Speaker 18: who are the people who ordered ice into this city, right,
Speaker 18: who are directly responsible for the deaths of this man
Speaker 18: who was also a single father. Actually well, no, Kirk
Speaker 18: was not a single father, but this guy was and
Speaker 18: was just murdered in cold blood by Ice.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 18: This is not considered political violence by sort of either
Speaker 18: liberals or conservatives, right, because they don't think the political
Speaker 18: violence can be done by the state. And this is
Speaker 18: also part of how you get to the situation now
Speaker 18: where you can be like, well, the states should just
Speaker 18: murder homeless people and that's not considered political violence because
Speaker 18: it's the state doing it, and because they don't think
Speaker 18: homeless people are people.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean to broaden that statement slightly or take
Speaker 6: a different angle on it, right, Like there is a
Speaker 6: complete bipartisan consensus that we should kill hundreds of people
Speaker 6: a year acrossing our southern border because that supposedly serves
Speaker 6: as a deterrent from other people coming, which it doesn't,
Speaker 6: But that is not seen as political violence.
Speaker 18: Now, they just murdered three more people on a boat
Speaker 18: but leaving Venezuela a few days ago.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, as Evan's ended the Charlie Kirk Show episode.
Speaker 3: He advocated that listeners find and call the employers of
Speaker 3: people celebrating Charlie Kirk's death to join a TEPA USA
Speaker 3: chapter or to run for office.
Speaker 13: But I promise you that we will explore every option
Speaker 13: to bring real unity to our country and stop those
Speaker 13: who would kill their fellow Americans because.
Speaker 7: They don't like what they say. But you have a
Speaker 7: role too. Civil society, Charlie.
Speaker 13: Understood this well, is not just something that flows from
Speaker 13: the government. It flows from each and every one of us.
Speaker 13: It flows from all of us. So when you see
Speaker 13: someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell, call
Speaker 13: their employer. We don't believe in political violence, but we
Speaker 13: do believe in civility, and there is no civility in
Speaker 13: the celebration of political assassination.
Speaker 6: The idea of the fusion of the state with civil
Speaker 6: society is really notable there, like, that's not what civil
Speaker 6: society is, right. That is a concept that is inherently totalitarian,
Speaker 6: that civil society should flow downstream from the state and
Speaker 6: the movement.
Speaker 3: It's this fusion between the two that the right has
Speaker 3: deployed so successfully. Yeah, which has increased their ability to
Speaker 3: actually like rule.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I mean that's that's what fatism does, right, like that,
Speaker 6: that's yeah, Franco, that's Hitler, Like that is textbook.
Speaker 3: That's like the point of the brown Shirts.
Speaker 6: Yeah, or like the Women's movement in Spain, right to
Speaker 6: give a more civil society example, they're not like, they're
Speaker 6: not like a state police agency. There are a civil
Speaker 6: society organization explicitly run by the state for its agenda.
Speaker 3: So to return to the years of lead Paint idea
Speaker 3: that opened this episode, what I'm observing right now across
Speaker 3: the political ocean is this flattening of tactics. As I
Speaker 3: discussed on the show before in the Blue One episodes,
Speaker 3: the right trojan horst political conspiracism into acceptable political discourse,
Speaker 3: which the left is now embracing liberals and the left.
Speaker 3: And you can see this with people's reactions to the
Speaker 3: Charter assassination and theories about the alleged shooter. So the
Speaker 3: left is embracing conspiracy theories. Meanwhile the right is adopting
Speaker 3: and accelerating political cancel culture style docsing. The key difference
Speaker 3: here is on the right, these actions have state backing
Speaker 3: and coordination or serve to maintain state power. For example,
Speaker 3: there's types of political violence that get cheered on by
Speaker 3: the right, such as deportations and the cheering on of
Speaker 3: police after officer involved shootings. Back the blue keeps alignment
Speaker 3: with state power. Same thing with cheering on or encouraging
Speaker 3: violence against BLM protesters that supports the state structure and
Speaker 3: advocating or celebrating the deaths of protesters gets viewed very
Speaker 3: differently than the targeted assassinations that have happened in the
Speaker 3: past year here and now the past few days, Trump
Speaker 3: has discussed once again designating Antifa and other groups as
Speaker 3: domestic terror organizations and bringing RICO charges against Code Pink
Speaker 3: activists who screamed at him at a restaurant in DC
Speaker 3: a few weeks ago.
Speaker 9: Do you plan on designating Antifa finally a domestic terror organization?
Speaker 11: Well, it's something I would do, yeah, if I have
Speaker 11: support from the people back here.
Speaker 3: I think would start with PAM.
Speaker 11: I think, but I would if you give me, I
Speaker 11: would do that one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: And others also, by.
Speaker 11: The way, But Antifa is terrible.
Speaker 3: There are other groups, Yeah, there are other groups.
Speaker 5: We have some pretty radical groups and they got away
Speaker 5: with murder.
Speaker 7: And also I've been speaking to.
Speaker 11: The Attorney General about bringing RICO against some of the
Speaker 11: people that you've been reading about that have been putting
Speaker 11: up millions and millions of dollars for agitation.
Speaker 3: These aren't protests, these are crimes.
Speaker 11: What they're doing where they're throwing brit I said cars
Speaker 11: of the of ice and mortar patrol.
Speaker 18: And I want to close by. You know, we've seen
Speaker 18: the sort of repercautions that people have had, not even
Speaker 18: for like celebrating Charlie Kirk's death, but for like being like, wait,
Speaker 18: this guy fucking sucks, and this whole you know, this
Speaker 18: whole argument about civility. And I mean that, I mean
Speaker 18: the Vice President of the United States is making right.
Speaker 18: I want to read this quote from Matt Walsh as
Speaker 18: we're recording. This is this is from Tuesday, September sixteenth.
Speaker 18: This was left wing LGBT terrorism. There was never much doubt.
Speaker 18: Now there is none at all. All left wing terror
Speaker 18: networks must be crushed, All of the terrorists and their
Speaker 18: helpers and funders must be arrested, prosecuted, and put to death.
Speaker 18: So and there have been absolutely zero consequences for again
Speaker 18: Matt Walsh calling for this whole network of people that
Speaker 18: he imagines exists being executed. That's their endgame, right, It
Speaker 18: is to destroy the concept of free speech in order
Speaker 18: to preserve quote unquote free speech right, in order to
Speaker 18: sort of unquote and political violence. They want to carry out,
Speaker 18: you know, mass political killings of their opponents.
Speaker 3: Coordinated at a state level with state resources. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And the state involvement makes it okay, That makes it
Speaker 3: a moral action, not the actions of some like unhinged terrorist. Yeah.
Speaker 18: And this is a really significant problem for the way
Speaker 18: that we think about political violence because this is something
Speaker 18: that's true for both liberals and conservatives that they think
Speaker 18: that the state is the appropriate arbiter for this kind
Speaker 18: of political violence, which is how Obama can do a
Speaker 18: drone strike on a sixteen year old American citizen and
Speaker 18: kill him in cold blood because Obama had political disagreements
Speaker 18: with his father, right, and how this is treated as
Speaker 18: something that's fine by a huge portion of liberals. And
Speaker 18: this is one of the things that's going to allow
Speaker 18: if these people are successful, and I don't know that
Speaker 18: they will be, but if they can be, that's going
Speaker 18: to be.
Speaker 3: Why, Well, that is how we at the show understand
Speaker 3: the years of lead Paint, or the current twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five September era of the years of lead Paint. There's
Speaker 3: phantoms everywhere, there's conspiracies everywhere and nowhere, and the specter
Speaker 3: of political violence is around every corner. This is it
Speaker 3: could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's
Speaker 3: happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what
Speaker 3: it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined
Speaker 3: by James Stout, Miya Wong, and Robert Evans. Yep. This episode,
Speaker 3: we're covering the week of September eleven to September eighteenth.
Speaker 6: Normally a week in history when very little happens.
Speaker 3: The most normal week of a American politics. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Traditionally, nothing around the first third of September's days
Speaker 2: as ever mattered in American history.
Speaker 3: We should schedule our calendar just to block out this
Speaker 3: whole section of the year each time.
Speaker 2: I already have it written down in Mike calendar as
Speaker 2: the week to forget, so I just spend it drinking.
Speaker 3: Robert, do you want to introduce their first topic?
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean, our first topic, as we talked about
Speaker 2: last week, is the fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk,
Speaker 2: particularly its impact on free speech and the pretext it's
Speaker 2: being used for to justify a crackdown on the quote
Speaker 2: unquote left different NGOs and other organizations that are being
Speaker 2: accused of being part of a vast and let's say,
Speaker 2: unlikely conspiracy to commit terrorism that has nothing to do
Speaker 2: with what's actually been discovered about Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk's killer,
Speaker 2: but nonetheless it's being used that way, And kind of
Speaker 2: the first thing to probably talk about is what's come
Speaker 2: out about Tyler Robinson's motivations in the time since we
Speaker 2: recorded our last episode. Honestly, I was kind of surprised
Speaker 2: Gare when we recorded on Friday. I had expected us
Speaker 2: to need to do an update before Monday in order
Speaker 2: to catch up. Really, there wasn't much that it came out.
Speaker 21: No.
Speaker 3: I did a brief update confirming that he was living
Speaker 3: with a transperson, but that was really all we knew
Speaker 3: at the time that could be confirmed. That was pretty
Speaker 3: evergreen as we suspected it it might be, and I
Speaker 3: will say, frankly, the motive still remains not entirely clear,
Speaker 3: but we do have some more concrete details about his
Speaker 3: online background. Yeah, and a few others, like ancillary pieces,
Speaker 3: which is included in the charging document, as well as
Speaker 3: reporting on his discord logs.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think we should talk first about the
Speaker 2: whole trans roommate thing of it all, because obviously, first off,
Speaker 2: this is one of the most massive reaches I've seen,
Speaker 2: Like they're always desperate to have a trans connection anytime
Speaker 2: there's a shooting.
Speaker 3: They were trying to establish this literally like seconds after
Speaker 3: it happened.
Speaker 2: And that's been the case with like the last year
Speaker 2: and a half or two worth of mass shootings. Yeah,
Speaker 2: or at least a sizable number of them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that was a meme, right for why it's like
Speaker 6: a four Chan thing to suggest that any mass shooter
Speaker 6: was trans and now it's just become reality.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And in this case, the allegation started coming out
Speaker 2: from the police that his roommate was transgender. This was
Speaker 2: before the discord logs had leaked. So I want you
Speaker 2: to talk a little bit. Gare you found the Reddit
Speaker 2: profile of Tyler Robinson's roommate. Yeah, so first question is
Speaker 2: do we know if they actually were trans and do
Speaker 2: we know if they actually were in some sort of
Speaker 2: a relationship. What is the actual evidence that exists to
Speaker 2: suggest that based on what we have so far.
Speaker 3: They did post about their transition on multiple subreddits and
Speaker 3: public facing posts, and they referred to having a boyfriend
Speaker 3: BF that was helping them cope with the results of
Speaker 3: the twenty twenty four election. But that's really all we
Speaker 3: can tell from this at the time of public Reddit
Speaker 3: profile for the roommate of Tyler Robinson, who had again
Speaker 3: some sort of romantic relationship with the like nitty gritty
Speaker 3: you know, arc of their whole relationship is like not
Speaker 3: explicitly clear, but certainly a pad a romantic relationship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I want to make it clear, which should
Speaker 2: be obvious to anyone who has like a third of
Speaker 2: a brain cell to rub together against the inside of
Speaker 2: their skull. There's not any evidence that this roommate was
Speaker 2: tied in any way to the Tyler Robinson's crimes, and
Speaker 2: in fact, the exit evidence this.
Speaker 3: The state is arguing this that the roommate had no
Speaker 3: prior knowledge, yes, and has been fully cooperative. That the
Speaker 3: roommate is not involved.
Speaker 2: Not only is fully cooperative, but turned Tyler in.
Speaker 3: Like in part or produced evidence that was now used
Speaker 3: in the Charging documentary. Tyler turned himself in with his
Speaker 3: father like officially, but there was certainly conversations happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's one of those things you can come
Speaker 2: down morally on that however you want. It's just a
Speaker 2: matter of there's absolutely no evidence. As people like Matt
Speaker 2: Walsherre saying that this is part of some grand LGBT conspiracy,
Speaker 2: their roommates seemed horrified to have been and you know,
Speaker 2: understandably terrified to have been potentially implicated in a massive act,
Speaker 2: like massively famous active murder, right, Like that's a scary
Speaker 2: thing to come to, like get a discord message realizing,
Speaker 2: oh fuck now I'm potentially implicated in this. So I
Speaker 2: do have some understanding for what a shocking moment that is,
Speaker 2: Like it's hard to imagine, yeah, dealing with that in
Speaker 2: any way, shape or form. That's just a wild thing
Speaker 2: to have happened in the middle of your fucking day,
Speaker 2: presumably while you're at work or some shit. This would
Speaker 2: have been around noon, so I'm guessing they were on
Speaker 2: the job when they got these messages. She's a horrible,
Speaker 2: horrible thing to deal with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's go over some of the text exchanges included
Speaker 3: in the charging document. It's technically not an indictment because
Speaker 3: they did not charge via grand jury. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: placeholder for that. Yeah, but it's referred to as like
Speaker 3: a charging information document that they included some text messages
Speaker 3: because it was the clearest evidence to lay out to
Speaker 3: charge them with the crime, though not the only evidence,
Speaker 3: as we will soon discuss. And these textlogs are core
Speaker 3: to like people like Walsh's current argument that the trans
Speaker 3: roommate must have actually been involved because they think that
Speaker 3: the messages that I'm going to read here we were
Speaker 3: like scripted between the roommate and the shooter specifically to
Speaker 3: exonerate the roommate, and that that's the conspiracy that people
Speaker 3: like Walsh are spreading. Let's go over this section of
Speaker 3: this document quote. The police interviewed Robinson's roommate, a biological
Speaker 3: male who was involved in a metal relationship with Robinson.
Speaker 3: The roommate told police that the roommate received messages from
Speaker 3: Robinson about the shooting and provide those messages to police.
Speaker 3: On September tenth, twenty twenty five, the roommate received a
Speaker 3: text message from Robinson which said, drop what you are doing,
Speaker 3: look under my keyboard. The roommate looked under the keyboard
Speaker 3: and found a note that stated I had the opportunity
Speaker 3: to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take
Speaker 3: it unquote. Police found a photograph of this note. The
Speaker 3: following text exchange then took place. After reading the note,
Speaker 3: the roommate responded, what with many question marks? You're joking, right, Robinson?
Speaker 3: I am still okay, my love, but I am stuck
Speaker 3: in orm for a little while longer yet, shouldn't be
Speaker 3: long until I can come home. But I gotta grab
Speaker 3: my rifle still. To be honest, I'd hoped to keep
Speaker 3: this secret till I died of old age. I'm sorry
Speaker 3: to involve you, roommate. You weren't the one who did
Speaker 3: it right, many question marks, Robinson. I am sorry, roommate.
Speaker 3: I thought they caught the person Robinson. No, they grabbed
Speaker 3: some crazy old dude that interrogated someone in similar clothing.
Speaker 3: I had planned to grab my rifle from my drop
Speaker 3: point shortly after, but most of that side of town
Speaker 3: got locked down. It's quiet almost enough to get out.
Speaker 3: There's one vehicle lingering roommate, Why Robinson? Why did I
Speaker 3: do it? Roommate, Yeah, Robinson, I had enough of his hatred.
Speaker 3: Some hate can't be negotiated out. If I'm able to
Speaker 3: grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence.
Speaker 3: Going to attempt to retrieve it again. Hopefully they have
Speaker 3: moved on. I haven't seen anything about them finding it. Roommate,
Speaker 3: how long have you been planning this, Robinson? A bit
Speaker 3: over a week. I believe I can get close to it,
Speaker 3: but there's a squad car parked right by it. I
Speaker 3: think they already swept that spot. But I don't want
Speaker 3: to chance it, Robinson. I'm wishing i'd circle back and
Speaker 3: grabbed it as soon as I got to my vehicle.
Speaker 3: I'm worried what my old man would do if I
Speaker 3: didn't bring back Grandpa's rifle. I don't know if it
Speaker 3: had a serial number, but it wouldn't trace to me.
Speaker 3: I worry about Prince. I had to leave it in
Speaker 3: a bush where I changed outfits. I didn't have the
Speaker 3: ability or time to bring it with I might have
Speaker 3: to abandon it and hope they don't find Prince. How
Speaker 3: the fuck will I explain losing it to my old man.
Speaker 3: Only thing I left was the rifle wrapped in a towel.
Speaker 3: Remember how I was engraving bullets. The fucking messages are
Speaker 3: mostly a big meme. If I see notices bulje ooh
Speaker 3: wu on Fox News, I might have a stroke. Got
Speaker 3: it all right, I'm gonna have to leave it. That
Speaker 3: really fucking sucks. Judging from today, I'd say Grandpa's gun
Speaker 3: does just fine. IDK, I think that was a two
Speaker 3: thousand dollars scope. Robinson, Delete this exchange, Robinson. My dad
Speaker 3: wants photos of the rifle, he says. Grandpa wants to
Speaker 3: know who has what. The FEDS released a photo of
Speaker 3: the rifle and it is very unique. He's calling me
Speaker 3: r n not answering, Robinson. Since Trump got into office,
Speaker 3: my dad has been pretty diehard Mega. I'm going to
Speaker 3: turn myself in Willingly. One of my neighbors here is
Speaker 3: a deputy for the sheriff. You are all I worry about,
Speaker 3: love roommate. I'm much more worried about you, Robinson. Don't
Speaker 3: talk to the media. Please, don't take any interviews or
Speaker 3: make any comments. If police ask you questions, ask for
Speaker 3: a lawyer, and stay silent. That's the end of the exchange.
Speaker 6: Yep, it seems like this person fairly wisely stopped engaging
Speaker 6: with the Yeah.
Speaker 2: There's not a good response to give to that.
Speaker 6: No, that's not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Discord Again, one of the one thing I would
Speaker 2: hope this would bust is this has to have been
Speaker 2: a professional hit man assassin of some sort, which is
Speaker 2: a job that I mean, it technically exists, Like there
Speaker 2: are guys who are for the fucking crypts of the Bloods,
Speaker 2: or you could call them professional hitmen, and that they
Speaker 2: kill people for money, but they're not like the people
Speaker 2: you see in movies, Like they're guys who will walk
Speaker 2: up with a thirty eight and gut shoot somebody and
Speaker 2: run the fuck off, Like they're not We're not talking
Speaker 2: about like smooth operators. Those people almost don't exist as
Speaker 2: a profession, and certainly not is a standard thing in
Speaker 2: the United States. And that that like the fact that
Speaker 2: he was having this kind of conversation on Discord.
Speaker 3: This is I believe, regular text.
Speaker 2: So these are regular regular text.
Speaker 6: This is straight up yeah sms, right, like yeah.
Speaker 2: He's messaging this shit through unencrypted lines and left a
Speaker 2: note under his keyboard and dropped the rifle in the woods,
Speaker 2: Like this is all about what you'd expect from a
Speaker 2: twenty two year old kid who's a reasonably good shot
Speaker 2: with a rifle and had no real other skills. Like
Speaker 2: it's what it looked like.
Speaker 6: Yes, this doesn't even seem like someone who spent a
Speaker 6: great deal of time planning, right, like learning about that.
Speaker 3: They said they've been planning about it for about a week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this lines up with what they said, right, like Nick, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they seem almost surprised. Yeah, I got this weird
Speaker 2: feeling reading it, Like Tyler almost is shocked that they
Speaker 2: did it, Like there's this sense of being pulled by history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's seemingly confused by his own actions in a sense.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like watching himself almost like.
Speaker 2: Yes, and like I I scrite like one of the things.
Speaker 2: It sounds like and this is a little unclear, but
Speaker 2: it sounds like in terms of those memes winding up.
Speaker 2: But he was doing that before, maybe even before he'd
Speaker 2: ever planned to shoot Kirk. That's just like a thing
Speaker 2: he did for shit for people.
Speaker 3: People have pointed to that as being like, oh, well,
Speaker 3: obviously the roommate knew something was up. If if the
Speaker 3: roommate was aware that that Robinson was carving bullets. That's
Speaker 3: first of all, that's not a crime. No, people just
Speaker 3: do weird shit sometimes, especially if someone goes to the
Speaker 3: range often maybe they're gonna fucking scribble on a bullet Like.
Speaker 3: That's not indication of anything that's legitimately concerning.
Speaker 2: Frankly, yeah, it's indication again that this guy was very
Speaker 2: online in the gamer right.
Speaker 5: Yea.
Speaker 2: But that's it.
Speaker 3: So it's not just people like Walsh who are casting
Speaker 3: doubt on the authenticity of these messages. Plenty of liberals
Speaker 3: and people on the left have taken to suspecting that
Speaker 3: these could have been written by an quote unquote FBI
Speaker 3: agent or law enforcement as fake evidence to frame the shooter.
Speaker 3: And people have pointed towards some weird verbiage like calling
Speaker 3: his dad his old man and referring to quote unquote
Speaker 3: like law enforcement type language like interrogate and Yeah, to me,
Speaker 3: this is not very confusing. He talks like this because
Speaker 3: he's raised Mormon and plays a lot of tactical video
Speaker 3: games thousands of hours I have. I have a Steam profile, huge,
Speaker 3: huge gamer, and he might talk a little odd because
Speaker 3: he just did a fucking crazy thing.
Speaker 2: I don't even think it's that odd. It's nice people
Speaker 2: call someone they're in love with, my love. That's a
Speaker 2: thing that happens in the world.
Speaker 7: Like that's not like a.
Speaker 3: Very normal What are we doing here?
Speaker 2: Why are we questioning this part of the Yeah?
Speaker 3: But and again like these texts were handed over to
Speaker 3: local police by Robinson's roommate. Why fake evidence that would
Speaker 3: jeopardize the case when the police already have a lot
Speaker 3: of other evidence, DNA ballistic evidence, the fun group discord
Speaker 3: chat where he also admitted to the crime right before
Speaker 3: he turned himself in. Like these tex slogs don't even
Speaker 3: like make him out to be a crazy leftist. He
Speaker 3: talks like very vaguely about Kirk, like spreading hatred. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he says nothing about politics. And again, as we'll talk
Speaker 3: about because there's some evidence here suggesting that both Tyler
Speaker 3: and their roommate, like their politics were mixed from what
Speaker 3: little we can glean about them, right or a very
Speaker 3: minor part of their lives in a sense like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're not talking about redistribution of wealth, they're not
Speaker 2: talking about overthrowing the gun.
Speaker 3: Oh no, they're not talking about politics in that way.
Speaker 3: This seems more like personal to him.
Speaker 2: Yes, he's in love with a transperson and he didn't
Speaker 2: like what Charlie Kirk said about Tree.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like, if the government's going to fake messages,
Speaker 3: why would they do so in a way that exonerates
Speaker 3: the trans roommate the real ideological target here.
Speaker 2: Especially, look at what the government is doing right now,
Speaker 2: right they're going after quote unquote Antifa, They're going after
Speaker 2: the Open Society Foundation, George Soros, all of these left
Speaker 2: wing NGOs. If they were faking this, would he not
Speaker 2: have referenced one of those organizations? Would there not be
Speaker 2: a fucking black and red flag somewhere right there?
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like it would be so easy. If you're going
Speaker 6: to implicate someone, you could implicate in text messages really easily.
Speaker 6: Like it's ridiculous to suggest that, yeah, the state did this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, why would you fake that?
Speaker 2: Why would you fake it that way?
Speaker 3: Baffling, incomprehensible. These texts are not load bearing to this case.
Speaker 3: There's plenty of other evidence. And this isn't the same
Speaker 3: thing as like cops planting evidence or like a district
Speaker 3: attorney making subjective claims about intent, Like you don't need
Speaker 3: to overestimate state intelligence here.
Speaker 2: No, we don't even need for what we have. There
Speaker 2: was no need for them to have done anything at all,
Speaker 2: because Robinson specifically notes that as soon as pictures of
Speaker 2: the rifle were posted online by police, his dad fucking
Speaker 2: calls family knew because it is a unique gun. It
Speaker 2: is an antique mouser that was sportized and rebarreled, presumably
Speaker 2: personally by his grandfather. Both his grandpa and his dad
Speaker 2: seemed to have recognized it immediately. There was no getting
Speaker 2: away with it once the rifle was found.
Speaker 3: This is totally different from like the MS thirteen tattoo thing,
Speaker 3: where the trumpetdministration argued for an interpretation of tattoos and
Speaker 3: then printed out a picture with like very clearly photoshopped
Speaker 3: letters to draw a parallel between what they think the
Speaker 3: tattoos meant and with their interpretation of it as letters
Speaker 3: and numbers, which trump in all of his genius, mistook
Speaker 3: for being actual tattoos. And then they just ran with
Speaker 3: it because no one has the capacity to tell the
Speaker 3: president you were wrong. This is completely different than faking
Speaker 3: all these text messages. There's metadata, there's cell phone records.
Speaker 3: It's probably still on the roommate's own phone, like physical
Speaker 3: a physical evidence, and like subjectively saying that you don't
Speaker 3: know any gen z that talks like this, that's not
Speaker 3: valid evidence. Twenty two year olds know how to use punctuation.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let me tell you of someone who crades hundreds
Speaker 6: of papers every year from people who are largely but
Speaker 6: not all, between eighteen and twenty five. Yeah, young people
Speaker 6: can use punctuation. This is not like some kind of
Speaker 6: forensic fucking literary analysis required.
Speaker 3: And the information obtained in these chat logs and through
Speaker 3: interviews with his parents match reporting by Ken Klippenstein, who
Speaker 3: got leaked messages from the shooter on discord, very very similar.
Speaker 3: Like lots of libs and people on the left are
Speaker 3: saying this is fake because they wanted the shooter to
Speaker 3: be conservative and they think that these texts damage the
Speaker 3: narrative that they have chosen. And I think that's why
Speaker 3: we're seeing people react so strongly to this. It's not
Speaker 3: about actually evaluating the evidence on like a base level, right,
Speaker 3: Like this guy grew up in a conservative Mormon family.
Speaker 3: His dad's pretty mega. Robinson figured out he was bisexual
Speaker 3: and started to move a little bit to the left
Speaker 3: on like gender and sexuality issues. And like and even
Speaker 3: like a lot of gen Z straight guys kind of
Speaker 3: have this political profile, right, they're like pro gun, but
Speaker 3: their life revolves around like gaming discord and read it
Speaker 3: more than like the political.
Speaker 2: And they're probably often pro capitalist. They're just not bigoted
Speaker 2: against queer people. Yeah, because that's not as common anymore.
Speaker 3: These aren't political partisans. Yeah, they're not even on our
Speaker 3: slash bread tube, Like, yeah, that's that's not what's happening.
Speaker 3: He played, he played furry sex games on Steam when
Speaker 3: he was younger. One of his Steam names was Donald
Speaker 3: Trump because yeah, he's twenty two years old. Trump was
Speaker 3: an Augurat when he was like thirteen or whatever, Like,
Speaker 3: oh god, yeah.
Speaker 7: It's.
Speaker 2: We fucked the kids up so bad.
Speaker 3: It's it's a large it's largely a political and like
Speaker 3: this what he did is is existential violence manifesting a
Speaker 3: political action from someone who isn't otherwise overtly political. Right,
Speaker 3: because shooting Charlie Kirk incredibly political action, even if that's
Speaker 3: not the way that that the shooter maybe conceived it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like this person happens. It happened across a queer
Speaker 6: person who they are very fond of. Right, they have
Speaker 6: queer people in their lives. That is not indicative of
Speaker 6: any politics other than they have a queer person in
Speaker 6: their life.
Speaker 2: If this person stand the Soviet Union, we would fucking
Speaker 2: know about.
Speaker 3: It because they would be running with that.
Speaker 6: They'd have found a most into gud used a mosin
Speaker 6: for what. So they would have missed.
Speaker 2: A little bit of Moses slander for you today to
Speaker 2: break up the horrors. Yeah, speaking of crackdowns, crack down
Speaker 2: on your wallet by buying.
Speaker 3: These products and services.
Speaker 6: Beautiful, lovely.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, First Amendment crackdown. Massive rhetoric coming out of Stephen
Speaker 2: Miller and from Pam Bondi and basically every mouthpiece of
Speaker 2: the administration about going after the left, about dismantling particularly
Speaker 2: organizations like the Open Society Foundation, going after George Soros
Speaker 2: and his son. There's talk about prosecuting people criminally and
Speaker 2: using the death penalty even on folks who are quote
Speaker 2: unquote funding terrorism, a term which has been so broadly
Speaker 2: described by mouthpieces of the administration as to include potentially
Speaker 2: just about anybody.
Speaker 3: This could be like bail funds, environmental NGOs, legal support NGOs,
Speaker 3: like it's really unclear at the exact form that this
Speaker 3: is going to take. But this is stuff that the
Speaker 3: administration has pined of a doing for a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's unclear.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It's one of the big pieces of news that's happened
Speaker 2: within twenty four hours of US recording this episode, which
Speaker 2: we recorded on Thursday the eighteenth, is that Trump has
Speaker 2: designated ANTIFAH a domestic terrorist organization. That he's said that
Speaker 2: what I'm saying is he said that, he said up
Speaker 2: words that he has said.
Speaker 3: Words that he has said before, including it in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: For the letter of the law, for one thing, there's
Speaker 2: a wild difference between what you can do legally to
Speaker 2: an international foreign terrorist organization, yeah, and in domestic terrorist organization.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Because of the First Amendment, you can't just declare legally,
Speaker 2: in terms of what is written law, the president can't
Speaker 2: just declare a group of people to be a domestic
Speaker 2: terrorist organization.
Speaker 3: It's usually an enhancement charge.
Speaker 2: Yes, and then just go after people who have spoken
Speaker 2: out or donated money to legal charities that are randomly
Speaker 2: declared to be in support of that. That's not league,
Speaker 2: which doesn't mean it won't happened. Let me be really clear, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 2: but that's not what the law is about.
Speaker 3: And they've tried to do that in Atlanta was stop
Speaker 3: Crop City and the Lena Solidarity Fund and going after
Speaker 3: the Bail Fund and people who had donated money to
Speaker 3: like the Forest Defense Fund, and this Trump is similarly
Speaker 3: actually to Atlanta. Is also talked about using RICO charges
Speaker 3: to get people in trouble who are funding these quote
Speaker 3: unquote domestic terror organizations. And on yeah, September seventeenth, Trump Truth,
Speaker 3: I am pleased to inform our many USA patriots that
Speaker 3: I'm designating Antifa, a sick, dangerous radical left disaster, as
Speaker 3: a major terrorist organization. I will also be strongly recommending
Speaker 3: that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance with
Speaker 3: the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your
Speaker 3: attention to this matter.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean for a use of word major, right,
Speaker 6: which doesn't that's like there's a domestic terrorism is a
Speaker 6: concept that's nebulus FTO, foreign terrorist organization is an extremely
Speaker 6: clear legal definition. He didn't use either of those. Yeah,
Speaker 6: this is a thing that like Ted Cruz, and I
Speaker 6: think he enjoyed it. I'm sure there are other people
Speaker 6: to vote, but Ted Cruz in before twenty twenty twenty nineteen,
Speaker 6: tried to introduce a resolution in the Senate condemning Antifa
Speaker 6: like this has been a thing.
Speaker 3: Marjor Taylor Green introduced legislation which went nowhere or talked
Speaker 3: about dilation. I don't even know if she actually introduced
Speaker 3: it like this year about designating Antifa terrorist organization. It's
Speaker 3: been it's been something like Andy, you know, has been
Speaker 3: advocating for for years.
Speaker 2: It's a really important point that they have attempted and
Speaker 2: failed to do this numerous times because the law doesn't
Speaker 2: let them. And this is something that if you have
Speaker 2: been in the riot reporting on public shootings business as
Speaker 2: long as I said christ one thing I can tell
Speaker 2: you is that in the wake of something like this,
Speaker 2: it was the same with christ Church and the immediate
Speaker 2: wake of christ Church, there was this really shocking moment
Speaker 2: where a bunch of conservative I talked to these people
Speaker 2: because I published the art the defining article on that shooting. Yeah,
Speaker 2: a shitload of conservative organizations came out and said, you
Speaker 2: know what, maybe we've been wrong about demonizing Muslim immigrants.
Speaker 2: Maybe like that was really fucked up and we should
Speaker 2: Like those people were talking about that people who you
Speaker 2: would not expect that now, they didn't keep talking that way.
Speaker 2: They got to work pretty quick. But what you have
Speaker 2: in a moment like this is there's a limited period
Speaker 2: of time where people's shock and horror and surprise at
Speaker 2: what has happened creates spaces of possibility for folks who
Speaker 2: have an agenda and who have a clear plan for
Speaker 2: what to push, to push the overton envelope in their direction. Right,
Speaker 2: this is not a period of time that lasts forever,
Speaker 2: and the folks who are largely orchestrating the conservative response
Speaker 2: to Charlie Kirk's murder are aware of this, and they
Speaker 2: are making the best use of this period of time
Speaker 2: that they can get. Now, that doesn't mean the fact
Speaker 2: that this is a limited period of time doesn't mean
Speaker 2: there aren't law term consequences, doesn't mean that they can't
Speaker 2: make significant progress on their plan to stifle free speech.
Speaker 2: Doesn't mean we're not in massive danger. Because we are
Speaker 2: in danger, folks. I'm not telling you we're not. I'm
Speaker 2: telling you these spaces of possibility don't last forever, in
Speaker 2: part because the public moves on, and in part because
Speaker 2: there is always a backlash to the backlash, and you're
Speaker 2: seeing pieces of that already.
Speaker 3: We are seeing pieces of that.
Speaker 2: Fucking Carl Rove, of all motherfucking people, wrote an article
Speaker 2: about how the administration is unfairly blaming liberals and leftists
Speaker 2: for the actions of an individual shooter. Tucker Carlson came
Speaker 2: out and made a statement that like, if the government
Speaker 2: is able to go after you for this, they'll come
Speaker 2: after conservatives at some point. He's not wrong about I
Speaker 2: don't credit him doing that because of a serious moral thing.
Speaker 2: I credited him to be a relatively intelligent guy who
Speaker 2: was like, no, no, no, if they're able to do
Speaker 2: this to you know whatever, milktoast liberals, eventually it will
Speaker 2: happen to me, right.
Speaker 3: And specifically, like Pam Bondi is Turner General made some
Speaker 3: statements a few days ago about them going after quote
Speaker 3: unquote hate speech, yeah, which spawned a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: conservative commentators Steven Krawdertucker Carlson, as well as Matt Walsh.
Speaker 3: And under no circumstances do you have to hand up
Speaker 3: to Matt Walsh. But this prompted them to be like, no, actually,
Speaker 3: we don't believe in hate speech as a legitimate legal category.
Speaker 3: There should be social consequences for people who celebrate the
Speaker 3: murder of an innocent man, but there should not be
Speaker 3: legal consequences for hate speech.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: We're fine with the government helping us like dos you
Speaker 3: and get you fired from your job, but prosecuting hate
Speaker 3: speech as a category is something that we do not
Speaker 3: agree with, and neither did Charlie Kirk. So there's been
Speaker 3: like that small reaction, which then prompted Pambondi to be like, no,
Speaker 3: when I say hate speech, what I really mean is
Speaker 3: like threats and assignment of violence, and like, yeah, okay.
Speaker 6: Fighting words, I think is a legal term, right, Like
Speaker 6: incitements to violence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you know, there's some stuff that's always been
Speaker 2: illegal and never been punished. For example, when conservatives I've
Speaker 2: been dealing with this for years, threatened to kill and
Speaker 2: rape activists and show up outside of their houses and
Speaker 2: harass them. As a general rule, the police don't do
Speaker 2: anything if those activists are on the left, right, even
Speaker 2: though that crosses the boundary into fighting words. However, they
Speaker 2: have legally could they choose not to, right, But if
Speaker 2: someone is out there saying in the wake of the
Speaker 2: Charlie Kirk shooting, I want to incite people to kill
Speaker 2: this person. That is illegal. You're not allowed to say
Speaker 2: I want to incite people to murder this person.
Speaker 6: That is a crime.
Speaker 2: If you're posting and saying that you have broken the law,
Speaker 2: they won't go after a conservative for doing that, but
Speaker 2: they'll go after you, right like. That is how things work,
Speaker 2: you know. However, we have seen people who have been
Speaker 2: attacked for speech that absolutely is not crossing the line
Speaker 2: into fighting words.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: One of the better examples for this happened at Texas Tech.
Speaker 3: It happened.
Speaker 2: You've had variants of this happened at a couple of
Speaker 2: colleges all around the country. They're specifically at Texas Tech,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, one of Texas's kind of premiere
Speaker 2: state schools. There was a video of an incident on
Speaker 2: the day that Charlie Kirk was killed where a student
Speaker 2: scene jumping up and down, yelling profanity at a vigil
Speaker 2: in a free speech zone outside of a student union
Speaker 2: building on the campus, saying y'all, Homie dead, making fun
Speaker 2: of people who were mourning Kirk's death. At one point,
Speaker 2: she touched a guy's hat. The video of her went viral.
Speaker 2: Governor Greg Abbott called for her to be arrested and expelled.
Speaker 2: She was expelled immediately. She was arrested and charged with
Speaker 2: assault shortly thereafter. Her family has not made a statement.
Speaker 2: Very wisely, there's really nothing they could say that would
Speaker 2: be great at this point. There has been some pushback
Speaker 2: from student organizations in the state because this is blatantly illegal.
Speaker 2: Calling what she did assault is nonsense. In my opinion
Speaker 2: from watching the video, she was at a free speech zone,
Speaker 2: laughing y'all homely dead when someone is killed is no words.
Speaker 2: That is not illegal. You are allowed to say stuff
Speaker 2: like that under the letter of the law. Does this
Speaker 2: mean this person won't get convicted of a crime. It's Texas,
Speaker 2: and she's a black woman.
Speaker 3: She might.
Speaker 2: And this is very chilling. This is deeply concerning. This
Speaker 2: is not the only case. There's a universe, smaller university
Speaker 2: outside of Austin where again a student was videotaped celebrating
Speaker 2: individual for Kirk's death. That person was expelled as well.
Speaker 2: There have been a number of teachers fired. Obviously, stuff
Speaker 2: like this has been happening all over the country, right
Speaker 2: and this is deeply worrying. And even if even if
Speaker 2: the space of possibility closes on these people faster than
Speaker 2: they're expecting. If the crackdown on the Open Society Foundation
Speaker 2: doesn't happen, if this Antifa stuff doesn't go any further
Speaker 2: than the last time they've talked about going after Antifa,
Speaker 2: stuff like this is going to continue to happen, and
Speaker 2: it will only accelerate over the next couple of years, right,
Speaker 2: and that is a massive problem.
Speaker 3: Part of this culture shift can be seen in what
Speaker 3: some people are probably not very smartly calling the biggest
Speaker 3: attack on free speech they've ever seen in their life,
Speaker 3: which is on Wednesday evening, ABC put Jimmy Kimmel's show
Speaker 3: on hold quote unquote, indefinitely, following pressure from the FCC
Speaker 3: and affiliate stations owned by Nextstar. Before ABC's announcement next
Speaker 3: our release to statement quote, next Star's owned and partner
Speaker 3: television stations affiliated with the NBC Television Network will preempt
Speaker 3: Jimmy Kimmel Live for the foreseeable future, beginning with Tonight's show.
Speaker 3: Next to our strongly object to the recent comments made
Speaker 3: by mister Kimmel concerning the killing and Charlie Kirk, and
Speaker 3: will replace the show with other programming in its ABC
Speaker 3: affiliated markets unquote. Sinclair Broadcasting also stated it would not
Speaker 3: air Kimmel's show and called on Kimmel to apologize to
Speaker 3: the Kirk family and donate to the Kirk Family as
Speaker 3: well as TPUSA. Earlier that Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr
Speaker 3: advocated on the conservative podcaster Benny Johnson's show, quote, it's
Speaker 3: really sort of past time that a lot of these
Speaker 3: licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast Disney and say
Speaker 3: we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you
Speaker 3: straighten this out, and we, the licensed broadcaster, are running
Speaker 3: the possibility of fines or license revocation from the SEC
Speaker 3: if we continue to run content that ends up being
Speaker 3: a pattern of news distortion un quote. Carr then made
Speaker 3: vague threats towards like direct FCC involvement, quote, we can
Speaker 3: do this easy way or the hard way. These companies
Speaker 3: can find ways to change conduct and take action frankly
Speaker 3: on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for
Speaker 3: the FCC ahead on quote. The SEC controls broadcast licenses
Speaker 3: for local TV channels, and next Star is planning a
Speaker 3: merger with Tegna, which requires SEC approval, and this is
Speaker 3: obviously a coerced attack on free speech.
Speaker 2: And we've seen a lot of people shows and whatnot
Speaker 2: getting polled and people speaking out getting in trouble because
Speaker 2: they're companies. They're trying to do a merger. Right, that's
Speaker 2: not new.
Speaker 3: Yes, this has happened with ABC already. This happened with
Speaker 3: a CBS and paramount. I think some people, including people
Speaker 3: on the right, are misunderstanding some of the circumstances of
Speaker 3: the firing or the being put on hold, as well
Speaker 3: as what, like Kimmel said, kim wasn't joking about or
Speaker 3: celebrating Kirk's death. What he did do is possibly like
Speaker 3: falsely insinuate that the shooter was Mega when evidence at
Speaker 3: the time pointed otherwise. Kimill said, quote, we hit some
Speaker 3: new lows over the weekend with the Mega Gang desperately
Speaker 3: trying to characterize the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as
Speaker 3: anything other than one of them and doing everything they
Speaker 3: can to score political points from it. Quote. He then
Speaker 3: went on to tell a joke about how Trump did
Speaker 3: not seem very sad in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death,
Speaker 3: comparing the death to a goldfish in Trump's mind, that
Speaker 3: was the way the joke was framed. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 3: what kim Oll actually said. You can interpret that either way,
Speaker 3: whether he's just saying that megas are desperately trying to
Speaker 3: make it look like he's not one of them and
Speaker 3: scoring political points, or you can interpret it as Kimmel
Speaker 3: kind of insinuating that the shooter probably is mega. I
Speaker 3: don't know Kimmel's mind. I'm not sure what he exactly
Speaker 3: meant by that, But The Rolling Stone reported that sources
Speaker 3: told them the quote. Senior executives at ABC, its owner,
Speaker 3: Disney and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how
Speaker 3: to minimize the damage. Multiple execs felt Kimmel had not
Speaker 3: actually said anything over the line, but the threat of
Speaker 3: Trump administration retaliation loomed unquote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is again, this is chilling, absolutely chilling speech.
Speaker 2: The things he said, we're not in line with the
Speaker 2: best available evidence at the time that he said them.
Speaker 2: But they weren't hate speech, they were not incitement to violence.
Speaker 2: There was nothing a league know about them. And again,
Speaker 2: you had a fucking right wing figure on television urging
Speaker 2: for homeless people to be executed.
Speaker 3: The involuntary lethal ejection to solve the homeless crisis. Quote,
Speaker 3: just kill them. He's not getting fired.
Speaker 2: No, he had to make a half assed apology, but
Speaker 2: that's it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like he had to pretend to be sorry.
Speaker 18: If I had a nickel for every time someone on
Speaker 18: Fox News said that like any mass shooter at all
Speaker 18: was linked to a trans person, Like none of my
Speaker 18: trans friends would ever be homeless. Again, Like they say
Speaker 18: this shit all the time and nothing happens, even though
Speaker 18: it is I mean literally just it is straight up
Speaker 18: tofammatory yep. And they say that shit constantly and nothing happens.
Speaker 18: And this is just a really pure, i mean example
Speaker 18: of just the latant political suppression of speech. And also
Speaker 18: this sort of like we talked about this with the mergers,
Speaker 18: is the structural problem with the way that like the
Speaker 18: American quote unquote free press is supposed to be structured,
Speaker 18: which is that they're all for profit companies. And because
Speaker 18: of that, all you need to do is just buy
Speaker 18: out or threaten their profit enough and they'll just fall
Speaker 18: in line. And that's what we've been watching with news
Speaker 18: outlet after news outlet for news outlet like firing anyone
Speaker 18: who said anything being about Kirk.
Speaker 3: Yep, I think with that that concludes our Charlie Kirk
Speaker 3: assassination aftermath discussion for now. But there is in fact
Speaker 3: other news this week happening. James, do you have stuff? Yeah,
Speaker 3: un Fortunately, I'm like I'm embracing myself. I know that
Speaker 3: James's news is never that good either.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so it was good news these days.
Speaker 3: Really the passport thing was killed, right, the Mark Rubio.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is some good news. Actually, there
Speaker 2: was a Senate bill, a writer on a bill that
Speaker 2: was introduced that would have given Marco Rubio the power
Speaker 2: to revoke passports for citizens for effectively political speech and
Speaker 2: the guys of speech protecting you know, quote unquote terrorists.
Speaker 2: That failed, like that was pulled by the sponsor, which
Speaker 2: is good. There was a backlash to it, and again
Speaker 2: when there's backlashes, that's that's good. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's it's it's so annoying to have
Speaker 3: to like we all know that like pointing out the
Speaker 3: hypocrisy doesn't work as like a real strategy, but like
Speaker 3: there's if there's a way besides that to like actually
Speaker 3: channel resistance to these authoritarian and like speech chilling measures.
Speaker 3: Besides just smugly going like haha, the Party of free
Speaker 3: speech strikes again, which I understand how that's emotionally compelling,
Speaker 3: but no one cares. It's not going to stop them
Speaker 3: from taking away your free speech.
Speaker 17: No.
Speaker 3: Yeah, speaking of free speech, here's some free ads.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we are back. I don't worry, folks. It is
Speaker 6: all downhill from here. I'm afraid because things have not
Speaker 6: been good outside of the coverage and repercussions to the
Speaker 6: Charlie Kirk shooting. And to start with, I want us
Speaker 6: to talk about Ghana. And this is one stories that
Speaker 6: unfortunately has been kind of eclipsed this week, but it
Speaker 6: shouldn't be, so we're going to talk about it. So
Speaker 6: the United States has begun using Ghana as a pass
Speaker 6: through to send people back to other countries in West Africa.
Speaker 6: In international law, when somebody has protection from being sent
Speaker 6: to a place and you send them back via another place,
Speaker 6: that's called chain refoulment.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: One could probably also pronounce that it's a bit where
Speaker 6: a French word, but I have decided not to. In
Speaker 6: this instance, they're sending people to Ghana when their home
Speaker 6: countries has been deemed to be too dangerous by a
Speaker 6: United States court, or they are unable to send them
Speaker 6: back to that country for some other reason. Right, people
Speaker 6: in this part of the world don't need visas to travel,
Speaker 6: so they can send them to neighboring countries without requiring
Speaker 6: like that, the Ghana can just bust them back, right,
Speaker 6: it doesn't require a great deal of paperwork. So a
Speaker 6: court has ordered the United States that there was an
Speaker 6: attempt right to secure protection for these people via them
Speaker 6: into a temporary restraining order to prevent them either being
Speaker 6: sent away. Some of them were in Ghana at the
Speaker 6: time the case was filed, right, so to prevent them
Speaker 6: being sent from Ghana to places where they may face,
Speaker 6: as we're about to hear, torture, death, pretty much the
Speaker 6: worst ship that can happen to people. So the court
Speaker 6: did order the United States to produce a document which
Speaker 6: details the exact nature of its agreement with Ghana. At
Speaker 6: the time I'm writing, the United States has not produced that.
Speaker 6: Ghanan sources have repeatedly suggested that one exists. Right in
Speaker 6: Ghanaian government press conferences and internal Ghanan news reporting, the
Speaker 6: case was bought by both Gambia and Nigerian citizens. Right, So,
Speaker 6: people who don't want to be returned to those countries
Speaker 6: in their attempt to obtain a restraining order. In one instance,
Speaker 6: one of the people who bought the case fled after
Speaker 6: torture by the police and military and was explicitly told
Speaker 6: that if he came back they would kill him. And
Speaker 6: what the US is doing here is using Ghana as
Speaker 6: a pass through to send him back.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Some of them also detailed in the case they're
Speaker 6: transport They said they were in straight jackets for sixteen
Speaker 6: hours on the flight the US. Right, the government, the
Speaker 6: United States government in this instance has once again claimed
Speaker 6: that these people are out of its hands and it
Speaker 6: has no way of stopping the government of Ghana from
Speaker 6: sending them back to these other countries.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: This is an argument that is attempted to make in
Speaker 6: several other instances. And I do just want to flag that,
Speaker 6: like this, use of third party countries for deportation has
Speaker 6: much increased under the Trump administration, But it was the
Speaker 6: Biden administration who begun funding Panamanian deportations right way before
Speaker 6: Donald Trump was even elected, and I have documented that
Speaker 6: extensively in my series on the Darien Gap. The court
Speaker 6: determined in this case that it didn't have the jurisdiction
Speaker 6: to grant the plaintiff's relief right, so that means that
Speaker 6: they're not able to get a restraining order. One of
Speaker 6: the people had actually already been returned to the place
Speaker 6: where they had a convention against torture protection from and
Speaker 6: was in hiding at the time. At the court case right,
Speaker 6: the judge said that the government's actions were part of
Speaker 6: a quoting here pattern and widespread effort to evade the
Speaker 6: government's legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.
Speaker 6: We are recording this on the eighteenth of September. It's
Speaker 6: a Thursday, and about fifteen minutes ago, another United States
Speaker 6: flight just landed in Ghana, so this practice appears to
Speaker 6: be ongoing. Secondly, what I want to talk about is
Speaker 6: sadly another shooting, the killing of Silverio Viegas Gonzales in Chicago.
Speaker 6: Diegos Gonzales was a thirty eight year old father, a
Speaker 6: Mexican national, and he was shot by either one or
Speaker 6: two ICE agents while driving away from them. An ICE
Speaker 6: state mclaim that he drove towards them and ended up
Speaker 6: dragging an agent a significant distance. Surveillan's camera footage at
Speaker 6: the scene shows one agent talking to Vegas Gonzales in
Speaker 6: his vehicle. We then see the vehicle reverse away from
Speaker 6: them and then move around them to the left when
Speaker 6: it sees a gap in traffic. The ICE agents have
Speaker 6: placed their vehicle, which is an SUV, in front of
Speaker 6: his vehicle, sort of cramping it into the curve right,
Speaker 6: so he has to reverse backwards and then move forward
Speaker 6: and to the left in order to try and drive away,
Speaker 6: which is what he's trying to do. Right. We can
Speaker 6: only see one of the officers in the footage. We
Speaker 6: see the other officer later in other footage. The officer
Speaker 6: in the footage does not appear to be dragged, but
Speaker 6: he appears to draw his weapon in by standard footage,
Speaker 6: we then see two officers pull vee Gas Gonzales from
Speaker 6: the vehicle and they begin administering first aid. We're just
Speaker 6: rewatching the footage now and you can see the other
Speaker 6: agent on the other side of the vehicle.
Speaker 3: This sounds very similar to the time that ICE shot
Speaker 3: at the car driving away just a few weeks ago.
Speaker 6: Sure, and Sam Bernardino absolutely, yeah. Generally, I have no
Speaker 6: idea of what rules ICE are operating under. It's not
Speaker 6: considered best practice to open fire a vehicle that is
Speaker 6: moving away from you unless it's actively endangering no, someone
Speaker 6: else's life, right.
Speaker 2: In part because even if it's endangering someone else's life,
Speaker 2: a handgun will not stop a car. Yeah, maybe you
Speaker 2: hit the driver, but the odds are just as good,
Speaker 2: if not much better. Then it goes through a window
Speaker 2: and remains lethal going past the car and endangering people's lives.
Speaker 18: And also it's worth mentioning on the other side of
Speaker 18: the car from the officer who we see draw his
Speaker 18: gun is the other agent. Yes, yeah, so if you're
Speaker 18: shooting at the car, you're shooting at your other agent.
Speaker 2: Guns don't stop cars, generally, unless you're killing a fifty
Speaker 2: caliber anti materiel rifle. Guns don't stop cars. Yeah, like
Speaker 2: they do stop people, but they but they keep bullets
Speaker 2: keep going when they mess. It's just bad. It's a
Speaker 2: bad thing to do. It's irresponsible, it's normal cap shit.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So what we see is at least two shots fired,
Speaker 6: and then we begin to see that then they leave
Speaker 6: the screen of the surveillance camera, right, so we don't
Speaker 6: see exactly like we're unable to see. I guess where
Speaker 6: those bullets impact the bystander. Footy Sen shows his vehicle
Speaker 6: crashed into the undercarriage of a large lorry like a truck, right,
Speaker 6: and he's hit that vehicle in a way that could
Speaker 6: also have been fatal, right, like the way that he's
Speaker 6: he's hit that vehicle, like the engine block of the
Speaker 6: car goes underneath, So it would be the driver who
Speaker 6: would take the main impact because the because the trailer
Speaker 6: is higher off the ground.
Speaker 21: Right.
Speaker 6: Hopefully that's making sense to people. Totally, He's traveled about
Speaker 6: one hundred feet in this time period. Unraveled Press have
Speaker 6: a pretty good account of this, if cobbled together. I
Speaker 6: think most of the open source video and also the
Speaker 6: surveillance video. There don't appear in those videos to be
Speaker 6: any other agents present, And when we see the agents
Speaker 6: rendering aid, none of them appears to be in the
Speaker 6: state someone would be had they been dragged by a
Speaker 6: fast moving car. Also, again, like with reference to shooting
Speaker 6: at a moving vehicle, if the moving vehicle is dragging
Speaker 6: your colleague, you're shooting also at your colleague if you
Speaker 6: shoot at the vehicle. So unfortunately, none of this changes
Speaker 6: the fact that this guy is now dead. Right, the
Speaker 6: Mexican Consulate has confirmed his age. They said he was
Speaker 6: working as a cook as his profession and that he
Speaker 6: was from michual punt The Consulate has been in touch
Speaker 6: with his family. Generally, I'm not familiar with this instance
Speaker 6: and what will happen. Generally, the Mexican Consulate will help
Speaker 6: with returning the remains of Mexican nationals to their families
Speaker 6: in Mexico. That's most of what I have on his death.
Speaker 6: It seems to have moved like very quickly through the
Speaker 6: news cycle, which is unfortunate because obviously you have children
Speaker 6: who have lost a father here like this. This is
Speaker 6: a tragedy too. Yeah, no, this is tragic. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: you know. And I am sitting here haunted by the
Speaker 6: fact that they killed this guy two days after the
Speaker 6: Charlie Kirk shooting. I think most of the people who
Speaker 6: are listening to the show right now don't know this happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, these agents aren't going to get prosecuted in the
Speaker 3: court of law for this, the same way that absolutely
Speaker 3: the Charlie kirkissas as will.
Speaker 6: Yeah, generally, like local there have been some cases, but
Speaker 6: I'm not really aware of any filed against border patrol agents. Generally,
Speaker 6: DHS has an agency which investigates like use of force incidents, right,
Speaker 6: and it is I will say it is extremely There
Speaker 6: have been times when agents have been charged.
Speaker 3: They are rare Stephen Miller's DHS that seems very unlikely.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like I'm aware of some charges, for instance in
Speaker 6: San Diego, for agents who have allowed drugs to cross
Speaker 6: the border.
Speaker 18: Sure, it is pretty rare. Yeah, So let's let's talk
Speaker 18: about what ICE's occupation of Chicago has been. Like, Yeah,
Speaker 18: I kind of want to start with something that's been
Speaker 18: very frustrating, which is a lot of the way that
Speaker 18: Chicago has been discussed in the wake of Trump, like
Speaker 18: not deploying the National Guard. There has been about oh,
Speaker 18: if you resist trumpet will like you know, you can
Speaker 18: defeat him, and like that's true. But also ICE and
Speaker 18: Border Patrol are on the ground in Chicago as we're
Speaker 18: listening to this right now, dragging people from their homes.
Speaker 18: The raids have gone to a significant extent the way
Speaker 18: that we expected them to.
Speaker 3: They have been.
Speaker 18: Largely very very fast lightning raids. A lot of them
Speaker 18: have been an outlying part of Chicago land, which has
Speaker 18: been making it difficult to both track them and determine
Speaker 18: numbers because a lot of these parts of these massive
Speaker 18: high suburby we're going to talk about one later called
Speaker 18: Elgin then has one hundred thousand people in it, but
Speaker 18: also doesn't have the kind of I mean they have
Speaker 18: like local journalists, but they don't have like the kind
Speaker 18: of press corps that they like the City of Chicago
Speaker 18: proper has, and so documentation isn't much harder, which is
Speaker 18: part of why they've been striking out there. It's largely
Speaker 18: been Ice, but Border patrol has shown up, and part
Speaker 18: of the Border patrol appearing has been that this has
Speaker 18: also been a giant PR blitz for Trump administration officials,
Speaker 18: as the people at Unraveled have pointed out, and we'll
Speaker 18: be talking to them more next week about what things
Speaker 18: have been like on the ground. A senior Border Patrol official,
Speaker 18: Gregory Bovino, has claimed to we don't actually have like
Speaker 18: photograph everyone's in there, but he was posting on X
Speaker 18: that he was he went to Franklin Park, which is
Speaker 18: where Ice shot that guy a couple of days after
Speaker 18: the shooting. Okay, he has been releasing an entire higher
Speaker 18: stream of TikTok and X posts to sort of like
Speaker 18: advertise his presence in the city and doing this whole
Speaker 18: we did this in La or doing this here now
Speaker 18: thing on GMC. You don't talk a little bit about
Speaker 18: who he.
Speaker 6: Is, Yeah, I do so. Baveno was, at least until recently,
Speaker 6: he's appeared to be, as you say, working in Chicago.
Speaker 6: Now his Twitter now reads Commander op at Large CA
Speaker 6: Gregory K. Bavino. He was a chief patrol agent in
Speaker 6: the El Centro sector when we saw Operation Return to
Speaker 6: Sender right. Operation Return December was December of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 6: That's happened under the Biden administration. This was the first
Speaker 6: of these border patrol roving stops way north of the border,
Speaker 6: right up in the central Valley, stopping people in home depots,
Speaker 6: stopping people who appeared to be Latino Latina Latine on
Speaker 6: the street. I would say that cal Matters has had
Speaker 6: a really good coverage of that, and I can link
Speaker 6: it in the show notes. We also saw the deployment
Speaker 6: of border patrol to La Right, that was the El
Speaker 6: Centre Sectl't familiar with El Centro east of San Diego
Speaker 6: along the border right, it's sort of most of the
Speaker 6: way to Arizona if your driving from San Diego. He
Speaker 6: is really, like I would say, a man of the
Speaker 6: moment in terms of Trump's Border patrol, right, Like, border
Speaker 6: patrol is an agency that's changed a lot over the years.
Speaker 6: There was a time with border patrol recruiter from the
Speaker 6: Peace Corps. Now it's not that time. One thing that
Speaker 6: Bavino has been very good at in the sense of
Speaker 6: like doing what the administration wants from a border patrol
Speaker 6: agent right now is his use of social media. My
Speaker 6: understanding is that they have a whole team dedicated to
Speaker 6: this in the El Centro sector, right that they have
Speaker 6: videographers and photographers and such to make social media for
Speaker 6: the border patrol. And Bavina really seems to have been
Speaker 6: stepping up in importance, like he has this sort of
Speaker 6: he also cuts a very distinctive figure with this kind
Speaker 6: of crop side haircut, Like you can find a picture
Speaker 6: of his haircut on and I don't know how to
Speaker 6: describe it. His twetter brick picture shows him holding an
Speaker 6: ar with a low power variable octic like he is
Speaker 6: this new like like tactical aggressive, very aggressive social media
Speaker 6: presence border patrol officer. Right, And we've seen El Centro
Speaker 6: Border Patrol station specifically be at the forefront of a
Speaker 6: lot of these operations. As I said, even going back
Speaker 6: to the Biden era, if you're wondering, border patrol sectors
Speaker 6: are not just around the cities that they're named for, right,
Speaker 6: They can go a long way north. So it's the
Speaker 6: San Diego sector, the El Centro sector. These are not
Speaker 6: necessarily defined by places that you would recognize as being
Speaker 6: close to San Diego or El Centro, which is why
Speaker 6: you would have seen them operating as far north as
Speaker 6: Los Angeles. I'm not as familiar with northern border sectors,
Speaker 6: haven't spent as much time there, but I would imagine
Speaker 6: that there is a border patrol sector that pertains to
Speaker 6: the area that Chicago is in. So perhaps Bavino is
Speaker 6: now doing some kind of operational command for these urban
Speaker 6: things rather than working in that sector. I'm not entirely sure,
Speaker 6: but that's who he is.
Speaker 18: Yeah, and he's been, you know, he's been making it
Speaker 18: enormous deal of showing up in Chicago, and this has
Speaker 18: been something that's increasingly This is part of what it
Speaker 18: means for ice and Border patrol to show up in
Speaker 18: the cities. You get these fucking just absolutely hideous pr ops.
Speaker 18: On Tuesday, Kursy Nome, last scene shooting a dog, joined
Speaker 18: a raid in Elgin, which is a pretty far flung
Speaker 18: suburb of Chicago with about one hundred thousand people in it,
Speaker 18: and she showed up to do basically a pr junket
Speaker 18: at this raid at five in the morning in Elgin,
Speaker 18: where ICE arrived with helicopters. They blew up someone's door
Speaker 18: and they grabbed a bunch of people, and then they
Speaker 18: were forced to release two of the seven people they
Speaker 18: grabbed because they immediately turned out to be US citizens.
Speaker 18: Kurst has denied that they detained them and said that,
Speaker 18: oh no, actually we just separate raided them for their protection.
Speaker 18: What we did the operation like that doesn't seem to
Speaker 18: be true from everything that we've heard from witnesses the scene.
Speaker 18: But yeah, this is you know, these are the way
Speaker 18: that these enforcement operations, the way that these raids have
Speaker 18: gone is that the beginning of a major operation cycle
Speaker 18: is turned into these press circuits for people like Chursy Nome.
Speaker 6: Yeah, GNOME's been on a few raids like this. Has
Speaker 6: been a consistent thing, right that these raids are a
Speaker 6: content creation exercise. As much as the law enforcement word.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it excuse to dress up all that good stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know it. It's this.
Speaker 18: It's just like reveling both in this, you know, in
Speaker 18: this sort of like like constructed like I'm holding an
Speaker 18: Air fifteen lookout tough I am image, and also just
Speaker 18: in the cruelty and the suffering in the same way
Speaker 18: that the Alligator Alcatraz stuff was. But it's worth noting
Speaker 18: that most of the raids have not looked like this.
Speaker 18: Like this, this was a raid where like, you know,
Speaker 18: people were woken up in this basically this random ste
Speaker 18: at five in the morning because they heard an explosion
Speaker 18: and ice had blocked off all of their streets and
Speaker 18: their armored vehicles and helicopters. Most of what they've been
Speaker 18: are not like that. They've been following the pattern established
Speaker 18: in LA of very very rapid raids to avoid rep
Speaker 18: response networks, targeting a combination of houses, job sites, and
Speaker 18: places like home depot. And you know, we talked about
Speaker 18: this beginning a couple of weeks ago. We talked about
Speaker 18: how these people are being deployed largely from this naval
Speaker 18: base that is hours out from the city, right and
Speaker 18: that's part of why these a lot of these raids,
Speaker 18: although they have been going to the South Side, which
Speaker 18: is significantly far away, but a lot of these raids
Speaker 18: have been in places like Elgin that are further north
Speaker 18: and are more outlined because they are closer to this
Speaker 18: naval base than the core of the city of Chicago,
Speaker 18: and it's easier to do there because there's less resistance.
Speaker 18: There's been a bunch of raids in Elgin.
Speaker 7: They took.
Speaker 18: Didn't from a community college. They've just been dragging people
Speaker 18: from their homes and workplaces. There was a very very
Speaker 18: well publicized raid in Naperville, which is another sort of
Speaker 18: outlying suburb, where they'd grabbed people who are like fixing
Speaker 18: someone's roof.
Speaker 6: Was that the one where people remained on the roof?
Speaker 6: Yeah some time? Yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 18: Yeah, really horrible seeing people are extremely pissed off. There's
Speaker 18: another story that I's gotten very very little coverage that
Speaker 18: was horrifying in Displans, which is the suburb just north
Speaker 18: of O'Hare, where ice agents and masks did a very
Speaker 18: very standard thing that they've been doing. You know, this
Speaker 18: is I mean a kind of standard ice tactic where
Speaker 18: they wait for people to get back into a truck,
Speaker 18: and then they block the truck off with their trucks
Speaker 18: to prevent it from leaving. Yeah, and I'm going to
Speaker 18: read a CBS report of what happened next because I
Speaker 18: think it's important to understand what it is actually like
Speaker 18: for these people. Edgar, who's one of the people who
Speaker 18: was in the car, said that when the agent originally
Speaker 18: came to the path passenger door, he tried holding the
Speaker 18: door closed, preventing him from opening it. He said at
Speaker 18: the time that he and his family had no idea
Speaker 18: who was at the vehicle, and everyone was scared. When
Speaker 18: the agent tried opening the door, Edgar said he was
Speaker 18: tased in the face. That's when he told everyone in
Speaker 18: the truck to run for their lives. Despite being a
Speaker 18: US citizen, they ran out of fear. So what's happening
Speaker 18: here is there's these two brothers and their dad who
Speaker 18: is undocumented. The two brothers were born in Chicago, and
Speaker 18: they block off this car. They show up in masks.
Speaker 18: The people in the car have absolutely no idea who
Speaker 18: they are, and when they try to not get their
Speaker 18: car broken into, they tase this guy who was an
Speaker 18: American citizen in the face. He has to go to
Speaker 18: the hospital because they tased him in the face, right, Yeah,
Speaker 18: And there are stories like this, this is a particularly
Speaker 18: bad one, but there are stories like the rest of
Speaker 18: the raids that we've been talking about every single day
Speaker 18: in Chicago that do not break containments at all. In
Speaker 18: a country that is literally entirely just talking about Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 18: There are people being dragged from their homes, there are
Speaker 18: people being dragged from their fucking places of work, They're
Speaker 18: being dragged from their schools. And this is just what
Speaker 18: the US is right now now, as fucking unbelievably bleak
Speaker 18: as this is right, and people are terrified, but they're
Speaker 18: also angry, and people are also organizing, and as we
Speaker 18: saw in LA, people are forming rapid response networks and
Speaker 18: they're showing up in places that I never would have thought.
Speaker 18: I mean, maybe there'd be NGO networks, but they're doing
Speaker 18: things in places I just wouldn't have thought possible. I
Speaker 18: want to close this by there was a report on
Speaker 18: Thursday by Sean Molkay, who's the news editor at The Reader,
Speaker 18: which is a good independent outlet in Chicago. So I
Speaker 18: tried the same tactic of blockading someone's truck and grabbing
Speaker 18: them in a summer called Wheaton, Illinois, and a bunch
Speaker 18: of people when they tried to do this smash and
Speaker 18: grab of this person's truck, a whole bunch of people
Speaker 18: showed up and confronted them and screamed at them and
Speaker 18: recorded them. And this caused the Ice people to take
Speaker 18: off and run away without attending the person. And this
Speaker 18: is a stunning development if you know anything about either
Speaker 18: Chicago Land or evangelicalism. Wheaton is the home of Wheaton College,
Speaker 18: which is like it's one of like the three big
Speaker 18: right wing like Christian universities alongside like Brigham Young and Liberty.
Speaker 3: This is wild.
Speaker 18: This was one of the home bases of power of
Speaker 18: the Bush era moral majority, right like Wheaton College is
Speaker 18: a school where dancing was illegal until two thousand and three,
Speaker 18: like they abandoned dancing for one hundred and forty three years.
Speaker 18: And if people in Wheaton are showing up to do
Speaker 18: direct actions against Ice, these people, they're cooked right, They
Speaker 18: will be able to do a significant amount of damage.
Speaker 18: They have been doing significant amount of damage. We've just
Speaker 18: been talking about the amount of damage they've been doing.
Speaker 18: But if this is what is happening in places that
Speaker 18: used to be moral majority strongholds right, places that produce
Speaker 18: some of the most famous like Christian right wingers, who
Speaker 18: shaped an entire half century of American politics. If people
Speaker 18: there are showing up and doing direct actions against eisen Winning,
Speaker 18: things are fucking changing. People are radicalizing very quickly. And
Speaker 18: despite everything that's been happening by all of the kirkstuff,
Speaker 18: Trump's pulling keeps getting worse and worse. And I think
Speaker 18: this is a good reminder that, like these people, part
Speaker 18: of the reason they're moving so fast and so hard
Speaker 18: right now is because they know they are staggeringly unpopular
Speaker 18: and they have to get their crack down and they
Speaker 18: have to build a political and legal power right now
Speaker 18: before it gets even worse for them, and they're terrified that,
Speaker 18: you know, if there are a thousand Wheatns, if enough
Speaker 18: people resist them, they don't have the capacity to stop them.
Speaker 18: Because everybody fucking hates these people and they hate what
Speaker 18: they're doing. Nobody actually likes, you know, shock troopers showing
Speaker 18: up in the neighborhoods and dragging the people they love
Speaker 18: away from them. And it's going to be a really,
Speaker 18: really long and hard battle but the fact that people
Speaker 18: are fighting in places where that would have been unimaginable
Speaker 18: even ten years ago is I think at least a
Speaker 18: small sign of hope in the darkness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's probably where we ought to end. Is
Speaker 2: a small sign of hope in the darkness.
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