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
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Speaker 3: Hello, dear listener. My name is Carlos Berrios Polanco and
Speaker 3: I'm a journalist from Puerto Rico. I'm here with.
Speaker 4: Me James Stown. I'm a journalist who lives in San Diego.
Speaker 3: Thank you for being here, James. Today, I'm here to
Speaker 3: talk to you about the Dominican Republic's immigration system and
Speaker 3: how it has been shaped by the US's immigration system
Speaker 3: to kind of function as a part of the US
Speaker 3: border outside of what we would normally consider the US's border.
Speaker 3: And instead of diving in immediately to that, I want
Speaker 3: to start this episode by talking a little bit about
Speaker 3: the tragic death of Ezra Francis Houllett, a transperson from
Speaker 3: the United States, in immigration detention in the Dominican Republic.
Speaker 3: I should mention that they use both them and he
Speaker 3: him pronouns. However, I'm going to be using they them
Speaker 3: going forward, because that's what the friends and family of
Speaker 3: Hullet put as their pronouns, and the GoFundMe. They were
Speaker 3: found dead in the Haina Immigration Detention Center, the biggest
Speaker 3: immigration detention center in the Dominican Republic, on June twenty third,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five. The GoFundMe, set up by their family
Speaker 3: to bring their body back to the States, describes them
Speaker 3: as a compassionate and sensitive person who lived with mental
Speaker 3: health issues and the after effects of childhood trauma. They
Speaker 3: were twenty four and a really good artist from looking
Speaker 3: at their Instagram. Per the Dominican news show Ellen form Conaltega,
Speaker 3: who interviewed Hollet's mom, Hullet traveled to Puerto Rico without
Speaker 3: their family's knowledge and seemed to be in contact with
Speaker 3: a social worker here. I found a local Telemundo affiliate
Speaker 3: here in Puerto Rico that reported that they went missing
Speaker 3: on September third of twenty twenty four. However, it gofund
Speaker 3: me says that they were missing in pr since March
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty five. And Hollet's mom told elin Former
Speaker 3: that that's when they last spoke. Around that same time,
Speaker 3: Hollett flew to the Dominican Republic. According to ellen Form,
Speaker 3: shortly after that, they were detained inside a construction site
Speaker 3: where it appears that they were squatting alongside a Dominican man.
Speaker 3: After being detained by the tourism police, they were passed
Speaker 3: on to the Dix Young henerrad Le Megrasciung or DGM,
Speaker 3: which does immigration enforcement and manages detention centers. Per ellen Former,
Speaker 3: this was about thirty seven days after they entered the DR.
Speaker 3: I want to preface this next section by saying that
Speaker 3: the DR isn't particularly kind to transfolks, which I'm sure
Speaker 3: affected Hollet's experience during immigration detention. Hollet was initially sent
Speaker 3: to the male wing of HEINA, not because the DR
Speaker 3: is particularly woke and sends people to detention based on
Speaker 3: their gender identity, but because they were male presenting and
Speaker 3: didn't have any ID on them. However, once the DGM
Speaker 3: was able to identify Hullet, they were transferred to the
Speaker 3: female wing of HEINA. To be honest, quite a bit
Speaker 3: of the reporting around Hullet in the DR and here
Speaker 3: in Puerto Rico is quite transphobic, and the way that
Speaker 3: these immigration officials talk about Hullet in this kind of
Speaker 3: mini documentary by Ellen Former is also quite transphobic. Videos
Speaker 3: published by Ellen Former appeared to show Hullet curled up
Speaker 3: on the floor next to dozens of other people who
Speaker 3: were sleeping in two small rooms inside of immigration detention.
Speaker 3: Some of the notes in videos uncovered by Ellen Former
Speaker 3: appeared to show that Hullet was suffering from a mental
Speaker 3: health crisis Throughout the more than two months they were
Speaker 3: in immigration detention. Pullet's mom told ellen fordmher that Hullet
Speaker 3: suffered from schizophrenia. They also wrote about having asthma and
Speaker 3: being allergic to milk. Per Ellen Fode Ma, Hullett's mom
Speaker 3: conferred to them that they needed an inhaler and an EpiPen.
Speaker 3: Although news reports say that DGM provided Hullett with some
Speaker 3: medicine for the apparent mental health crisis they were going through,
Speaker 3: I can't find any reporting that says that they ever
Speaker 3: got an inhaler or an EpiPen that they needed. A
Speaker 3: coroner's report found that they died from a heart attack,
Speaker 3: according to notesjasin a national news website. There, per information
Speaker 3: obtained by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights, quote,
Speaker 3: at least four facilities are being used as immigration detention centers,
Speaker 3: present overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, deficient food, and lack of access
Speaker 3: to healthcare. The same report states that a newborn died
Speaker 3: in Heina on November fourteen of last year. People I've
Speaker 3: spoken to who've been detained in Heina over the years
Speaker 3: have described the conditions there as horrific, particularly as the
Speaker 3: Dominican government has ramped up deportation efforts massively against the
Speaker 3: country's Haitian population. Detention Centers are routinely overcrowded and people
Speaker 3: have very little access to food or water for days,
Speaker 3: from what they tell me. Further, people I've spoken to
Speaker 3: detainnes are sometimes beaten or extorted by guards to be
Speaker 3: able to call their families, to get their documents or
Speaker 3: for food, and I talk a little bit more about
Speaker 3: this later on in the episode. But the reason that
Speaker 3: I started with Hullet's story is twofold. First because their
Speaker 3: death was significantly undercovered by English language media, and second
Speaker 3: because they died as a direct result of an immigration
Speaker 3: system the systematically abuses Haitian immigrants and has been historically
Speaker 3: shaped by the US military and the American border apparatus.
Speaker 3: While they're organized in different ways within the law enforcement
Speaker 3: structures of their respective countries, there are a lot of
Speaker 3: similarities between the DGM and ICE and the United States,
Speaker 3: particularly in their tactics and how they've terrorized immigrant communities. However,
Speaker 3: before diving into the current immigration situation in the Dominican
Speaker 3: Republic and how a lot of it has come as
Speaker 3: a result of collaboration with American immigration enforcement, I want
Speaker 3: to give some historical context about how, in a very
Speaker 3: real way, the United States created the Dominican Haiti border.
Speaker 3: The Demerican Republic was originally a Spanish colony, Haiti was
Speaker 3: originally a French colony. Haiti became independent, then invaded the
Speaker 3: Dominican Republic, then they fought them back to become independent themselves.
Speaker 3: But throughout all of that time, the Dominican Haiti border
Speaker 3: was in amorphous space, not the kind of quote unquote
Speaker 3: hard border that it is today. There had been agreements
Speaker 3: on where the border was supposed to be. People roughly
Speaker 3: knew where that border was supposed to be on a
Speaker 3: map and on the earth. If they lived near that area. However,
Speaker 3: it was just kind of essentially an imaginary line that
Speaker 3: ran along the two hundred and forty miles of land
Speaker 3: that make up the border between the two countries. However,
Speaker 3: in nineteen oh five, the US established a customs receivership
Speaker 3: over the Dominican Republic to force the Caribbean nation to
Speaker 3: pay its foreign debts and ostensibly protect it from a
Speaker 3: possible European invasion, which is a classic Monroe doctrine move.
Speaker 4: Of course, yeah many such cases.
Speaker 3: This agreement was officially ratified for a nineteen oh seven
Speaker 3: convention and created the Dominican Border Guard to police the
Speaker 3: frontier between the two countries and make sure that all
Speaker 3: duties were collected from commerce and people crossing the border.
Speaker 3: According to a journal article titled Haitians, Magic and Money,
Speaker 3: Drasa and Society and the Titian Dominican Borderlands by A.
Speaker 3: Lauren Derby, while these weren't the first border guards, they
Speaker 3: were essential to turning the border lands into the border
Speaker 3: as it exists today, one of the most highly regulated
Speaker 3: and police borders in the Western Hemisphere. And I should
Speaker 3: also say that at some points throughout Dominican history, the
Speaker 3: military patrol the border. Per a document from the Marines
Speaker 3: titled Marines in the Daminican Republic nineteen sixteen to nineteen
Speaker 3: twenty four, North Americans were part of the Dominican Frontier
Speaker 3: Guard that regulated this border. Some would later go on
Speaker 3: to become part of the Guadala National Dominicana, which was
Speaker 3: created by the American military government that controlled the dr
Speaker 3: between nineteen sixteen and nineteen twenty four. In nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 3: the GND turned into the Porcia Dominicana, which also stationed
Speaker 3: people of the border. At that time. For more context,
Speaker 3: the American government was occupying Haiti at more or less
Speaker 3: the same time from nineteen fifteen to nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 3: This period of American occupation of L'spanola greatly defined the
Speaker 3: relationship that both countries would have with each other go
Speaker 3: going forward, as well as both countries military and law enforcement.
Speaker 3: The military occupation of the Dominican Republic also led to
Speaker 3: laws that prevented the entry of workers who weren't white
Speaker 3: unless they came through official border crossings and paid for
Speaker 3: temporary residence permits. This is, according to the book More
Speaker 3: Than a Massacre, Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian
Speaker 3: Dominican Borderlands by Zabine Cadeau. While there had always been
Speaker 3: racial prejudice on Hispaniola, this brought even more, leading to
Speaker 3: Dominican security forces to arrest people on suspicion that they'd
Speaker 3: broken this law even if they hadn't, and it was
Speaker 3: later used to strip Dominicans of their citizenship. It also
Speaker 3: strengthened the idea of quote unquote Dominican ivad as something
Speaker 3: closer to being white and European. That sentiment that continues
Speaker 3: to this day and in some ways is even stronger
Speaker 3: now than it was then.
Speaker 4: What centering my mind is I think it was a
Speaker 4: tweet that said they're coming out with a new version
Speaker 4: of white that doesn't include you. Like whiteness is a
Speaker 4: liminal concept, is something that can be can be hard
Speaker 4: for people from the US to understand. But yeah, I've
Speaker 4: heard this directly elucidated to me many times that like
Speaker 4: dominicanness and blackness are distinct. Absolutely the Haitian people are black,
Speaker 4: which obviously is someone who's who's lived in the UK
Speaker 4: and the United States is difficult for me to understand.
Speaker 4: But like all of these things are so feally constructed
Speaker 4: that doesn't mean they're not real. It just means that
Speaker 4: that people made them, people can move them.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. I have also had people, to my face
Speaker 3: say that the Dominican identity is completely separate from blackness,
Speaker 3: you know, and as someone who has lived in Puerto Rico,
Speaker 3: which is part of the United States are owned by it,
Speaker 3: that also to me was very very strange. And I'd
Speaker 3: say this as someone who whose mother is Dominican, right,
Speaker 3: So I was just kind of like, yeah, stand when
Speaker 3: the first time that I heard it, and sometimes it's
Speaker 3: called even at Kiska is how it's it's being marketed
Speaker 3: by some people in the current day. Although I will say,
Speaker 3: if you've seen the video of the comedian I think
Speaker 3: saying I know blacky Dominican, that's a I have pretty
Speaker 3: much witnessed something exactly like that said completely seriously several
Speaker 3: times throughout my life.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it doesn't mean that like Dominican people coming into
Speaker 4: the unit US will not encounter anti blackness, because.
Speaker 3: They will, oh absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just that it also doesn't mean that on
Speaker 4: return to Dominican Republic they cannot slot into a different
Speaker 4: structure which puts them above Haitian people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's a very it's a very interesting
Speaker 3: topic how those kind of identities are presented in separate
Speaker 3: ways depending on on where you live. Because for me,
Speaker 3: for example, if I went to the US, most people
Speaker 3: would say that I'm brown, but here in Puerto Rico,
Speaker 3: I'm kind of very explicitly a white person here, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's so it's such a short flight as well.
Speaker 4: Know that flight from Miami Tominic come by, You got
Speaker 4: Punta Kana or whatever at the airport there, that's like
Speaker 4: out of Santo Domingo, and so much changes, right like
Speaker 4: you can you can literally get on that plane as
Speaker 4: someone who is considered to be black and then get
Speaker 4: off that and be treated by American law enforcement like
Speaker 4: you are ye, within like a one hour flight. And yeah,
Speaker 4: it's just this is like the nature of creating hierarchies, right,
Speaker 4: they can shift to include people and shift to exclude people.
Speaker 3: To absolutely absolutely, So I know I'm speaking to the
Speaker 3: choir about this, but this kind of definition of borders
Speaker 3: and national identity are an essential part of the nation
Speaker 3: state and immigration enforcement because if you don't have an
Speaker 3: established border, it's very hard to define the in group
Speaker 3: that belongs inside of the nation and that group that doesn't,
Speaker 3: who can then be detained, penalized, and deported for crossing
Speaker 3: that imaginative line in the earth. These kinds of steps
Speaker 3: by the US military government were essential to creating this idea.
Speaker 3: The Dominicans in Haitians are two completely different people, have
Speaker 3: it to be clear, It's not that this sentiment didn't
Speaker 3: exist beforehand. In particular, the Dominican elite hated Haitians a
Speaker 3: lot for the invasion of dr by Haiti. That centem
Speaker 3: existed in the borderlands, but a lot of those people
Speaker 3: were bilingual, which is very different from kind of people
Speaker 3: inside of the metropol who saw themselves as kind of
Speaker 3: this one identity versus along the borderlines, which is usually
Speaker 3: what happens. Right there is a kind of melding identities
Speaker 3: in ways that isn't seen anywhere else.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is the same where I live, right, Like
Speaker 4: San Diegotijuan's effectively like it's not one large city. They're
Speaker 4: important and very very very real differences, but like in
Speaker 4: many ways, one community, right, like so many of our
Speaker 4: community members, Like I have students at at the community
Speaker 4: college who cross every day. I've had students who have
Speaker 4: to high school classes who crossed every day. Like I've
Speaker 4: got friends who couldn't make rent work in California and
Speaker 4: so they go to Tijuana and like, obviously, o those
Speaker 4: people speak two languages or like both languages at the
Speaker 4: same time. I think that's just a nature of living
Speaker 4: in the borderliness.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely so. Following the US's exit from the Dominican Republic,
Speaker 3: Dictator trafil Throughhillo came to power in nineteen thirty. He
Speaker 3: was trained by the US military and eventually rose to
Speaker 3: the rank of Brigadier General of the PND. Then militarized it,
Speaker 3: and as the word dictator implies, he was not a
Speaker 3: good guy. Under him, the already burgeoning and existent anti
Speaker 3: Haitian sentiment essentially exploded. He introduced the SEA, a national
Speaker 3: identification document for all adult men, so Haitians had to
Speaker 3: pay for the SEA and a foreign residency permit, essentially
Speaker 3: ending the binational lifestyle of communities on the border. According
Speaker 3: to more than a massacre, if the US started the border,
Speaker 3: then Trhillo marked it as a sign of utter violence
Speaker 3: by ordering his troops to ethnically cleanse the Dominican border
Speaker 3: of Haitians. In October of nineteen thirty seven. This was
Speaker 3: known as the Parsley Massacre, and estimates of people killed vary,
Speaker 3: but the most common number I've seen used is roughly
Speaker 3: twenty thousand Haitians killed over the course of about a
Speaker 3: week to two weeks. And this massacre, of course came
Speaker 3: about as a way for him to define the border
Speaker 3: by stripping Haitians of that land because they were It
Speaker 3: was mostly done inside of the Dominican side of the
Speaker 3: d R. Haiti border. Yeah, it's called the Parsley Massacre
Speaker 3: because soldiers reportedly recognize Haitians by their inability to pronounce
Speaker 3: Parsley in Spanish prehied. However, experts think that this was
Speaker 3: just a myth, another way to separate Haitians from Dominicans.
Speaker 3: According to More Than a massacre also is a not
Speaker 3: so fun fact. A lot of the violence took place
Speaker 3: along the Massacre River, which a lot of people think
Speaker 3: is called that because of the nineteen thirty seven massacre.
Speaker 3: But from the various Spanish language sources I've read, they
Speaker 3: all essentially say that this isn't true that it was.
Speaker 3: It's called the Massacre River because of the frequent violence
Speaker 3: that took place there. Between Spanish colonizers and French buccaneers
Speaker 3: in the eighteenth century. And this is according to an
Speaker 3: article by se Montal Driguos Nacola titled Dominican Republic and
Speaker 3: Haiti at the crossroads of the Massacre River. The Dominican
Speaker 3: Immigration Agency the DGM was also established by Trigo just
Speaker 3: two years after the Parsley Massacre. Not only were they
Speaker 3: essential to deporting Haitians during Trhiyo's reign, but they also
Speaker 3: forced the Haitian population into the sugar producing regions of
Speaker 3: the country, and because he couldn't deploy overt state violence
Speaker 3: there in the same way that he did along the border,
Speaker 3: they came up with a new plan. Any Haitian immigrant
Speaker 3: detained in the area would just be brought back to
Speaker 3: whatever sugar plantation would pay their immigration taxes, essentially creating
Speaker 3: these zones which still very much exist to this day
Speaker 3: of Haitians living in and around these sugar plantations that
Speaker 3: they also work at. I should say that this wasn't
Speaker 3: a codified policy, but that it coexisted with other tactics
Speaker 3: throughout the years. The Juhio government also instituted a policy
Speaker 3: that made all Haitians who owned land or businesses to
Speaker 3: not be able to work outside of the sugar producing regions.
Speaker 3: According to a journal article titled Avail of Legality by
Speaker 3: Amelia Hinson, I visited some of these sugar plantations in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three, and many of the Haitians and Dominicans
Speaker 3: of Haitian descent who live there are descendants of the
Speaker 3: ones Trhiyo pushed into the region. While anti Haitianism already
Speaker 3: existed before, through Hillyo, he cemented it into the political
Speaker 3: structures of the Dominican Republic to the point that it
Speaker 3: still continues incredibly strong into the modern day. About fifty
Speaker 3: one percent of Dominicans believe that immigration harms the country,
Speaker 3: per a twenty twenty four pole by the polling firm
Speaker 3: Latin Nobarromtro. Many Haitians come to the Dominican Republic seeking
Speaker 3: a better life for themselves and their families, much like
Speaker 3: immigrants in the US, and similarly to the US, getting
Speaker 3: a visa or becoming a citizen for them is extremely difficult.
Speaker 3: This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of
Speaker 3: Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic, and I should also
Speaker 3: say that they are by far the largest immigrant group
Speaker 3: in the country, which makes sense because they're next door neighbors.
Speaker 3: The construction and the sugar cutting industry are completely dependent
Speaker 3: on cheap Haitian labor. The sugar cutting industry is heavily
Speaker 3: reliant on this labor, a lot of which is done
Speaker 3: by undocumented immigrants. Many people over the years have called
Speaker 3: it a quote unquote modern form of slavery. I've been
Speaker 3: to these camps and what they endure for extra dreamely
Speaker 3: little pay is horrific. I went there at the tail
Speaker 3: end of twenty twenty three. And while there are some
Speaker 3: places set up by the companies that own those sugar
Speaker 3: producing regions that are they're like they're called batayas inside
Speaker 3: of the sugar cane mazes. Some of the batayas have
Speaker 3: like houses made out of cement with electricity, and some
Speaker 3: are completely degraded, made from wood that's rotting and they
Speaker 3: have no access to running water or electricity. There have
Speaker 3: been over the years attempts by both human rights groups
Speaker 3: and the companies that own those regions. It wasn't benevolently,
Speaker 3: is my opinion on it, but more because of the
Speaker 3: pressure that they've received over the years. To move these
Speaker 3: people into somewhat better conditions, and thankfully for some of
Speaker 3: them that they have. For others they have not. A
Speaker 3: lot of the Haitian migration in the last decades has
Speaker 3: come after the twenty ten Haiti earthquake and the twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one assassination of Haitian President Jovenol Moyes. The two events,
Speaker 3: as well as other crises, have caused people in Porter Prince,
Speaker 3: the capital of Haiti, to experience significant violence and hunger crises.
Speaker 3: Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced out of
Speaker 3: their homes and left the country over the last decade,
Speaker 3: per the Migration Policy Institute, For many, the national path
Speaker 3: of migration out of Porter Prince is towards the border
Speaker 3: and towards the Amican Republic. And as we've seen, a
Speaker 3: lot of those Haitian migrants have also tried to go
Speaker 3: into the US through Latin America. And I mean not
Speaker 3: to say that they exclusively go there, of course, but
Speaker 3: they try to go wherever they're able to go.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wor a piece for NBC. God when you
Speaker 4: could still write things critical of the Biden deministration NBC,
Speaker 4: like in twenty twenty one, right when the United States,
Speaker 4: embas See and Haiti had a picture of Biden. It
Speaker 4: was translated into kreole right, but it was like it essentially,
Speaker 4: do not come that, We'll turn you around sand you
Speaker 4: back like this. This is the guy who'd run, you know,
Speaker 4: like months before on a kindness where Trump had done cruelty.
Speaker 4: I remember like right around that time in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 4: so there was a large number of migrants, of course,
Speaker 4: who had been stuck in Tijuana because of Title forty two.
Speaker 4: They tried to cross and they kept getting bounced back right,
Speaker 4: and so I would cross to talk to them. They
Speaker 4: moved to like right by where the ped West pedestrian
Speaker 4: crossing is now, and they were just camping there in
Speaker 4: the square. Like literally, you go over the broad border
Speaker 4: bridge that goes over the road, you pop out your
Speaker 4: first step on like on the ground, and the bridge
Speaker 4: is probably in Mexico at some point, but they're right there.
Speaker 4: I remember speaking to Haitian folks there about like they'd
Speaker 4: had genuinely hoped for a little bit better from the
Speaker 4: Biden administration, which of course they didn't get. Very common
Speaker 4: pathway is to Brazil to do underpaid construction work for
Speaker 4: the Rio Olympics, and then finding yourself without work, without
Speaker 4: much of a chance at citizenship for permanency, deciding to
Speaker 4: come Norfolk that that was very common pathway at a
Speaker 4: time too.
Speaker 3: So about two hundred thousand display Haitians are believed to
Speaker 3: have moved to the DR in the months after the earthquakes,
Speaker 3: according to the International Organization for Migration, And after that
Speaker 3: flow of migrants to the DR and the rising tide
Speaker 3: of anti Haitianism which had been building for a very
Speaker 3: long time, in twenty thirteen, the Constitutional Court of the
Speaker 3: Dominican Republic ruled that people born in the Dominican Republic
Speaker 3: two immigrant parents without a regularized migration status had never
Speaker 3: been entitled to Dominican citizenship. This ruling is called lacent
Speaker 3: ensia the judgment. What this essentially did was that if
Speaker 3: you do not have at least one parent who is
Speaker 3: a Dominican citizen, then you do not have Dominican citizenship.
Speaker 3: In the US, we have birthright citizenship or jusli, which
Speaker 3: means that if you're born on this land or inside
Speaker 3: the US, you are an American citizen. This course applies
Speaker 3: almost everywhere except certain colonies like American Samoa, so essentially,
Speaker 3: in the Dominican Republic, if one of your parents was
Speaker 3: not Dominican, you did not have citizenship. The thing about
Speaker 3: judicial decisions is that they typically only go forward in time.
Speaker 3: But what was particularly evil about La Centensia was that
Speaker 3: it applied retroactively to nineteen twenty nine. And I want
Speaker 3: listeners to sit with that for a second. Even if
Speaker 3: it applied just going forward, it would be a horrible thing,
Speaker 3: but going back nearly one hundred years is just horrendous
Speaker 3: because what the ruling caused was a chain reaction that
Speaker 3: stripped entire families of their citizenship. Because if your grandparents
Speaker 3: were in citizens then neither was your dad. And if
Speaker 3: your mom was in a citizen then then neither are you.
Speaker 3: Of course, this ruling also affected anyone who did legally
Speaker 3: still have citizenship but didn't have the documentation going back
Speaker 3: that far to prove it if the government came knocking.
Speaker 3: So yeah, essentially, imagine if you had to prove that
Speaker 3: your great grandparents were citizens in nineteen twenty nine. I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't think I personally would have that documentation for
Speaker 3: my great grandparents.
Speaker 4: Especially living like in the lower forty eight in the
Speaker 4: US it's just more likely that you one might have
Speaker 4: documentation of ones like great grandparents and living in parts
Speaker 4: of the DA.
Speaker 3: But yeah, essentially for me, it would be incredibly hard
Speaker 3: to have a documentation for my great grandparents. I couldn't
Speaker 3: imagine someone who has moved throughout their lives inside of
Speaker 3: the Dominican Republic to also have a documentation. And that
Speaker 3: there's also the fact that because of the antiationism that
Speaker 3: was there, a lot of people who did or were
Speaker 3: supposed to legally still have citizenship were rolled up in
Speaker 3: the people whose citizenship this law took away. In total,
Speaker 3: the decision impacted about two hundred and forty five thousand Dominicans,
Speaker 3: of which two hundred eleven thousand were Dominicans of Haitian descent,
Speaker 3: according to the Center for Migration Studies, I of course
Speaker 3: say Dominicans because they were legally speaking Dominicans at the
Speaker 3: time that the sentenciad took place, but now they have
Speaker 3: been stripped of that citizenship. The Dominican government tried to
Speaker 3: backtrack this decision just a year later, after a lot
Speaker 3: of international criticism and provide a path to the stateless,
Speaker 3: but the damage was done. In twenty twenty three, it's
Speaker 3: estimated that as many as one hundred thirty thousand people
Speaker 3: remained stateless CMS. There is no law that provides a
Speaker 3: path to citizenship for the children of the stateless. So
Speaker 3: even after this twenty fourteen law that tried to make
Speaker 3: people back into citizens or provide a pathway to citizenship
Speaker 3: if you have a child, that child was not going
Speaker 3: to have citizenship. Yeah, because so many people were affected
Speaker 3: by it, and a lot of the slowness of the government,
Speaker 3: the ways that government doesn't work. You have this wave
Speaker 3: of denationalizations, and because of a lot of the problems
Speaker 3: of the government, some people who should have had that
Speaker 3: pathway to citizenship provide it to them still don't have it.
Speaker 4: Right, it's going to be so much harder to get
Speaker 4: those people back, and like understandably, it's going to be
Speaker 4: very hard to get those people to engage with the
Speaker 4: state in any way. Absolutely, because why the fuck would
Speaker 4: you that it just told you like that you don't
Speaker 4: belong right, that this state is a danger to those people.
Speaker 3: And of course not to mention that the anti Haitian
Speaker 3: sentiment that the government has. You know that maybe the
Speaker 3: government at the top decided to go back, but that
Speaker 3: anti Haitian sentiment is still there from the top down
Speaker 3: of course.
Speaker 4: So yeah, yeah, it takes a long time to get
Speaker 4: out of something like what happened on the trio, right,
Speaker 4: like the massacre and then ongoing like the state being
Speaker 4: used as a weapon against you, Like yeah, people aren't
Speaker 4: going to just be like, Okay, well this is a
Speaker 4: benevolent entity. Now let me go, let me go chat
Speaker 4: with him, tell them where I live and make sure
Speaker 4: they got all my information up to date. Like It's
Speaker 4: just it takes a long time to rebuild that trust.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. So at the same time that this was happening,
Speaker 3: the Dominican government created a sprawling immigration enforcement apparatus that
Speaker 3: has systemically punished Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent that
Speaker 3: they made stateless. These numbers are honestly, quite quite horrifying.
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty five, the DGM registered three hundred seventy
Speaker 3: nine thousand, five hundred and fifty three deportations according to
Speaker 3: their self published numbers. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 3: three hundred seventy nine thousand, five hundred and fifty three
Speaker 3: people were removed from the country because of possible double
Speaker 3: or triple counting if a person crossed the border more
Speaker 3: than once and were detained and deported. But even if
Speaker 3: you cut that figure in half or in freeze, that
Speaker 3: still is a staggering amount of people's lives who have
Speaker 3: been touched and affected by this deportation apparatus. To give
Speaker 3: some more recent numbers, in May of twenty twenty six,
Speaker 3: the DGM said that they deported thirty five thousand, three
Speaker 3: hundred and five migrants according to their own numbers, And
Speaker 3: the thing about the Dominican Republic is that essentially every
Speaker 3: law enforcement agency does immigration enforcement. The great majority of
Speaker 3: those migrants deported in May were detained by the DGM,
Speaker 3: the Detectinda. Out of the racion, about five eight hundred
Speaker 3: were detained by the Dominican Army and about two thousand,
Speaker 3: three hundred by this specialized Land Border Security Corps which
Speaker 3: is known as says Front. They essentially patrol the national
Speaker 3: border with Haiti, and about one thousand, three hundred of
Speaker 3: those people were detained by the National Police. These numbers
Speaker 3: are so staggering because all of these law enforcement agencies
Speaker 3: are trying to meet a ten thousand a week quota
Speaker 3: that President Luis avinade is set for the Dominican government
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty four and continues to follow. This number,
Speaker 3: to me is really really staggering, and it's kind of
Speaker 3: horrific because you read it on paper and it's hard
Speaker 3: to really understand the immensity of this mechanism to forcefully
Speaker 3: move people out of the country, and as well as
Speaker 3: all of the law enforcement work and immigration enforcement work
Speaker 3: that goes into detaining the people in the first place,
Speaker 3: then sending them to immigration centers, and then deporting them
Speaker 3: outside of the Demican Republic. And that the way that
Speaker 3: that usually happens is that they are loaded into these
Speaker 3: trucks which are converted horse trucks. Sometimes they are like
Speaker 3: the little short ones and sometimes are the very long
Speaker 3: ones that you see to move palettes of stuff that
Speaker 3: have this cage built onto the mac and people are
Speaker 3: just stuffed to the brim inside of there. It's really
Speaker 3: incredibly inhumane.
Speaker 4: Yeah, damn, that's rough.
Speaker 3: So migrants are routinely extorted while in immigration detention. Per
Speaker 3: an anonymous source that spoke with least Indiadio, a national
Speaker 3: paper in the dr that detainees are routinely hit up
Speaker 3: for bribes during immigration raids and during their detention. For
Speaker 3: the article, guards in Haina, the largest immigration detention center
Speaker 3: in the DR, we're charging about two hundred and two
Speaker 3: hundred and seventy dollars to be freed, which might not
Speaker 3: seem like an insurmountable amount of money in the US,
Speaker 3: but it's about half of the average monthly salary in
Speaker 3: the DR, and these migrants are making much much less
Speaker 3: than that. Yeah, the same report says that guards sometimes
Speaker 3: charge migrants families so Detanese can get food while detained.
Speaker 3: So much of the rhetoric that abin Aleed and other
Speaker 3: Dominican officials used to justify their actions, especially in recent years,
Speaker 3: is that immigration contributes to the destabilization of their society. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: the vast majority of Haitian immigrants are just trying to
Speaker 3: live in peace and escape the violence or crisis that
Speaker 3: they're facing in their home country. And like I said earlier,
Speaker 3: a lot of industries than the DR rely on cheap
Speaker 3: patient labor. And I would be remiss to mention that
Speaker 3: a lot of the people that the Dominican Republic's immigration
Speaker 3: enforcement are deporting are people that the Dominican Republic made
Speaker 3: stakeless first place. So they essentially created this gigantic group
Speaker 3: of people that they are now supporting rights. It's the
Speaker 3: way that the nation state operates to kind of push people,
Speaker 3: to push people that it considers undesirable out of that
Speaker 3: nation's borders.
Speaker 4: Yet it this is like Ben Anderson right when he's
Speaker 4: writing about nations, says, no nation can be co terminous
Speaker 4: with all of humanity. And then when we combine the
Speaker 4: nation with the state, that's when we get if no
Speaker 4: nation can be co terminous with all humanity, and then
Speaker 4: the state is policing who and it's not part of
Speaker 4: the nation and expelling those are not like that, that's
Speaker 4: when we get what we see here, right, what we
Speaker 4: see here in the US.
Speaker 3: We talked about this a little bit earlier, but whenever
Speaker 3: I talked to Haitians or Dominicans of Haitian descent about
Speaker 3: immigration enforcement in their country, they pretty much tell me
Speaker 3: the same thing. So the Dominican government everyone black is Haitian.
Speaker 3: And we talked about and how the conception of Dominicanidad
Speaker 3: has become separate from the way that they view Haitians
Speaker 3: as black. Yeah, many civil society and human rights organizations
Speaker 3: have documented how the DGM uses racial profiling as a
Speaker 3: justification to detain pretty much whoever they want. It's got
Speaker 3: so bad that in twenty twenty two, the American State
Speaker 3: Department issued a travel warning for quote unquote darker skinned
Speaker 3: Americans about the risks of being swept up in the
Speaker 3: country's immigration crackdown. And to me at the time, having
Speaker 3: written about that, it's kind of incredible to see American
Speaker 3: agency be like, Hey, the racism this country is so bad,
Speaker 3: you should be on the lookout. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like you might not want to go exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's wild.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So the DGM routinely performs midnight immigration rates on
Speaker 3: Haitian communities, break down their doors and drag people kicking,
Speaker 3: screaming from their beds, and load them up on the
Speaker 3: repurposed cattle trucks and horse trucks that I was talking
Speaker 3: about earlier. There are usually about thirty or so people
Speaker 3: in those immigration trucks, the small ones pushed up against
Speaker 3: the metal bars. And I've seen this personally at the
Speaker 3: dr Haiti border, where they're taken from immigration detention centers
Speaker 3: and then dropped off and essentially forced to walk into
Speaker 3: the Haiti. When I was at the border in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three. The ones I saw and was able to
Speaker 3: speak to had grabbed everything that they could as they
Speaker 3: were getting detained, because they knew that it was possible
Speaker 3: they could never make it back. Some of these people
Speaker 3: included mothers carrying small children and babies. One worker who
Speaker 3: I spoke with worked in construction, and he claimed that
Speaker 3: he was being deported because his boss had called immigration
Speaker 3: enforcement on them because they were talking about getting paid more.
Speaker 4: Yeah, tail us all as time with a documented labor sadly.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and this is big in the sugar cane cutting
Speaker 3: regions as well, or at least it used to be. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And it's a kind of a recurring system because you know,
Speaker 3: they get deported, but there's not really any work or
Speaker 3: safety in some cases in Haiti, so they're forced to
Speaker 3: come back over the border to do the same job.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Many Haitians live in fear, hiding from immigration authorities as
Speaker 3: much as they can while trying to work to feed
Speaker 3: their families. It's especially bad for pregnant mothers who can't
Speaker 3: go to hospitals for fear of being swept up by
Speaker 3: immigration rates. There have been several women who were deported
Speaker 3: very quickly after being discharged, according to a report by
Speaker 3: the Guardian, and I've personally seen a pregnant mother with
Speaker 3: a small child forced across the dr Haiti border after
Speaker 3: being dumped there by DGM, similar to how the American
Speaker 3: government essentially created the Dominican Haiti border and shaped its
Speaker 3: border guard in the early nineteen hundreds. They also routinely
Speaker 3: provide training for several law enforcement agencies who enforce the
Speaker 3: Dominican immigration laws. For example, agencies from the Dominican Republic
Speaker 3: routinely received training from International Law Enforcement Academies, which are
Speaker 3: international police academies administered by the US State Department where
Speaker 3: US law enforcement trained police and other law enforcement agencies
Speaker 3: from other countries. A training schedule from twenty twenty four
Speaker 3: I found showed that the Dominican Republic participated in nine
Speaker 3: sessions throughout the years with agencies like ICE and CBP. However,
Speaker 3: when it comes to being trained by the US, no
Speaker 3: one beats the Querpo Especial Sado de Segrestre known as
Speaker 3: SESSFRONT or the Specialized Land Border Security Corps. They are
Speaker 3: in charge of securing and quote unquote protecting the Dominican
Speaker 3: border with Haiti. They are in arm of the military
Speaker 3: and were created in two thousand and six. That same year,
Speaker 3: unidentified quote unquote US experts reported that there were a
Speaker 3: quote series of weaknesses that will lead to all kinds
Speaker 3: of illicit activities along the border. According to a two
Speaker 3: thousand and six article from Dominican Today. For the same article,
Speaker 3: the military patrolled the area beforehand, but the study revealed
Speaker 3: the lack of and bad shape of the Dominican Armies facilities,
Speaker 3: the lack of training, logistics, weapons, vehicles, garments, as well
Speaker 3: as low wages and bad nutrition for these these soldiers.
Speaker 3: And I should say that's a quote from the Dominican
Speaker 3: Today's article, and I wanted to talk a little bit
Speaker 3: about the border before I explain it later on in
Speaker 3: more detail. But a lot of the border that I've
Speaker 3: been to between the Demaican Republic and Haiti is along
Speaker 3: the Massacre River where part of the Parsley massacre happened,
Speaker 3: and you essentially have this very big cement and iron
Speaker 3: and steel border wall going up that has completely separated
Speaker 3: this contiguous piece of land where people were once upon
Speaker 3: a time over one hundred years ago, able to more
Speaker 3: or less walk between and walk over without much restriction.
Speaker 3: At all, and you know the place where they've built
Speaker 3: the barrier. This was not like what you know whenever
Speaker 3: someone from Puerto Rico, whenever someone talks to me about
Speaker 3: the US border, I'm imagining the big iron wall throughout
Speaker 3: the desert. This, yeh, was not that. This was kind
Speaker 3: of very lush, green mangroves. They used to be one
Speaker 3: big forest, but now they created a bait strip of
Speaker 3: land that now separates that forest that once was won
Speaker 3: and then put the border wall there. So a lot
Speaker 3: of this modern history of collaboration between the US and
Speaker 3: the dr immigration enforcement is recorded in Todd Miller's Border
Speaker 3: Patrol Nation and Empire of Borders, both of which I
Speaker 3: recommend everyone go read. Yeah, Miller is great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, mid Thiss books are fantastic. I know, we both
Speaker 4: really enjoy them.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a real resource for anyone looking to understand the
Speaker 4: border and its history and like how we got to
Speaker 4: this situation. Wasn't hard to see it coming, actually, Yeah.
Speaker 3: And a lot of Orbitral Nation is from the early
Speaker 3: twenty tens too, so it was really kind of pressure
Speaker 3: in many ways.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very much. So, Like I remember, I remember reading
Speaker 4: that book and then like thinking about it a lot
Speaker 4: as I was in the Dominican Republic, and even when
Speaker 4: I was in Panama last year, like the Biden administration
Speaker 4: right was financing deportations from Panama of people who had
Speaker 4: just crossed a varian gap, but chiefly to Colombia, almost
Speaker 4: entirely Colombian young men. I literally watched these guys get
Speaker 4: like I watched a family who had known from the
Speaker 4: jungle right, and then we reconnected in La Jas Blancas,
Speaker 4: which is a reception center. Reception center is a pretty
Speaker 4: euphemistic term there. It's not a great place to be.
Speaker 4: I think it's closed now actually, but they would come
Speaker 4: and call out names and it was like, what's going on,
Speaker 4: Like maybe we're getting taken somewhere, like maybe this is
Speaker 4: they want to check out passports and then just start
Speaker 4: loading me into same thing like a flatbed truck. And
Speaker 4: I remember one guy like having to give his baby
Speaker 4: to his wife and I was there and he was like, Hey,
Speaker 4: what are they doing? And I was like I don't know, man,
Speaker 4: Like I don't know that. Some guy was like this
Speaker 4: is how they deport people. It was a very wow, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's horrible. And then his wife was just like standing
Speaker 4: there next to me and like I was horrible, Like
Speaker 4: I put my arm around her, and she was just
Speaker 4: sobbing and of course separated from her partner and the
Speaker 4: father of her child. But yeah, it's rough to think that.
Speaker 4: Then I went home and did my work and paid
Speaker 4: my taxes and paid my little share of that family
Speaker 4: getting torn apart. But yeah, that was that was Blue Team.
Speaker 4: There wasn't a drump thing like this is. The US
Speaker 4: has been trying to move that traumatic violence further and
Speaker 4: further from its population for a long time. That's what
Speaker 4: strong borders are, right, Strong borders of violence. Strong borders
Speaker 4: are tearing families apart. Strong borders are people dying. And
Speaker 4: there was an understanding shared by both parties that Americans
Speaker 4: don't like seeing dead people. They don't like seeing families
Speaker 4: torn apart, as we've seen in the last few years,
Speaker 4: a couple of years, and so they have sought to
Speaker 4: move that violence further away from the metropol rather than
Speaker 4: stopping doing the violence.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. Miller talks a lot about this in his
Speaker 3: book Right Where. Part of the US's internal migration policy
Speaker 3: as it relates to foreign policy, is that if you
Speaker 3: can stop migrants from coming into the US at another border.
Speaker 3: That means that they won't be able to reach their border,
Speaker 3: right yeah. An academic who described it to Todd Miller
Speaker 3: as kind of border sets in ways that the borders go.
Speaker 4: There, Yeah, like clusters or something, right yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It was a dude who he's like a veteran and
Speaker 4: he was like in Afghanistan and saw border patrol out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the way that better than that person explains it
Speaker 3: is that these borders are created in such a way
Speaker 3: to keep people from flowing into the United States, but
Speaker 3: able for people inside of the United States to more
Speaker 3: very easily leave them and pass through them. Right. So,
Speaker 3: for example, let's say a migrant from Haiti wanted to
Speaker 3: go into the US, they would be faced with an
Speaker 3: incredibly uphill battle of passing several borders. It might be
Speaker 3: the border from Haiti into the Dominican Republic, than into
Speaker 3: Puerto Rico, or it might be Haiti to some Latin
Speaker 3: American countries, then a several Central American countries, and then
Speaker 3: onto the US southern border. Right yeah. But versus let's
Speaker 3: say if I wanted to go to Haiti, it would
Speaker 3: be pretty incredibly easy for me to go there, right,
Speaker 3: and this is you know what we see.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the way that these this mechanism is constructed for
Speaker 3: the in group to be able to move freely around
Speaker 3: the world and the out group to have an incredibly
Speaker 3: hard time actually coming into the US.
Speaker 4: My friend Erica from Alosta, Alada like to say, we
Speaker 4: already have open borders. We already have no borders only
Speaker 4: for some people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And of course I'd be remiss not to
Speaker 3: mention that capital flows very easily through borders as if
Speaker 3: they do not exist. Yeah, because they don't for money.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: As Miller lays out an Empire Borders post nine to eleven,
Speaker 3: the US adopted a very strong policy of considering terrorism
Speaker 3: against American interest quote over there needing to be regarded
Speaker 3: in the same way as terrorism over here, right, And
Speaker 3: of course terrorism the way that the US government sees
Speaker 3: it is probably extremely different from the way that you
Speaker 3: and I see it, James. Yes, So this ideology essentially
Speaker 3: pushed the American border everywhere because everything that the US
Speaker 3: didn't agree with was a threat to its interest. This
Speaker 3: is essentially kind of the same reasoning as a Monroe doctrine,
Speaker 3: and the American Empire just massaged it for the modern
Speaker 3: world in some ways. This is why international collaboration between
Speaker 3: American immigration enforcement and border security agencies his skyrocketed since
Speaker 3: the dawn of the millennium, to the point that CBP
Speaker 3: agents have traveled around the world to show countries how
Speaker 3: to enforce their country's borders so that people inside of
Speaker 3: those countries wanting to leave and reach the United States
Speaker 3: borders are never able to do. So. We talked a
Speaker 3: little bit about this, I can't remember if it was
Speaker 3: on air or off air, about how Bavino did that
Speaker 3: in Honduras.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right, that was something I found recently. I
Speaker 4: was reading some document about this border of externalization and
Speaker 4: he's one of the people interviewed. Yeah, it's like when
Speaker 4: he was in bor Tech, Right, Bavino was a member
Speaker 4: of bor Tech and they were going out on patrol
Speaker 4: with I guess, I don't know Hondoras has border patrol
Speaker 4: or I coudn't quite know what the structure they're under is,
Speaker 4: but they were going out on patrol with him, and
Speaker 4: then like the bor Tech guy so armed and running
Speaker 4: around but not technically not the ones making arrests. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Like you can read this in the Miller books. But
Speaker 4: this is a thing that the US does all over
Speaker 4: the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And Miller traveled to a lot of countries where
Speaker 3: people were agents of their countries border security apparatus or
Speaker 3: law or an agency. We're like, yeah, I've been trained
Speaker 3: by the US of course.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like talking about like the Kaibiles.
Speaker 3: Like in.
Speaker 4: Anyway, everyone should read the book, kind of recount the book.
Speaker 4: It's a good book.
Speaker 3: So if you look at the border enforcement or immigration
Speaker 3: agencies around the world, you'll find that they may look
Speaker 3: like the United States because they are modeling themselves off
Speaker 3: of the trainers that train them or help shape their creation.
Speaker 3: Says FRONT takes after its border patrol big brother in
Speaker 3: many ways, but one of the most salient is in
Speaker 3: the wall that they patrol. As I mentioned a little
Speaker 3: bit earlier, in twenty twenty two, the Dominican Republic started
Speaker 3: construction of a Mexico US style border wall that, if
Speaker 3: it's finished, would span almost half of the border with Haiti.
Speaker 3: When the project is completed, it will be the second
Speaker 3: longest border wall in the Americas, the first being the
Speaker 3: Mexico US Wall. It is supposed to be high tech,
Speaker 3: containing a series of cameras, radars, and drones that are
Speaker 3: supposed to run the length of the wall. This wall,
Speaker 3: like many other border walls, has done intense environmental damage
Speaker 3: along the course of the border, particularly to the mangroves
Speaker 3: that run along the border where the wall is being built.
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty three, I visited Dahabong, a town in
Speaker 3: the northern section of dr Haiti border, to report on
Speaker 3: the Dominican Republic's immigration enforcement apparatus. For myself. The Hobong
Speaker 3: is where the Cessfront has a very important base, and
Speaker 3: as I mentioned earlier, it's a place where a lot
Speaker 3: of the violence of the Parsley massacre took place. Tessafront's
Speaker 3: base in the Hobong is painted in a beige brown
Speaker 3: camouflage pattern that makes it stick out like a sore
Speaker 3: foam against the green forest background where it's stationed. However,
Speaker 3: it does blend into that strip of land where they've
Speaker 3: cut out to make the border wall. You know, in
Speaker 3: many ways the government tries to reshape the land in
Speaker 3: nature to fit its image.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's kind of the same here, Like that's in
Speaker 4: the desert this weekend and I was like climbing up
Speaker 4: into mountains there, and you can look down at the
Speaker 4: border wall and it's like a it's like a scar
Speaker 4: across the landscape. You can for miles as far as
Speaker 4: you can see it. So looks like somebody sliced through
Speaker 4: this in this case, this pristine desert landscape, right, And yeah,
Speaker 4: I can see it being only worse in these areas
Speaker 4: where like it's so lush and green.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, from aerial drone images that I've seen of
Speaker 3: the border, it definitely looks like a kind of sand
Speaker 3: colored scar, especially in that the Habong area where you
Speaker 3: have green on both sides and then that sand color
Speaker 3: line running through it. Yeah, so the Dahabon border crossing
Speaker 3: is extremely close to cessfront space there. When I was there,
Speaker 3: the border between the two countries was officially closed because
Speaker 3: of a dispute over the canalization of the Massacre River.
Speaker 3: Haitians needed the water for agriculture along the border, but
Speaker 3: the Meinican officials said that the canalization would take water
Speaker 3: away from their own purposes. A couple weeks after I
Speaker 3: was there, they opened up the border again, which was
Speaker 3: extremely necessary because border towns like Dahawong and Juanaminthe, which
Speaker 3: is the town on the Haitian side rely on each
Speaker 3: other a lot for trade, and this has been that
Speaker 3: way since time immemorial in that region. Right, the binational
Speaker 3: market in Da Howong is pretty much the only place
Speaker 3: where Haitians are legally allowed to enter, but they have
Speaker 3: to leave the same day they came in. So essentially
Speaker 3: this giant market, and there is a steel wall that
Speaker 3: runs along the outer perimeter of it, which is where
Speaker 3: you have cess front border guards. So if you pass
Speaker 3: through the border cross saying you do the whole like
Speaker 3: immigration check, you're able to go into the market. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you could essentially do like a circle around it,
Speaker 3: so you're able to go into the market and then
Speaker 3: you leave the backway which connects to another border crossing.
Speaker 4: Oh so you're like you're in like a like a bubble.
Speaker 3: Yeah, essentially like that you yeah, okay, Yeah, essentially it's
Speaker 3: crazy that they're like going that hard to be like
Speaker 3: we want your money, we just don't want you exactly exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And it's really the it really shows that the hypocrisy
Speaker 3: of these these border systems, because you know they're yeah,
Speaker 3: these two towns are extremely reliant on one another, but
Speaker 3: the countries that represent both towns are like, no, we
Speaker 3: need to enforce this this border right yeah. So yeah, this,
Speaker 3: this market in the Hubbong is where a lot of
Speaker 3: people on the Haiti side of the border are able
Speaker 3: to buy and sell a lot of stuff they wouldn't
Speaker 3: otherwise have access to. Sure. So the bridge that runs
Speaker 3: over the Massacre River that connects the Hobong to what
Speaker 3: I mean is within feet of the national and like
Speaker 3: I mentioned, all encircled by says Funt's guards. Any Haitian
Speaker 3: who would try to pass that fence without going past
Speaker 3: the official checkpoint would likely be detained and deported immediately
Speaker 3: if they're caught by the border guards. And as we know,
Speaker 3: even if a border presents itself as extremely rigid, a
Speaker 3: lot of it is for show. At least in my
Speaker 3: experience with the Dr Haiti border, right, a lot of
Speaker 3: it is theater security theater. Yeah. Yeah. So when I
Speaker 3: was there, I spent the better part of my time
Speaker 3: there just watching DGM trucks bring dozens of people to
Speaker 3: the border, then watched as sysfront guards herded them out
Speaker 3: of the Dominican Republic.
Speaker 4: Jesus, Yeah, it was.
Speaker 3: Incredibly inhumane and heartbreaking. I remember taking this picture of
Speaker 3: a little girl with a suitcase who was just and
Speaker 3: this wasn't a person being deported by the drugs, but
Speaker 3: this was a Haitian person who was leaving. Of a
Speaker 3: little girl just waiting for her dad with a suitcase.
Speaker 3: Jesus out of that. That image really sticks in my mind. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So the thing about the border, as I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 3: even if it seems to be incredibly hard, it's still
Speaker 3: pourus in several places. When I was in the bateyas
Speaker 3: in the sugar producing regions, which are the little towns
Speaker 3: that they have or little settlements that they have inside
Speaker 3: of the sugar cane maze, I spoke to someone who
Speaker 3: had been detained outside of the sugar cane areas without
Speaker 3: their work permit and then deported. His family had to
Speaker 3: pay a buskung essentially what the US would call a
Speaker 3: coyote to bring them back across the border. However, this
Speaker 3: forced him into what's essentially debt bondage to the buskung
Speaker 3: because the worker couldn't really pay because of the sugar
Speaker 3: plantations pay a pittance, so they were essentially in a
Speaker 3: recursive cycle of some part of my money has to
Speaker 3: go to the buskung and then whatever's left has to
Speaker 3: go to paying for my family and my needs, and
Speaker 3: it was never enough. Sadly. Yeah. So, one of the
Speaker 3: news videos that I watched as part of research for
Speaker 3: this was a PBS like a seven minute clip where
Speaker 3: they talked to a Haitian man as they were being
Speaker 3: deported along the border, and when they went to talk
Speaker 3: to the guy's family the next day, the guy who
Speaker 3: had been deported was there because he crossed the border
Speaker 3: through the river overnight, and you can hear the astonishment
Speaker 3: in the narrator's voice, even though that script reading was
Speaker 3: probably weeks later. And it's just an example of how
Speaker 3: these borders are more porous than the state wants them
Speaker 3: to be and wants them to appear to be. So
Speaker 3: I wanted to start finishing off by mentioning that the
Speaker 3: Dominican government is now actively collaborating with the Trump administration's
Speaker 3: deportation campaign by agreeing to accept for country deporties from
Speaker 3: the US under the initiative. This agreement, as I hope
Speaker 3: I've shown throughout the course of this episode, is another
Speaker 3: action in a line line of collaboration between the dr
Speaker 3: and the US when it comes to immigration enforcement. Noticeably,
Speaker 3: the agreement leaves out Haitian nationals, and the US is
Speaker 3: supposed to provide funding to ensure that these deportees have
Speaker 3: a quote unquote adequate conditions per the Global Detention Project,
Speaker 3: which really remains to be seen if that's the case.
Speaker 3: But if the conditions in the current immigration detention centers
Speaker 3: are anything to go by, I'm really not holding out
Speaker 3: hope that they're adequate conditions. So before I finished the episode,
Speaker 3: I want to return to Hulletts stuff in Haina, a
Speaker 3: facility systematically created with a deep racism towards the Haitian
Speaker 3: migrants who make up the vast majority of the people
Speaker 3: detained there. Hallet was killed by a system that the
Speaker 3: United States helped create and then shaped. The probability that
Speaker 3: the DGM agents who were at Haina at the time
Speaker 3: that Hullet died, the probability that they were trained by
Speaker 3: US officials is not zero. And right now we're seeing
Speaker 3: the immigration sets that the US helped train outside of
Speaker 3: the country boomerang back towards US. What I thought was
Speaker 3: only a thing of the Dominican Republic, where you have
Speaker 3: a kind of paramilitary style immigration force raiding everyone insight
Speaker 3: and you know, kind of systematically terrorizing and population has
Speaker 3: now become a common reality for millions of people inside
Speaker 3: of the US.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I hope that we live long enough to see these
Speaker 3: border walls become ruins.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, me too.
Speaker 4: I often thought like it would be a good book project,
Speaker 4: just got to look at border walls. Absolutely, I just
Speaker 4: don't particularly want to do it. Fucking suck. That's a
Speaker 4: human experience. But yeah, like, if you've lived in the
Speaker 4: US in the last twenty years, you've paid for border
Speaker 4: walls and border violence all over the world, and in
Speaker 4: Europe to be fair, like the e the EU it
Speaker 4: does this too, Right, if you've lived in the global North,
Speaker 4: you probably have a hand in the death of migrants
Speaker 4: just through paying your taxes, and that fucking sucks. It
Speaker 4: shouldn't be that way. Absolutely, Yeah, it's tragic. I want
Speaker 4: to thank the person who reached out to us to
Speaker 4: share this story with us as well, because, like I
Speaker 4: wouldn't have been aware of it otherwise, there's so much
Speaker 4: horrible shit happening in the immigration system that you know,
Speaker 4: we miss things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So thank you for doing that, absolutely, thank you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you for sharing that with us. It's a
Speaker 4: it's a long time. I used to used to ride
Speaker 4: my bicycle around the Dominican Republic a lot when I
Speaker 4: was there, and there it was always nice to go
Speaker 4: out to those areas, get get out of the Santa
Speaker 4: Domingo and like, let's see how folks live in these
Speaker 4: rural areas. But then also to be reminded of how
Speaker 4: two tiered rural existence was, especially for people like you say,
Speaker 4: Clent and Caine, Like it's it's a brutal way to
Speaker 4: make a living too, like hard backbreaking work under the
Speaker 4: hot sun, like a machete, Like swinging a machete all day,
Speaker 4: Like you can fuck yourself up pretty easily.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they'll do this for like between ten to fourteen
Speaker 3: hours a day. Day after they you know, it's just
Speaker 3: them and sometimes a big hat and some clothes to
Speaker 3: protect them from the sun and a little bit of water.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's like backbreaking labor that they're they're working on.
Speaker 3: And you know, historically there was a movement of Haitian
Speaker 3: labors from the Haiti to the dr who would come
Speaker 3: for the sapa, which is the sugar cane cutting season. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and then they would leave after about six months. But
Speaker 3: as the border hardened, those people had to make decision
Speaker 3: whether they stayed in Haiti or stayed in the place
Speaker 3: where they could get work. And a lot of them
Speaker 3: decided that they had to stay in the places where
Speaker 3: they could get work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, much the same as it is in the United States, right,
Speaker 4: like got of seasoned agricultural labor is what he did,
Speaker 4: the same, of course, Yeah, but it might be kind
Speaker 4: of that guy you're saying, you look pot back the
Speaker 4: next day over the river. Reminded me of that Woody
Speaker 4: Guthrie song where he's talking about the the Los Gatos
Speaker 4: Canyon plane crash and how all those people had Many
Speaker 4: of those people had traveled multiple time times from their
Speaker 4: homes in Mexico to the US whenever there was an
Speaker 4: expense so they couldn't cover with like whatever they could
Speaker 4: sell from their estantia. Right, they would come come across
Speaker 4: in labor, or young people come across in labor in
Speaker 4: order to establish themselves in life, and then go back
Speaker 4: and then if they needed they had to expend their children.
Speaker 4: Whether they would come back in labor some more or
Speaker 4: some people would just come back in labor every year
Speaker 4: and then one time on the way back. They're plane
Speaker 4: crashed and they all died. Like it's uh, yeah, it's
Speaker 4: so much needless suffering that happens because of borders. It's
Speaker 4: rough to think about people in those detention centers like
Speaker 4: that always kind of makes me sad. Yeah, having spent
Speaker 4: a lot of time around them, it's pretty fucking miserable
Speaker 4: in there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, especially like for me. You know, I became
Speaker 3: a Dominican citizen in twenty twenty four after I had
Speaker 3: been there, and I always think about, you know, I
Speaker 3: was seeing these people, some of which they had spent
Speaker 3: their entire lives in the American Republic and knew nothing
Speaker 3: else outside of it, but they were stateless because of
Speaker 3: this this twenty thirteen decision, right, And I was thinking,
Speaker 3: you know, they've spent their whole lives here, and I
Speaker 3: have more of a right to citizenship than them, just
Speaker 3: because my mom was born there and then left when
Speaker 3: she was a small child. Like to me, I don't know,
Speaker 3: it was an extremely bleak, bleak thing to realize just
Speaker 3: how how the state prefers some people under it and
Speaker 3: then others not. You know, it was, yeah, I always think, like,
Speaker 3: you know, this is this is a person who is
Speaker 3: a Dominican, like this is so so like culturally more
Speaker 3: Dominican than I could ever be. But I'm the one
Speaker 3: who legally is entitled to citizenship.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, I used think about that a lot more
Speaker 4: like I would go there and like we'd try and
Speaker 4: have Haitian folks come over to join us. The time,
Speaker 4: I always said, helping with some diabetes education, no properly
Speaker 4: diabetes education for folks there. And how much harder it
Speaker 4: was for the Haitian folks, even if they in some
Speaker 4: cases that they had family who were there, they had
Speaker 4: spent most of their lives there, like like for them,
Speaker 4: it was so much harder than it was for me, who, like,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm just a guy from Britain, like, like,
Speaker 4: I have no stake in this at all, but I
Speaker 4: could you know, no one batted Nilid when you fly
Speaker 4: into the airport there and come on through that you
Speaker 4: don't even need a visa.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I also think like, and this might be
Speaker 3: getting too too into the weeds, but my great great
Speaker 3: grandparents had to leave Spain because of the monarchy, and
Speaker 3: they were part of the people who were or we
Speaker 3: or my family falls into part of the people who
Speaker 3: get citizenship through the le memory Storica.
Speaker 4: Oh well, okay, yeah, I've.
Speaker 3: Seen videos of so many videos and read so much
Speaker 3: about migrants trying desperately to reach Europe, and that to
Speaker 3: me is like, you know, I get to legally become
Speaker 3: a citizen because some guy that I've never met had
Speaker 3: to leave Spain, And I'm just like, this is crazy,
Speaker 3: Like I wish I could just pass it on to
Speaker 3: somebody else, because I you know, they need it, and
Speaker 3: you know, some people who've lived there in their entire
Speaker 3: lives deserve it like much more than I ever could, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, it's such a strange lottery that gives you
Speaker 4: the right to, yeah, to go there, beside their work
Speaker 4: there whatever, And someone who deeply wants to and whose
Speaker 4: life will be in danger if they weren't able to,
Speaker 4: who might die trying to, can't have it, and they're
Speaker 4: very determined to keep it from them, Like it's such
Speaker 4: a stupid hierarchy or however they want to put it,
Speaker 4: like system. But yeah, unfortunately, it happens all over the
Speaker 4: world and it's only getting worse. Right, Like, as we're
Speaker 4: recording this, people in Belfast are fucking attacking people who specifically,
Speaker 4: I guess, like I spoke to some people in Belfast
Speaker 4: today and they were like, yeah, it's not all of us.
Speaker 4: It's a small group of loyalists who are very, very
Speaker 4: racist and have been for a very long time. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but nonetheless, right, like a there's a crime think sticker
Speaker 4: that I think of a lot that says the border
Speaker 4: doesn't protect you, it controls you. And like maybe Americans
Speaker 4: are realizing that now that border patrol and murdering US
Speaker 4: citizens in US cities. You know, I said this the
Speaker 4: other day, and we're talking about Gregory Bavino, Like there
Speaker 4: is no reforming this shit. Like the nature of what
Speaker 4: we have done for decades with borders is that it
Speaker 4: kills people who did nothing wrong. And if we want
Speaker 4: to get away from the place where at now when
Speaker 4: this shit needs to be torn down, all of it.
Speaker 4: The way they're building border wall now, it's very clearly
Speaker 4: with the understanding that they just need to build as
Speaker 4: much as possible because no administration will ever tear it down. Absolutely,
Speaker 4: That's what they did in the first truanp administration too.
Speaker 4: They literally skip the hard parts. I remember being out
Speaker 4: there in late twenty twenty, even after August, September, October, November, December,
Speaker 4: and they're like skipping the difficult helly bits just just
Speaker 4: to put more miles of wall in. And like they're
Speaker 4: building now. They're kind of fellings those gaps and just
Speaker 4: building wall in places where we never thought they would
Speaker 4: because they have fun, limited money, and like they're doing
Speaker 4: it because they were right in twenty twenty, right, Biden
Speaker 4: didn't tear it down. In fact, he repaired and maintained
Speaker 4: and continued to build it. Like we need to really
Speaker 4: think about rolling this shit back if we ever want
Speaker 4: to make sure that this can't happen again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, the depths of the mechanism have to be
Speaker 3: destroyed because, like you said, there's there's no reforming it.
Speaker 3: And I specifically use like kind of mechanism or machine
Speaker 3: to describe it, right, because even if you think that
Speaker 3: the only thing it applies to is you know, immigration
Speaker 3: enforcement in the US and seeing ICE and CBP, you know,
Speaker 3: terrorizing the streets. Like I hope I have evidenced in
Speaker 3: the episode, this is this is a global project. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're not only doing immigration enforcement in the US, They're
Speaker 3: helping and sometimes do it immigration enforcement outside in you know,
Speaker 3: if they could, they would probably go to every country
Speaker 3: on Earth and be like, hey, this is how you
Speaker 3: hearden your borders and do immigration enforcement. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just say it's a part of colonialism. It's
Speaker 4: spreading our violence around the world. Well, thank you for
Speaker 4: sharing that story with us. Where can people find you
Speaker 4: they want to read more of your work? Follow you online.
Speaker 3: I'm at baco to xl V a q u e
Speaker 3: r O two XL on all social media, and I'm
Speaker 3: also actually working on a series of many documentaries about
Speaker 3: immigrant communities in Puerto Rico for a local website here
Speaker 3: called Miami Jonas, and I am an editor at the
Speaker 3: Latino Newsletter, where I have been reporting a lot of
Speaker 3: immigration enforcement here in Puerto Rico. Yeah, thank you, James,
Speaker 3: thank you for thank you for sharing it with us.
Speaker 4: We'll look forward to doing for you against hun.
Speaker 6: With scenes of the genocide and Palestine plastering or screens
Speaker 6: over the past few years and increasing analysis of the settler,
Speaker 6: colonial and supremacist route of Israel's violence, it's having thinking
Speaker 6: more about the concept of settler colonialism. Many people know
Speaker 6: now about Israel's settler colonial past and it's parallels with
Speaker 6: the US Australia, South Africa, and Canada. Those are common comparisons,
Speaker 6: but few know much about the settler colonial origins of Liberia,
Speaker 6: which has gained a little attention as people have begun
Speaker 6: learning more about the concept. So I'd like to take
Speaker 6: a look at Liberia, Israel and the parallels of settler colonialism.
Speaker 6: This is it can happen here. I'm Andrew Sage Andrewism
Speaker 6: on YouTube, and I'm joined once again.
Speaker 4: By James Again. I'm excited to learn about this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm mainly looking ato parallels through the lens of
Speaker 6: analysis provided by historian Patrick Wolfe in his famous article
Speaker 6: Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Nature, with other
Speaker 6: historical resources and articles linked in the show notes pulls off.
Speaker 6: Before we start making comparisons, I'll need to introduce the
Speaker 6: concept for those unfamiliar. Settler colonialism is, in one sentence,
Speaker 6: an ongoing structural process where outsiders permanently occupy indigenous lands
Speaker 6: to build new societies. Wolf notes that invasion is a structure,
Speaker 6: not an event. He calls setler colonialism inherently eliminatory but
Speaker 6: not invariably genocidal, and calls elimination an organizing principle of
Speaker 6: setler colonial society rather than a one off occurrence, Unlike
Speaker 6: the kind of exploitation colonialism, which seeks to extract resources
Speaker 6: and leave settlers come to state to claim land. As
Speaker 6: Wolf quotes, the we bird rose to get in the
Speaker 6: way of settler colonization. All the native has to do
Speaker 6: is stay at home. Settlers tell various stories to justify
Speaker 6: their eliminatory ambitions race, religion, ethnicity, civilization status, but it
Speaker 6: really comes down to territory. Settlers want to establish lastin
Speaker 6: autonomous communities by eliminating the existing indigenous way of life
Speaker 6: and replacing it with the colonizers culture, economy, and political order.
Speaker 6: Wolf says that settler communism destroys to replace point into
Speaker 6: the quite visceral example of Israeli settlers of root in
Speaker 6: ancient olive trees and replacing them with foreign fruit trees,
Speaker 6: or as Israel often euphromizes it, making the desert bloom.
Speaker 6: Elimination doesn't have to mean the wholesale slaughter of indigenous people,
Speaker 6: though frontier homicide tends to be a trend, but elimination
Speaker 6: seeks to dissolve indigenous people and their way of life
Speaker 6: through various means expulsion, encouraged population mixing and forced assimilation, enclosure,
Speaker 6: child abduction, missions and board in schools, religious conversion, marginalization,
Speaker 6: labor exploitation, and more often several at once. Settler clunalism
Speaker 6: tends to remain deeply embedded in the laws and institutions
Speaker 6: of the countries foundly that way. But Woth points to
Speaker 6: a curious side effect of settler clunalism, which is the
Speaker 6: way that settler society subsequently attempts to recuperate indigenity in
Speaker 6: order to express its independence from the mother country. He
Speaker 6: references Australia's incorporation of indigenous symbolism for one example. Australia, Canada,
Speaker 6: the US, New Zealand, South Africa, French, Algeria, Rhodesia, Liberia,
Speaker 6: and Israel are all examples of contemporary or historical settler
Speaker 6: colonial societies, but I'm focused on the parallels between just
Speaker 6: two of them, Liberia and Israel. In eighteen eighteen, the
Speaker 6: American Colonization Society scouted what was then known as the
Speaker 6: Grain Coast and deemed it a suitable location for their
Speaker 6: planned African colony, meant to be a home for formerly
Speaker 6: enslaved people in the US foreign emancipation as well as
Speaker 6: free black people that already existed in the territory. The
Speaker 6: first successful settlement was established in eighteen twenty two after
Speaker 6: an agreement with the local chiefs signed in eighteen twenty
Speaker 6: one granted the society possession of Cape Mesurado. Now, some
Speaker 6: free black Americans had advocated returned to Africa projects long
Speaker 6: before the ACS was even founded, so we shouldn't erase
Speaker 6: the agency in this. But the ACS was led by
Speaker 6: a mix of white abolitionists and white and slavers who
Speaker 6: mostly just wanted to rid themselves the free black population
Speaker 6: in the US. Most free black Americans opposed project, either
Speaker 6: initially or in time. Those Black Americans that did participate
Speaker 6: came to be known as Americo Liberians. They carried on
Speaker 6: the American Colonization Society's narrative that the establishment of Liberia
Speaker 6: was a return to the promised Land and exodus, a
Speaker 6: formally enslaved people return into the ancestral homeland to establish
Speaker 6: an independent land of freedom, and as a minority in
Speaker 6: that land, the American Liberians would establish a government and
Speaker 6: various settlements they ruled that would attempt to expand Liberia's
Speaker 6: initial territory and to bring civilization and Christianity to the natives.
Speaker 6: Those that went were clearly heavily influenced by their American background,
Speaker 6: viewing themselves culturally, socially, and educationally superior to the Native
Speaker 6: African ethnic groups they encountered. After a few decades of
Speaker 6: support from the American colonization Society, independence was declared in
Speaker 6: eighteen forty seven, but only recognized by the US in
Speaker 6: eighteen sixty two, so very quickly fell into a deteriorating
Speaker 6: economic situation marked by heavy foreign deck obligations culminating in
Speaker 6: multinational intervention and oversight in the early nineteen hundreds, as
Speaker 6: well as the establishment of a million eco rubber plantation
Speaker 6: for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which would exploit
Speaker 6: the indigenous people in Liberia for decades to come.
Speaker 4: Any time is setting up a rubber plantation, I feel
Speaker 4: like that should be a massive red flag that you're
Speaker 4: one of the bad guys.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: People who have been subject to settle a colonial violence
Speaker 4: and to like racially motivated sound like a cop, and
Speaker 4: I say racially motivated violence like the violence to inherent
Speaker 4: and racism and capitalism. The idea that the way to
Speaker 4: kind of right those wrongs is to become the one
Speaker 4: doing the violence, not the one subject to the violence.
Speaker 4: It's see in the Anmar, right like, a country that
Speaker 4: was brutally colonized by the country that I was born in,
Speaker 4: but in which essentially today the state of Myanma is
Speaker 4: it's self a colonial entity.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: We have a number of different ethnic groups, dozens of
Speaker 4: ethnic groups within Meanma, and we have one ethnic group
Speaker 4: which is dominated governance, and which has dominated the military,
Speaker 4: and which has used the tool of the state to
Speaker 4: extract resources, labor, human bodies from the other ethnic groups,
Speaker 4: right Like, because they've gone from being colonized to effectively
Speaker 4: being like a contiguous empire, and they've adopted the logic
Speaker 4: of the colonizer in doing so.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Unfortunately, this is a very common phenomenon.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 6: This is why I tend to view nationalism, even so
Speaker 6: called Third world nationalisms, as dead ends, as explicitly counter revolutionary,
Speaker 6: as against the liberation.
Speaker 3: Of all people.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because that construction of the nationisted really of states
Speaker 6: in general, tends to come with the establishment of certain
Speaker 6: superiors and inferiors, you know, subordinates and rulers. Yeah, and
Speaker 6: the privilege in of certain religions, ethnic groups, skin tones,
Speaker 6: whatever the case may be. Even within so called ethnically
Speaker 6: homogeneous societies.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can even.
Speaker 6: Look at Japan, right, which is sulted by you know,
Speaker 6: supremacists of all flavors as an ethnically homogenous society. Even
Speaker 6: within that society there's you know, colorism, and there's also
Speaker 6: the exploitation and marginalization of certain groups within that territory,
Speaker 6: such as the I knew.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think about like nationalism, and there was a
Speaker 4: time when there was a movement to try and use
Speaker 4: nationalism as a positive thing, the have a brotherhood of nations, right,
Speaker 4: It existed within catal anti fascism in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 4: like we are a nation which has been suppressed by
Speaker 4: the state, so we will build a nationalism that doesn't
Speaker 4: suppress people.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: It's sort the same thing with Kurdish people, right, with
Speaker 4: the Kurdish Freedom movement. Their understanding, i would say, was
Speaker 4: more advanced than the Catalans, and that like their their
Speaker 4: analysis was what we are a nation that has been
Speaker 4: suppressed by multiple states, and therefore we will build society
Speaker 4: without the state in order to link create well where
Speaker 4: there is no boots, so you can't tread on people, right.
Speaker 4: I still believe that that is possible, but like in
Speaker 4: the last six months, you know, I've seen people back
Speaker 4: away from that within Kurdistan, right and start talking again
Speaker 4: about the Brotherhood. People's was a mistake. They feel betrayed.
Speaker 4: I don't think those people would consider themselves to be
Speaker 4: super but they feel that their project didn't work. That
Speaker 4: really makes me sad. Ultimately, the Brotherhood of Nations like
Speaker 4: didn't succeed in Syria, right, and we've seen it effectively
Speaker 4: at like Sirious Dog or the Syrian Arab Republic after
Speaker 4: hundreds of thousands of people gave their lives for it
Speaker 4: to be a place where everyone could be free. And yeah,
Speaker 4: it really saddens me to see that that, like, like
Speaker 4: I really hoped for something better, this idea of Brotherhood
Speaker 4: of Nations, which acknowledges people's difference, but it doesn't create
Speaker 4: a hierarchy. But we're not. We haven't made it quite
Speaker 4: work yet, I guess. And because we live in a
Speaker 4: world right where they appeal to nationalism and bigotry and
Speaker 4: the idea, like specifically in Syria, I think that like
Speaker 4: Arabs should not be equal to Kurds was appealing. Through
Speaker 4: making that appeal, this project was able to be sabotaged.
Speaker 6: I guess now, I think that while we're still fortunate
Speaker 6: different approaches to liberation, trying to figure out what that
Speaker 6: looks like, we've seen the truck record of nationalism, is
Speaker 6: my point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's fair like it's it's
Speaker 4: been used much more as a force for dividing us,
Speaker 4: in making us hate each other, than it has been
Speaker 4: for creating a world where we can all live together
Speaker 4: alongside each other.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is a digression, but in my experience in Trinidad,
Speaker 6: what I've noticed is that their efforts to kind of construct,
Speaker 6: and they have been since the establishment of Trinidad as
Speaker 6: an independent country Trance Tobago as an independent country in
Speaker 6: nineteen sixty two, first led by doctor Eric Williams, there
Speaker 6: were efforts to kind of build this kind of cross
Speaker 6: racial overarching like Trinidadi and Trindigo Nian identity, which I
Speaker 6: mean I use that to trind Diego in some of
Speaker 6: my work, but Tobago is kind of attached to Trinidad
Speaker 6: against their will. And even now if there are people
Speaker 6: who try to push that trend bag or unity. But
Speaker 6: there are also people who will assert, particularly people from Tobago,
Speaker 6: who will assert that, yeah, no, we want greater autonomy,
Speaker 6: we want even independence from Trinidad. And so for maybe
Speaker 6: certain people unifying purposes that would use the term. But
Speaker 6: I try not to give off that impression that I'm
Speaker 6: using it for kind of unifying nationalism, because I think
Speaker 6: with the nationalism of such a young, quote unquote nation,
Speaker 6: a nation of nations, of various people from all over
Speaker 6: the world, mostly brought here against their will. Yeah, they
Speaker 6: are these competitions I think over the proportionality of the
Speaker 6: representation of different ratio ethnic groups, the competitions over who
Speaker 6: gets to define what this Trinidadian nation is, what it
Speaker 6: means to be a Trinidadian, and efforts to kind of
Speaker 6: balance or imbalance the proportion of representation depending on which
Speaker 6: government is in power. You know, our current government is
Speaker 6: very much oriented toward a kind of Indo Trinardi and
Speaker 6: Indian focus and have in many ways marginalized all other groups,
Speaker 6: maligned all other groups, disrespected all other groups within the
Speaker 6: country to kind of elevate the sense of or get
Speaker 6: back for the Indian people in Trona and I don't
Speaker 6: want to go too much down that road talking about that,
Speaker 6: but it's just another example to me or the frustration
Speaker 6: and misdirection that comes with investment in nationalism, which currently
Speaker 6: holds a monopoly both here and much of the world
Speaker 6: on narratives of liberation and anti colonial resistance. So Ima
Speaker 6: streeted as an anticlonial resistance is synonymous with nationalism. Yeah,
Speaker 6: as though the two cannot be distinguished.
Speaker 4: It should be a relic of the twentieth century, right,
Speaker 4: like it was heavily tied to, like state socialism.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: The idea of the way that we fight the wrongs
Speaker 4: of colonialism is through creating post colonial nation states and
Speaker 4: ignoring the fact that many of those states, many of
Speaker 4: the boundaries they find themselves within, include a diverse range
Speaker 4: of identities, like you said, of many people, including those
Speaker 4: against their will to those places, and many of those
Speaker 4: identities don't line up with the national identities, and it
Speaker 4: almost always results in a change of the oppressure rather
Speaker 4: than the absence of oppression.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean you could literally just look at the entire
Speaker 6: history of independent Nigeria. Yes, the one very clear example
Speaker 6: of that. Yeah, But getting back to the right. I
Speaker 6: don't see an explicitly titled ideology behind the founding of
Speaker 6: Liberia beyond settler colunalism, I suppose, but the implicit ideology
Speaker 6: was the supremacy of the elite American Liberian way of
Speaker 6: life and the right to that territory and the label
Speaker 6: and the resources of its people. While the elite would
Speaker 6: themselves be subordinate to the global catalyst order dictated particularly
Speaker 6: by America and Europe, so the supremacy the American Liberian
Speaker 6: elite did not place them in a position of supremacy
Speaker 6: in the global stage. They were still in a subordinate
Speaker 6: position in some ways. Turning out to Israel. The political
Speaker 6: Zionist movement emerged in the late nineteenth century Europe amid
Speaker 6: programs and a failure to achieve equality for Jews in
Speaker 6: many countries. Its most influential early theorist Theodohood So argue
Speaker 6: that Jews constituted a nation and that anti Semitism could
Speaker 6: not ultimately be solved through integration into European societies. Instead,
Speaker 6: they required a state of their own, and Palestine was
Speaker 6: not initially the only territory under consideration. Various proposals included Argentina,
Speaker 6: Uganda and other locations before Palestine became firmly established as
Speaker 6: the movement's focus. Not all Jews agreed with this political
Speaker 6: Zionist cause that many Jewish socialists, particularly those associated with
Speaker 6: the General Jewish Labor Bund, rejected Zionism altogether. They argued
Speaker 6: the Jews should fight for libration where they lived, rather
Speaker 6: than establishing a separate nation state. Nevertheless, the Zionists colonial
Speaker 6: settlement efforts began and expanded in Palestine through the late
Speaker 6: nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aided by wealthy benefactors, land
Speaker 6: purchases from absentee landlords, and growing immigration. The movement received
Speaker 6: a major boost in nineteen seventeen when the British government
Speaker 6: and issued the Balfour Declaratia express in support for the
Speaker 6: establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Despite the
Speaker 6: fact that Palestine's our population constituted the overwhelming majority of
Speaker 6: the inhabitants at the time, a settlement expanded. Sinus narratives
Speaker 6: increasingly emphasized the idea of return. The Jews were not
Speaker 6: colonizing a foreign land, but return into an ancestral homeland
Speaker 6: from which they had been dispersed centuries before, and The
Speaker 6: state of Israel was officially established in nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 6: accompanied by the Nakba or catastrophe, when more than seven
Speaker 6: hundred thousand Palestinians were displaced or expelled from their homes
Speaker 6: across Palestine. Like Liberia before it, Israel emerged as a
Speaker 6: state founded by a population claiming a historic connection to
Speaker 6: the territory, and like Liberia, is legitimacy would be built
Speaker 6: upon narratives of return, civilization, and nationhood, while the indigenous
Speaker 6: inhabitants found themselves excluded from the political order being constructed
Speaker 6: on top of their home.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 6: Already, these situations aren't exactly one to one, but they
Speaker 6: don't need to be. To apply a settler clonal analysis.
Speaker 6: The key questions for ascertaining settler cloninalism are if the
Speaker 6: settlers established permanent residents, if they claimed political sovereignty, if
Speaker 6: they dominated indigenous populations, if they created institutions that privileged settlers. Basically,
Speaker 6: what was the political and social order that emerged after
Speaker 6: they arrived and who was elevated and degraded by it.
Speaker 6: For Liberia, the answer becomes pretty clear once we look
Speaker 6: at how the new state was organized over the course
Speaker 6: of the nineteenth century America, Liberia and settlements expanded their
Speaker 6: territory through a mixture of purchases, treaties, coercion and military expeditions,
Speaker 6: and outright warfare with inditionous peoples who made up the
Speaker 6: overwhelming majority population, who were largely excluded from political life
Speaker 6: for generations. They lacked meaningful representation in government and were
Speaker 6: treated as subjects to be administered. The elite monopolized state
Speaker 6: institutions and eventually established what was effectively a one party
Speaker 6: state under the True Whig Party, which ruled Liberia for
Speaker 6: over a century. The Liberian state extracted taxes and tribute
Speaker 6: from indigenous communities, relied on indigenous labor, and by the
Speaker 6: early twentieth century, international investigations were uncovering systems of forced
Speaker 6: labor and human trafficking, so surveyor that they generated an
Speaker 6: international scandal. While the settlers themselves had once been victims
Speaker 6: of slavery and racial oppression, they recreated similar class and
Speaker 6: ethnic hierarchies in their state. Liberia, of course, differs from
Speaker 6: many other settler colonies, but they retained the basic framework
Speaker 6: of a settler population clearing sovereignty over territory inhabited by
Speaker 6: indigenous peoples and conscer treating political and economic power in
Speaker 6: its own hands. Now, compare this to Israel. From the
Speaker 6: late nineteenth century onward. Zionist organizations acquired land through purchases
Speaker 6: and violence following the Knappa, which created one of the
Speaker 6: largest refugee populations in the modern world. The Palestinians, which
Speaker 6: remained within Israel, was subjected to military administration for years.
Speaker 6: While Palestinians in the occupied territories continue to live under
Speaker 6: a different legal regime than Israeli settlers. The nineteen fifty
Speaker 6: two Citizenship Law and the twenty eighteen Nation States Law
Speaker 6: cemented the Jewish supremacist heart of the Zinis project. As
Speaker 6: since nineteen sixty seven, settlement expansion in the West Bank
Speaker 6: had steadily increased, accompanied by land seizures, home demolitions, restrictions
Speaker 6: on movement, and the fragmentation of Palestinian communities and Gaza
Speaker 6: has been an open air prison where settlers occasionally mow
Speaker 6: the lawn aka slaughter population since two thousand and seven.
Speaker 6: It's worth noting a major difference between the two cases,
Speaker 6: which is the demographic element. America Liberians remained a small
Speaker 6: minority ruling a much larger indigenous population, but the entire
Speaker 6: history of American Liberian ruled Liberia. Those kind of demographics
Speaker 6: are more akin to settler societies like South Africa, Rhodesia,
Speaker 6: and French Algeria, which leaned heavily into the exploitation aspect
Speaker 6: of clonalism. Israel developed differently intentionally to ensure that Jewish
Speaker 6: people became the demographic and majority within its territory, so
Speaker 6: it's more comparable to settler societies like the US, Canada,
Speaker 6: and Australia. Such demographics necessarily led to a difference in
Speaker 6: how indigenous peoples were managed between projects. Liberia system depended
Speaker 6: upon indigenous labor, while Israel's project has generally prioritized secure
Speaker 6: in land while minimizing dependence on pasted labor. In many
Speaker 6: periods of Zionus history, Palestinian labor was actively displaced in
Speaker 6: favor of exclusively Jewish labor. But again, settler colonism operates
Speaker 6: according to a logic of elimination that might often be
Speaker 6: expulsion and extermination, but it can also mean assimilation, confinement,
Speaker 6: and whatever else. Again, the settlers want the land, the
Speaker 6: native becomes an obstacle, and different set of societies developed
Speaker 6: different methods for dealing with that obstacle. The US had
Speaker 6: its ethnic cleansings, removals, reservation system and boarding schools. Australia
Speaker 6: had frontier wars, stolen generations and land dispossessions. Canada had
Speaker 6: assimilation policies like reservation schools. South Africa and a wide
Speaker 6: rule couldn't expel the black majority, so they maintained apartheid
Speaker 6: controlled reservations and extracted labor. But again, what matters for
Speaker 6: definance at the clonalism is that indigenous sovereignty is displaced
Speaker 6: and settler control over the land is secured. Of course,
Speaker 6: indigenous people in all cases do not take this abuse
Speaker 6: lying down. From the very beginning of Liberian settlement, Indigenous
Speaker 6: peoples resisted the crew grabble vy and numerous other ethnic
Speaker 6: groups fought against territorial expansion, taxation, forced labor, and attempts
Speaker 6: by the Liberian states to extend its authority into the interior.
Speaker 6: And despite generations of American Liberian dominance, indigenous resistance never
Speaker 6: entirely disappeared. Eventually, the political order that had governed Liberia
Speaker 6: for over a century began to crack, economic crisis, corruption
Speaker 6: and grow and resentment towards settled domination culminated in a
Speaker 6: military coup in nineteen eighty led by Samuel Doe, overthrowing
Speaker 6: the government of President William Tolbert and ended more than
Speaker 6: a century of uninterrupted American Liberian political dominance. Now, that
Speaker 6: coup clearly did not create a free or egality society.
Speaker 6: Liberia would soon face thectatorship, civil war and immense suffering,
Speaker 6: but it did mark the collapse of the older settler
Speaker 6: elites monopoly on state power, and efforts at recovery in
Speaker 6: the country are ongoing. Palestinian resistance, on the other hand,
Speaker 6: faced a very different structory. From the beginning of Zius settlement.
Speaker 6: Palestinians resisted displacement and land loss through protests, strikes, political organizing,
Speaker 6: and armed revote. The Great Arab Revolt of nineteen thirty
Speaker 6: six to nineteen thirty nine saw Palestinians launch a massive
Speaker 6: reich An uprising against both British colonial rule and Zonus settlement.
Speaker 6: Decades later came the first and second in Defaders mass movements,
Speaker 6: a combined protest, civil disobedions, community organized and armed resistance.
Speaker 6: Pastidians have built a number of institutions alongside international Solarity
Speaker 6: movements in an effort to sustain their efforts under occupation, siege, exile,
Speaker 6: and apart. Even today, amid the destruction genocide of Gaza,
Speaker 6: passing and resistance continues. Liberia and Israel are both settled
Speaker 6: clinal projects, but they are different enough in scale and
Speaker 6: goals and methods and historical development that obviously treating them
Speaker 6: must equivalent for be misleading. The point of the comparison
Speaker 6: is to identify what these societies have in common. Since
Speaker 6: the cool In Liberia, the old American Liberian elite has
Speaker 6: lost its monopoly on power, but in Israel, the settler
Speaker 6: cluninal project is alive and well was ever expanding settlements, occupation, displacement,
Speaker 6: and brutality. Whether settler dominance in Israel remains or falls
Speaker 6: is yet to be seen. In Liberia, the end of
Speaker 6: settler rules not automatically bring justice, equality or freedom. The
Speaker 6: liberation through state power has not brought their relief, especially
Speaker 6: in the context of a global capitalist order. The replacement
Speaker 6: of one ruling class for another has not ended the struggle,
Speaker 6: but maybe put a semi coola on that struggle. I
Speaker 6: believe the aim of deconization must be not merely the
Speaker 6: fight against the people at the helm of the system,
Speaker 6: but the very helm of the system itself, dismantling the
Speaker 6: structures that make domination possible. The first place, for Palestine
Speaker 6: and for all people's struggling against oppression, ending set localism
Speaker 6: is only the beginning in the pursuit of liberation. That's
Speaker 6: all I have for today. All power to all the people. Peace.
Speaker 4: Hey everyone, it's James. I just wanted to insert a
Speaker 4: quick clarification here. Right at the top of the episode,
Speaker 4: when we talk about Fort Snelling, we talk about the
Speaker 4: largest mass execution in the United State's history. The execution
Speaker 4: occurred in man Cato, Minnesota, not at Fort Snelling, the
Speaker 4: execution of thirty eight people. Two people were executed at
Speaker 4: Fort Snelling and Dakota people were incarcerated at Fort Snelling.
Speaker 4: Banks wanted to clarify exactly what was being said there
Speaker 4: so that we could make sure that everyone got the
Speaker 4: right information. Hello everyone, and welcome to the show. It's
Speaker 4: me James today, and I'm very fortunate to be joined
Speaker 4: by three other people to discuss this indictment in Minnesota.
Speaker 4: I'm going to ask them all to introduce themselves. So
Speaker 4: if we start off with you Mo that would be wonderful.
Speaker 7: Sure, good afternoon. I'm Maura Meltzer Cohen. I'm an attorney, abolitionist,
Speaker 7: and educator. I primarily represent people arrested in the course
Speaker 7: of justice struggles, and I do a lot of popular
Speaker 7: legal education. I also teach at Cuny School of Law.
Speaker 4: Wonderful, Thank you, Olive, If you'd like to go next.
Speaker 8: Hi, I'm Olive.
Speaker 9: I'm a legal worker, a movement legal worker based in Minneapolis,
Speaker 9: and I also make Outlaw. So you might have heard
Speaker 9: my voice on here before.
Speaker 4: MiG By.
Speaker 10: Hi, I'm Margaret. I am sometimes on this show. You
Speaker 10: probably hear me on Sunday's Close and Media book Club,
Speaker 10: And like you all, I woke up to a lot
Speaker 10: of messages this morning being like, oh fuck, things are
Speaker 10: happening in Minneapolis. People are being rated. As always, we
Speaker 10: started off with some false information or some like early rumors,
Speaker 10: but right away people were like, there's a bunch of
Speaker 10: people who are getting arrested. And people started sharing that
Speaker 10: we were about to see a press conference by the
Speaker 10: federal government and they were going to be like, we've
Speaker 10: caught this terrible anti foot terrorists, and I thought that's.
Speaker 8: The kind of thing I like paying attention to.
Speaker 10: So I woke up, well, I've been away for a minute,
Speaker 10: and then I watched a press conference, and then I
Speaker 10: read a very long indictment, and I think I'm not
Speaker 10: the one who's supposed to do the very short version
Speaker 10: of it all.
Speaker 8: But that's how I was.
Speaker 4: That's my narrative version.
Speaker 1: Of what happened.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's that's a good narrative. We are
Speaker 4: going to get on to talking about the indictment, talking
Speaker 4: to about what it does and doesn't do, and what
Speaker 4: it means and doesn't mean. But I know you wanted
Speaker 4: to begin with some really important context about it, the
Speaker 4: physical locations where the alleged actions took place.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I wanted to ground this whole discussion in the
Speaker 7: historical reality of the United States Federal government's violent colonial
Speaker 7: history in this specific place. So one of the places
Speaker 7: that is mentioned a number of times in the indictment
Speaker 7: is Fort Snelling, and Fort Snelling is a US military
Speaker 7: installation that was built on a sacred site at the
Speaker 7: confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. I think it's
Speaker 7: really critical that we understand and that not only is
Speaker 7: the United States Federal government continuing to perpetuate its violent
Speaker 7: occupation in the same places that it has historically done
Speaker 7: so in ways that are intended to either include or
Speaker 7: exclude certain groups of people, depending on what's expedient for
Speaker 7: the federal government, but that they're doing it in the
Speaker 7: exact same place as I think the largest mass execution
Speaker 7: in US history, which was a mass execution of Dakota people,
Speaker 7: that after it was carried out, was determined to have
Speaker 7: been totally unlawful and to have involved totally insufficient legal
Speaker 7: process on the part of the United States government, and
Speaker 7: to have involved actions that far exceeded the lawful, legitimate
Speaker 7: authority of the US government. And of course that's exactly
Speaker 7: what we're seeing here again, is the United States federal
Speaker 7: government taking actions that far exceed its lawful authority and
Speaker 7: punishing people who resist those excesses.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's really important.
Speaker 9: One thing I just want to add, I'm not sure
Speaker 9: if you said this clearly, but Fort Snelling is also
Speaker 9: the area that where Whipple is located. So you're going
Speaker 9: to probably hear us talk about the Whipple Building, and
Speaker 9: that is the ice headquarters for the Midwest. It's where
Speaker 9: people detained by ice and all of Minnesota are processed
Speaker 9: through and protesters arrested by Ice as well.
Speaker 7: Yeah, thank you alive. I don't think I did make
Speaker 7: that clear.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's very important context if people are looking for
Speaker 4: a little bit more context and whipple building, or if
Speaker 4: made a wonderful podcast for us that they can listen
Speaker 4: to about that. And Margaret and I did some reporting
Speaker 4: when we were in the Twin Cities as well. We
Speaker 4: will link to all of those in the show notes
Speaker 4: subsequently to this, Like Margaret, right, I began to receive
Speaker 4: messages that we would be seeing people have been detained,
Speaker 4: we'd be seeing a presser and ittment, So what's the pressor?
Speaker 4: And then they actually really see indictment like fifteen minutes
Speaker 4: before the presser, I believe.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and they were like mad at people forming not
Speaker 10: already read a like ninety four page indictment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they kept saying reading, Well, this is a thing
Speaker 4: where they can that allows them when they're answering questions
Speaker 4: to say, well, read the indictment. But then for people
Speaker 4: not to ask questions about things that are covered or
Speaker 4: not covered in the indictment.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it was a shitshew. They told people to read
Speaker 10: the indictment. The indictment did not say what they claimed
Speaker 10: the sun.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It was a press conference, so it was exactly squarely
Speaker 4: what I would expect from a press conference in that
Speaker 4: like people ask questions, which are good, and they got
Speaker 4: answers which were useless.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I was impressed with how quick the press was to
Speaker 7: point out identify, even without having read the indictment, to
Speaker 7: identify the gaping holes in the government's claims.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And there's been a lot of really excellent local reporting
Speaker 4: in this winteries for a long time. Actually, it's one
Speaker 4: of the places where like local journalism has not been
Speaker 4: gutted just yet, which is a good thing. The indictment
Speaker 4: that I have in front of me here indicts I
Speaker 4: believe fifteen individuals. From what we know, one of those
Speaker 4: people was already detained. Another twelve have been detained, and
Speaker 4: I believe two are yet to be detained.
Speaker 8: As of recording, I think we're down to one is
Speaker 8: yet to be detained.
Speaker 4: Okay, we're down to one. Yeah, And that they suggested
Speaker 4: in the presser that those people are maybe negotiating surrender.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And at the time we are recording, there is a
Speaker 4: bit gathering outside the federal court which is being attacked
Speaker 4: by eight Feds of some description. I'm not quite sure,
Speaker 4: maybe fbs pepper spraying people. We saw them throwing some
Speaker 4: kind of leslieth or grenades. But like there's something that
Speaker 4: people who live in the Twin Cities will have become
Speaker 4: very familiar with at this point, right, which is this
Speaker 4: kind of state violence. Yes, as Mahos pointed out in
Speaker 4: the chat, these people are being perpostrayed for attending court
Speaker 4: proceedings which are public. In the indictment, the district Attorney,
Speaker 4: I guess outlines that these people were members of a
Speaker 4: group called Damn Direct Action Minnesota, previously known as Twin
Speaker 4: Cities direct Action. There are a number of other groups
Speaker 4: and acronyms here that I don't think is huguely important.
Speaker 4: That they are alleging that they were part of a
Speaker 4: group that conspired two, among other things, disrupt and obstruct
Speaker 4: federal agents too. I'm going to quote here. The purposes
Speaker 4: of the conspiracy include the following preventing the enforcement of
Speaker 4: federal immigration law by force, intimidation and threats, opposing the
Speaker 4: authority of the United States government, preventing, hindering or delaying
Speaker 4: by force, the execution of the laws governing the identification, detention,
Speaker 4: and moval of non citizens, to include the Immigration and
Speaker 4: Nationality Act, and preventing impeding and interfering federal law enforcement
Speaker 4: from discharging their duties, including enforcement federal immigration law by force, intimidation,
Speaker 4: and threats. They then go on to detail a great
Speaker 4: number of messages from a number of signal chats. They
Speaker 4: specifically identify them as signal chats, and a large number
Speaker 4: of the messages pertained to a protest held at the
Speaker 4: Whipple Federal Building on the twenty third of January. That's
Speaker 4: a protest that Margaret and I covered, and you will
Speaker 4: have heard our coverage of it before you can go
Speaker 4: back and listen to it. The specific allegations here are
Speaker 4: that the accused people conspired to create a soft quote
Speaker 4: unquote and hard quote unquote barricade. The soft barricade took
Speaker 4: the form of a shield wall that Margaret and I
Speaker 4: reported on the time. The hard barricade they're alleging was
Speaker 4: a number of trailers that they're alleging the accused people
Speaker 4: attempted to flip over in order to prevent fed accessing Whipple.
Speaker 9: From my skim read of the indictment. So far, it
Speaker 9: looks like the actual actions that the conspiracy charge focuses
Speaker 9: on largely about the planning and carrying out of two
Speaker 9: blockade actions at the Whipple Building on January twenty third
Speaker 9: and March first, and then the participation in the coordination
Speaker 9: of commuting or ice watching by car and general ice
Speaker 9: watch activities after the occupation draw down from March to June,
Speaker 9: and the conspiracy charge and the evidence that goes to
Speaker 9: those two things takes up most of the ninety four
Speaker 9: page indictment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then as we get to the very very end,
Speaker 4: somebody is accused of kicking a government vehicle and somebody
Speaker 4: else is accused of getting in a road traffic accident
Speaker 4: with a government vehicle, which marg I know you'd read
Speaker 4: that before, but that it's being allected they were deliberately
Speaker 4: using their vehicle as a weapon, right. Yeah.
Speaker 10: The indictment doesn't say that it was a car accident.
Speaker 10: The indictment implies that it caused physical contact, and we
Speaker 10: don't know whether that was physical contact with a vehicle
Speaker 10: or the officer themselves. But in the entire indictment, there
Speaker 10: are very few things that the average person reading this
Speaker 10: indictment would be like, oh, that sounds like a crime.
Speaker 10: And one of those is kicking a police car. And
Speaker 10: one of those is this using a vehicle as a
Speaker 10: dangerous weapon to make quote physical contact and inflict bodily injury.
Speaker 10: And that is number two hundred and seventy six out
Speaker 10: of two hundred and seventy six not counts, but like
Speaker 10: claims made in this document. So they are clearly spending
Speaker 10: the overwhelming majority talking about other things.
Speaker 4: Get a claims MO has that a reasonable way to
Speaker 4: refer to him las allegation?
Speaker 10: So you go, ah, yes, So there's two hundred and
Speaker 10: seventy six allegations and the vast majority are the kind
Speaker 10: of things that the average person reading a thing would
Speaker 10: say that sounds like the most free speech thing I've
Speaker 10: ever read. Not just One of the allegations is that
Speaker 10: one defendant made a video calling for people to come armed.
Speaker 8: During the press conference.
Speaker 10: They actually did a good job, though the reporters were like, cool,
Speaker 10: is there any evidence that that person or anyone who
Speaker 10: that they spoke to actually came armed?
Speaker 4: And they were like, we're not answering that.
Speaker 10: Which is more or less what they said to everything,
Speaker 10: But overall we are talking about a document that describes
Speaker 10: how to organize any protest, how to organize any protest.
Speaker 10: It talks about how do we organize our signal groups
Speaker 10: so that we can communicate more clearly with each other,
Speaker 10: how do we know that the people in our group
Speaker 10: are who they say they are? And it's it's the
Speaker 10: kind of thing that protest organizers have been doing in
Speaker 10: this country for at least several decades. That's just what
Speaker 10: I can speak to personally, and it has been framed
Speaker 10: in a different way. They've done this kind of thing before,
Speaker 10: but it is in this current, real bad.
Speaker 8: Context where everything gets real intense.
Speaker 4: The point that you're making, Margaret is very important because
Speaker 4: a lot of people will look at this and be like,
Speaker 4: this is standard First Amendment shit. And I don't want
Speaker 4: people to think that standard First Amendment shit is illegal now,
Speaker 4: because that is what these prosecutions do. They have a
Speaker 4: chilling effect or protect the First Amendment activity. So, MO,
Speaker 4: I know you enjoy the First Amendment. Would you like
Speaker 4: to explain to us exactly what conspiracy is and what's
Speaker 4: going on here with the charges of conspiracy?
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 7: I am a First Amendment enjoyer, So if you look
Speaker 7: through through this indictment, almost all of the allegations that
Speaker 7: are made about the quote overt acts, the actions that
Speaker 7: were taken in support of the conspiracy are, as you said,
Speaker 7: really First Amendment protected conduct. So in order to understand
Speaker 7: how First Amendment protected conduct can be evidence of criminality,
Speaker 7: we have to look at what is a conspiracy, And
Speaker 7: a conspiracy is a fascinating legal animal, because what it
Speaker 7: is is a claim that a group of people made
Speaker 7: an agreement to do something illegal and then took steps
Speaker 7: overt acts, engaged in these quote overt acts in the
Speaker 7: service of carrying out their illegal agreement or their agreement
Speaker 7: to do something unlawful. Right, So all of these things.
Speaker 7: You know, there's so many things in here that are
Speaker 7: clearly institutionally protected. They're very preoccupied with people being members
Speaker 7: of different groups identifying themselves as anarchists, swearing T shirts
Speaker 7: or sweatshirts that are at one point, I think they
Speaker 7: say they're ANTIFA branded. I didn't know we had a brand.
Speaker 10: Yeah, oh yeah, I could send you some merch sor
Speaker 10: I don't know if I should make that joke.
Speaker 8: That's a joke.
Speaker 7: You know, there are all these things, you know, people
Speaker 7: having conversations, people using rhetoric, and all of these things
Speaker 7: are clearly First Amendment protected. And then there are people
Speaker 7: talking about the Second Amendment, which of course is also
Speaker 7: a constitutional amendment, and you know all kinds of you know,
Speaker 7: interesting evidence where they talk about people following or identifying
Speaker 7: ice agents or vehicles driven by ice agents. Well, we
Speaker 7: have a First Amendment right to observe law enforcement in
Speaker 7: the public discharge of their duties. Looking at an ice
Speaker 7: agent or taking notes on what they're doing. Is actually,
Speaker 7: it's not only not unlawful, it's clearly First Amendment protected conduct. Right.
Speaker 7: These people are doing legal observation. And so what is
Speaker 7: the thing that's allegedly removing the First Amendment protection from
Speaker 7: these behaviors is this claim that all of these things
Speaker 7: are being done in the service of this larger agreement
Speaker 7: to do something illegal. What is the illegal thing interfering
Speaker 7: with the discharge of ice you know, I guess I'll
Speaker 7: say duties for a given value of duties.
Speaker 8: There's a lot of air quotes happening for people who
Speaker 8: can't see.
Speaker 7: Sorry, I remember that this is not actually a visual medium. Yeah,
Speaker 7: thank god, I will verbalize this for the record. So
Speaker 7: the thing about conspiracy. That makes it so attractive is
Speaker 7: that it makes it possible for prosecutors to criminalize garden
Speaker 7: variety lawful and even constitutionally protected behavior and whole communities
Speaker 7: of people who are engaged in those behaviors by making
Speaker 7: the claim that all of those things, and all of
Speaker 7: those associations, and all of those beliefs, and all of
Speaker 7: those otherwise protected activities are in the service of a
Speaker 7: larger agreement to do something illegal. Now, of course, they're
Speaker 7: not addressing the fact that people are organizing themselves to
Speaker 7: prevent Ice from doing things that we know are very
Speaker 7: much not lawful, right, like detaining people who are citizens, detaining,
Speaker 7: among others, indigenous people, punching through people's windshields and pulling
Speaker 7: them out of vehicles, like I don't know, murdering two people,
Speaker 7: And that's not being dealt with in this at all. Right,
Speaker 7: The idea that Minneapolis is organizing itself to prevent this massive,
Speaker 7: you know, unlawful occupation, that true to form, exceeds the
Speaker 7: lawful authority of these agencies.
Speaker 4: To your point on Minneapolis organizing itself, it's worth noting
Speaker 4: that every single one of these indicted people is from
Speaker 4: the Twin Cities, and they're repeatedly said in the press
Speaker 4: conference and the endictment that these people try to hijack
Speaker 4: peaceful or First Amendment protests. But that's say admitted in
Speaker 4: the press that every single one of these people was
Speaker 4: from that community.
Speaker 7: I would actually like to point something out about that specifically.
Speaker 7: One of the things that's happening in this indictment is
Speaker 7: that the prosecutors have framed it as these bad protesters
Speaker 7: are trying to use use as cover the actions of legitimate,
Speaker 7: peaceful protesters. So what they're doing is they're setting up
Speaker 7: this idea that there are good protesters and bad protesters,
Speaker 7: which first of all, is a way to divide in
Speaker 7: conquer social movements. But the other thing that they're doing,
Speaker 7: and I really want people to be alert to this,
Speaker 7: is that they are making it possible by associating the two,
Speaker 7: they're making it possible to later come back and go
Speaker 7: after even those people that they are currently defining as
Speaker 7: good protesters. So there's a point in this indictment where
Speaker 7: they make a claim that an organization, I think it's
Speaker 7: the It might have been the five oh five OHO
Speaker 7: one organization. We need to check that.
Speaker 4: But they are mentioned in the indicty. I mentioned as
Speaker 4: a DA yeah.
Speaker 7: And the DSA is and a union is. There's a
Speaker 7: point at which an organization asks twin Cities DA for
Speaker 7: assistance with a rally. And even though in this situation,
Speaker 7: I believe the prosecutors are setting it up like, oh, well,
Speaker 7: this legitimate group is working with this the bad guy group,
Speaker 7: what they've done is created a discourse that will allow
Speaker 7: them if they want to, that will allow the government
Speaker 7: to come back and say, look at this group purporting
Speaker 7: to be a union and doing legitimate, peaceful protests, but
Speaker 7: they're actually enlisting the assistance of you know, the Direct
Speaker 7: Action Group. So on the one hand, you know, I
Speaker 7: think the indictment is playing right into this good protester
Speaker 7: bad protester narrative, which, to be clear, it doesn't matter
Speaker 7: if you are protesting in the air quotes right way,
Speaker 7: you will still be subject to police violence.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: The function of this sort of nonviolent protest is that
Speaker 7: it exposes how unwarranted police violence is, not that police
Speaker 7: are not violent toward you if you are protesting the
Speaker 7: quote right way.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Margaret and I were there very clearly identified as press
Speaker 4: on the twenty third of January at the Whipple Building,
Speaker 4: and that did not stop us being exposed to police finance.
Speaker 4: We saw people approaching the cops to ask what they
Speaker 4: were supposed to do and get arrested.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we sawry camera Ben from Italy get Peppa sprayed
Speaker 4: in face. Yeah, that was what I was thinking of.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And actually, mo, I really like this point because
Speaker 10: I actually don't think that the good protester bad protesters
Speaker 10: split is going to work in the popular conversation in
Speaker 10: this particular case as effectively as it usually does. And
Speaker 10: that's part of why ICE is so scared as relates
Speaker 10: to Minneapolis is because there is such a I mean, obviously,
Speaker 10: I'm sure there's divisions, right, but overall there's such a
Speaker 10: unity around like the thing that is happening is far
Speaker 10: more important than our differences that like, I think they're
Speaker 10: not going to successfully split people in the general discourse.
Speaker 10: They'll do it a little bit, right, but they're not
Speaker 10: going to have nearly the traction they usually do. So
Speaker 10: I actually think that this point that you bring up
Speaker 10: is so vital, except of course for the fact that
Speaker 10: there's no time in history when anyone has ever come
Speaker 10: for one person in the morning and then a different
Speaker 10: person at night. I can't think of any examples of that, Right,
Speaker 10: that's sarcasm for Yeah.
Speaker 7: That's my concern, and that's really the thing I want
Speaker 7: to highlight here is that even though they're sort of claiming, oh,
Speaker 7: this group is legitimate, this group is not legitimate, they've
Speaker 7: done this in a manner that's certainly setting them up
Speaker 7: to come for Dsay later, to come for the you know,
Speaker 7: the extream liberal groups and behave as though those liberal
Speaker 7: groups who are of course protesting in the quote right
Speaker 7: way are actually engaged in violent, militant revolutionary action.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 9: I think the veil on this has already kind of
Speaker 9: dropped here on Twin City is just how people have
Speaker 9: been charged, with the church pro testers facing these Face
Speaker 9: Act charges, super serious federal charges, and so many people
Speaker 9: facing federal eighteen USC one eleven charges, most of which
Speaker 9: have already been dropped with those cases closed, and the
Speaker 9: way that we've seen people show up in solidarity has
Speaker 9: been so cool, just like your average liberal mom is
Speaker 9: like drop all the charges. There does feel like this
Speaker 9: sense of solidarity among people for being brave and trying
Speaker 9: to get out there and support their neighbors. That feels
Speaker 9: unique and makes it feel like it would be pretty
Speaker 9: hard for them to be really successful and pushing this
Speaker 9: narrative here.
Speaker 4: I don't think you get to do like anarchists bought
Speaker 4: the violence to the otherwise peaceful protest when you murdered
Speaker 4: a mother in the street and then you murdered someone
Speaker 4: else a few days later.
Speaker 7: And I think this is part of the thing that
Speaker 7: I'm finding interesting about this indictment is on the one hand,
Speaker 7: they're making these factual allegations where they're saying things like
Speaker 7: paragraph seventies says that ICE was totally boxed in for
Speaker 7: half an hour and inconvenienced all morning. Right, It's like, okay,
Speaker 7: But then on the following page it's very clear they're
Speaker 7: talking about, you know, how violent Ice is being, and
Speaker 7: it's very clear that the steaks are actually life or death,
Speaker 7: and that all of the people who are in the
Speaker 7: streets inconveniencing Ice are doing so in defense of others,
Speaker 7: like and when I say defense of others, I mean
Speaker 7: in a legal sense, right, a self defense or defense
Speaker 7: of others. And they're not coming there and shooting ICE agents.
Speaker 7: They are inconveniencing them and even the indictment itself, even
Speaker 7: from the government's own narration, you can see that what
Speaker 7: is at stake for the community in Minneapolis is true
Speaker 7: life or death steaks, and what is at stake for
Speaker 7: the ICE agents is that they are inconvenienced all morning.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: One of the things that they spend the great deal
Speaker 4: of time talking about to indictment is optick operational security
Speaker 4: for those who are not familiar, and how that is evidence.
Speaker 4: So they were bad people conscrying to do bad things,
Speaker 4: and very obviously this group's operational security has some kind
Speaker 4: of breach, and we should talk about the time and
Speaker 4: place to discuss that breach. So if anyone would like
Speaker 4: to take a swing at either of those things, would
Speaker 4: be lovely.
Speaker 10: I mean, I would say that obviously, if you're reading
Speaker 10: someone's signal messages in an indictment, clearly the security did
Speaker 10: not fully succeed. Yeah, but I would just say that, actually,
Speaker 10: a lot of the indictment seems to be people being
Speaker 10: frustrated at the success of the operational security.
Speaker 4: A lot of the indictment.
Speaker 10: Is like and then they kept vetting, and therefore the
Speaker 10: implication is like, and therefore we didn't get to the
Speaker 10: next stage with our attempts.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I do think it's important to understand that operational
Speaker 7: security is not evidence of guilt, and playing who's the
Speaker 7: cop in the group chat is a game that everybody loses.
Speaker 7: And also, not everything needs to be set on the internet.
Speaker 7: I'm going to say it again if you missed it
Speaker 7: the first time I said it, not everything needs to
Speaker 7: be set on the internet.
Speaker 10: But what if I want to just explain to everyone
Speaker 10: that I'm really cool and radical? Isn't the best way
Speaker 10: to do it to just say that on the internet.
Speaker 4: If you have an Instagram account.
Speaker 7: Hey, remember that crazy chat min song where she says
Speaker 7: talking about a revolution sounds like a whisper.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but also had a really fast car.
Speaker 10: Yeah, sorry, I just really like Tracy Chatman. Yeah no, No,
Speaker 10: that's a that's a good point, and stand out in
Speaker 10: the welfare line might be a better.
Speaker 4: Place to do it than online.
Speaker 3: Maybe.
Speaker 9: And we also are just seeing that the bulk of
Speaker 9: evidence is extensive records of some supposedly vetted signal chat
Speaker 9: messages and highly detailed reports from supposedly vetted in person meetings,
Speaker 9: both gathered over the course of nearly half a year
Speaker 9: since January and there's a lot of ways they could
Speaker 9: have gotten this information. Some of these events were public events.
Speaker 9: There's transcripts of a tour that some people did, a
Speaker 9: speaking tour about resistance to Minneapolis. Those were open events
Speaker 9: to the public. Of course, there's going to be FEDS there.
Speaker 9: But as wiser people than me have always said, your
Speaker 9: signal messages, if you can see them on your phone,
Speaker 9: and someone else gets your phone, they can also see
Speaker 9: them on your phone. So a lot of people were
Speaker 9: arrested here and had their phone seized as evidence. There's
Speaker 9: lots of ways that these messages could have been obtained.
Speaker 9: And what Moe is saying, I just think it's worth
Speaker 9: elaborating on that.
Speaker 8: It won't help anyone.
Speaker 9: What did you say about cop looking for the cop
Speaker 9: and the chat will never don't play?
Speaker 7: Who's the cop in the group chat?
Speaker 8: Yeah? Yeah, everybody loses is a good way to describe that.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And just to make it explicit. I think it's
Speaker 9: because you could read this and be like, oh my god,
Speaker 9: somebody snitched or there's an infiltrator, and I just think
Speaker 9: that's not clear.
Speaker 4: We don't know. Yeah, we just don't know.
Speaker 7: And I think the other thing that I would like
Speaker 7: to say is I'm looking at a lot of these
Speaker 7: text messages and they're not particularly evidence of unlawful conduct.
Speaker 8: No, No, they're really not right.
Speaker 7: And so I don't think this allusion to that is
Speaker 7: to never talk to your friends or to never organize.
Speaker 7: I do think that it's in important to remember that
Speaker 7: basically anything you say, Hannon, will be used against you.
Speaker 7: When I say to my clients, look, even when you're
Speaker 7: saying you're protesting your innocence, you know, when you're.
Speaker 4: Telling people publicly I.
Speaker 7: Didn't do anything that can be used against you. Who
Speaker 7: don't know what police and prosecutors are going to understand
Speaker 7: as evidence or what they're going to understand it as
Speaker 7: evidence of. That doesn't mean we don't talk to each other.
Speaker 7: It doesn't mean we self censor. It means we have
Speaker 7: the courage of our convictions. Yeah, And it means that
Speaker 7: we're thoughtful and circumspect about what we say.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I think that's just like the most important point to
Speaker 10: all of this. We have the courage of our convictions,
Speaker 10: and that doesn't mean we should be fools. Right, Like
Speaker 10: the indictment is much more concerned with that they built
Speaker 10: shields than it is about their conspiracy to kick police
Speaker 10: cars or whatever it is that they're accused of their
Speaker 10: overt acts. Yeah, you know, and a lot of it
Speaker 10: is around the ideology of these people, and interestingly, it
Speaker 10: mentions anarchism or anarchists substantially more than it mentions antifa
Speaker 10: with emphasis on the wrong syllable, of course.
Speaker 4: And that's actually not new. That's actually really old.
Speaker 8: In American history.
Speaker 10: But it's interesting to me that one of the cases
Speaker 10: that it looks like they're trying to build with these
Speaker 10: allegations is that all of these people identify as anarchists,
Speaker 10: and that they're obviously not being accused of being an anarchist,
Speaker 10: because that's not a crime, but that it certainly seems
Speaker 10: like they're attempting to say, like, this person identifies an anarchist,
Speaker 10: therefore they are more likely to have committed these other
Speaker 10: crimes or whatever. And I just think that's worth pointing
Speaker 10: out that that is a thing that the state is
Speaker 10: heavily focused on. But for me, as an anarchist, this
Speaker 10: is about the kind of thing where you're like, well,
Speaker 10: the courage of my convictions. It's not a crime to
Speaker 10: believe that we should organize society and a bottom up,
Speaker 10: horizontal structure.
Speaker 4: And to add to that, the reason they're doing that
Speaker 4: is that they're relying on a popular misunderstanding of anarchism
Speaker 4: to mean a predilection for chaos and violence probably. And
Speaker 4: the more that we can explain that anarchists mostly just
Speaker 4: want to make tea for you and be nice to you,
Speaker 4: then the further we can go to dispelling Yeah that,
Speaker 4: Like I like to define anarchism as building ways to
Speaker 4: take care of people that don't reinforce ways to control.
Speaker 10: People, which includes guarding kindergartens, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, there are many ways that we can do that.
Speaker 4: But the fewer people who have that misunderstanding that, the
Speaker 4: harder it comes to make that argument.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I think the point in this indictment that perfectly illustrates
Speaker 7: the fundamental misapprehension that the government has about what an
Speaker 7: anarchist is and what we're up to is the phrase
Speaker 7: the aggressive use of shields.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was what I was going to clip out
Speaker 4: as well.
Speaker 7: Because, as you say, we're not food and bombs, right,
Speaker 7: it's food not bombs. We're seeing each other, we're protecting
Speaker 7: kindergartens where you know, we're providing security for meetings we're
Speaker 7: mostly frankly feeding each other. Yeah, not always very well,
Speaker 7: right yet a.
Speaker 10: Little over emphasis on badly cooked eggplant.
Speaker 7: Too many human beings possibly, but you know, but we're
Speaker 7: doing our best out here. And maybe I actually think
Speaker 7: that the idea that anarchists are people who engage in
Speaker 7: the aggressive use of shields is actually, in some respects
Speaker 7: really precise.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: If these people will walk, it would be a great
Speaker 4: album title for someone. There has been a lot of
Speaker 4: reaction to several federal cases in the last twelve months, right,
Speaker 4: maybe sixty eighteen, God knows how long we've entered this.
Speaker 4: But this is not that this is not prairie land.
Speaker 4: As we spoke about before, More than half the eighteen
Speaker 4: USC cases in this so to have already been dropped.
Speaker 4: Can you maybe help situate this in a place that
Speaker 4: helps people who are drubbing with the sky is falling
Speaker 4: feeling right now? Well?
Speaker 9: I think one really nice thing is the arraignments are
Speaker 9: I believe still ongoing as we are speaking of the
Speaker 9: people who were raided and arrested this morning, and last
Speaker 9: I heard, all five whose cases had been called were
Speaker 9: ordered released with conditions of not talking to each other
Speaker 9: with one exception for people who are roommates. But that's
Speaker 9: interesting and probably a whole other conversation. But that's a
Speaker 9: big deal that people were facing conspiracy charges, which are
Speaker 9: very serious federal charges, and were released today at their arraignments.
Speaker 9: I think it shows it's an indication of where the
Speaker 9: courts are at, and also just these cases are taking
Speaker 9: place in these cities where the whole world watched the
Speaker 9: federal government do absolute terror and people do beautiful human
Speaker 9: loving each other in all the ways that they could
Speaker 9: to try and keep people alive while federal agents killed people.
Speaker 8: So it's just the context that it is in.
Speaker 9: It's super different than rural Texas, you know, and even
Speaker 9: the facts that we are dealing with in this are
Speaker 9: just less hard.
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 9: There's not allegations that someone shot a cop, which is
Speaker 9: a harder narrative to overcome in public the court of
Speaker 9: public opinion, and the allegations generally also seem even less
Speaker 9: serious than the recent indictment that came out in Michigan
Speaker 9: for the Palestine protesters. So I just think that's an
Speaker 9: interesting grounding thing. And on the other hand, we did
Speaker 9: recently see it with the Spokane three people convicted of conspiracy,
Speaker 9: which was that's the second one after Prairie Land. So
Speaker 9: while a lot of these cases around the country have
Speaker 9: been dropped, not all of them have. But it's hard
Speaker 9: to imagine this being super successful given where it's taking place.
Speaker 10: And I think that when we we look at Minneapolis
Speaker 10: and we're like, Okay, Minneapolis was the or the Twin Cities.
Speaker 10: I'm sorry, Saint Paul. I'm so sorry I keep accidentally
Speaker 10: doing that in Saint Paul, You're also wonderful and people
Speaker 10: have done so much work and they have been this
Speaker 10: like guiding light for a huge chunk of people living
Speaker 10: in the United States of America in this past year, right,
Speaker 10: like looking how people have come together to defend their
Speaker 10: neighbors and themselves, and like, I think that it's important
Speaker 10: that we say that unity has to continue. And so
Speaker 10: it's like the reason that I am optimistic is because
Speaker 10: of the actions that I saw in Minneapolis. Sorry I
Speaker 10: didn't go to Saint Paul, but you know, the actions
Speaker 10: I saw in Minnesota. But that has to continue, like
Speaker 10: what during court support during you know, so it's not
Speaker 10: like just a oh, we've got this right, but instead
Speaker 10: by continuing to say we we are looking.
Speaker 8: This does matter to us, This matters to everybody.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I'm hoping that that kind of continues to influence things.
Speaker 9: And I think we've I saw that today the arrangements.
Speaker 9: The courtroom was packed, it was overflowing, so people were
Speaker 9: outside chanting, and that's when teargas was deployed and there
Speaker 9: was unprecedented I mean, it just was unprecedented here at
Speaker 9: the Federal Courthouse to see that kind of force used.
Speaker 9: But there's tons of people outside. You know, this happened
Speaker 9: this morning, and the community is not having it.
Speaker 8: So Yeah, even though they're car kicking anarchists.
Speaker 4: Cause living in fear.
Speaker 7: We need to remember too that no action is over
Speaker 7: until the last person accused is home and free. Yeah,
Speaker 7: we have to keep doing court support, we have to
Speaker 7: do prisoner support. I am so relieved, I guess to
Speaker 7: know that Minneapolis and Saint Paul have such well developed
Speaker 7: legal infrastructure, including not only lawyers who have you know,
Speaker 7: decades of experience fighting against the politically motivated abuse of
Speaker 7: state power against people, you know, on the basis of
Speaker 7: their First Amendment protected beliefs, but also legal workers and
Speaker 7: jail support and people who have really learned over the
Speaker 7: course of not just this last winter, but you know,
Speaker 7: through the course of many decades of movement struggles, how
Speaker 7: to deal with this kind of stuff. And I know
Speaker 7: that these particular this particular group is in really good hands.
Speaker 7: It's not that this isn't a terrible situation, and it's
Speaker 7: not that it isn't going to be potentially devastating for
Speaker 7: the individuals who've been indicted, but the kind of solidarity
Speaker 7: that we have seen and that we saw this morning
Speaker 7: at the courthouse is really heartening to me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess I'll just say like I had the
Speaker 4: misfortune of having to listen to Gregory Bavino's interview at
Speaker 4: the remigration conference in Portugal as part of my job,
Speaker 4: and one of the things he said was that they
Speaker 4: surrendered to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, right, and they felt
Speaker 4: like they were defeated there. And I don't think it's
Speaker 4: a coincidence that this is happening right after they got
Speaker 4: their funding bill passed, right, but very clearly the people
Speaker 4: of the Twin Cities stood up to ICE and CBP
Speaker 4: and one and ICE and CBP know that they are
Speaker 4: very upset about it, but that means you can do
Speaker 4: it again, and like this takes a different form when
Speaker 4: it comes in the form of court support, right, there's
Speaker 4: a different kind of struggle, but the way we confront
Speaker 4: it is the same, which is to say together, we
Speaker 4: saw people wholly each other so close in the Twin
Speaker 4: Cities and it was really beautiful amidst horrible, horrible shit.
Speaker 4: And I think that people can continue to do that
Speaker 4: and continue to be this light that the rest of
Speaker 4: the country looks up to.
Speaker 9: You as a wise mentor. MO has said many times before,
Speaker 9: the punishment is the process for anyone going through this.
Speaker 9: I hope you don't feel that, however hard this is,
Speaker 9: is being undermined. It's incredibly difficult to go through this process.
Speaker 9: But staying grounded in the reality of where you are,
Speaker 9: the cases that have been dropped, and the fact that
Speaker 9: there's not yet a conviction to minimize fear is a
Speaker 9: way of taking back power from the state which they
Speaker 9: get to wheeled over us by doing things like this
Speaker 9: to freak us out and make us really scared. And
Speaker 9: we don't know if this will hold up in court yet,
Speaker 9: so let's keep our feet on the ground and puld
Speaker 9: each other close and try not to.
Speaker 8: Let them get us down more than more than they
Speaker 8: have to.
Speaker 13: Yeah, welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 2: I'm Robert Evans. Now. A few days ago I had
Speaker 2: the experience of listening to somebody that I've known for
Speaker 2: a while and known as a fairly mainstream liberal, someone
Speaker 2: who does not, in general support the personal ownership of firearms,
Speaker 2: certainly not weapons like ar fifteens react to the recent
Speaker 2: race riots bagrams, you know, whatever term I guess is
Speaker 2: most appropriate in Belfast, where racist mobs ran through the
Speaker 2: streets attacking people in their homes, pulling them out of
Speaker 2: their homes, lagging their homes on fire, targeting these people
Speaker 2: because they were not white. And this person, who I've
Speaker 2: known for a while, reacted to watching footage of this
Speaker 2: and reading headlines and their general shock and horror by
Speaker 2: saying something along the lines of I guess if this
Speaker 2: kind of stuff is on the table, I understand why
Speaker 2: people need are fifteens Now? Nothing had actually changed about
Speaker 2: the way the world works to alter this person's opinion
Speaker 2: of guns or of reality. They were simply forced to
Speaker 2: confront an aspect of reality that had previously been obscured
Speaker 2: to them because in earlier days, they had assumed that
Speaker 2: in any civilized nation, and they considered Northern Ireland to
Speaker 2: be part of a civilized nation, police would stop this
Speaker 2: kind of behavior. And if you feel like the rule
Speaker 2: of law is something you can trust on pretty immutably,
Speaker 2: then someone else saying no, I would rather have a
Speaker 2: gun of my own than trust a cop might sound
Speaker 2: like a mania. Today's episode is not about guns or
Speaker 2: gun rights. It is in the most direct sense, about
Speaker 2: data centers and the current people's war on building more
Speaker 2: of them. I see the current vast groundswell of support
Speaker 2: for this kind of activism and this fight in general,
Speaker 2: as the most hopeful change in domestic politics in quite
Speaker 2: some time, and I think this movement could become a
Speaker 2: weapon that drives a stake into the hearts of the
Speaker 2: silicon oligarchy that currently rule quite a lot of our world.
Speaker 2: The problem is any mass movement like this, especially one
Speaker 2: built on what is essentially also like the biggest name
Speaker 2: in the news right now, AI, is going to involve
Speaker 2: a lot of misinformation and even disinformation. People don't just
Speaker 2: hate data centers for good reasons, they hate them for
Speaker 2: bad ones too, Or at least it would probably be
Speaker 2: more accurate for me to say a lot of people
Speaker 2: hate them for reasons that don't reflect something data centers
Speaker 2: actually do or make worse. The broader reason that I've
Speaker 2: seen some people have issues with this fight, with this
Speaker 2: mass movement against the construction of new data centers is
Speaker 2: that data centers are utterly necessary modern infrastructure and incredibly
Speaker 2: crucial to the maintenance of what we would consider basic
Speaker 2: daily life. This is something that's true even without AI,
Speaker 2: and this is something that was true prior to the
Speaker 2: introduction of what Silicon Valley likes to call AI into
Speaker 2: all of our lives. Data centers are what make the
Speaker 2: age of cloud computing possible, and starting in the twenty tens,
Speaker 2: we decided that the cloud was where everything compute wise
Speaker 2: was increasingly going to happen in the future. There were
Speaker 2: pragmatic reasons for this. Having words savior document to a
Speaker 2: cloud file that makes it instantly accessible from any machine
Speaker 2: with Internet access should you desire. That's a big leap
Speaker 2: forward in capability, at least in one direction. Likewise, having
Speaker 2: like a watch on your body that cannot just take
Speaker 2: down your biometric data during a workout, but can store
Speaker 2: it and analyze it over long periods of time that
Speaker 2: offers people real utility. There's a reason products like this
Speaker 2: are very popular. You can't, however, have the entire world
Speaker 2: mapped out and accessible for turn by turn navigation without
Speaker 2: needing a shitload of data centers somewhere and in fact,
Speaker 2: in quite a few somewheres to make that possible. Now,
Speaker 2: of course, there are also privacy trade offs for all
Speaker 2: of these kinds of products. That's been the entire logic
Speaker 2: of the Internet of Things era. You hand over your
Speaker 2: data and we deliver utility. Privacy advocates have had issues
Speaker 2: with this from the jump, but most people didn't because
Speaker 2: the benefits were obvious and most people don't like to
Speaker 2: read or think very hard if we can avoid it.
Speaker 2: For almost twenty years, consumers largely ignored the rollout of
Speaker 2: data centers around the world, even sometimes into our backyards,
Speaker 2: because big tech had reasonably good pr and most people
Speaker 2: were happy with their gizmos. All in all, you get
Speaker 2: a hint of how uncontroversial this used to be. In
Speaker 2: a twenty twenty two article I found published on Microsoft's
Speaker 2: source Emea website, written.
Speaker 4: By Bill Briggs.
Speaker 2: The title was critical to our modern society, how data
Speaker 2: centers power every day necessities. Now, there was a little
Speaker 2: bit about AI in there, but this is twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two and the hype cycle hadn't nearly hit its peak
Speaker 2: at that point. The article spent much more time emphasizing
Speaker 2: how integral data centers are in things that people like quote.
Speaker 2: Simply put, they are the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing,
Speaker 2: and across Europe, Microsoft data centers are operating around the
Speaker 2: clock to support a wide spectrum of critical services, from
Speaker 2: the life saving work of doctors and first responders to
Speaker 2: essential services like groceries and online banking. At the same time,
Speaker 2: data centers also empowered everyday necessities like food deliveries, remote work,
Speaker 2: and video calls to family. The article goes on to
Speaker 2: include a quote from Rahil Nasir, an associate research director
Speaker 2: at a market research firm, who called data senaers the
Speaker 2: invisible infrastructure, which I find interesting because absolutely no one
Speaker 2: would call it that today, right People on these saw
Speaker 2: them as invisible back then because there hadn't been much
Speaker 2: public discussion about these things, and there weren't nearly as
Speaker 2: many of them, to be fair. In twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: the del Oro Group estimated global data center capex to
Speaker 2: have been about two hundred and forty one billion dollars.
Speaker 2: McKenzie is currently predicting global spending on data centers will
Speaker 2: reach seven trillion dollars by twenty thirty. The number of
Speaker 2: data center projects in development or under contract exploded pretty
Speaker 2: much right after Microsoft put out the article I quoted
Speaker 2: from earlier, and this put millions of people face to
Speaker 2: face with the reality of data center construction projects, many
Speaker 2: of them revolted. Q one of twenty twenty six saw
Speaker 2: a record seventy five data center projects blocked or delayed nationwide,
Speaker 2: which made it, in NBC's words, the most blocked and
Speaker 2: delayed quarter for data center projects on record. Researchers at
Speaker 2: Data world Watch told journalists they did not consider this
Speaker 2: a cyclical spike polygon, instead a structural shift caused as
Speaker 2: quote communities internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal
Speaker 2: regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more
Speaker 2: than doubled to eight hundred and thirty three across forty
Speaker 2: nine states now. The rapid and obviously organic nature of
Speaker 2: this growth has alarmed certain democratic and Republican politicians, largely
Speaker 2: the ones who have taken money from the tech industry.
Speaker 2: Some of these folks have panicked and insisted that Chinese
Speaker 2: government propaganda is behind the growth and opposition to data centers.
Speaker 2: The New York Times published a piece by sociologist Tressy
Speaker 2: McMillan Cottam, who argued that Democrats need to make the
Speaker 2: issue of data centers their issue because she believes that
Speaker 2: these protests could have a significant impact on the midterms,
Speaker 2: and in twenty twenty eight, in her column, she states
Speaker 2: that she wasn't initially sold on the value of data
Speaker 2: center protests, but time around activists convinced her that she'd
Speaker 2: been wrong, in part because this was not an issue
Speaker 2: that inherently drew urban or suburban or rural voters together,
Speaker 2: but all of them like it didn't inherently pull it
Speaker 2: Republican or Democratic voters, and thus it was a way
Speaker 2: to bring people together and get them working together uncommon cause,
Speaker 2: which is a really beneficial thing to do if you're
Speaker 2: trying to pull people closer into like a broader political
Speaker 2: alignment with you. And I would add to that point,
Speaker 2: just based on my own research and what I've seen,
Speaker 2: I feel like the fight against data centers is something
Speaker 2: that has what I like to call a high likelihood
Speaker 2: of fundamentalism in it, or HLF, and an HLF issue
Speaker 2: is a kind of political fight that if you get
Speaker 2: drawn into it, you're really likely to become some kind
Speaker 2: of fundamentalist on the matter. And abortion would be a
Speaker 2: good example of this sort of issue, right. That's why
Speaker 2: back in the nineteen seventies the Republican Party adopted abortion
Speaker 2: as a central concern, because if you get someone to
Speaker 2: become an anti abortion activist, they'll vote just based on
Speaker 2: that right. And if one party is against abortion and
Speaker 2: one parties for it, they'll never consider the party that
Speaker 2: is even open minded to it being legal in some
Speaker 2: limited sense, right, they become an absolutist on the matter.
Speaker 2: These are great issues to pull people into like a
Speaker 2: voting block with, because if you can get them to
Speaker 2: associate that issue with your party, you can kind of
Speaker 2: immunize that chunk of your voter base from economic concerns
Speaker 2: or other points of attack, at least in theory. Now,
Speaker 2: different issues tend to create fundamentalists for different reasons. People
Speaker 2: who aren't organizing against data centers aren't doing it, usually
Speaker 2: because they think the idea of a data center is wrong.
Speaker 2: But many of them do believe that AI is evil
Speaker 2: and immoral, and AI is the reason that so many
Speaker 2: new data centers are going up. Many more people oppose
Speaker 2: new data centers for the specific reason they see them
Speaker 2: as a threat to their own personal environment and to
Speaker 2: their own power bills, and to the cleanliness of their
Speaker 2: own water and air. It may seem as if this
Speaker 2: is the kind of support that would tend to breed
Speaker 2: shallow activists. If you just don't want a data center
Speaker 2: in your hometown, that doesn't mean you give a fuck
Speaker 2: about one going up in Mississippi or wherever you don't live.
Speaker 2: After all, none of these people presumably cared about the
Speaker 2: data centers that had been going up five years ago,
Speaker 2: ten years ago, before the issue became salient to them.
Speaker 2: But as treci Cottam wrote, the realities of doing this
Speaker 2: kind of organism on the ground have a tendency to
Speaker 2: transcend the reasons individual start getting into the fight.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: I have been watching this new groundswall of discent firsthand
Speaker 2: and community meetings, organizing sessions, and civic trainings. Here in
Speaker 2: North Carolina. The resistance has lifelong joiners, alumni from environmental
Speaker 2: and housing movements, and young organizers. There are also a
Speaker 2: lot of people who have never dreamed of being disagreeable
Speaker 2: in public, much less considered joining a rock as social movement.
Speaker 2: The imminent risk of living next to a data center
Speaker 2: may be why they show up for a meeting, but
Speaker 2: they're committing to the issue for bigger, deeper reasons. Political
Speaker 2: corruption and corporate mouthfeasance make them feel politically impotent. Voicing
Speaker 2: their objections, sharing their anxieties with others, recalling politicians who
Speaker 2: override them, and in some cases beating the opposition is
Speaker 2: giving them something. Few politicians are offering a taste of
Speaker 2: political power. And we'll continue, but first, here's some ads,
Speaker 2: and we're back. I think it's really important to emphasize
Speaker 2: something that Cottam said at the end of that last quote,
Speaker 2: which is that part of why the anti data center
Speaker 2: movement is potent and why it tends to draw people
Speaker 2: in much deeper than maybe the initial shallowness of why
Speaker 2: they got in would suggest, is that it offers them
Speaker 2: a sense of political power and of agency, and an
Speaker 2: age in which people are being trained more and more
Speaker 2: to feel as if they have no agency. You can't
Speaker 2: stop this, you can't fight this, or alternatively, this guy
Speaker 2: will do the fighting for you.
Speaker 14: Right.
Speaker 2: People are getting it from all sides wherever they actually
Speaker 2: land in the political aisle, and that's quite frankly, not
Speaker 2: very much fun. It's really fun to feel like you're
Speaker 2: a part of a movement like this that's kicking ass
Speaker 2: and taking names. Now. I don't share the long term
Speaker 2: goals that led Cottom to that article, at least not
Speaker 2: all of them. I get the sense that she wants
Speaker 2: to give the Democratic Party a powerful new long term
Speaker 2: voting block. I don't care so much about that now.
Speaker 2: I do, of course, want to see the Republican Party
Speaker 2: beaten electorally, and more Democratic votes is the only current
Speaker 2: way to do that. But the Democratic Party is not
Speaker 2: morally or logistically capable of doing anything but betraying these
Speaker 2: people in the long run. I really do believe that
Speaker 2: the reason why is the reason why the party has
Speaker 2: been incredibly slow to embrace these activists in any cohesive fashion.
Speaker 2: This movement is death for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley
Speaker 2: has a lot of fucking money. And when I say death,
Speaker 2: don't think I'm exaggerate. Data Center Watch is calculated that
Speaker 2: the total value of data centers blocked in early twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six. This is just the first three months of
Speaker 2: this year, was around one hundred and thirty billion dollars,
Speaker 2: compared to a total of one hundred and fifty six
Speaker 2: billion dollars in projects blocked in all of twenty twenty five. Now,
Speaker 2: a huge month last year for data construction expenses in
Speaker 2: the US was last Juli, which was actually a historic month,
Speaker 2: and that represented about fourteen billion dollars in expenses. So
Speaker 2: the value of the projects that have been stopped are significant,
Speaker 2: even in tech industry terms. More to the point, nearly
Speaker 2: all the money that underlies and underwrites these corporations and
Speaker 2: their owners is fake. Elon Musk could not produce a
Speaker 2: trillion dollars of real, liquid US dollars if he wanted to,
Speaker 2: because that simply is not how assets work. Most of
Speaker 2: his wealth is in stock valuation, and those stocks are
Speaker 2: worth what they're worth because of consumer sentiment as much
Speaker 2: as anything objectively real. The entire AI bubble is being
Speaker 2: underwritten by the belief that this will be worth it.
Speaker 2: There are trillions in value here, and we just need
Speaker 2: to spend a few trillion more to unlock them.
Speaker 4: None of that.
Speaker 2: Value can be unlocked without data centers, and if you
Speaker 2: throw a wrench in their plans to build more, you
Speaker 2: can hobble the whole effort. Any delay or serious setback
Speaker 2: creates the risk of a panic, and panic is their
Speaker 2: greatest enemy. All it takes is one sufficiently disastrous crash
Speaker 2: to kill many of these big overvalued companies. SpaceX and
Speaker 2: Anthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft and Meta can't all survive
Speaker 2: a market collapse, just as they won't sadly all die,
Speaker 2: nor can their billionaire bosses all remain masters of the universe.
Speaker 2: If they fall off their perch in a ray that
Speaker 2: shatters the global economy. We won't even have to bring
Speaker 2: all of these guys to court. Some of them will
Speaker 2: get done and by their former friends overseas. There's a
Speaker 2: reason why some VC types have already started trying to
Speaker 2: describe anti data center activism as terroristic. They are in
Speaker 2: fact terrified of it. This segment from an ArsTechnica article
Speaker 2: by Ashley Bellinger should give you an idea of what
Speaker 2: I'm discussing.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 2: The researchers suggested that the back half of twenty twenty
Speaker 2: five marked a turning point as data center opposition emerged
Speaker 2: as a national level narrative that showed the AI industry
Speaker 2: can no longer see the fights as individual zoning disputes.
Speaker 2: It is now reshaping elections, regulation, and site viability nationwide.
Speaker 2: Data Center Watch reported last year, where before officials were
Speaker 2: criticized for quietly signing deals without discussing construction with nearby residents,
Speaker 2: now they're in encountering backlash before any deal is in
Speaker 2: the books. Data Center Watch found in some cases, research
Speaker 2: is reported opposition mobilized before any project was officially filed.
Speaker 2: The mere rumor of a data center was enough to
Speaker 2: trigger organize resistance. Now, folks, when you hit this level
Speaker 2: of cultural inflection with a movement, you are in an
Speaker 2: extremely powerful but also very dangerous position. There's a reason
Speaker 2: that Steve Bannon's also made waves recently by encouraging his
Speaker 2: side to start reaching out to the anti data center people.
Speaker 2: He knows this energy can be co opted, or at
Speaker 2: least he believes it can. For my part, I want
Speaker 2: to see this energy harnessed. I want to see it
Speaker 2: burn brightly like the working flame of an oxyocettylene torch,
Speaker 2: because I want to see it used to cut directly
Speaker 2: into the belly of the industry that I hate. The
Speaker 2: best way for us to do this right now is
Speaker 2: to create as many moments as possible where projects to
Speaker 2: construct new data centers clash with protesters. Each of these
Speaker 2: conflicts has the potential to spark a panic in the market,
Speaker 2: and every piece of bad press contributes to the overall
Speaker 2: weight of public opinion and expectation against AI and against
Speaker 2: big tech. We never know which piece will be the
Speaker 2: one that breaks this current incarnation of the industry. The
Speaker 2: name of the game for us, then, is to create
Speaker 2: as many moments as we can that endanger the future
Speaker 2: of this market and the industry behind it. And we
Speaker 2: can do that entirely legally by forcing them to confront reality.
Speaker 2: None of these data center projects are sold to towns
Speaker 2: and cities based on real, accurate information about how they
Speaker 2: will impact the environment and the local community. One good
Speaker 2: example of this recently from the United States is a
Speaker 2: story earlier this year about a data center project in
Speaker 2: box Elder County, Utah. The proposed buildings together would have
Speaker 2: been three times the size of Manhattan and stretched across
Speaker 2: multiple sites. The project was championed by celebrity billionaire Kevin O'Leary,
Speaker 2: who was also the VC behind it, for a separate
Speaker 2: article in Ours Technica, quote residents' top concern was the
Speaker 2: straight out data center project draining local waters, and they
Speaker 2: were willing to pay to protect them, most especially the
Speaker 2: vulnerable Great Salt Lake. Many locals paid a fifteen dollars
Speaker 2: fee to register comments to block the transfer of nineteen
Speaker 2: hundred acre feet of water from a ranch to the
Speaker 2: hyperscale data center. Other concerns include electricity bills rising and
Speaker 2: potential risks to air quality, local wildlife and land. Venture
Speaker 2: capitalist Kevin O'Leary, chair of o Leery Digital and Shark
Speaker 2: Tank Investor, is behind the construction of the project. He
Speaker 2: told a local ABC affiliate that he regrets not working
Speaker 2: with state officials to be more transparent about the project
Speaker 2: from the beginning. We really screwed it up, O'Leary said,
Speaker 2: while confirming he was not expecting this intense kind of
Speaker 2: blowback from the public. He claimed that he and state
Speaker 2: officials anticipated that people would be excited about the major
Speaker 2: local investment and made huge mistakes by not involving the
Speaker 2: public more and discussions based on that assumption. We pissed
Speaker 2: off a lot of people, and that's not the way
Speaker 2: I do business. O'Leary said, that's not now, even that
Speaker 2: he undeniably did business this way. I disagree, but that's
Speaker 2: beside the point. The resistance was successful. Now, the project
Speaker 2: wasn't killed entirely, but it has been massively scaled back
Speaker 2: and may yet on the vine. The fact that resistance
Speaker 2: to this huge project and many like it, has caused
Speaker 2: so much damage to the industry has prompted a scale response.
Speaker 2: In late May and early June of twenty twenty six,
Speaker 2: I noticed a drip and then a flood of new
Speaker 2: articles and viral content critical of the anti data center protests.
Speaker 2: One good example of this would be a June tenth
Speaker 2: article on the website bar Chart by Nash Riggins. It
Speaker 2: was titled data centers get a bad rap for using
Speaker 2: too much water and energy. It turns out almonds suck
Speaker 2: up even more now. In this incredibly snotty little shit
Speaker 2: of an article, Nash is reporting on the fact that
Speaker 2: a bunch of pro AI influencers had with shocking coordination,
Speaker 2: started posting online responding to complaints about data center water
Speaker 2: usage by pointing out how wasteful it really is to
Speaker 2: grow almonds. You know, the almond industry uses even more
Speaker 2: water than AI does. And you know, if you want
Speaker 2: a good response to that, just say, sure, put them
Speaker 2: out of business.
Speaker 4: Fuck them.
Speaker 2: Another popular article in this genre was a blog post
Speaker 2: by Andy Masley. He critiqued the argument that AI was
Speaker 2: particularly wasteful by making arguments like this for an interview
Speaker 2: with him on azfamily dot com. Almost all of that
Speaker 2: one point seven trillion gallons of water per year, specifically
Speaker 2: water that is withdrawn in the return to the source,
Speaker 2: Masley told me, referring to a widely cited estimate from
Speaker 2: Karen How's Empire of Ai. The book claimed surging AI
Speaker 2: demand could use up to one point seven trillion gallons
Speaker 2: of fresh water globally by twenty twenty seven, or half
Speaker 2: the water annually withdrawn in the UK. Masley says the
Speaker 2: word use in that sentence is misleading. Data centers do
Speaker 2: evaporate most of the water they use on site for cooling,
Speaker 2: but on site use represents only about twenty percent of
Speaker 2: their total water footprint. The other eighty percent comes from
Speaker 2: power plants that heat water to spin turbines. That water
Speaker 2: is then returned, mostly unchanged, to its source. Masley's viral
Speaker 2: post got him interviewed by The New York Times and
Speaker 2: earned a correction from the author of the book, But
Speaker 2: his critiques about specific claims made there shouldn't be seen
Speaker 2: as having any overall legitimacy to the broader argument about
Speaker 2: data center water use. For one thing, he acts as
Speaker 2: if all data centers function the same way basically, both
Speaker 2: in terms of how they are powered and in terms
Speaker 2: of how they do cooling, and thus you can make
Speaker 2: the kind of assumptions about water use that is making
Speaker 2: and you just fucking can't now. The Environmental and Energy
Speaker 2: Study Institute has published an expanse of analysis of data
Speaker 2: centers and water consumption. They point out that this is
Speaker 2: all much more complex than Masley's quote might lead you
Speaker 2: to believe, and I'm going to read from that article quote.
Speaker 2: In the context of data centers, water consumption refers to
Speaker 2: the amount of water withdrawn from blue or gray sources
Speaker 2: minus the water discharged by the centers, primarily warm water
Speaker 2: left over from cooling the it racks. The consumed water
Speaker 2: is generally the water that evaporates or is otherwise taken
Speaker 2: out of immediate human usage. Withdrawal of fresh water from
Speaker 2: local streams or underground aquifers may lead to aquifer exhaustion,
Speaker 2: particularly in water stressed areas. Approximately eighty percent of the water,
Speaker 2: typically fresh water withdrawn by data centers, evaporates, with the
Speaker 2: remaining water discharge into municipal wastewater facilities. The large volume
Speaker 2: of waste water from data centers may overwhelm existing local
Speaker 2: facilities which were not designed to handle such a high volume.
Speaker 2: And again, one of the things that Masley tends to
Speaker 2: ignore is that even when you're putting this water back
Speaker 2: into the system quote unquote, that doesn't mean it's going
Speaker 2: back to the aquifers that it was pulled out of.
Speaker 2: It doesn't mean that it's going back into the same way,
Speaker 2: which can still cause massive issues. Now, how water efficient
Speaker 2: a data center is is going to vary depending on
Speaker 2: the climate of its location. But because these tend to
Speaker 2: require a lot of space, many are built in places
Speaker 2: where land is cheap. Those places are often hot and dry,
Speaker 2: like Utah and Wyoming. Data centers and hotter climates use
Speaker 2: more water. Data centers specifically built for the AI industry
Speaker 2: also have higher chip density, which requires more cooling, which
Speaker 2: uses more water. As time goes on, These increased demands
Speaker 2: lead to more and more being demanded of the local
Speaker 2: areas that agree to host data centers. Since data centers
Speaker 2: don't lend themselves to any other industries or create very
Speaker 2: many jobs, this often leaves local communities dependent upon them,
Speaker 2: which means they have no choice but to say yes
Speaker 2: to ever harsher environmental demands. I'm not creating a hypothetical here.
Speaker 2: This has happened over and over again, and I'm going
Speaker 2: to read again from that article by EESI dot org.
Speaker 2: Northern Virginia is considered the world capital for data centers,
Speaker 2: with over three hundred operational data centers spread across four counties. Collectively,
Speaker 2: all data centers in Northern Virginia consumed close to two
Speaker 2: billion gallons of water in twenty twenty three, a sixty
Speaker 2: three percent increase from twenty nineteen. Luton County, with approximately
Speaker 2: two hundred operational data centers, used about nine hundred million
Speaker 2: gallons of water in twenty twenty three. This has led Lutenwater,
Speaker 2: the county's fresh water authority, to rely heavily on potable
Speaker 2: water for data centers rather than reclaimed water. Now activists
Speaker 2: looking for cautionary tales about what data center addiction could
Speaker 2: do to an area should look no further than Northern Virginia.
Speaker 2: The region started saying yes to such development decades ago,
Speaker 2: when the industry was very much different. Back then, AOL
Speaker 2: was based there and their data center was part of
Speaker 2: an overall campus that employed more than five thousand people
Speaker 2: per an article by the Lincoln Institute. The campus has
Speaker 2: since been demolished. Three large data center facilities are being
Speaker 2: built on the site. There's a big fence around it
Speaker 2: for security purposes, so it's totally isolated from the community now,
Speaker 2: and it's only going to employ about one hundred to
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty people on the same piece of land.
Speaker 2: That's the difference. That's a quote from a local resident,
Speaker 2: and well here from some other local residents. But first,
Speaker 2: here's ads and we're back now. I've mostly discussed the
Speaker 2: fight against data centers thus far as an American thing,
Speaker 2: and it isn't. I think it is particularly relevant to
Speaker 2: our upcoming elections in a way that deserves particular attention.
Speaker 2: But this is a global fight. And it is a
Speaker 2: global fight not just because people hate AI, but because
Speaker 2: data centers and the AI they enable have come to
Speaker 2: symbolize the tech elite who have bought our world and
Speaker 2: who are in the process of burning it to the ground.
Speaker 2: Hatred of these people should know no geographical boundary, and
Speaker 2: this presents the possibility of internettional outreach as well as
Speaker 2: collaboration and strategizing. As an example, I'll discuss a small
Speaker 2: community in Romania, Mishli, which is located in one of
Speaker 2: the poorest sections of the country. In twenty twenty, they
Speaker 2: said hello to a team from Cluster Power who wanted
Speaker 2: to construct a data center in the area. The mayor
Speaker 2: gave a welcoming speech that should sound familiar to many
Speaker 2: of you. We are incredibly proud to have an investor
Speaker 2: on board and to see people talking about the data
Speaker 2: center in Mishli. The company contributes to the local economy
Speaker 2: by paying taxes here and has chosen this area as
Speaker 2: its headquarters. So that all sounds great, But I found
Speaker 2: an article for algorithm Watch that notes quote no documentation
Speaker 2: was provided to verify the tax revenue actually generated for
Speaker 2: the commune. A June of twenty twenty four, only ten
Speaker 2: jobs had been created, compared to at least three hundred
Speaker 2: that had been promised.
Speaker 4: Now you can find.
Speaker 2: Stories that are almost identical to this all over the
Speaker 2: United States, but also elsewhere in Europe, like the Netherlands
Speaker 2: and Germany, and in many other places besides. Everywhere these
Speaker 2: companies do business, they leave behind broken promises and lies,
Speaker 2: like a trail of gasoline reeking behind them as they go.
Speaker 2: Why shouldn't we drop a match and watch the fire
Speaker 2: catch them. There are dangers to embracing a movement based
Speaker 2: around opposing the construction of infrastructure that is necessary for
Speaker 2: a lot of modern life, But I might argue those
Speaker 2: dangers look a lot less scary if we recognize that
Speaker 2: necessary for modern current life and necessary for life itself
Speaker 2: aren't necessarily the same thing. In much the same way
Speaker 2: as I would give up my ability to buy pistachios
Speaker 2: and almonds year round to avoid California not having water,
Speaker 2: I'm willing to reconsider what miracles of daily life are
Speaker 2: really worth the cost. If it turns out the cost
Speaker 2: is that high, and the scariest thing in the world
Speaker 2: to the people who currently run it is this, perhaps
Speaker 2: one day soon everyone will start to feel this way.
Speaker 4: There you go, The passion fucking fixed it.
Speaker 3: And that's what I've always been.
Speaker 2: While I've never said.
Speaker 4: That there's one thing that sd CODs know. It's passion.
Speaker 2: Passion is negotiable.
Speaker 12: Deadlines are not welcome to Go ahead, guy, this is
Speaker 12: it could happen here.
Speaker 15: Executive Disorder or her weekly discast covering what's happening in
Speaker 15: the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means
Speaker 15: for you. I'm Garrison Davis today, joined by Miawong, James Stout,
Speaker 15: and Robert Evans. This episode recovering the week of June
Speaker 15: tenth to June seventeenth. Some small news items to start
Speaker 15: Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire.
Speaker 4: Oh good, at least on paper?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 4: What other?
Speaker 2: There's no other kind of trillionair. It's all on paper.
Speaker 2: It's a billionaire. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 15: This is following SpaceX going public on the Nastak Stock Exchange.
Speaker 15: Eight hundred and sixty six billion dollars of Musk's wealth
Speaker 15: is now in SpaceX stock, and space itself is currently
Speaker 15: valued it over two trillion on the market.
Speaker 4: Not good, Yeah great.
Speaker 15: DHCHS has announced it will not comply with Virginia's new
Speaker 15: law prohibiting federal officers from wearing masks, and on June eleventh,
Speaker 15: the DJ filed the lawsuit against Virginia quote challenging their
Speaker 15: unconstitutional attempts to regulate federal law enforcement. The French government
Speaker 15: suspects the Israeli quote unquote elite influence cyber and technology
Speaker 15: firm Black Core, of interfering in elections in France, Scotland,
Speaker 15: and the New York City mayoral race by orchestrating online
Speaker 15: smear and disformation campaigns against left wing pro Palestine politicians in.
Speaker 4: Fucking welcome New Uile?
Speaker 3: Did they?
Speaker 2: And I wanted to include this because it literally just
Speaker 2: broke as we are recording. But Representative Jamie Raskin, a
Speaker 2: Democrat from Maryland, put out a letter today that states, quote,
Speaker 2: we have been receiving troubling reports that and this is
Speaker 2: too cash Betel, that you may be using part of
Speaker 2: the budget of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a
Speaker 2: personal slow fund to make tens or hundreds of thousands
Speaker 2: of dollars in unlawful bonus payments to loyalist MAGA henchmen
Speaker 2: who have engaged in misconduct. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: here from an article on MS now by Kindlanian quote
Speaker 2: Committee Democrats have information that Betel has issued more than
Speaker 2: one million dollars in awards, the letter says. The letter
Speaker 2: says that the money went to special agents serving on
Speaker 2: his director's advisory team, which Raskin's letter describes as a
Speaker 2: curated group of agents who are willing to carry out
Speaker 2: your unlawful and partisan orders. There's very little else known
Speaker 2: other than that allegedly some of these payments were made
Speaker 2: so rapidly that they bounced back like he was sending.
Speaker 4: Money to people.
Speaker 2: That's when they are alleging.
Speaker 16: I'm going to.
Speaker 2: Assume Cash is going to deny this, and so will
Speaker 2: the FBI. I don't think they've even had time to
Speaker 2: make a response yet. The FBI has not responded for
Speaker 2: comment by ms NOW, at least according to their article,
Speaker 2: this just dropped.
Speaker 4: So that's fun for.
Speaker 3: Us all to know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, all right, so cool.
Speaker 2: So I just felt like that was good.
Speaker 17: Yeah, great, lead corrupt administration in history.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Okay, let's talk about a bunch of other stuff
Speaker 4: that isn't also great.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Donald Trump issued a broad executive order on Friday which
Speaker 4: rescinded previous orders by the Carter and Nicks administrations limiting
Speaker 4: offered vehicle access to public lands, although it doesn't immediately
Speaker 4: change the rules. This has the potential to do massive
Speaker 4: and irreparable damage to public lands by taking away the
Speaker 4: pillars really on which they've built regulation and motor vehicle
Speaker 4: use of public land to the other public land thing. Now,
Speaker 4: friend of the show, Mike fucking Lee is back again,
Speaker 4: trying to fuck up your public lands again. Fuck Mike Lee,
Speaker 4: Utah Senitor, if you're not familiar. So, there was a
Speaker 4: bipartisan Wildfire Prevention Act of twenty twenty five Fire Prevention
Speaker 4: Act that was going along smoothly in its little Senate
Speaker 4: journey until Mike Lee decided to put in a spoiler
Speaker 4: that would rescind the roadless Rule. We've spoken about the
Speaker 4: two thousand and one roadless rule before, so I'm not
Speaker 4: going to go into very great detail. I've spoken about
Speaker 4: Lee ad nauseum. Lee used his position of chair of
Speaker 4: this committee to insert this right, and in doing so,
Speaker 4: not only is Lee trying for a third time since
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five to sell off public lands, he is
Speaker 4: also probably ruining the future of the Wildfire Prevention Act,
Speaker 4: the funding that this will have, that the effect that
Speaker 4: this will have. It's now unlikely to pass because Mike
Speaker 4: Lee has spoiled it with his public land sell off shit. Again.
Speaker 4: People might recall Lee try to sell our public lands
Speaker 4: with parts of the Better the Better Business Bureau, No,
Speaker 4: the Big Beautiful Bill, the other BBB, and again when
Speaker 4: he attempted to justify motor vehicle use in wilderness. Garrison
Speaker 4: and I med an episode about that where he was
Speaker 4: talking about how you need roads in wilderness areas to
Speaker 4: allow border patrol to do border patrol stuff. The Forest
Speaker 4: Service had previously talked about rescinding the road this rule
Speaker 4: through like administrative rule chain that seems to have been
Speaker 4: an extremely unpopular choice, but that that process is still
Speaker 4: on going. But what Lee's trying to do here is
Speaker 4: lock it into legislation as opposed to something that another
Speaker 4: administration could change back. Finally, I guess it's all kind
Speaker 4: of public lands and related stuff for me. This week,
Speaker 4: Fish and Wildlife Service agents served a warrant on a
Speaker 4: property in New Mexico after two colored Mexican gray wolves,
Speaker 4: which are covered by the endangered Species that were killed.
Speaker 4: Calling to an Affidavid file in New Mexico. Both wolves
Speaker 4: were killed after being caught in the leg hole traps.
Speaker 4: One was left to die, the other was shot and
Speaker 4: then beaten in the head. I read this warrant today.
Speaker 4: It's kind of interesting. I saw something very very brief
Speaker 4: reporting on it, and Molly helped me find the warrant.
Speaker 4: The people on who the warrant was served on were
Speaker 4: horse breakers, but I think they worked on a family
Speaker 4: cattle ranch. It seems that the Fish and Wildlife Service
Speaker 4: agents set up cameras after the collars of the wolves
Speaker 4: told them that the wolves had died, and then they
Speaker 4: realized that they had remained in one area. It suggests
Speaker 4: that they had remained one area sometime then died I
Speaker 4: either had been trapped. They were able to set up
Speaker 4: cameras and film these guys recovering the traps, according to
Speaker 4: Jaffa David, and so they are now going to begin
Speaker 4: their prosecution. I guess well more from me. Fifteen people
Speaker 4: in Minnesota were indicted on criminal conspiracy charges for events
Speaker 4: and protests around the Whipple Federal Building and Fort Snelling.
Speaker 4: We covered this in great detail on a show that
Speaker 4: broadcast on Wednesday, the seventeenth of June, So if you'd
Speaker 4: like to know more about that. We got some comment
Speaker 4: from a couple of lawyers, and Margaret and I were
Speaker 4: present at one of the events that this indictment centers on,
Speaker 4: so we get some more insight there.
Speaker 15: For some election news, we still don't have right choice
Speaker 15: vote tallies in Maine for the governor's race there. I
Speaker 15: will keep an eye on that. But in Washington, DC,
Speaker 15: Democratic Socialist Denise Lewis George won the Democratic primary in
Speaker 15: the Washington d C mayoral race with fifty two point
Speaker 15: eight percent of the vote, and a DSA cadre member
Speaker 15: named a Perno Raj is in the lead for the
Speaker 15: Ward one City Council seat with about forty seven percent
Speaker 15: of the vote in the Democratic primary. Both candidates are
Speaker 15: not expected to face substantial opposition in the upcoming general election,
Speaker 15: so it looks like big wins for the DSA in Washington,
Speaker 15: d C. Last Tuesday. Robert California, Yes.
Speaker 4: What's going on with it?
Speaker 3: Robert?
Speaker 4: Why is it the way it is? In short?
Speaker 2: James, the sun So, California US House District fourteen is
Speaker 2: currently undergoing a special non partisan primary because Eric Swawell,
Speaker 2: friend of the Pod in the you know, joking sense,
Speaker 2: not literal sense, because we don't like him.
Speaker 15: Definitely, definitely not eemy of the enemy of the graced
Speaker 15: enemy of the pod.
Speaker 4: No longer can his job are avowed nemesis.
Speaker 2: Now, the fun thing about that is that Eric Swawall
Speaker 2: is genocide denier, and he is currently the number one
Speaker 2: person And you know this is just like the first
Speaker 2: round of voting. Is Aisha Wahab, who's at about forty
Speaker 2: two point six percent of the vote based on the
Speaker 2: most recent numbers I have. Melissa Hernandez is number two
Speaker 2: at about sixteen point eight percent of the vote. So
Speaker 2: Aish's got a sizeable lead here, and her politics are
Speaker 2: significantly better in some important ways than Eric Swawall's, including
Speaker 2: the fact that she is not a genocide denier. So
Speaker 2: that's kind of bracing. That's nice to see. Anyway, That's
Speaker 2: really all I've got to say.
Speaker 16: Yeah, So, in much bleaker news on Sunday, June fourteenth,
Speaker 16: police and Senatobia, Mississippi, shot and killed a one year
Speaker 16: old child named Cohen Wiley as they opened fire on
Speaker 16: a car in the parking lot of a Walmart. An
Speaker 16: adult who was in the car, who is a right
Speaker 16: just the child's mother, is described as quote critically injured
Speaker 16: after also being shot.
Speaker 4: I think it's.
Speaker 16: Important to hear what happened first year, I Cliff of Flessia,
Speaker 16: Whiley the mother of comb.
Speaker 14: Whiley, it was me, my son, and another friend of
Speaker 14: mine was at Walmart. As we was leaving out the Walmart,
Speaker 14: they tried to stop her, but I kept walking because
Speaker 14: it had nothing to do with me. By the time
Speaker 14: in my baby got in the car, she came and
Speaker 14: then they when we was bagging up, they was running
Speaker 14: out the come. I raised my baby up because they
Speaker 14: redrawed their gun. She had no tent. I raised my
Speaker 14: baby up trying to show them there. He was in
Speaker 14: the car. So she was bagging up and she hit
Speaker 14: a car as I was opening the door, so the
Speaker 14: doe flew back in. By the time I sat my
Speaker 14: baby down, it was like three to four shots. One
Speaker 14: of the shots hit him and his real cage, and
Speaker 14: the other shots hit her in her arm and her thigh.
Speaker 14: We lived and went to since help your hospital where
Speaker 14: he was pronounced did my god.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is fucking heartbreaking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's just a nightmare.
Speaker 3: It's horrible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it looks like Benjamin Crump's representing her, which is
Speaker 4: like that guy is a powerhouse.
Speaker 16: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like any time you're trying to train people how
Speaker 2: to use firearms responsibly. One thing you have to drive
Speaker 2: home repeatedly is that like, bullets don't stop if you miss,
Speaker 2: and they don't necessarily stop just because you've hit the target. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so you always need to be not just aware of,
Speaker 2: but paranoid about what's what's around you and around where
Speaker 2: you're shooting, if you're going to shoot. And police are
Speaker 2: trained to do the opposite of that. You know, they're
Speaker 2: trained that their lives mean more than the lives of infants.
Speaker 3: That's what this is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it God, Yeah that video.
Speaker 16: By the way, p W reg so As was mentioned
Speaker 16: in the video, the cops were nominally responding to a
Speaker 16: claim of shoplifting. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigations, per the
Speaker 16: Mississippi Free Press, claims that the car was driving towards
Speaker 16: the officers. This is ereally similar to claims made by
Speaker 16: federal agents after the murder of a good. Police have
Speaker 16: yet to release bodycam footage. The footage we do have,
Speaker 16: it's not very good. Cell phone camera doesn't show the
Speaker 16: shooting itself, but shows the car driving away from officers.
Speaker 16: We also had some of the witnesses basically described the
Speaker 16: car like driving away from the officers and the officers shooting.
Speaker 16: But you're right, it's definitely following the trend that we've
Speaker 16: seen a lot with federal law enforcement, but not just them. Yeah,
Speaker 16: this is a local Yeah, of this idea like vehicle weaponization. Yeah,
Speaker 16: and that they have the ability to respond to quote
Speaker 16: unquote vehicle leapization with with lethal force. Yeah, or something
Speaker 16: we've seen claim a number of lives just this year.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 16: And this is combining and we'll talk about this a
Speaker 16: bit more in a second, but this is combining with
Speaker 16: sort of the shoplifting panic to create this nightmare of
Speaker 16: a situation. Yeah, a police in Senatobia have a history
Speaker 16: of police violence. Here's from wrig again.
Speaker 6: Quote.
Speaker 16: Last year at the same Walmart, the department came under
Speaker 16: fire after a woman had a tser pulled on her
Speaker 16: and was tackled to the ground after the department claimed
Speaker 16: she illegally parked in a handicapped spot. The woman claims
Speaker 16: she had just dropped her grandmother off at the store.
Speaker 16: In twenty twenty three, the case of a ten year
Speaker 16: old boy made national news after he was detained for
Speaker 16: urinating in public in an attorney's office private parking lot. Yeah,
Speaker 16: so this is you know, this is Mississippi. This is
Speaker 16: a place where things like this have happened before. The
Speaker 16: fact that there was a woman like again last year
Speaker 16: who was tackled in this same parking lot by the
Speaker 16: police says a lot. Yeah, and continue in the trend
Speaker 16: of police violence. Yeah, the police tear gas protesters on
Speaker 16: Tuesday in the parking lot and like the same parking
Speaker 16: lot where protests were going on. All of this comes
Speaker 16: in the sort of context of the deployment of a
Speaker 16: nationwide panic about shoplifting, deployed by the right as part
Speaker 16: of their strategy to bolster support from the police and
Speaker 16: roll back the gains of the twenty twenty George Floyd Uprising.
Speaker 16: Everything about police killings has just just continued to get
Speaker 16: worse since the Sharp administration took power. We've had it
Speaker 16: now from federal agents, we've had it from the police
Speaker 16: in general, and as Gary was talking about earlier, Yeah,
Speaker 16: this is kind of this intersection of this panic about
Speaker 16: shoplifting combining with this panic about sort of vehicle weaponization
Speaker 16: and turning into the cops murdering a one year old.
Speaker 16: I think it's also worth noting in the context of
Speaker 16: this allegedly being about shoplifting that nobody involved, like no
Speaker 16: one who was in the car, which is the mother
Speaker 16: of the baby, and also the woman driving the car
Speaker 16: who the police had initially confronted in the story we
Speaker 16: heard earlier. Neither of them have been arrested. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 16: I don't know. This is one of the worst stories
Speaker 16: for police shooting I've ever encountered. And yeah, yeah, protest
Speaker 16: presumably are going to continue tonight. This is again being
Speaker 16: recorded on Wednesday, June seventeenth. They may have escalated by
Speaker 16: the time you're hearing this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The cops in LA also killed a fucking a Golden Saint,
Speaker 4: Bernard doodle Oh this week.
Speaker 2: Not to equivocate these fucking cases, I guess this is
Speaker 2: just in the news.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely not, no, no, this is just another incident
Speaker 4: of police shooting when they absolutely had no need to.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: In this case, the lady had been watching the Knicks game.
Speaker 4: Somebody called to report screaming, which resulted in the cops
Speaker 4: coming and killing this person's dog. It's nowhere near the
Speaker 4: same as someone killing someone's child. I'm not suggesting that
Speaker 4: it's just yet another example that cops can just shoot
Speaker 4: first and ask questions later in this country, Yeah, six
Speaker 4: years after George Floyd was murdered.
Speaker 16: Yeah, and I think to close, one of the things
Speaker 16: that I always remember about that protest is every single
Speaker 16: city had their own list of names.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 16: I don't know, we like we had our own in
Speaker 16: Chicago And yeah, I mean I'm immediately sort of like
Speaker 16: just thinking about the killing a time of rice and yeah,
Speaker 16: how we just continue to live in this country where
Speaker 16: the cops just murder black people constantly, And the only
Speaker 16: thing that's shanged since then is the police have more money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they're working to be able to murder other
Speaker 2: groups of people more often too.
Speaker 16: You know, the feds are expanding out and shooting white
Speaker 16: people in cold blood.
Speaker 2: Eventually the racism will be less noticeable. Yeah, if the
Speaker 2: violence just becomes more all encompassing. Yeah, that's the promise
Speaker 2: of the future.
Speaker 3: Yeah it won't.
Speaker 2: It'll still be noticeable, guys. Yeah that they're not going
Speaker 2: to come through on that promise either.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's gonna say. Like this country, like after after Elicha. McLean,
Speaker 4: I feel like anyone who could watch it and be like, yeah,
Speaker 4: shit's going fine. We just at some point cops just
Speaker 4: to say we're never going to change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's I'm going to guess the number of
Speaker 2: people who stumble onto our shows and don't already think like, yeah,
Speaker 2: the cops kill a lot of people they don't need
Speaker 2: to be killing. That's pretty low. So I feel like
Speaker 2: we preach into the we've done, we've we've we've done
Speaker 2: what we need to here like yeah, yeah, not not
Speaker 2: that it's not important.
Speaker 15: Nope, just said we'll go on a breakdown and come
Speaker 15: back to talk about Iran and sports.
Speaker 4: Yep, we are back, and we are back to report
Speaker 4: peace in our time.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: Old Trump did it somehow, somehow, he finally brought an
Speaker 2: end to a long, lingering conflict that he's started a
Speaker 2: couple of weeks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, calling him the peacemaker.
Speaker 2: This is this is like three or four days after
Speaker 2: like a really long bender, when like I'm like, wow,
Speaker 2: I actually I haven't gotten fucked up at all, and
Speaker 2: it's been like ninety six hours. You know, I think
Speaker 2: I've learned a couple of things about sobriety. I've reached
Speaker 2: like a new level of wisdom that's allowed me to transcend.
Speaker 2: Like that's that's that's how I what I compared to
Speaker 2: Donald Trump right now.
Speaker 4: Yep is he announced that quote oil will flow on
Speaker 4: both ends again for the region and the world. So
Speaker 4: we initially learned about this this deal via True Social Right,
Speaker 4: and I initially wrote this space on what we didn't know.
Speaker 4: Then this morning, after a lot of people complain that
Speaker 4: nobody knew the details of the deal, State Apartment spokesperson
Speaker 4: and read the text of the deal allowed to report
Speaker 4: us on a conference call. So this is a memorandum
Speaker 4: of understanding right the MU is titled quote Islamabad Memorandum
Speaker 4: of Understanding between the United States of America and Islamic
Speaker 4: Republic of Iran. It'll be signed on Friday. That that
Speaker 4: would be the day. If you hit US today comes out,
Speaker 4: that will be that day. It's already been electronically signed.
Speaker 4: Apparently it's still unclear if it's trumple Von she's going
Speaker 4: to sign it on behalf of the US.
Speaker 2: I love the idea that they've got a DOCU sign
Speaker 2: that's like being in back and forth something fucking Darron
Speaker 2: is like wait a minute, Like I refreshed my phone, man,
Speaker 2: I'm like, I'm still not seeing it. I'm still not
Speaker 2: seeing it. Did you Okay, how did you spell my
Speaker 2: email address? Let me check the span. Dude trying to
Speaker 2: get the Trump administration to spell your name right in
Speaker 2: an email as any Iranian politician.
Speaker 11: My god.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Quick update.
Speaker 15: Here turns out Trump signed the Memorandum of Understanding right
Speaker 15: after we recorded on Wednesday in Versailles. So well, it
Speaker 15: is an MoU of Versailles.
Speaker 3: Back to jams.
Speaker 4: Once they sign it, they're going to do a sixty
Speaker 4: day intensive negotiation period which will certainly focus on the
Speaker 4: nuclear issue. It gets that in a bit. The MoU begins,
Speaker 4: quote the United States of America and Islamic Republic of
Speaker 4: Iran and their allies in the current war are selling
Speaker 4: this MoU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of
Speaker 4: military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon. An undicate
Speaker 4: from now on not to initiate any war military operation
Speaker 4: against each other, and to refrain from the threat or
Speaker 4: use of force against each other. And it's showing the
Speaker 4: territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will
Speaker 4: confirm the permanent termination of the war and all fronts,
Speaker 4: including in Neblon. We're going to get onto that, don't worry.
Speaker 4: Probably the headliner rate is the nuclear stuff zero point
Speaker 4: eight quote. The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it
Speaker 4: shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. There's still negotiation
Speaker 4: on a rich geranium. But CNN had a leaked version
Speaker 4: of a previous version of this draft, and it didn't
Speaker 4: have the following. So this has been added at a
Speaker 4: relatively late stage. And it seems that there is a
Speaker 4: quote unquote minimum methodology for like degrading their enriched uranium,
Speaker 4: which is to downblend it under IAEA supervision. That seems
Speaker 4: to have been added very late, so that that's kind
Speaker 4: of their like lowest threshold that the US is willing
Speaker 4: to accept. I guess, which will be not transferring that
Speaker 4: uranium but down blending it. The United States is committed
Speaker 4: to withdraw down its blockade and its forced pasture within
Speaker 4: thirty days. Today we saw Iranian tankers across the USA's
Speaker 4: blocke with that an issue claims about the straight up
Speaker 4: horror moves on Trump's true social account and those that
Speaker 4: we see on Iranian state media and in the document Diverge,
Speaker 4: Trump has claimed and equivocally that straight is open without tolls.
Speaker 4: This is not something we see in Pakistani PM Shabasha
Speaker 4: Reef's statement or in Iran. As far as News Agency
Speaker 4: fast US, she seems to say that the strait will
Speaker 4: be administered by a man in Iran, and then I'll
Speaker 4: just read from the MoU here. The Islamic Republic of
Speaker 4: Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the
Speaker 4: safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for sixty
Speaker 4: days only from the Persian Gulf to the See of
Speaker 4: a Man and vice versa. The traffic of commercial vessels
Speaker 4: will immediately start and considering the need for removing the technical,
Speaker 4: military obstacles and de mining by the Islamic Republic of Iran,
Speaker 4: will be instated within thirty days. The Islamic Republican Iran
Speaker 4: will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of a Man to
Speaker 4: determine the future administration and maritime services in the Straight
Speaker 4: of Horn Moose in discussion with other Persian Golf littoral
Speaker 4: states in line with the applicable international law and sovereign
Speaker 4: rights of coastal states of the Straight of Hornmos not
Speaker 4: entirely clear there, but it does seem to perhaps leave
Speaker 4: open some kind of Iranian A man whole agreement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're definitely going to start charging a service. We're
Speaker 2: going to make a sht money off this.
Speaker 4: Yep, let's talk about a shitload of money, because because
Speaker 4: that's only unfortunately some of the shipload of money. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they're going to make of this. So the document includes
Speaker 4: three hundred billion dollars in reconstruction funds to total sanctions
Speaker 4: relief out of the deal.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: That's why they call him deal man.
Speaker 15: This is tough because we have destroyed massive parts of
Speaker 15: their infrastructure and we should we get that. But also, dude,
Speaker 15: you started this war, Yeah, spent billions of dollars, and
Speaker 15: now we're going to give them three hundred billion.
Speaker 7: What is wrong with you?
Speaker 2: Fucking ten years ago he was like, you know, the
Speaker 2: only thing that stopped around from falling off the brink
Speaker 2: was that Obama's that deal game one hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: billion dollars.
Speaker 12: All this circle back to another version of some kind
Speaker 12: of a raw nuclear agreement.
Speaker 15: All we've gotten is they say they won't, but now
Speaker 15: they get to rebuild all their infrastructure using our money
Speaker 15: because we used our money to destroy their infrastructure.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, they're supposed to be like an international
Speaker 2: monitoring thing, but like fuck yeah, that's not new.
Speaker 16: And I think more importantly for like America geo strategically,
Speaker 16: it's like Trump has managed to end the American protectorate
Speaker 16: of open trade lanes, a thing that has been the
Speaker 16: core of American power since like World War Two, and
Speaker 16: then no one.
Speaker 18: Was even thinking about taking away a ran and no
Speaker 18: part of Iran strategy it was to do this. This
Speaker 18: was not in that like this was a move they
Speaker 18: made because they were at a tight spot.
Speaker 4: And they had this was always in that if shit
Speaker 4: HiT's a found, they will do this, and now we've normalized.
Speaker 2: Right, this has always been an option for them, and
Speaker 2: they were put in a bad enough position that they
Speaker 2: had to do that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This was their helm's deep thing, you know, is like
Speaker 2: well we can strangle global trade, you know.
Speaker 17: Yeah, this this wasn't even like a thing in like
Speaker 17: the like the I mean, I guess it kind of
Speaker 17: was in like the worst nightmares of like Israeli Fezbigoria
Speaker 17: about Iron getting a nuke, but like this wasn't even
Speaker 17: a thing that was like ooh they could Iran could.
Speaker 16: Do this, Like it's it's astonishing what they've what they've
Speaker 16: managed to do.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's a good time and every thing's
Speaker 2: very fine, So.
Speaker 4: Let's talk about it. Three hundred million just because I'm
Speaker 4: interested in the preconditions for fascism, and of course paying
Speaker 4: reparations for a war that you started was one of
Speaker 4: them first time around in Germany. It does, if you
Speaker 4: do the math, calculate to a lot less in the
Speaker 4: reparations that Germany had to pay off to World War One,
Speaker 4: of course.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The document labels the three hundred billion as reconstruction funds,
Speaker 4: but does not give a source other than quote, the
Speaker 4: United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop
Speaker 4: a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD three
Speaker 4: hundred billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the
Speaker 4: Islamic Republic of Iran. A separate line item details the
Speaker 4: United States of America undertakes to make fully available for
Speaker 4: use the frozen or restricted funds and assets that Republic
Speaker 4: of Iran upon implementation as MoU so they also get
Speaker 4: sanctions relief, right, Yeah, so they are getting all of
Speaker 4: the funds in the US has had frozen. They're getting
Speaker 4: sanctioned relief. And it seems like, it's conceivable with these
Speaker 4: two sentences that they're trying to include the unfrozen funds,
Speaker 4: but also highly conceivable that they're not. They don't seem
Speaker 4: to have restricted ballistic missiles, they don't seem to have
Speaker 4: mandated anything about changing the in the regime of Iran.
Speaker 4: Human rights, women's rights, rights for minority ethnic groups in Iran.
Speaker 4: Iran since this, since we first learned as mu, Iran
Speaker 4: has continued drone strikes against Kurdish groups in Southern Kordistan,
Speaker 4: Iranian Kurdish groups who are currently in Southern Kordistan. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And then then like with not over yet, because let's
Speaker 4: talk about what Israel has to say. Oh boy, yeah,
Speaker 4: Israel it just seems to be showing no signs of
Speaker 4: feeling themselves to be in any way restrained by this.
Speaker 4: Many Israeli politicians are public broken with the US on this.
Speaker 4: Israel's National Security Minister bank Via, famous for many terrible things,
Speaker 4: took to Twitter to announce that he had other plans, saying, quote,
Speaker 4: Trump's agreement does not bind us Israel. It's not subject
Speaker 4: to the United States. We're an independent sovereign nation explanation mark.
Speaker 4: Our duty is to the citizens of Israel, to the
Speaker 4: soldiers of the IDF, and to the Jewish people, and
Speaker 4: our historical duty to the persecuted and murdered Jews over
Speaker 4: thousands of years of exile to provide security to Jews
Speaker 4: in the land of Israel. Every time we succumbed to
Speaker 4: international pressure at the expense of Israel's security, we played
Speaker 4: a blood place with interest. So I don't think Bangavia
Speaker 4: feels bound by this to stop aggression in Lebanon, which
Speaker 4: will make the implementation of the whole thing very difficult.
Speaker 4: We've seen Trump really break with BB in a way
Speaker 4: that we'd heard before, but there have now been several
Speaker 4: more reports of Trump being very annoyed at NETN Yahoo
Speaker 4: continuing to effect if he sabotage these negotiations. Right, So, yeah,
Speaker 4: great times, very successful war. Huge dub. Speaking of dubs,
Speaker 4: let's talk about sports. Oh yeah, this past.
Speaker 15: Weekend, there were three sporting events that I think each
Speaker 15: reflect a unique facet of current American politics. This is
Speaker 15: the NBA Finals, the World Cup, and of course the
Speaker 15: Formula One Grand Prix in Barcelonia. No it says, of course,
Speaker 15: the UFC fight in the White House. Yeah, Before we
Speaker 15: talk about the UFC, which we will because there's a
Speaker 15: lot to do there. On Saturday night, the New York
Speaker 15: Nickerbockers overcame the curse of James Dolan and beat the
Speaker 15: San Antonios Urus five games to one, becoming NBA champions
Speaker 15: for the first time in fifty three years. After the
Speaker 15: next drought ending victory, the city lit up in celebration,
Speaker 15: literally in the case of a school bus in Times Square.
Speaker 15: But I think thousands, possibly one hundred of thousands of
Speaker 15: New Yorkers celebrated in a largely peaceful yet energized fashion
Speaker 15: all throughout the streets, buses and trains until the early
Speaker 15: hours of the morning.
Speaker 2: I love celebrating at a largely peaceful fashion.
Speaker 4: Five police cars did not survive the night.
Speaker 16: RiPP and pepperoni, as is the youth used to say.
Speaker 15: But come morning everything was all cleaned up in the
Speaker 15: city was sparkling ahead of the Puerto Rico Day Parade.
Speaker 15: On June eleventh, the World Cup kicked off, with matches
Speaker 15: being hosted in the US, Mexico, and Canada. And guys,
Speaker 15: everyone knows FIFA has tried to cozy up to Trump
Speaker 15: the past few years, notably awarding the president with the
Speaker 15: first ever FIFA World Peace Prize a few months prior
Speaker 15: to Trump starting a war, well.
Speaker 4: He'd already started a couple. He invaded Venezuela. That was
Speaker 4: That was a small skirmish compared to I think he
Speaker 4: had a big ward.
Speaker 15: The scale of our of our three hundred billion dollar
Speaker 15: restitution being paid to Ahurad fair. But the Trump administration's
Speaker 15: foreign policy and immigration restrictions have still caused disruptions to
Speaker 15: the World Cup. World Cup referee Omar Abdul Kadir Artan
Speaker 15: was denied entry to the US by CPB at the
Speaker 15: Miami International Airport due to quote unquote vetting concerns after
Speaker 15: being detained and questioned for eleven hours. Artan is from Somalia,
Speaker 15: which is currently on Trump's travel ban list, but Artan
Speaker 15: had actually already been vetted by the State Department and
Speaker 15: was issued a valid visa to referee at the World Cup.
Speaker 15: The executive director of the White House's World Cup Task Force,
Speaker 15: Andrew Giuliani, son of from the Pod and America's Mayor
Speaker 15: Rudy Giuliani, said that Artan was quote talking to some
Speaker 15: very bad people right as he was coming to the
Speaker 15: United States. There's some classified information we can't discuss now
Speaker 15: at some point that may be released unquote. Just last year,
Speaker 15: the Confederation of African Football named Artan as Referee of
Speaker 15: the Year. The Trump administration currently has travel bands against
Speaker 15: four of the qualifying countries participating in the World Cup.
Speaker 15: That's Haiti, Iran, Ivory Coast, and Singal, with exemptions for
Speaker 15: athletes and team officials participating at certain sporting events like
Speaker 15: the World Cup. For football fans wanting to attend the
Speaker 15: World Cup, there are visa bond waivers for Ivory Coast
Speaker 15: and Singhal, but not Haiti in Iran, with the Admin
Speaker 15: citing a high visa over stay right among Haitians and
Speaker 15: national security concerns related to the war in Iran. The
Speaker 15: Iranian travel ban also does have an exemption for certain
Speaker 15: religious minorities. Fans from the afric Coast and Stingal still
Speaker 15: have to deal with restrictions, as fans from those countries
Speaker 15: have reported getting their visas denied. It appears that in
Speaker 15: order to attend the World Cup they needed to apply
Speaker 15: for their visas prior to the presidential proclamation on December sixteenth.
Speaker 15: Very few fans from those countries are in and many
Speaker 15: have reported getting visas denied. Bomber visa bond waiver just
Speaker 15: applies to the fee, the visa fee that the Trump
Speaker 15: administration has has introduced, and they announced that there was
Speaker 15: a waiver for the fee for World Cup countries. Yeah,
Speaker 15: so if they did get the visa, they don't need
Speaker 15: to pay this extra fee, but they can only get
Speaker 15: the visa prior to the travel band going into effect
Speaker 15: in December.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Indonesia was removed as a host for twenty twenty
Speaker 4: three under twenty World Cup. They don't have diplomatic ties
Speaker 4: with Israel, and they had had opposed Israel's participation in
Speaker 4: the tournament, and obviously weren't going to like I believe
Speaker 4: they weren't going to allow them visas, but I'd have
Speaker 4: to check that last part that at that point, FIFA
Speaker 4: acted very swiftly, Right, They're not going to do that here.
Speaker 15: And despite the acted exemption, the Iranian team has ran
Speaker 15: into issues. Their training base camp had to be relocated
Speaker 15: from Arizona to Mexico, and the Trump administration has been
Speaker 15: making the team enter and exit through US customs on
Speaker 15: the same day as their matches.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're right there in Tijuana actually, so like they're
Speaker 4: as close as they can be, right whilst not being
Speaker 4: except playing the games up in la I think I
Speaker 4: played in Englewood, but still I'm guessing they are transiting
Speaker 4: to sand They're probably crossing, having to go to San
Speaker 4: Diego and then fly north. It seems they said they flew,
Speaker 4: so maybe they fled directly to Tijani, didn't they.
Speaker 15: Despite the travel band exemption also technically applying to coaches
Speaker 15: and non player members of the athletic team, Iranian football
Speaker 15: officials have had their visas tonight. Star Iraqi player Amen
Speaker 15: Hussein and the Iraq team photographer were detained for in
Speaker 15: the player's case, seven hours, the photographer's case twelve hours
Speaker 15: at the Chicago airport while going through customs. Hassein was
Speaker 15: ultimately allowed entry, but the team photographer was not. Finally,
Speaker 15: New York City is hosting eight games for the World Cup,
Speaker 15: including the final, and in the lead up to the
Speaker 15: World Cup, Tom Homan threatened to send quote more ICE
Speaker 15: agents than you've ever seen on quote to New York
Speaker 15: City following legislations signed by Kathy Hokel limiting cooperation between
Speaker 15: ICE and local law enforcement. Following Homan's threat, Mary Mum
Speaker 15: Donnie said, quote, the World Cup is supposed to be
Speaker 15: a celebration of the world as a whole, and some
Speaker 15: of the decisions that we've seen being taken by the
Speaker 15: federal administration is anethema to what this tournament is supposed
Speaker 15: to be about.
Speaker 4: Unquote.
Speaker 15: Let's talk about one more sporting event, and of course
Speaker 15: that is the UFC Freedom two point fifty streaming on
Speaker 15: Paramount Plus, which happened this Sunday at the White House
Speaker 15: South Lawn, which was turned into a UFC stadium arena.
Speaker 4: Trump and Donald White.
Speaker 15: Walked together from the Oval office all the way to
Speaker 15: the octagon and like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's this is the most idiocracy things have been. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not like a a even a comparison you can
Speaker 2: make anymore. It's just we're just doing the exact thing.
Speaker 11: So cool, Welcome to UFC Freedom two fifty. Here is
Speaker 11: the President w United States of America, Donald J.
Speaker 4: Trump. Cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that movie's aged. Wow, better than I would have thought, unfortunately.
Speaker 15: Yeah, the cold open for the event was narrated by
Speaker 15: Ron Perlman, which is kind of the saddest part of
Speaker 15: this whole ordeal for me.
Speaker 2: Ah, that's upsetting, that's upsetting.
Speaker 8: Wait what really?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm sorry, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm sure UFC offered him a dump truck full of money.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Ron Perlman's well known to do things for dump dregs
Speaker 2: full of money.
Speaker 15: In between the fights, they played a series of largely
Speaker 15: AI generated videos covering American history and showing how the
Speaker 15: UFC embodies the country's fighting spirits.
Speaker 4: Are not good.
Speaker 15: You can find them on the UFC YouTube channel. They're
Speaker 15: titled Americana. There's a series of three UFC Veteran announcer
Speaker 15: Bruce Buffer kicked things off in a way that really
Speaker 15: encapsulated this entire event. And I do want to play
Speaker 15: this clip here.
Speaker 4: There's a gentleman.
Speaker 2: From the SHOFFM Love the Wide House in Washington.
Speaker 19: For you safe Freedom two fipter Perata by Ram Trucks
Speaker 19: not Pleased off Ram and by Crypto dot com, the
Speaker 19: world's leading crypto cursey platform.
Speaker 16: Man just the most cardios bullshit seen Crypto dot Com.
Speaker 12: Yep, Wow, it wasn't just Crypto dot Com that had
Speaker 12: a presence at Freedom two fifty. The Octagon stage itself
Speaker 12: was covered with logos for Red, White and Blue, Monster Energy,
Speaker 12: bud Light, Rumble, Meta, Steak, gambling and polymarket.
Speaker 2: Such a good country man. I'm just I love this place.
Speaker 2: I were nailing it.
Speaker 15: The four thousand seat South lond Arena was mostly filled
Speaker 15: by members of the military, Trump's cabinets, and politicians and
Speaker 15: billionaires like David Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 2: Man the incredible ratio of billionaires to guys with thirty
Speaker 2: one percent APR loans on a Ford F one fifty.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's ever existed before in like
Speaker 2: this small space.
Speaker 15: The normal people had to watch from Olyps Park.
Speaker 4: Near the Washington Arnument.
Speaker 15: This was a sixty million dollar production.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: There was a military flyover.
Speaker 15: The US Marine Band played songs like the Boys Are
Speaker 15: Back in Town and of course Trump's favorite YMCA. But
Speaker 15: the thing that caused the most headlines after the event
Speaker 15: relates to UFC heavyweight to Josh Hokit, who acts a
Speaker 15: sort of heel for the UFC while making statements that
Speaker 15: pander to a mega fan base. After winning his match,
Speaker 15: he gave Trump a chain necklace and said, hey, shout
Speaker 15: out to Trump for having the balls to put on
Speaker 15: some shit like this.
Speaker 4: Unquote.
Speaker 15: Trump's balls received multiple shoutouts on stage, but following that comment,
Speaker 15: Josh Hokit said.
Speaker 8: This, Mochelle Hopebama is a man.
Speaker 4: Am I right America.
Speaker 15: Joe Rogan is on stage at the same time holding
Speaker 15: the microphone for Hokit.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Rogan never a d rest the comment for the rest
Speaker 15: of the night, and the UFC cut out this comment
Speaker 15: from their own YouTube upload and has issued takedown requests
Speaker 15: for this clip across social media. Denna White told Time magazine, quote,
Speaker 15: I understand that the Obamas are public figures, but I'm
Speaker 15: completely against saying nasty and false things about people's families.
Speaker 15: Everyone knows my position on free speech, but I hate
Speaker 15: that kind of nonsense.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you make that bed, you get a lie in it.
Speaker 4: So that was freedom two fifty.
Speaker 15: I watched about an hours worth of the Paramount plus
Speaker 15: broadcast and the fights. I did not watch the full thing.
Speaker 15: Most of the actual fighting was just like a regular
Speaker 15: UFC fight, right. The Hokit comment was the main thing
Speaker 15: that was like politically motivated actually on stage, besides the
Speaker 15: fact that you know, Trump's sitting right there and you're
Speaker 15: fighting at the White House. But according to the FBI,
Speaker 15: this event could have gone very different. Here's Fox News reporting.
Speaker 20: Everyone breaking news out of Washington, d C on a
Speaker 20: potential tragedy that's been averted. The FBI, revealing earlier today,
Speaker 20: had foiled an alleged terror plot that was set to
Speaker 20: target Sunday night's UFC Freedom event at the White House.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 15: On Tuesday morning, Fox reported there was a sophisticated multi
Speaker 15: step plan involving explosives, drones, and snipers targeting the Freedom
Speaker 15: through Fifty event. Vice President JD. Vance addressed the alleged
Speaker 15: terror plot on Fox and Friends, saying, quote, so much
Speaker 15: of the far left rhetoric is driving itself towards violence,
Speaker 15: and also said.
Speaker 12: This Unfortunately, I think a lot of my Democratic colleagues
Speaker 12: in Washington have got to look themselves in the mirror
Speaker 12: and say, why is so much of this political violence
Speaker 12: coming from our side of the spectrum.
Speaker 4: Maybe they can do something different.
Speaker 15: So, according to Vance, this alleged terror plot was coming
Speaker 15: from the Democrat side of politics a result of turning
Speaker 15: up the political rhetoric. Fox reported that the thwarted attack
Speaker 15: was targeting capitalism, millionaires, and a pack with upwards of
Speaker 15: twenty three people involved in the plot, five of whom
Speaker 15: are in custody, with the details of the plan being
Speaker 15: uncovered on the encrypted messaging app Signal. A Fox contributor
Speaker 15: said that terrorist organizations and countries used by them's open
Speaker 15: border to bring people inside the United States. Advance pointed
Speaker 15: to the administration's efforts to go after left wing terrorist
Speaker 15: funding networks. Almost all of that is not true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just lies. It's just lies, complete nonsense.
Speaker 12: Yeah, almost all of that is at the very least
Speaker 12: stretching what actually happened to a near unrecognizable status, or
Speaker 12: is completely lying about the context and background of this attack.
Speaker 12: We will get into what actually happened regarding this alleged
Speaker 12: planned attack after this app break.
Speaker 15: Okay, we are back. On Tuesday morning, the FBI and
Speaker 15: DOJ announced law enforcement had thwarted a mass casualty attack
Speaker 15: attempting to kill government officials with arrests happening over the
Speaker 15: weekend in Ohio, Missouri, Nebraska, and California. But rather than
Speaker 15: being the result of the FBI's excellent investigative prowess, law
Speaker 15: enforcement only learned about this potential attack because the mother
Speaker 15: of one of the members of this group as planning
Speaker 15: the attack called the police concerned about her son's recent
Speaker 15: firearm purchases and contact with individuals online. By the time
Speaker 15: the FBI got to this person, nineteen year old Tyson Proper,
Speaker 15: he was already in a mental hospital.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Literally could not have done this. And just to
Speaker 2: be clear that the scale of the plan that they're describing,
Speaker 2: I would think would be difficult for like an nation
Speaker 2: state actor to carry off successfully in DC.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Absolutely, Yeah, these guys were LARPing.
Speaker 2: These guys were LARPing on a signal group and there
Speaker 2: was definitely some mental illness involved in that too.
Speaker 15: A group of a group of men larped themselves into
Speaker 15: federal custody.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 15: Now, after police were called to Tyson Propper's home, where
Speaker 15: he lived with his parents, he was transported to the
Speaker 15: Dublin Springs Mental Health Center for homicidal ideations. Tyson Propper
Speaker 15: himself told police and FBI that he and others online
Speaker 15: had planned to use drones to detonate explosives on the
Speaker 15: north side of the UFC arena, forcing event attendees to
Speaker 15: evacuate south, where other co conspirators would be set up
Speaker 15: with sniper rifles to fire on the fillying crowd, targeting
Speaker 15: politicians and other quote unquote high value targets at the
Speaker 15: Freedom two fifty event. Proper and for others are charged
Speaker 15: with conspiracy to commit murder. A family member told officers
Speaker 15: that Proper talked about meeting up with people he had
Speaker 15: met online to conduct quote unquote missions and quote unquote
Speaker 15: recons and that he allegedly spent about three thousand dollars
Speaker 15: of his graduation money to buy quote camping gear, food,
Speaker 15: ballistic plates, a new shotgun, a rifle, lots of ammunition,
Speaker 15: extra magazines, and plate carriers unquote. After searching his phone,
Speaker 15: investigators found signal chats detailing of planned attack, with maps
Speaker 15: highlighting potential sniper locations and drone launch points. The day
Speaker 15: after local police first visited Proper's home, the sheriff's office
Speaker 15: contacted the FBI. The FBI then searched Proper's home and
Speaker 15: found a journal that the criminal complaint says contained a
Speaker 15: list of approximately forty six names, including celebrities and politicians,
Speaker 15: as well as pages quote in which Proper wrote that
Speaker 15: the government sought to control people and to sacrifice children
Speaker 15: and others to a demonic figure unquote. Family told FBI
Speaker 15: that Proper had quote recently began interacting with a group
Speaker 15: online that was comprised of individuals who represented themselves as
Speaker 15: ex military and that may share some Christian based ideology.
Speaker 15: Family members said that these individuals were using religion to
Speaker 15: manipulate Proper, and that they quote expressed ultra religious and
Speaker 15: anti government sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the
Speaker 15: handling of the Epstein files, data centers, taking up all
Speaker 15: the water in communities, and other government actions. The Ohio
Speaker 15: criminal complaint says that Proper family members also highlighted concerning
Speaker 15: statements that he had made in recent months, quote, such
Speaker 15: as making sympathetic comments about Adolf Hitler and posting anti
Speaker 15: Semitic comments on Facebook.
Speaker 4: When will the left stop its violence?
Speaker 14: Yeah?
Speaker 15: Basic, basic antifa left wing plot against capitalists here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, standard leftist Hitler appreciate.
Speaker 15: Sacrificing children to demonic figures.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah. Well I don't know if you know Garrison,
Speaker 4: but they're still called the National Socialist Party.
Speaker 16: You know.
Speaker 2: These people were like Christian extremists with I'm sure some
Speaker 2: very weird views that will all get elucidated. I look
Speaker 2: forward to reading through the signal chats. This is not
Speaker 2: really a thing. This is people who are mentally ill
Speaker 2: and certainly. I mean it sounds like if you have
Speaker 2: a signal chat where you're passing around a map of
Speaker 2: targets crossed a line where I'm not surprised one of
Speaker 2: them was already in a mental hospital, but there was
Speaker 2: no danger to the event.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 15: To be clear, he was placed in the mental hospital
Speaker 15: after first being interviewed by police. But I think it's
Speaker 15: noteworthy the police did not take him into custody. They
Speaker 15: sent him to a mental health facility after first contacting him.
Speaker 2: Because he clearly had no ability to do this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, did he get a get involuntary mental health hold.
Speaker 15: There was an emergency request to put him in this
Speaker 15: mental hospital based on the homicidal ideation. The application detailed
Speaker 15: that he had also sought to join police or military,
Speaker 15: specifically just to kill human beings.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like, this kid sounds like he very easily
Speaker 2: could have become a mass shooter.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like, I'm sure there's a number of those like that.
Speaker 2: It does sound like that's something that was going on here.
Speaker 2: Ideation is certainly present, So this is very concerning. But yeah,
Speaker 2: what Vance's description of what happened is so so far
Speaker 2: Afield is to effectively be.
Speaker 15: Alie, Oh yeah. As for the sort of group formation
Speaker 15: here proper allegedly told police that members of the group
Speaker 15: that was planning this attack were primarily recruited through TikTok. Yeah,
Speaker 15: and then once they had been vetted on TikTok, they
Speaker 15: were allowed in a signal chat. The largest signal chat
Speaker 15: investigators found contained nineteen members. There's also some smaller spinoff
Speaker 15: signal chats.
Speaker 2: Even among there, the danger of the spinoff group chat
Speaker 2: is impossible to avoid.
Speaker 15: The chats was called quote unquote Hunters Jesus God, and
Speaker 15: the complaint says it contained detailed instructions for carrying out
Speaker 15: the attack, including plans to escape.
Speaker 4: They're completely delusional. They think they're escaping from doing something
Speaker 4: like that.
Speaker 15: Next week, I'm going to do a full episode about
Speaker 15: the criminal complaint here and we'll get into more details
Speaker 15: about the attack and their planning. And yes, there was
Speaker 15: no way this attack as plan was going to happen.
Speaker 15: They didn't have the material, the personnel, or the logistical
Speaker 15: capacity to pull this off. Now, they weren't just communicating
Speaker 15: on signal though, They also were using another encrypted messaging
Speaker 15: app called simple.
Speaker 4: X Y Simplex Messenger.
Speaker 15: Where they had one chat called the Vanguard of the
Speaker 15: Old Republic.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, this has shades that fucking dude in
Speaker 2: Texas who got killed by a security guard trying to
Speaker 2: attack the courthouse with a Gladys on his belt.
Speaker 4: In addition to it, they are fifteen.
Speaker 3: I did see that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you'd like a post of himself like a modern
Speaker 2: Gladias to defend a modern republic. It was one of
Speaker 2: the one of the lamer attempts at a mass shooting.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 15: One of the co conspirators who was arrested in California
Speaker 15: wrote on simplex quote to be clear, I intend to
Speaker 15: escalate this group. I don't want to take six business
Speaker 15: years to do it. Unquote business year's the fuck man. Sorry, Yeah,
Speaker 15: that's a fascinating term. I guess I'm just saying a
Speaker 15: long time, right, They're trying to say a long time.
Speaker 2: Sorry, Garrison, please continue.
Speaker 15: Yeah, also writing that everyone in the group should quote
Speaker 15: consider yourselves an enemy of the state. In this group chat,
Speaker 15: they also discussed imagining executions. Another another co conspirator, also
Speaker 15: from California, read about the need for quote unquote gorilla
Speaker 15: style warfare and quote unquote raid attacks with quote skilled
Speaker 15: operators to work like ghosts to conduct quote infiltration missions,
Speaker 15: completely delusional stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's it's the same. The bigger what if
Speaker 2: we were really good at being terrorists? Would that work?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: That's what's going on here.
Speaker 15: Tyson Proper showed the FBI the TikTok profiles of other
Speaker 15: members of the group, and based on those accounts and
Speaker 15: chat logs, investigators were able to identify other co conspirators
Speaker 15: across multiple states. Part of the plan for the Freedom
Speaker 15: to fifty attack was for co conspirators to meet in Fredericksburg, Virginia,
Speaker 15: a day or two before the event. This obviously never
Speaker 15: happened because it appears the group never actually acquired the
Speaker 15: explosives or the drones needed for plans. Expensive and we're
Speaker 15: still trying to figure out how to get enough money
Speaker 15: to purchase materials needed.
Speaker 4: For that attack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's important. Having the ability to do it
Speaker 2: is important.
Speaker 15: One of the members allegedly wrote that the attack would
Speaker 15: require quote five teams of three, each team consisting of
Speaker 15: one sniper, one Tier one operator as support slash lookout,
Speaker 15: and one drone operator.
Speaker 4: Yeah what tier then Tier one of the.
Speaker 2: How many ex Delta guys?
Speaker 4: She got hanging out.
Speaker 12: In the extending plan, they had like written out like
Speaker 12: four different tiers of operators and like what is supposed
Speaker 12: to do and how and how and how if the
Speaker 12: tier ones get arrested, we have to we have to
Speaker 12: try to break the tier ones out of jail.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, because they're so important. There's they're super important.
Speaker 2: We got to get the tier ones out.
Speaker 15: One of the numbers from California did try to drive
Speaker 15: to DCA, but his vehicle had issues that needed to
Speaker 15: turn that out here.
Speaker 10: Share.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's uh, you know, honestly, the the Iranian hostage
Speaker 2: crisis Delta Force got stopped from doing a rescue something
Speaker 2: similar happened.
Speaker 15: This guy did admit this to the FBI, but he
Speaker 15: claimed that he was only going there to protest the
Speaker 15: UFC Freedom to fifty and that he was not involved
Speaker 15: in any conspiracy.
Speaker 2: That's tier one.
Speaker 15: But inside his vehicle agents found firearms, tactical belt, radios,
Speaker 15: and other supply. Inside the residents of the other California
Speaker 15: co conspirator, agents found firearms, thirty round accided magazines, and
Speaker 15: approximately one hundred and eighty rounds of ammunition. One of
Speaker 15: the members of the group in West Virginia, who was
Speaker 15: interviewed by FBI CAN affirmed that the members communicated online
Speaker 15: about attacking UFC FREEOM two fifty, but claimed the attack
Speaker 15: plan was canceled on June twelfth.
Speaker 2: That's fine then, yeah, yeah, and this is this is
Speaker 2: the kind of thing again, there's no way this attack
Speaker 2: ever would have happened the way the government's presenting this
Speaker 2: as nonsense. This community, little community absolutely could have spawned.
Speaker 15: One or more mass shooters. Yeah, yeah, totally super glad
Speaker 15: that it didn't. I find the sort of organizational structure
Speaker 15: of this really interesting.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 15: They also they also discussed doing like attack only power grids.
Speaker 15: So you have certain certain aspects of like accelerationist terrorism here,
Speaker 15: but not organized on like you know, telegram, not not
Speaker 15: still andy Semitic, but not necessarily explicitly just sort of
Speaker 15: like neo Nazi like terrorist model. These people are on TikTok.
Speaker 15: They're obsessed with like like military tactics. They're very they're
Speaker 15: very larpie. They wanted to do something like they discussed assassinations,
Speaker 15: They discussed various types of attacks, but that they were
Speaker 15: interested in a tax for these like general anti government
Speaker 15: reasons rather than a specific sort of like niche political
Speaker 15: ideology right or ties to neo Nazi accelerationist groups. Like
Speaker 15: I said, we will go into more detail next week.
Speaker 15: Tuesday night, Vance did comment again, admitting that the attack
Speaker 15: plan was quote unquote not that advanced and that the
Speaker 15: suspects quote weren't in town. They had not really done
Speaker 15: that much planning. Great cool, dude, Yeah, so yeah, Vans
Speaker 15: kind of changed his tune later on in the evening.
Speaker 4: That's good.
Speaker 2: I'm glad he eventually said something that was not complete
Speaker 2: bullshit speaking of places where everything is complete bullshit. Did
Speaker 2: you guys know Peter Teel has a new social network.
Speaker 2: Actually it's twenty years old. It's not new at all,
Speaker 2: but he does kind of have a social network. It's
Speaker 2: a private invite only organization called Dialogue'll have you caught
Speaker 2: this story that's been dribbling out? No, So this first
Speaker 2: got onto most people's radar in like twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: when Andrew Gellman, who's a statistician, posted on his blog
Speaker 2: that he had gotten an invite to this like Dialogue
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two, which was like that year's event. It
Speaker 2: was described as an off the record retreat for global leaders,
Speaker 2: and there was a list of confirmed participants like this
Speaker 2: was part of the like some of the names of
Speaker 2: people who have been in this organization we're talking about.
Speaker 2: It was going to be referred to as like a
Speaker 2: hack revealed some data that had not been like effectively
Speaker 2: redacted on the website to this organization.
Speaker 13: That revealed a bunch of the members.
Speaker 2: But we already had like a list of a like
Speaker 2: several dozen of the people in this group, and it
Speaker 2: included folks like Peter Brown, who's a CEO of Renaissance Technologies,
Speaker 2: Kelly Bayer, rosemarn who's the CEO of Optists, like you
Speaker 2: know a lot of CEOs, but also folks like Susan Athey,
Speaker 2: professor of economics at Stanford. Grogri Norquist was on that
Speaker 2: initial revealed list. He's an anti tax activist, I guess
Speaker 2: would be like the most basic way of saying what
Speaker 2: he is in the email to invite to Andrew said quote.
Speaker 2: There are no speeches or panels, only moderated breakout discussions
Speaker 2: for eight to twelve participants. Everything is one hundred percent
Speaker 2: off the record. The agenda is curated based on your
Speaker 2: interests and we optimize for introverts, no small talk. So yeah,
Speaker 2: there've been I think a couple of other previous cases
Speaker 2: where like invites to this have leaked out to different people,
Speaker 2: Like several folks who have gotten invited have like posted
Speaker 2: about it. This is not a totally weird thing for
Speaker 2: billionaires to do. Jeff Bezos has a similar kind of
Speaker 2: thing where every year or so he'll have a group
Speaker 2: of people he finds interesting that he takes to a
Speaker 2: resort or to a nice property or something that he
Speaker 2: owns somewhere and they'll all hang out and they'll have
Speaker 2: like discussions. Sometimes people put on presentation for like three
Speaker 2: or four days. And we've gotten that a couple of
Speaker 2: people who have been to these have like written about
Speaker 2: the experience and in some cases critically.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a big one at Sun Valley, right, that
Speaker 4: might be the one people I'm most familiar with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's That's that's one of
Speaker 2: the big ones.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So this is not a super weird thing. But the
Speaker 2: fact that Peter Teel is who he is, and the
Speaker 2: fact that he's only gotten more influential now that Trump
Speaker 2: is president again makes this organization a lot more relevant,
Speaker 2: which is why. It's particularly interesting that very recently there
Speaker 2: was apparently a directory in the website's code, and Swiss
Speaker 2: activist Maya Arson Crime, who is also a friend of
Speaker 2: the pod in the actual sense, was tipped off about
Speaker 2: a directory in the code for the website for Dialogue
Speaker 2: that basically was not They hadn't done the things that
Speaker 2: you would want to do to protect the data of
Speaker 2: their members, right, that's that's the basics of this, right,
Speaker 2: So something was left undone that should have been handled,
Speaker 2: and a bunch of information was revealed and Wired got
Speaker 2: as a result of this, the names of two hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty two people and the records, and these are
Speaker 2: a mix of folks who are like members of this organization,
Speaker 2: and Dialogue over the years has turned into more than
Speaker 2: just every year people meet. There's also apparently like a
Speaker 2: dating app component of it where they're advertising it like
Speaker 2: if you let us know who you're looking for, We've
Speaker 2: got this network of influential people will hook you up
Speaker 2: with another, you know, the you know, only special and
Speaker 2: important people. You know, that's a lot of the appeal, right,
Speaker 2: These are a lot of starfuckery that goes on in
Speaker 2: the Silicon Valley set but because of all of this stuff,
Speaker 2: there's also information on a retreat, the upcoming retreat this
Speaker 2: year's a bit which is apparently August twelfth to sixteenth. God,
Speaker 2: I'd love to get a seat at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.
Speaker 4: That's part of why.
Speaker 2: And to quote from that that Wired article and this
Speaker 2: is talking about like the program for this upcoming event.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: There's a series of off the record discussions including money,
Speaker 2: does by happiness, bring back new clear navigating World War
Speaker 2: three battlefield technologies? And how's your sex life? Other talks
Speaker 2: and ude build a cult moderated by the founder of
Speaker 2: the Christian networking site prey dot com and build a
Speaker 2: party run by a former White House National security official.
Speaker 2: Now I haven't looked in to build a party yet,
Speaker 2: that's boy howdy. But I did look into pray dot
Speaker 2: com and as soon as I went to the prey
Speaker 2: dot com website, it informed me that the founder and
Speaker 2: CEO is one Steve Gattina, who has the empty eyes
Speaker 2: of the shark from Jawns. Have you guys, Are you
Speaker 2: guys looking at this Steve now in the research stock?
Speaker 4: Is this the guy with the pray shirt?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's wearing the pray shirt, and I have to say,
Speaker 2: he's got like the same phenotype as Peter Teal.
Speaker 4: It's it's uncanny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like he weirdly looks a little like Peter Teal.
Speaker 17: Yeah, he looks like his like his grin is about
Speaker 17: to start like spreading wider and there's going to be
Speaker 17: an alien facetraine like transformation.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a said person case to be made here.
Speaker 4: So I was.
Speaker 2: Upset hearing that there's a build a cult workshop at
Speaker 2: Peter Thiel's private club invite. So I wanted to look
Speaker 2: into this guy a little bit, and they're read up
Speaker 2: on him. Gatina was before becoming an entrepreneur an NCAA champion,
Speaker 2: so he's used to having people take advantage of him.
Speaker 2: He played college football for the University of Southern California
Speaker 2: and won a Rose Bowl championship In two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2: He started his first company, REP Interactive, at the age
Speaker 2: of twenty two. I run into a lot of these
Speaker 2: LinkedIn founder guys, and often it's hard to tell what
Speaker 2: their many different companies do because they all have like
Speaker 2: thirty of them.
Speaker 15: Yeah yeah, Or if they're like real companies, yeah.
Speaker 4: If they're real, like that's bullshitting.
Speaker 8: This seemed it's real.
Speaker 2: It's it's a video agency. It's like a marketing agency
Speaker 2: that helps do video marketing. It's one of the best
Speaker 2: workplaces in America according to INC Magazine. I don't know
Speaker 2: if you paid a ban INC Magazine or not, so
Speaker 2: I don't know how impressive that is, but it seems
Speaker 2: to be a company that makes money. It's a social
Speaker 2: media like marketing company. He also has a stock footage
Speaker 2: company that has like drone stock footage. And after that
Speaker 2: he started a business called Prey dot Com in honor
Speaker 2: of his mentor and business partner who had just died.
Speaker 2: And when I started looking into this guy, I realized
Speaker 2: I've been following him before because I periodically on Reddit
Speaker 2: will go to the LinkedIn maniacs some Reddit.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's gotta be good. That's gonna be good.
Speaker 5: Man.
Speaker 2: Steve Katina is all over this shit because he's the
Speaker 2: CEO of Prey dot com. And I'm gonna read you
Speaker 2: one of his fucking posts.
Speaker 4: I and you love people who post on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2: Yesterday I swung by a twenty four hour diner after
Speaker 2: my late shift at work. I saw a waitress in
Speaker 2: her fifties sitting in a booth with a teenage boy.
Speaker 2: He had a notebook open and she was helping him
Speaker 2: tackle some algebra problems. When she got up to refill
Speaker 2: my coffee, I asked tutoring after hours? She smiled, looking
Speaker 2: a bit tired. That's my son. I can't afford a tutor,
Speaker 2: so we study here between my shifts. The boy looked
Speaker 2: up in said she's the smartest mom in the world.
Speaker 2: It turns out she just juggles two jobs but always
Speaker 2: makes time to sit with him every night and help
Speaker 2: him with his homework. He's going to college, she said,
Speaker 2: with determination, whatever it takes. It's amazing what love can
Speaker 2: do even when life gets tough. And to prove that
Speaker 2: this is a true story, he shows a picture of
Speaker 2: some lady and a kid sitting in a booth booking
Speaker 2: at a notebook. Wow, I love these guys and their
Speaker 2: inspirational Definitely didn't happen posts. Definitely not a thing that
Speaker 2: happened to you.
Speaker 4: Man, I'm such a genre.
Speaker 15: He credits the photo to somebody else.
Speaker 21: Where.
Speaker 2: Did you get it, Steve?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of great, great people who are
Speaker 2: going to be at these events, which boy howdy, it
Speaker 2: sure would be fun to be a fly on the
Speaker 2: wall at weak.
Speaker 15: It's also water bott yeah yeah, for illustrative purposes.
Speaker 2: You guys are stuck on her.
Speaker 14: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: So to go back into the people who help make
Speaker 2: Dialogue the great organization it is. The executive direct of
Speaker 2: Dialogue is apparently Raffi Grenberg, and he is also the
Speaker 2: author of a self help book titled How to Be
Speaker 2: a grown Up. He did not respond to Wired's request
Speaker 2: for a comment, but I looked into it Raffi a
Speaker 2: little bit in his website, and you get to like
Speaker 2: Raffi Greenberg's website. He immediately tries to sell you his
Speaker 2: book directly above a YouTube video titled do Princeton Grads
Speaker 2: know w Anything? And it's like a YouTube prank video
Speaker 2: where he runs to prince He's wearing like a green
Speaker 2: tight skin tight body suit and he runs up to
Speaker 2: Princeton grads like after right after graduation and asked, like,
Speaker 2: do you know how to pay your taxes? And it's
Speaker 2: also you can like give out a bunch of copies
Speaker 2: of a shitty book about like life skills, and like,
Speaker 2: I'm sure the book sells to like parents who give
Speaker 2: them to their kids, but no one reads this.
Speaker 15: Man.
Speaker 2: When kids need to learn how to pay their taxes,
Speaker 2: if they don't have parents who know how to teach them,
Speaker 2: they like google it, or like desperately go to h
Speaker 2: and R Block, or they just don't pay their taxes,
Speaker 2: but they don't read a book like how to be
Speaker 2: a grownup. And I'm sorry about that, RAFFI.
Speaker 15: Yeah no, that's like homeschooling parent target audience.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Oh man, So yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't know. There's like a lot more to say about this.
Speaker 2: I think I'm gonna do it like an actual dedicated
Speaker 2: episode about dialogue in the not too distant future. This
Speaker 2: is fascinating, It does sound really interesting, and I want
Speaker 2: to know more about this this fun club. But yeah,
Speaker 2: you should check out the Wired article. It's really interesting.
Speaker 15: You should mention Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 4: I was gonna ask if that was an EPs.
Speaker 2: She you're right, you're right, you're right, you're right. I
Speaker 2: tried to blow through Jeffrey Epstein's involvement in this. Now,
Speaker 2: Jeffrey Epstein is tied to this, but not in a
Speaker 2: bad way, well, mostly not in a bad way. There's
Speaker 2: one email from him where like, someone who is a
Speaker 2: friend of Jeffrey Epstein got invited to one of these
Speaker 2: events and like forwarded it to him and was like, hey,
Speaker 2: should I do this thing? Basically, I don't think we
Speaker 2: know what jeff responded, but you know that caused because
Speaker 2: there's that it like, there's an invite to their twenty
Speaker 2: fourteen rich in the Epstein files, there was a lot
Speaker 2: of confusional People are like, oh, Jeffrey Epstein was a
Speaker 2: member of Dialogue, and this was furthered by the fact
Speaker 2: that Jeffrey Epstein was a member of Dialogue, but not
Speaker 2: that Jeffrey Epstein, the former CFO of Oracle was also
Speaker 2: so the fact that number one in the Epstein file
Speaker 2: someone forwarded an invite to the jeff Epstein who's a
Speaker 2: pedophile and number two there is an actual member of
Speaker 2: the group named Jeffrey Epstein, just a different one, caused
Speaker 2: people to believe that he was a part of this,
Speaker 2: but he does not appear to have been in a
Speaker 2: way that anyone is proven.
Speaker 15: The former CFO of Oracle should absolutely change his name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I gotta say, very rarely do I extend this
Speaker 2: to especially a member of the Oracle c suite, But
Speaker 2: no one will blame you. We won't even joke about it.
Speaker 2: Like honestly, dude, like Jeffrey, it's not a weird name,
Speaker 2: you had no reason to expect. But somebody like this
Speaker 2: your name, then you don't deserve to bear this cross.
Speaker 2: I hope unless you do.
Speaker 4: I don't know you actually anyway, I think that's oh man. Okay,
Speaker 4: if you want to email us cool Zone Tips at
Speaker 4: proton dot me, keep it to story tips.
Speaker 16: Put a transcroll on your couch.
Speaker 15: We reported the news, We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 21: It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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