Speaker 1: Alzon Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know. This is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to it
Speaker 2: could happen here, a podcast about it happening here, and
Speaker 2: the it that is on everyone's minds right now. This
Speaker 2: will be dropping two or three days before the twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four election, possibly two or three days before everyone's
Speaker 2: life changes substantially. We have no way of knowing. I'm
Speaker 2: not optimistic or pessimistic. I have no idea what's going
Speaker 2: to happen. But one thing that everyone ought to be
Speaker 2: aware of, whether or not Trump wins, is kind of,
Speaker 2: to put it bluntly, the man has shooters. And some
Speaker 2: of those shooters are literal shooters in that they are
Speaker 2: local sheriff's departments, people who call themselves constitutional sheriffs. This
Speaker 2: is an organization that's really got off the ground in
Speaker 2: twenty twelve, and for more than a decade has been
Speaker 2: making inroads with elected Republican leaders, with Republican influencers, with
Speaker 2: groups like the Oathkeepers, And these are guys who, in
Speaker 2: brief belief, the sheriff is the only is You can
Speaker 2: kind of get two versions of this, but generally either
Speaker 2: the sheriff is the only legitimate law enforcement authority in
Speaker 2: the country or the sheriff is the highest legitimate law
Speaker 2: enforcement I've heard it both ways in the country, and
Speaker 2: kind of the reason for this basically is a lot
Speaker 2: of people in rural areas that are more conservative do
Speaker 2: not want to have to listen to or follow the
Speaker 2: laws made by people in cities. And more to the point,
Speaker 2: they believe that the country has been taken off of
Speaker 2: a good track by dangerous liberal communist types, and you know,
Speaker 2: they want the ability to use force against you know, migrants,
Speaker 2: against the undocumented, against people they see as criminals, against
Speaker 2: left wing protesters, and this is kind of a way
Speaker 2: for them to argue that they have a right to
Speaker 2: do it without any restrictions. Now, the whole story is
Speaker 2: much deeper than that, and to talk about what I
Speaker 2: think is one of the most important subjects to be
Speaker 2: discussing right now, because you know, people laugh a lot
Speaker 2: about like the gravy seals or whatever, like, you know,
Speaker 2: all these different kind of out of shape militia dudes,
Speaker 2: the kind of silly fumbling that we saw a lot
Speaker 2: at January sixth, you know, which I think is a mistake,
Speaker 2: just because January sixth was still quite dangerous. But when
Speaker 2: we're talking about these guys, these are not just like
Speaker 2: random yahoo's. These are people who have the force of
Speaker 2: law behind them. They're they're armed, they're organized, and they're
Speaker 2: quite dangerous. And to talk about how dangerous they are
Speaker 2: and where they came from, I want to bring on
Speaker 2: a wonderful journalist, investigative reporter and PRA research director Chloe Cooper,
Speaker 2: who has co executive produced a podcast on the Constitutional
Speaker 2: Sheriff's movement called The Insurgence, which is a co production
Speaker 2: of Political Research Associates and Quintero Productions. Chloe, I think
Speaker 2: I got that all right, right.
Speaker 3: That was awesome, Yes, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So let's talk about this. Where do these guys?
Speaker 2: I gave a little brief overview, but like, where do
Speaker 2: these guys come from? And you know, what are we
Speaker 2: seeing from them and the lead up to this election,
Speaker 2: Like what are they?
Speaker 4: What are they going to do? Do you think?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I loved the overview that you just gave.
Speaker 5: I think that was such a great way to approach
Speaker 5: this all. So the leader of the Constitutional Sheriffs and
Speaker 5: Peace Officers Association is this guy named former Sheriff mac
Speaker 5: and he was a sheriff in Arizona. But one little
Speaker 5: important detail to note is that he actually kind of
Speaker 5: got his bearings before that in Nevada, and he was
Speaker 5: courted by someone who was basically in very close company
Speaker 5: with the John Birch Society.
Speaker 4: Always comes back to them, I.
Speaker 5: Know, he actually becomes a sheriff partially because of some
Speaker 5: of the ideas that come out of the John Birch
Speaker 5: Society and some of this kind of like emerging trend
Speaker 5: that in some cases is actually like skeptical of the
Speaker 5: federal government, skeptical of state governments, and then they start
Speaker 5: to build out with sheriffs in different parts of the country.
Speaker 5: At times, I would say the network has really ebbed
Speaker 5: and flowed. But a couple of things that have been
Speaker 5: important to note, Like throughout the six years of researching
Speaker 5: this network of sheriffs that I think is really important,
Speaker 5: especially in advance of the elections. One is that sheriffs
Speaker 5: who are aligned with this have really embraced this idea
Speaker 5: that you can deputize anybody.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So in some cases you have oath keepers and other
Speaker 5: militias going to the sheriff to say, hey, you want
Speaker 5: to deputize me. But in other cases we've actually followed
Speaker 5: sheriffs who are going into churches and saying we're deputizing
Speaker 5: all of you.
Speaker 3: Great sheriffs in Virginia.
Speaker 5: When the state passed a law that was like a
Speaker 5: law for some gun restrictions, saying don't worry, people were
Speaker 5: actually going to deputize you.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: That way you can have whatever gun you want and
Speaker 2: carry it anywhere.
Speaker 6: Yes.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And also what we started to see is.
Speaker 5: That during the former Trump administration, he was really actually
Speaker 5: courting sheriffs around the country, and I think he started
Speaker 5: to see networks like CSPOA as like part of his
Speaker 5: ground troops. And so I think that there is a
Speaker 5: potential danger in sheriffs that are part of this formal
Speaker 5: network called the CESPOA or other sheriffs, because there are
Speaker 5: hundreds more that just have like aligned with their way
Speaker 5: of thinking about things, just playing this role of deputizing
Speaker 5: more people and creating this kind of idea of like
Speaker 5: a super citizen or people who are kind of aligned
Speaker 5: with a far right way of seeing the world, and
Speaker 5: then getting deputies to be part of the kind of
Speaker 5: ground troops for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's like one thing.
Speaker 5: And then in addition to that, there is also CSPOA
Speaker 5: itself teamed up with this group called True the Vote,
Speaker 5: which has mostly since been discredited, but it's been one
Speaker 5: of the loudest groups in the country that has been
Speaker 5: spreading this idea that the twenty twenty election was stolen
Speaker 5: and has been actually working with county sheriffs to try
Speaker 5: to investigate voter fraud at the local level, but in
Speaker 5: some cases also working with sheriffs to align with vigilante
Speaker 5: groups on the border, for example, to intimidate people from
Speaker 5: actually voting. And so there's kind of, i would say,
Speaker 5: like a multi pronged series of potential risks and dangers
Speaker 5: that could play out, particularly from this network in the
Speaker 5: coming weeks. One other quick thing I'll note is that
Speaker 5: one of the very late things that we saw and
Speaker 5: this actually came out of a close kind of colleague
Speaker 5: and the movement. Devin Burkhardt, who works at the Institute
Speaker 5: for Research and Education on Human Rights, is that he
Speaker 5: came across a plan that the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace
Speaker 5: Officers Association put.
Speaker 3: Out in Florida.
Speaker 5: And the plan is to essentially resurrect kind of sovereign
Speaker 5: citizens style groups in Florida, militia's citizen militias in collaboration
Speaker 5: with sheriffs to do kind of old school style like
Speaker 5: intimidation of election clerks of people involved in the election process,
Speaker 5: and they plan to try to hold tribunals if, for example,
Speaker 5: the certification of election goes in the direction they disagree with.
Speaker 5: And now, as a hardcore leftist, you may find like,
Speaker 5: how what do you actually think about voting and whether
Speaker 5: that actually changes things and all of that, And I'm like,
Speaker 5: I've had those, you know, thought bubbles in my brain
Speaker 5: for a long time also, But I think what we have,
Speaker 5: what I've started to see is that the Constitutional Sheriffs
Speaker 5: to me represent and also the groups of people who
Speaker 5: have aligned with them are actual not just white nationalists,
Speaker 5: but people who are neo Confederates. And I think of
Speaker 5: it more of like a neo confederacy, and that what
Speaker 5: we could see is something like sheriffs actually coming in
Speaker 5: confrontation with potentially even police and mayors and governors, and
Speaker 5: them representing a different kind of politic, a different type
Speaker 5: of way of seeing society. And one person also talked
Speaker 5: about how the constitutional what are they really referring to?
Speaker 5: Are they referring to? You know, what is it the
Speaker 5: organic constitution? Essentially before slavery was abolished, before women had
Speaker 5: the right to vote, before the you know, Native Americans
Speaker 5: had the right to vote. And so if that's the case,
Speaker 5: that that is actually the kind of constitution that they
Speaker 5: are upholding and representing, then they are actually been quite
Speaker 5: successful in building out different alliances around the country within
Speaker 5: a somewhat prominent law enforcement institution that has very little accountability.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I so this is where I kind of wind
Speaker 2: up in conflict with both liberals and a lot of leftists.
Speaker 2: Is I think that the leftists who say like there's
Speaker 2: no point in voting are wrong for the same reason
Speaker 2: that like I think people who say there's no reason
Speaker 2: for civilians to be armed, I don't happen to agree
Speaker 2: with that, and I don't happen to agree with it,
Speaker 2: because I think if somebody who wants to kill you
Speaker 2: has a weapon and you have the ability to either
Speaker 2: match that weapon or take it from them, then that's
Speaker 2: probably what you should do for the sake of your
Speaker 2: own survival. And handing over complete control of the state,
Speaker 2: the military, and the police apparatus to the far right
Speaker 2: is handing them the most powerful weapon anyone has ever made,
Speaker 2: and I just don't think that's wise.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 2: At the same token, the thing that kind of liberals
Speaker 2: will bring up a lot, which is that like, just vote,
Speaker 2: just get out and vote. What we've been doing, and
Speaker 2: Democrats have overwhelmingly outperformed conservatives in elections this century, and
Speaker 2: it hasn't been enough, and it hasn't been enough in
Speaker 2: part because these people don't care about the law. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a moment in your podcast where you know, I like,
Speaker 2: you have an expert on who's kind of talking about
Speaker 2: the sheriff deputizing you know, seventy people or whatever in
Speaker 2: this small town and being like, well, he's not actually
Speaker 2: allowed to do that, Like, you know, the actual letter
Speaker 2: of the law does not give him the right to
Speaker 2: be doing this. He's misinterpreting the Constitution. But the reality
Speaker 2: of the situation is that like he's allowed to do
Speaker 2: whatever he can get enough people with guns to back
Speaker 2: him in doing And that's that's honestly, the root of
Speaker 2: all politics is how much force can you bring to bear,
Speaker 2: you know, in order to support the reality you want
Speaker 2: to support, right, Like, that's that is how it all works.
Speaker 2: And the bet the right is making with all of
Speaker 2: these different anti democratic strategies they're trying is that no
Speaker 2: matter what they do, and no matter how far against
Speaker 2: the Constitution, against the rule of law they take things,
Speaker 2: they will have the force to support their version of reality.
Speaker 2: And I don't know, I don't know how we thread
Speaker 2: this needle. Right, The easiest thing is like, well, maybe
Speaker 2: if Kamala has a really resounding victory, there just won't
Speaker 2: be much for them to fight on right and they'll
Speaker 2: kind of back down. But even if she wins in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, which I think is the better of
Speaker 2: the options that we've got, these people aren't going away,
Speaker 2: and in fact, I think you are going to see
Speaker 2: challenges at local levels. I think it's not impossible that
Speaker 2: we wind up with like an anti pope style situation
Speaker 2: with the presidency, whereas like Trump holds his own inauguration
Speaker 2: and a bunch of state and local leaders say like, no,
Speaker 2: we're not recognizing the Harris administration. Donald Trump is our president. Like,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of weird shit that could wind up
Speaker 2: as the result of this, And I just don't see
Speaker 2: us getting out of this purely through electoral methods.
Speaker 4: And I don't know what.
Speaker 2: I don't know how else we handle it, right, because
Speaker 2: you also get into this situation of like, Okay, well
Speaker 2: we're going to send in the police to crack down
Speaker 2: on these sheriffs that are breaking the law. Well what
Speaker 2: if the police don't want to do it. What if
Speaker 2: the police are more supportive of these sheriffs departments than
Speaker 2: they are of you know, they're elected leaders in the
Speaker 2: state or at the federal level. You know, what if
Speaker 2: the FBI, as has happened in the past, what if
Speaker 2: the Feds are unwilling to go up against a bunch
Speaker 2: of arm heavily armed quote unquote patriots, you know, like
Speaker 2: we saw in you know, some of the Bundy shit
Speaker 2: from about a decade ago, right, Like, what if what
Speaker 2: if the people who are supposed to handle this for
Speaker 2: the citizenry in a situation that abides by the law,
Speaker 2: abrogate their responsibility because they're scared you know who backs
Speaker 2: us up?
Speaker 3: Then wow, Okay, you just put a lot out.
Speaker 4: There, Sorry, sir, Like I wanted.
Speaker 8: To respond about oh one more diapologist.
Speaker 4: That was my That was my bad that I think.
Speaker 3: Okay, a couple a couple of thoughts.
Speaker 5: One is that I think that far right movements are
Speaker 5: very much mobilizing within the government right now, and or
Speaker 5: you could say maybe.
Speaker 3: Fascism is trying to mobilize within the government, and.
Speaker 5: So I think you have I think we have to
Speaker 5: grapple with that really seriously. And so like in terms
Speaker 5: of anti fascist strategies, I don't know what is you know,
Speaker 5: what could that actually look like right now, but you
Speaker 5: have to grapple with the reality that many far right
Speaker 5: movements have made serious, serious headway into not just former president,
Speaker 5: but into state legislators, into the judicial system, into sheriff's departments,
Speaker 5: and so we are seeing a major fissure right now.
Speaker 5: So I don't know how to respond completely to some
Speaker 5: of the questions around around electoral politics, but I think
Speaker 5: those are really important questions that you're posing and then
Speaker 5: just to go pivot back to my wheelhouse, which is
Speaker 5: the right and the far right and some of their strategies.
Speaker 5: One of the things that you touched on is something
Speaker 5: that a number of different far right strategies have been
Speaker 5: practicing over the years, and it is about this idea
Speaker 5: of both nullification or interposition is what they call it. So,
Speaker 5: these constitutional sheriffs, one of the tactics that they have
Speaker 5: used over the years is to get sheriffs around the
Speaker 5: country to not enforce state laws. Right, and so you
Speaker 5: had a whole wave of sheriffs around the country supporting
Speaker 5: sanctuaries for the Second Amendment.
Speaker 3: Second Amendment sanctuaries.
Speaker 5: Okay, so they said in their own county, we're not
Speaker 5: going to enforce gun restriction laws. And again think about that, however,
Speaker 5: you will all good, but they're saying we're not going
Speaker 5: to afford us at the county level. Then you had
Speaker 5: all these shrifs around the country being like, we're not
Speaker 5: going to enforce lockdown orders, We're not going to enforce
Speaker 5: mask mandates. What are they practicing. They're practicing them muscle
Speaker 5: of exactly what you just talked about.
Speaker 2: Right right, Yeah, I think that's a great way to
Speaker 2: look at it too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, independent of what's happening at the federal government, independent
Speaker 5: of who wins. Right now, there is like a confederated
Speaker 5: situation happening in the country, and these sheriffs and also
Speaker 5: others have been very much in those muscles. So it's
Speaker 5: not just kind of the militias that will back these
Speaker 5: sheriffs that are interested in that type of strategy.
Speaker 3: There's the whole.
Speaker 5: Like all these different movements that come out of the
Speaker 5: Christian reconstructionists all talk about interposition, So the idea of
Speaker 5: getting sheriffs, other elected officials within the local magistrate to
Speaker 5: prop up and kind of protect your politics, regardless of
Speaker 5: the state or federal And so now we have this
Speaker 5: interesting moment where you've had in recent history, you know,
Speaker 5: a former president that actually aligned with some of those politics,
Speaker 5: and then you have a bunch of state legislators at
Speaker 5: align and so I think understanding some of the strategies
Speaker 5: that's important. It's important to understand that you may have
Speaker 5: sheriffs that are backing this, and they may not always
Speaker 5: align with the police, and they may not always align
Speaker 5: with the governor, and so it's going to be a
Speaker 5: little different than what we may often think of as
Speaker 5: like systemic white supremacy, where all the state and law
Speaker 5: enforcement are locking step together. Yeah, I think looking at
Speaker 5: the Civil War, as you've done so many different times,
Speaker 5: is actually really important, Like how does this reflect patterns
Speaker 5: that are more similar actually to you know, the Confederacy
Speaker 5: against the North or those or you know, these types
Speaker 5: of other moments in US history.
Speaker 2: I'm going to throw to ads and then I'll come back. So, yeah, everybody,
Speaker 2: here's here's some maths.
Speaker 4: We're back.
Speaker 2: I wanted to ask, are there cases you can think
Speaker 2: of of, like some of these guys, these constitutional sheriffs
Speaker 2: who have been voted out and like forced out of office,
Speaker 2: had kind of these some of these policies that they've
Speaker 2: been pushing reverse, Like do we have do we have
Speaker 2: any kind of case studies of times sheriffs went hard
Speaker 2: into this ideology and actually lost power as a result
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 5: So actually, in episode four it touches on it briefly,
Speaker 5: but it's a really interesting and kind of rather both
Speaker 5: in some ways inspiring but also disturbing.
Speaker 3: Case study to some degree.
Speaker 5: There is a sheriff in North Carolina, Sheriff Jim pendergraph
Speaker 5: of Mecklenburg County, and he was really inspired by the
Speaker 5: former sheriff Joe or Pio in Arizona, and he is
Speaker 5: one of the people who really champions this program called
Speaker 5: two eighty seven G which allows sheriffs to basically deputize
Speaker 5: their office as ICE federal ICE agents and work with ICE.
Speaker 5: So he pilots that in Mecklenburg County and then as
Speaker 5: basically picked up by ICE and kind of helps try
Speaker 5: to spread it all.
Speaker 3: Throughout the South.
Speaker 5: Something pretty historic and credible happened in some ways in
Speaker 5: twenty eighteen where you had black organizers, immigrant rights organizers
Speaker 5: pushed for this whole campaign to oust him and a
Speaker 5: number of other close by kind of real white supremacist
Speaker 5: sheriffs in North Carolina, and they were successful, and there
Speaker 5: was a sheriff that ran and a number of black
Speaker 5: sheriffs were elected in the state, and some of the
Speaker 5: sheriffs ran on not complying with ICE and knock up
Speaker 5: and ending this program called the twenty seven G Agreement.
Speaker 5: And seemed like this historic moment, this historic win in
Speaker 5: the immediate aftermath of that, as opposed to in moments
Speaker 5: where you have sheriff saying we're not going to enforce
Speaker 5: the lockdown order, and essentially, besides some reporters reporting on it,
Speaker 5: nothing happens. Instead, what happened is that within a few
Speaker 5: months of this sheriff ending the twenty seven g agreement,
Speaker 5: the federal government comes in and issues pretty massive ICE
Speaker 5: raids through the county and actually, you know, ends up
Speaker 5: locking up over one hundred different people, many of whom
Speaker 5: got deported.
Speaker 3: Pretty soon after that, you had.
Speaker 5: A number of other sheriffs in the state, including this
Speaker 5: one constitutional sheriff who also had aligned with another large
Speaker 5: anti immigrant network called the Federation for American Immigration Reform,
Speaker 5: essentially organizing in the state for the state to push
Speaker 5: back and push an entire state wide mandate that all
Speaker 5: sheriffs comply with ICE. So that's not really an uplifting story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, actually not quite.
Speaker 5: I think what it demonstrates, in a tough way, is
Speaker 5: more about this kind of like when sheriffs claim all
Speaker 5: of this autonomy at the local level, which they seem
Speaker 5: to actually in many cases be able to practice kind
Speaker 5: of quite well, you know, when they say they want
Speaker 5: to enforce the state wide gun restrictions or mask mandates. Again,
Speaker 5: from what I understand and I've been in touch with
Speaker 5: some of the leading constitutional lawyers who are trying to
Speaker 5: look into it further.
Speaker 3: Yeah, almost nothing happens.
Speaker 5: But then if you have let's say, a sheriff in
Speaker 5: this case, you know, not enforcing ending an agreement with ICE,
Speaker 5: there's a pretty serious and significant backlash. There has also,
Speaker 5: though been you know, there was an amazing campaign to
Speaker 5: eventually get sheriff, your former sheriff, you or Pyo out
Speaker 5: that took like a ton of organizing by immigrant rights
Speaker 5: organizers in Arizona, and that was pretty incredible and sustained,
Speaker 5: and there's been a lot of good stuff written about it.
Speaker 5: So it's not it's not not the case that people
Speaker 5: have built campaigns and have been able to unseat their sheriff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's that's good to know,
Speaker 2: because like I much prefer the like slow disassembling of
Speaker 2: this in a world in which they don't just get
Speaker 2: full power and start, you know, going after people with
Speaker 2: the wrong signs on their front yards. Been any other
Speaker 2: option here, It just it seems like it's one of
Speaker 2: those situations where the deck is very much stacked in
Speaker 2: their favor, right in part because of how long I
Speaker 2: think this problem has been ignored, Like it's really just
Speaker 2: now I'm so glad that y'all's podcast is out, because
Speaker 2: I still don't think there's nearly enough attention on like
Speaker 2: what these sheriffs are doing, because this really is it's
Speaker 2: so fundamentally anti democratic in a way that is also
Speaker 2: has a great deal of legitimacy in the eyes and
Speaker 2: ears of at least a lot of the people living
Speaker 2: in these areas, right Like, this is not just some
Speaker 2: Yahoo declaring himself, you know, a militia. It's not like
Speaker 2: the State of Jefferson movement saying like we're totally going
Speaker 2: to secede from California. These are guys with real power.
Speaker 2: So I guess kind of where I'd like to close
Speaker 2: by is asking do you see a shift in rhetoric
Speaker 2: from these people from like twenty twenty to twenty twenty four, Like,
Speaker 2: because I feel like right now the rhetoric is much
Speaker 2: more like aggressively anti like the enemy within, whereas you know,
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty it was much more focused on gun
Speaker 2: rights and going after migrants. But I think you would
Speaker 2: have a better better sense of that than I do.
Speaker 5: So one thing is that immediately following twenty twenty, there
Speaker 5: was some effort on the part of CSPOA to start
Speaker 5: to slightly distance themselves from the Oath Keepers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, CSPO and the Oathkeepers.
Speaker 5: I mean, the former Sheriff mac that was the founder
Speaker 5: of the CSPOA was on the board of the Oath Keepers,
Speaker 5: and Stuart Rhodes, who's been charged with seditious conspiracy for
Speaker 5: his role planning J six, has been working closely with
Speaker 5: CSPOA for the entire time that CSPOA, for the most part,
Speaker 5: has been around, So they were working really, really, really
Speaker 5: closely together. So there was a little bit of a
Speaker 5: shift after J six where CSPOA tried to distance themselves from.
Speaker 3: The Oath Keepers.
Speaker 5: But I would say that the other thing that you
Speaker 5: touched on is also true. As opposed to focusing so
Speaker 5: much on kind of nullification of any sort of creating
Speaker 5: you know, Second Amendment sanctuaries or those types of things,
Speaker 5: they've really leaned hard into investigating election fraud and kind
Speaker 5: of stop this deal style rhetoric.
Speaker 4: Oh right, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
Speaker 5: And they've really leaned hard in a very frightening way
Speaker 5: into more like really harsh and horrible anti immigrant rhetoric.
Speaker 5: And so, you know, back literally at their twenty twenty
Speaker 5: four spring CSPOA convening, they're talking about the great replacement theory.
Speaker 5: They're talking about doing every single thing in their powers
Speaker 5: to make sure that there is not election fraud. They're
Speaker 5: talking about, you know, making sure that I don't want
Speaker 5: to use the terms here, but that undocument people don't
Speaker 5: vote in the elections and those types of things. And
Speaker 5: then what was really frightening in this plan that I
Speaker 5: spoke about briefly in Florida that the state director of
Speaker 5: CSPOA released is that they are actually embracing more far
Speaker 5: right views overtly in that plan than they have in
Speaker 5: any other time actually since they were formed. So they're
Speaker 5: explicitly quoting, for any of your nerds out here that
Speaker 5: follow this stuff, this guy Matthew Truhella, and he openly
Speaker 5: advocated for political violence and was one of the people
Speaker 5: who actually justified violence against abortion providers in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 5: They quote him numerous times when talking about setting up
Speaker 5: citizen militias to actually essentially target election clerks in the
Speaker 5: event that they are not happy with how the elections
Speaker 5: turn out. So there is a shift I would say,
Speaker 5: in like in multiple directions, some of which are very
Speaker 5: very much just in line with Trump and the Trump
Speaker 5: campaign to some degree, and some of which are already
Speaker 5: kind of, you know, plans for a different type of
Speaker 5: insurgence at the local level, and the event that things
Speaker 5: don't go in their.
Speaker 8: Direction, yeah, I'm going to throw us to ads once
Speaker 8: more and then we will come back and to close
Speaker 8: ourselves out.
Speaker 2: So everybody have an ad and we're back, so quobe. Yeah,
Speaker 2: just kind of inclosing. What are you kind of keeping
Speaker 2: your ear to the ground on as we as we
Speaker 2: near election day? Like, what are kind of your do
Speaker 2: you have any like particular sort of red lines that
Speaker 2: you're keeping an eye out for from these people.
Speaker 5: I am looking closely at Florida and whether some of
Speaker 5: the plans that they've actually laid out in Florida might happen.
Speaker 5: I'm also keeping a close ear to battleground states where
Speaker 5: it seems like a number of these militias are kind
Speaker 5: of activated aligned with some sheriff's departments, and I want
Speaker 5: to particularly see if there's any type of cases that
Speaker 5: kind of show up in terms of either voter intimidation
Speaker 5: or those types of things. And it's just been dawning
Speaker 5: on me more and more that a number of the
Speaker 5: people who are in the CSPA network are actually in
Speaker 5: battleground states, and I just wonder to what degree that's
Speaker 5: a coincidence or not. I think I'm just trying to
Speaker 5: kind of get a sense of how also some of
Speaker 5: the framing from these sheriffs continue to shift and whether
Speaker 5: they actually become activated, whether they're polsees or citizen militias
Speaker 5: that become kind of mobilized as they did to some
Speaker 5: degree in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what I will be keeping an eye on too.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you so much for coming on. Thank
Speaker 2: you for putting together this podcast series everyone listened to.
Speaker 2: The Insurgents Sheriffs co produced by Political Researches, Soviets, Political
Speaker 2: Research Associates and Quintero Productions. Again, that's the Insurgents Sheriffs
Speaker 2: you can find wherever podcasts are found. Thank you for
Speaker 2: coming on. Everybody check this out and hopefully we will
Speaker 2: have a drop of the podcast and the Bastard Speed
Speaker 2: so people can listen in on that too. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much, Chloe, thank you so much for having me,
Speaker 2: and thank you listeners.
Speaker 6: Welcome to Ikadapa.
Speaker 9: Here a podcast taking place on a day that will
Speaker 9: live in infamy and set a country ablaze. I am,
Speaker 9: of course referring to Guy Fox Day. I'm your host,
Speaker 9: be along with these James here.
Speaker 4: I'm excited.
Speaker 8: I'm excited to share with people some of our national
Speaker 8: traditions in the United Kingdom.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and so as a person from the country who
Speaker 9: won the Revolution, I get to.
Speaker 6: Do the British episode because should I fucking yes? So
Speaker 6: all right.
Speaker 9: The the thing about the Gunpowder plot is that, like
Speaker 9: another event occurring in November fifth, there are no heroes
Speaker 9: and everyone like sucks shit. Yes, So in order in
Speaker 9: order to return to a type of heroes and to
Speaker 9: get the context of what the fuck is going on here,
Speaker 9: we're taking a digression because I Am never going to
Speaker 9: get another chance to talk about this part of history
Speaker 9: unless I read a Martin Luther episode. So we're going
Speaker 9: all the way back to the origins of the split
Speaker 9: between Protestantism and Catholicism.
Speaker 4: Good.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I just I was raised to Lutheran, Okay, so
Speaker 9: I got a very very sanitized version of who Martin
Speaker 9: Luther was, and then I read about Martin Luther actually
Speaker 9: was and was like, holy shit, yeah, different dude, Martin Luther.
Speaker 9: And this is the part also that doesn't really get
Speaker 9: talked about in the sort of luther tradition because Luthor
Speaker 9: and the Lutheran tradition is not a revolutionary tradition. Shall
Speaker 9: we say that the thing that Lutheran did, we started
Speaker 9: Protestant dism by accident, was accidentally kicked off a genuine,
Speaker 9: full scale social revolution in Europe with his attacks on
Speaker 9: the Catholic Church. He was not trying to do this,
Speaker 9: but he very quickly has has in fact accidentally done this,
Speaker 9: and through the sort of breach that he'd opened, and
Speaker 9: like the ironclad walls of Catholic monarchical rule, came the
Speaker 9: German Peasants Wars. And my favorite dude in this entire
Speaker 9: period of time, Flora Gehren.
Speaker 4: The thing. If you're familiar with Flora, good name.
Speaker 6: Oh, this guy rules. This guy fucking rips.
Speaker 9: Okay, there is a Knight who there's a lot of
Speaker 9: debate about this, but the sources that I've read a
Speaker 9: long time ago, when I was reading about this guy
Speaker 9: says that he is the only like they are, the
Speaker 9: only like knights, like mounted knights, in like the entire
Speaker 9: history of Europe to defect and join a peasant revolution.
Speaker 4: Oh, they're these guys, they're like the yeah Night so something.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the Black Company.
Speaker 9: Yeah yeah, he rules, Yeah, it slaps, So the druid
Speaker 9: peasant Wars kickoff and he he he enjoys the peasant
Speaker 9: revolution with this sword that is supposedly inscribed with the
Speaker 9: words neither cross nor crown.
Speaker 6: Unbelievably based he fucking proto. Yeah. Yeah, and his thing him.
Speaker 9: In the Black Company, which is part like, it's part
Speaker 9: Knight's part. Like peasants just basically run around the regia
Speaker 9: and kill the ship out of nobles and priests and
Speaker 9: like spread the spread, spread the glorious fire of the
Speaker 9: peasant revolution.
Speaker 6: What hero, Yeah, it's awesome.
Speaker 8: I found a picture of him strong chin as well,
Speaker 8: I will say powerful Joline.
Speaker 9: Yeah. I mean he has an interesting sort of conflicting legacy.
Speaker 9: So he gets killed eventually, the giant preasant revolution is
Speaker 9: eventually destroyed, and we'll talk about Martin Luther's role in
Speaker 9: that in a second. But he has this interesting legacy
Speaker 9: where he's taken up as an national hero by like
Speaker 9: every kind of non establishment faction of German politics. So
Speaker 9: he's like like there's an SS division named after him.
Speaker 9: He's also like one of the heroes of East Germany.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I can see this. Yeah, and like this is.
Speaker 9: One of these things were like and like in like
Speaker 9: twenty and thirties Germany you will have communist social Democrats
Speaker 9: and the Nazis all singing like the same songs about
Speaker 9: this guy.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: You know, he's one of the few sort of redeemable
Speaker 9: figures in German history.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, rips.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And this is what happens with national myth making, right,
Speaker 8: you just take you sing and make it plastic. It's
Speaker 8: like you mold it to whatever you want it to be,
Speaker 8: whatever you want you a national story to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And like like this happens with Makno and Ukraine.
Speaker 9: This happiest with what we talked was on Margaret Show
Speaker 9: and I did. We did a bunch of episodes about
Speaker 9: anarchism in Korea, and like they do this with a
Speaker 9: bunch of Korean anarchists too. They become like national like
Speaker 9: state heroes, and it's like, well, okay, this guy would
Speaker 9: have absolutely shot you. Like this is one of these
Speaker 9: things where it's like like if you if you if
Speaker 9: you were to show if you were to show this
Speaker 9: guy the SS, he'd be like, what the fuck?
Speaker 4: Like, get my sewed out again?
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's time, It's time to start the killing again.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And very specifically, Geary is like he'd actually had known
Speaker 9: Martin Luther back before he like joined the peasants, and
Speaker 9: like specifically the fact that they're they're like these peasants
Speaker 9: are like sacking castles and killing priests and like the
Speaker 9: ruling class very specifically makes is like like the fact
Speaker 9: that the ruling class could conceivably be in danger is
Speaker 9: the thing that convinces Martin Luther to become I think
Speaker 9: I've made this argument on the show before, but I
Speaker 9: think he is, at very worst, like the second greatest
Speaker 9: kind of revolutionary in like the last four or five
Speaker 9: hundred years, because I hold that the greatest kind of
Speaker 9: revolutionary is the one who starts the revolution and then realizes,
Speaker 9: holy shit, I can't control this and I don't like
Speaker 9: where it's going, and then immediately turns kind of revenue
Speaker 9: true to kill everyone who was involved.
Speaker 4: No, not like that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9: So the product of this is that Martin Luther writes
Speaker 9: this book kind of long pamphlet called against the murderous,
Speaker 9: diving hordes the peasants and aligns himself with the princes. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and you know, so then this is the start of
Speaker 9: what it's eventually a century.
Speaker 6: You know, there's a couple of centuries of religious war
Speaker 6: in here where they get to you.
Speaker 9: But this is in a lot of ways, I think
Speaker 9: the beginning of the reproach ma between Catholicism and Protestantism, because.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because class is more important.
Speaker 9: Yeah yeah, and that that actually, weirdly, is it an
Speaker 9: extremely important part of the story of Guy fox Day.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 9: And you know, the other thing that Luther's up to
Speaker 9: in this period is trying to outflank the Catholics on
Speaker 9: anti Semitism, which is pretty hard because like, so this
Speaker 9: is the early this is the early like fifteen hundreds, right, yeah,
Speaker 9: we are like forty years out from two Spanish monarchs
Speaker 9: like expelling the Jews from Spain.
Speaker 4: So like sixteenth century anti Semitism is like peak.
Speaker 9: I don't know, it's it's hard to exactly like tear
Speaker 9: list the like periods of anti Semitism, but like, right,
Speaker 9: like the Holocaust, the Holocaust is obviously number one, and
Speaker 9: then like this period like the Kolmannitsky pull Grom and
Speaker 9: like some of the stuff in late nineteen like late
Speaker 9: eighteen hundred Russia or like yeah, some like the worst
Speaker 9: periods in human history for this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is pretty terrific shit.
Speaker 9: And and Luther decides that he's going to like outflank
Speaker 9: the Catholics and anti Semitism, and so he writes this
Speaker 9: book called on the Jews and their Lies, which is like, yeah,
Speaker 9: the first version of this that I wrote had a
Speaker 9: joke here about how it could have been written by Hitler.
Speaker 9: But then I then I like did it a little
Speaker 9: bit of reading about it and was like, holy shit,
Speaker 9: this specific thing was used by like Nazi Like, oh,
Speaker 9: I'm sure Lutheran pastors specifically justifiedly that the Holocaust in
Speaker 9: like thirty eight.
Speaker 6: So that's great. Yeah, how cool.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So this is this is you know, this is
Speaker 9: the sort of one of like what you could call
Speaker 9: like the Protestant counter revolution against the sort of social
Speaker 9: revolutionary forces they kicked off right. Well, the anti Sumptus
Speaker 9: like hard line stuff is a bit later. But there's
Speaker 9: there's one more kind of big uprising which is very funny,
Speaker 9: which is the Anabaptist in Munster who formed this like
Speaker 9: oh yeah, pretty base democratic commune that eventually kind of
Speaker 9: peers into like a sex cult thing, but like in
Speaker 9: a way that's more like people realize they could be
Speaker 9: poly than it is like normal sex cult.
Speaker 8: It's people like like emerging from an extremely constrained like yeah,
Speaker 8: socialized sexuality.
Speaker 9: I guess, yeah, And you know, so this is like
Speaker 9: this is you know, those are the two sorts of
Speaker 9: periods of like high of like the highest levels of
Speaker 9: class conflict that that are the results of the prosent information.
Speaker 9: And this kind of ends with Muonster when they all
Speaker 9: get killed by by the monarchies.
Speaker 6: And this is something about the European peasantry. I don't know.
Speaker 9: Maybe one day I'll do a project on why the
Speaker 9: European pasantry was so much worse at doing were revolts
Speaker 9: in the Chinese peasantry, because the Chinese pasantry knocks off
Speaker 9: dynasties all the time, Like the Chinese central government is
Speaker 9: like one hundred thousand times more formidable as a force
Speaker 9: than like any of these dipshit like Holy Roman Empire principalities.
Speaker 9: But the Chinese peasantry did it anyway that I don't know.
Speaker 9: The German peasantry fought hard, it doesn't go great for them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the entirety of the European society is
Speaker 4: structured along like the state monopoly on violence and how
Speaker 4: oh yeah, like feudalism is like the sene kwandoon of
Speaker 4: feudalism is having the ability to kill all your peasants.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's it's a it's a it's a system.
Speaker 9: And I think this is something that like, you know,
Speaker 9: this is there's reflection of this you see in sort
Speaker 9: of like fantasy a lot, right, where like people will
Speaker 9: write monarchies and then you'll get like or like it's
Speaker 9: using like the science station right where like people people
Speaker 9: understand what's bad about a democracy because you've all lived
Speaker 9: in one and you know all the ways that it sucks.
Speaker 9: But because most of us like haven't lived under an
Speaker 9: actual monarchy. Well okay even then even then yeah, compared
Speaker 9: to this shit.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like people don't understand how just hideous this shit is.
Speaker 6: And this is gonna play a role.
Speaker 9: I mean this this is like again, this is like
Speaker 9: the thing that starts the French Revolution where the first
Speaker 9: time that not the first time but like when people
Speaker 9: actually like start beating the monarchists. Seriously, people have this
Speaker 9: tendency to remember like the violence of the French Revolution.
Speaker 9: It's like, yeah, there was a lot of shit that
Speaker 9: was very bad. But also like these people, these people
Speaker 9: that they are fighting, these are these are people who
Speaker 9: for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, anytime anyone
Speaker 9: has like even dared to talk back to them, has
Speaker 9: just fucking murdered them, their families and everyone around them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like as horribly as possible.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, and you know, and like as as the
Speaker 9: process of their them holding on to their fucking deranged
Speaker 9: hereditary power system. And the consequence of this is that
Speaker 9: once once these revolutions are put down, sort of Protestantism
Speaker 9: versus Catholicism, Like it's not fully this because it's like
Speaker 9: there are sort of popular e I mean not in
Speaker 9: the good sense, but there are sort of like more
Speaker 9: mass like Catholicism versus Prossetism stuff. But like a lot
Speaker 9: of it politically becomes the domain of like princes who
Speaker 9: are either sort of running wars that are like nominally
Speaker 9: religious based. Although like go go go, look on what
Speaker 9: side France enters on the thirty years War in about
Speaker 9: twenty years when when France enters out the side and
Speaker 9: of Protestants to figure out exactly how much right. But like,
Speaker 9: you know, but this kind of conflict becomes this this
Speaker 9: kind of more the actual politics becomes centralized in the
Speaker 9: ruling class. The metaphor that popped in mind to me
Speaker 9: is one that will make sense to about four people.
Speaker 9: But it's kind of like the way that all politics
Speaker 9: became centralized in the Bath Party and Serie over the
Speaker 9: course of like the sixties and seventies, like all where
Speaker 9: like you have this mass politics, but the only politics
Speaker 9: that matters is the military and the military factions the
Speaker 9: military fighting it out. Like that's kind of what's happening here,
Speaker 9: is that like all of these princes are sort of
Speaker 9: centralizing religious power.
Speaker 6: But this means that like religious wars.
Speaker 9: Quote unquote in conflict becomes the domain of like these
Speaker 9: coups and counter coups by like princes and they're like
Speaker 9: noble factions and shit. Yeah, and that's where we find
Speaker 9: ourselves in the year sixteen oh four, at the beginning
Speaker 9: of the gunpowdered treason. And but before before we get that,
Speaker 9: do you know what else supports the gunpowder treason the
Speaker 9: seventeenth century.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely, chump a casino.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they're really major funders.
Speaker 8: The Yeah, it's okay if you lose your money, jump
Speaker 8: at casino guys, because they're trying to blow up the
Speaker 8: houses of Parliament.
Speaker 6: We are back. We are back to the past.
Speaker 9: We're back you I guess the future of where we
Speaker 9: were several seconds before that. So England famously became Protestant
Speaker 9: when King Henry the eighth wanted a new wife and
Speaker 9: the Pope wouldn't let him get a new wife.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, anohing new wife, right, Like, was it like this,
Speaker 8: this was new Wait, that's a rhyme for this divorce divorced, beheaded.
Speaker 6: Survived, survived. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I think it was the first divorced because after that
Speaker 8: he just went he went ham on the wives.
Speaker 9: And so through this incredibly silly chain of events, they
Speaker 9: leave the Catholic Church and become Protestants through Anglicanism, which.
Speaker 4: Is Catholicism light.
Speaker 6: Like yeah, and I.
Speaker 9: Think it's more Catholicism light because like Lutheranism also gets
Speaker 9: described to this Becautholicism light. But I could emphatically state
Speaker 9: there is a major difference because I came, I was
Speaker 9: raised Lutheran, and I fucking have no guilt whatsoever.
Speaker 6: No guilt, zero, I feel bad about nothing, no shame.
Speaker 8: Catholicism to England is more or less Catholicism minus Pope.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and obviously they differ over time, because yeah, because
Speaker 8: it's just the drift of history, they evolved differently.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 9: But then but this this starts like actual a series
Speaker 9: of kind of horrendous religious conflicts inside of the UK
Speaker 9: where just like a bunch of random people get killed
Speaker 9: because once princes become the people controlling religions, everything gets
Speaker 9: unbelievably stupid really quickly.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's just a vehicle for like elite fucking ambitions,
Speaker 8: yeah right, that they can pick a faction and use
Speaker 8: that to get a little bit higher up the ladder.
Speaker 9: So there's like there's a series of like coups and
Speaker 9: countercups to attempt to like reinstall Catholic rule or get
Speaker 9: rid of and like it's all really boring, Like it's
Speaker 9: it's so boring I cannot haveize.
Speaker 8: Like, yeah, let me tell you, Mayer, I did that
Speaker 8: in history in school for years. Somehow overcame that to
Speaker 8: get a PhD in history, But that shit was dull.
Speaker 9: It's it's hideously boring, like which is insane because like
Speaker 9: like bloody Mary is involved in this and it's still boring.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, there's a lot of beheadings, the princes in
Speaker 8: the Tower, famous little dead children, a lot of murder.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but boring murder, which is staggering. How do you
Speaker 6: make murder boring? Easy? Ah? You do this shit.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Shakespeare wrote some good place about this shit. And
Speaker 8: for those of you who are interested.
Speaker 6: Yeah, go go consult that. I don't know.
Speaker 9: So by sixteen oh four, a group of guys that
Speaker 9: would eventually extend to like thirteen Catholic guys start to
Speaker 9: form a frankly not very good plan to do a
Speaker 9: coup and appoint the child king to restore Catholic rule
Speaker 9: to Indians.
Speaker 6: The child queen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they love a child king.
Speaker 9: So this plan has Okay, I'm separating it out into
Speaker 9: three stages. I don't know whether it's fair to but
Speaker 9: I'm doing it. So Part one, use a bunch of
Speaker 9: gunpowder to blow up the English Parliament. Okay, Now there's
Speaker 9: something that's very important to to understand what's happening here.
Speaker 9: This is not a parliament in the sense that we
Speaker 9: understand it today, Like this is not like a representative
Speaker 9: body like the Parliament is. Basically it's an assembly assembly
Speaker 9: of nobles. Yeah, it's the instrument of power of the
Speaker 9: English aristocracy. Yeah, which is one of the greatest forces
Speaker 9: for human evil in the entirety of human like the
Speaker 9: three hundred thousand year history of humanity.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we don't have it. Britain doesn't have a universal
Speaker 8: franchise until after eighteen thirty two, so.
Speaker 9: Like yeah, and this is this is this is sixteen
Speaker 9: oh five, yeah, right, like and throughout that whole period
Speaker 9: that the powers of the aristocracy like weighs, but this,
Speaker 9: this is there unbelievably powerful.
Speaker 8: They don't have an universal manhood suffrage even until late
Speaker 8: eighteen forty eight. Before that, every constituency it has its
Speaker 8: own franchise rules, which makes Parliament even fucking weirder. You
Speaker 8: have some that like proto democratic, and you have some
Speaker 8: where it's just a guy yep, and he just shows
Speaker 8: up to Parliament and represents himself.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's great. Yeah.
Speaker 9: So you know this part of the plan, the blowing
Speaker 9: up the parliament plan. Great, we love it. We support
Speaker 9: destroying the English aristocracy. Yeah, always great.
Speaker 8: Yet the king, why not it's gonna was it going
Speaker 8: to be at the state opening of Parliament?
Speaker 9: I think it was. It was going to be at
Speaker 9: some session of parliament with the King was going to
Speaker 9: be there. That was part parliament.
Speaker 8: So fun fact, Britain still does this incredibly antiquated.
Speaker 9: Like barbaric country. Yeah, this is where the we need
Speaker 9: China to conquer the UK and established civilization there like
Speaker 9: failed it there.
Speaker 6: Like Britain.
Speaker 9: Britain couldn't even do a bourgeois revolution. Do you know
Speaker 9: how easy it is to do a bourgeois revolution? Like son,
Speaker 9: yet send pulled it on because Britain.
Speaker 8: Has the most established fucking aristocracy in the world.
Speaker 6: So, oh my god.
Speaker 8: The potty state opening in Parliament, which still happens to
Speaker 8: this day, right, incredibly like antiquated procedure. They searched the
Speaker 8: sellers of Parliament before did and no one else is
Speaker 8: trying to blow them up like this is now part
Speaker 8: of the of the like there's a whole that's an
Speaker 8: exchange of hostages, like like there are all these things
Speaker 8: that are built in from bizarre episodes in British histories.
Speaker 8: They send someone a bottoment to Buckingham Palace to be
Speaker 8: like a hostage for the.
Speaker 9: Duration.
Speaker 4: It's an incredible Yeah.
Speaker 6: This is the stupidest system and the like it the British.
Speaker 9: The British system, like I think, functionally it is a
Speaker 9: more advanced democratic system than the American system, but in
Speaker 9: terms of the way that it's like procedure works, it
Speaker 9: is like like the American Constitution, which is like one
Speaker 9: of the most regressive constitutions, like a constitution that failed
Speaker 9: to enshrine one person, one vote. Yeah, right, Like that
Speaker 9: constitution looks like fucking star trek compared to like watching
Speaker 9: the stupid ass king the hauling around a scepter.
Speaker 8: Yeah, some dude three times and then yeah, it just
Speaker 8: gets in there and reads his speech.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: So so part two of the Gunpowder plot is the
Speaker 9: king who's going to be there too. This is also great.
Speaker 9: We like killing the king. The coolsone media is a
Speaker 9: pro killing the king register establishment, Yes is reticide rules.
Speaker 6: We love it. It's great.
Speaker 9: Part three is to install a Catholic theocracy or a
Speaker 9: place the Protestant one. And we simply do not love this.
Speaker 9: The ship sucks.
Speaker 8: That's where we diverge, sadly yeah, what, this work's very bad.
Speaker 8: Viva Vendetta may have misled you about the intentions of
Speaker 8: Guy Forks.
Speaker 9: Yes, and we'll get to Viva Vendetta because that's I
Speaker 9: think that's an important part of the closing of this story.
Speaker 6: So the plan falls apart. The plotters get betrayed.
Speaker 9: Guy Fox, who's the guy who's supposed to light the gunpowder,
Speaker 9: gets caught and like tortured, which is really funny because
Speaker 9: you'll read accounts.
Speaker 6: I'm going to read a bit from an account from the.
Speaker 9: Somewhat dubiously named English Heritage dot org that is like
Speaker 9: they're just quite pretty good on this.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: They like they own lots of like big old houses
Speaker 8: and stuff. Like if you want to go and see
Speaker 8: like a manor house, you're pretty going to give them
Speaker 8: money to go in. Like it's it's not like as
Speaker 8: bad as something named English Heritage could have been. It
Speaker 8: could be a lot more racist in an open and
Speaker 8: explicit way.
Speaker 9: Yeah yeah, now, but like to think about this, right,
Speaker 9: it's like they don't actually discribe what happened to him
Speaker 9: during his interrogation as torture, even though they tortured the
Speaker 9: shit out of this guy. Oh yeah, like the king
Speaker 9: was there. Well, they tortured the shit out of the sky.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, very unpleasant, imagine.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 9: And so eventually, like all the plotters are like either
Speaker 9: captured or killed. And I'm going to read this from
Speaker 9: that English Heritage article quote. Each was found guilty and
Speaker 9: sentenced to a trader's death by the grizzly ordeal of hanging, drawing,
Speaker 9: and quartering. Oh yeah, the men were hanged. It's it's
Speaker 9: so bad.
Speaker 4: I love this shit.
Speaker 8: When I was in school, you don't understand how great
Speaker 8: this is for like eight year old boys.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but Jesus fucking Christ. So they were hanged, cut
Speaker 9: down while still alivee castrated, dismember, and beheaded, and then
Speaker 9: their bodies were cut into quarters and displayed for all
Speaker 9: to see and for birds to feast upon. According to
Speaker 9: all accounts, all face their fates bravely. So these like
Speaker 9: and this is something that like is genuinely important to
Speaker 9: undersand because we're going to get to the French Revolution
Speaker 9: part of the story very soon.
Speaker 6: These people are fucking deranged.
Speaker 9: They're like they're psychopaths, Like they just they do this
Speaker 9: as public entertainments. Yeah, yeah, Like they hang people and
Speaker 9: then cut them down and castrate them and then dismember
Speaker 9: and behead them while they're alive, like they do this
Speaker 9: like for fun.
Speaker 8: Yeah, isn't this the opening scene of They're just s
Speaker 8: been punished by Fuco?
Speaker 6: Doesn't he describe?
Speaker 9: Yes? Yeah, yeah, and like you know, like this is
Speaker 9: this is the thing you have to remember about the
Speaker 9: French Revolution is that like these are the people who
Speaker 9: rule Europe for like seven hundred years, oh yeah, or
Speaker 9: like these motherfuckers and so you know, like they they
Speaker 9: stopped the gunpowder trees and no one gets blown up,
Speaker 9: and November fifth like immediately gets declared a holiday, but
Speaker 9: it's not really the same holiday as as we have today.
Speaker 9: I'm gonna read again from that article quote. Since sixteen
Speaker 9: seventy three and up until the nineteenth century, some crowds
Speaker 9: have paraded an effigy of the pope through the street,
Speaker 9: strung up above a bonfire. This symbolized continuing prejudice, prejudice
Speaker 9: towards Catholics, which again, like you motherfuckers weren't Catholics until
Speaker 9: like fucking seven seconds.
Speaker 6: Ago, Like what is wrong with you? People like I
Speaker 6: like you?
Speaker 9: You were all Catholics until your king decided to make
Speaker 9: a fake pope so he could get divorced.
Speaker 6: Like what the fuck?
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, the Anti want to say, some guy's pretty hot.
Speaker 9: Like for a country where like you, like, you were
Speaker 9: all literally Catholics until the king decided you weren't.
Speaker 6: What is it? Oh my god, I hate Christian so much.
Speaker 6: Shit sucks so badly.
Speaker 8: Cooking of parades? Have you have you read about the
Speaker 8: Lewis bom fire in Sussex? No, okay, they like they
Speaker 8: go super hard for bon finite. They also, like, I
Speaker 8: think it was the same day or something that some
Speaker 8: Protestants will burned at the steak thereat. They have this
Speaker 8: big parade where they like they drag, like I think
Speaker 8: it's burning barrels of like pitch or tar. Possibly those
Speaker 8: are the same thing they have. Like, I'm going to
Speaker 8: invite you to google Lewis Lewis bonfire. Just just tell
Speaker 8: me what the first image you see is.
Speaker 6: Oh Jesus Christ.
Speaker 8: Oh no, oh no, yeah that's correct. Yeah, yeah, what
Speaker 8: you see crosses jump scared. So they don't just burn
Speaker 8: guy forks in effigy. They have these big sort of
Speaker 8: every every year they'll have like the person of the
Speaker 8: Year they're going to burn so like effigies that they've
Speaker 8: burned include David Cameron, don't be Clarkson except blatter like
Speaker 8: some of it got surprisingly hard, Like I think at
Speaker 8: some point, like there's like a formal like they've been
Speaker 8: investigated by the police, fight multiple time. Nearly all of
Speaker 8: them are against politicians, like you know, we probably should
Speaker 8: have mentioned that they also burned a Romani caravan, which
Speaker 8: is pretty fucking terrible.
Speaker 9: Yeah, all right, speaking speaking speaking of burning David Cameron,
Speaker 9: do you know who else burns David Cameron?
Speaker 4: Is it the goods and services that support this podcast?
Speaker 6: Yeah? Great, yeah, yeah, we're now returning.
Speaker 9: Let's go back to that thing I was reading about
Speaker 9: what happened to them them haying the Pope. Yeah, so
Speaker 9: the less this symboli is continuing presidents against Catholics. However,
Speaker 9: during the French Revolution, English and Irish Catholics fought from Britain,
Speaker 9: which found itself on the same side of the Pope,
Speaker 9: and perhaps because of this, in around eighteen hundred, Guy
Speaker 9: Fox seems to have finally entered the picture as the
Speaker 9: boogeyman of Bonfire Night rather than the Pope. Fox was
Speaker 9: barely mentioned in fifth November sermons in the eighteenth century,
Speaker 9: and his name doesn't feature in the titles of books
Speaker 9: or tracks before eighteen hundred, but after that date his
Speaker 9: name began to appear, and Fox seems to have quickly
Speaker 9: become a central character in English popular culture, often portrayed
Speaker 9: as a dashing, doomed anti hero. Yeah, and this is
Speaker 9: a reminder that Protestant disn't versus Catholic.
Speaker 6: Catholicism is a fucking joke.
Speaker 9: The ruling class has always had one religion counter revolution,
Speaker 9: and when their asses are on the line, Protestant terrorists
Speaker 9: and Catholic Supreme Court justices can work together, just find
Speaker 9: to make sure you can't get a fucking abortion.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 6: So you know what we have here.
Speaker 9: And this is an interesting thing in the sense of
Speaker 9: like like Guy Fox becoming the guy that Guy Fox
Speaker 9: Day is about, and not like the pope is literally
Speaker 9: an icon of sort of like of kind of revolution. Yeah,
Speaker 9: that's a good point, like specifically again it's a French revolution.
Speaker 9: But it's interesting because it's like this eventually seems to
Speaker 9: kind of have backfired because.
Speaker 6: Guys Fux kind of like becomes the central figure. Right.
Speaker 9: But then, and this is something that like This article
Speaker 9: also mentions that I want to go into more. Everything
Speaker 9: sort of changes again about this when the movie Viva
Speaker 9: Vendetta gets made.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's very strange.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and let's actually say before we dovey, can you
Speaker 9: talk a little bit more about like what people do
Speaker 9: drin drink Guy Fox day, because it's fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, totally. Yeah, So it is fun.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 8: It's a nice like a little as burnings in effigy go,
Speaker 8: you know, a fun one at least.
Speaker 4: What we used to do I grow up in a
Speaker 4: more rural area is.
Speaker 8: We know everyone if you had like wood, or you
Speaker 8: chop down a tree, you know, on your land, or
Speaker 8: you had old furniture, you don't bring it to one
Speaker 8: place right, big field.
Speaker 4: You pilot and you're with it's fucking high.
Speaker 8: It's like a couple of stories high by the time, damn,
Speaker 8: and then you go down. On the fifth of November,
Speaker 8: everyone gets fireworks. This is where I'll tell my fireworks
Speaker 8: story very amusingly. When I was younger, everyone in my
Speaker 8: village club together to buy one of those fireworks displays,
Speaker 8: you know where it's like a box and you light
Speaker 8: one fuse and they all go off. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Oh shit.
Speaker 8: So we've set that up, my dad and his mate
Speaker 8: and we're in the van there. We've lit it. Then
Speaker 8: we've we're sort of standing there like grenny to go
Speaker 8: ooh ah. Unfortunately we've placed it upside down, fucking bouncing
Speaker 8: off the ground and then it flips on the side
Speaker 8: and it just went out behind the.
Speaker 4: Van and it's just fucking smashing the van.
Speaker 8: So yeah, what you do is you get fireworks, you
Speaker 8: shoot them at your friends, you shoot them in the air.
Speaker 8: You have a massive bonfire, like and it's this is
Speaker 8: November and Britain, right, so you know days are short
Speaker 8: nights so long, everything's wet, so you're using a lot
Speaker 8: of petrol to start the bonfire, like you know, irresponsible amount.
Speaker 4: And you just have a huge fire.
Speaker 6: And then if you have all clothes.
Speaker 8: At least, I'm sure different if you grow up in
Speaker 8: like a more urban setting, what we would do is
Speaker 8: we get our old clothes, tie the bottom of the
Speaker 8: trousers together, tie the wrists together, and then you stuffle
Speaker 8: that with straw bedding that you have, right, and then
Speaker 8: you put a head on it pet like a bag,
Speaker 8: like a plastic bag or flower bag.
Speaker 4: You draw a little face on it. And that's your guy.
Speaker 8: You can go around to people's houses and ask for
Speaker 8: a penny for the guys. That had sort of become
Speaker 8: quite old fashioned by the time I was a child.
Speaker 8: But you make these guys and then you take them
Speaker 8: down there, and then you put them on top of
Speaker 8: the bonfire before you light it, and everyone watches as
Speaker 8: he catches on fire and burns to death. And you
Speaker 8: have toffee apples at the other thing, new apples dipped
Speaker 8: in toffee.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I used to like it.
Speaker 8: And you have sparklers, you know, which is you know,
Speaker 8: a little sparker on a stick.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was fun. It's got something for every age.
Speaker 4: A little kid, you have a sparker.
Speaker 8: And then once you get to you know, like ten twelve,
Speaker 8: you can shoot fireworks at your friends and like it's
Speaker 8: something for everyone. And I guess unless you're Catholic.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: But that's the thing though, that the Catholic hasn't been Protestantism.
Speaker 4: It's very it's secularized.
Speaker 9: Yeah, like they've been united, they've been united in the
Speaker 9: single Greek British religion of kind of revolutions. So now
Speaker 9: everyone can celebrate Guy Fox state together.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 8: And it's supposed to like reinforce the state and be like,
Speaker 8: if you funk with the state, we will burn you,
Speaker 8: which Viva Vendetta kind of I guess messes with a
Speaker 8: little bit.
Speaker 9: But yeah, and this I think is actually a really
Speaker 9: interesting process because I think Guy Fox now is most
Speaker 9: known for the Guy Fox mask, which was one of
Speaker 9: the symbol and the symbol of anonymous and like one
Speaker 9: of the symbols of Yeah, but it wasn't before that, yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And parts of how this happens is so it is
Speaker 9: a character named Guy Fox in Alan Moore's view for
Speaker 9: Vendetta and viv for Vendetta is not about a Catholic
Speaker 9: plot to establish the Catholic rule in.
Speaker 6: Britain.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: This is about like effectively the government of the UK
Speaker 9: is going to have in five years when they just
Speaker 9: like completely descended to fascism.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I would not that far away now, to be honest.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah. And it's about that government getting overthrown by by
Speaker 9: an anarchist revolution.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And and it's like this because like you know, Alan
Speaker 9: Moore is a leftist. It's made by the Wachowskis of
Speaker 9: like of Matrix fame, who are also trans leftists, We're
Speaker 9: gonna close on them actually, But you know sort of
Speaker 9: what happens to you, right, is like this mask becomes
Speaker 9: a symbol of like kind of like really altogether detached
Speaker 9: from the original figure of Guy Fox, and like through
Speaker 9: the form of this movie, like this becomes the symbol
Speaker 9: of like the twenty eleven like occupy cycle revolutions everywhere.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and like like.
Speaker 9: One of my most sort of like harrowing memories like
Speaker 9: coming up in that movement was of this like twenty fourteen,
Speaker 9: everything's going By twenty fourteen, everything's going to shit, right,
Speaker 9: Like the Serians of War is kicked off through Bob
Speaker 9: Massacre in Egypt has like slaughtered a bunch of protesters,
Speaker 9: and Egypt's like just under full military rule. And there's
Speaker 9: a like there are like Palestinian kids like wearing Guy
Speaker 9: Fosx masks, and there's like this image that haunts me
Speaker 9: is there's video and an image of it of this kid.
Speaker 9: Is like this kid's like seventeen, maybe like sixteen seventeen,
Speaker 9: like wearing this mask and he walks around a cord
Speaker 9: and this really sniper just fucking shoots him the head.
Speaker 9: And there's this picture of him with like this just
Speaker 9: like mask with a hole in it next to his face,
Speaker 9: and he's just like lying there on the floor, and
Speaker 9: it's like one of the things that is like the
Speaker 9: reason why the way I am now is because.
Speaker 6: Of that shit.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and you know, in some sense, like he's become
Speaker 9: it weirdly and enduring danger to the state in ways
Speaker 9: that he would be extremely pissed about, which, yeah, very
Speaker 9: funny to me.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: He started as a graphic novel, right, it was a
Speaker 4: graphic novel before.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, it was an Alan rograph novel. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 9: And I want to close on on the wachousekis and
Speaker 9: specifically I wanted to shout out so again like the
Speaker 9: watch House. He's made the movie Viva Vedetta, which is
Speaker 9: the thing that like popularized it and is in a
Speaker 9: lot of sense responsible for like the aesthetic of the
Speaker 9: twenty eleven revolutions. And she's found in a new project
Speaker 9: called Anarchist United. I'm going to quote from an interview
Speaker 9: with her quote. It will be a studio wholly owned
Speaker 9: by a foundation. It's owned by this five O one
Speaker 9: C three. The five O one C three provides grants
Speaker 9: for artists and young filmmakers with marginalized points of view.
Speaker 9: Hopefully those people will create stuff, bring it over to
Speaker 9: the studio, the studio can make it, and then fund
Speaker 9: the foundation. So you create this evergreen operation that can
Speaker 9: hopefully exist outside of the studio system if necessary. And
Speaker 9: so they're making a bunch of trans shit, like they're
Speaker 9: adapting Gretchen Felken Martin's Manhunt, which is like the most
Speaker 9: transfem ass like book of the last like that GE's
Speaker 9: a book about trans misogyny and it's getting We're getting
Speaker 9: a fucking adapted. So yeah, it's really cool. And yeah,
Speaker 9: like I think, I think, I don't know that. That's
Speaker 9: the thing I want to close on is like a
Speaker 9: note of hope of like even the most deranged kind
Speaker 9: of revolutionaries actions against the state can sometimes ricochet around
Speaker 9: four hundred years later and into like a revolutionary movement.
Speaker 8: Bounce back in transferm films. And it's like I often
Speaker 8: think about Hunger Games, like, yeah, the Hunger Games symbol.
Speaker 8: I would love to into the lady who wrote Hunger Games.
Speaker 8: I think she's quite like doesn't like the media attention
Speaker 8: so much from.
Speaker 4: What I've heard.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but like that became the symbol of the like
Speaker 8: around the Milky Alliance right in Hong Kong, Myanmar obviously
Speaker 8: even in Thailand they use yeah and think it's fascinating
Speaker 8: how these things have these cultural and like, yeah, they
Speaker 8: sort of bounce around. It becomes a bit completely different
Speaker 8: from what they were.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Well, and and you know it's this weird thing too,
Speaker 9: because like the Hunger Games was born of Susan Collins,
Speaker 9: like flipping channels between coverage of like the like watching
Speaker 9: the bombing in the Iraq War and reality TV.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I remember reading that and.
Speaker 9: You see and you watch like this rebound of this
Speaker 9: like the intense reaction of this cultural moment to runs
Speaker 9: two thousand and three, two thousand and four, like like
Speaker 9: what of the peaks of American like kind of revolution
Speaker 9: rebounds around a bunch of like a bunch of bunch
Speaker 9: of revolutionaries of MBAR are doing the like fucking two
Speaker 9: figures thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, doing the cub scouts.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And so you know, this is one of these things
Speaker 9: where like you know, who knows where where your story
Speaker 9: one day is going to end up in rebound two.
Speaker 9: But if if if we survived this, we are promised
Speaker 9: that this year was the beginning of the golden age
Speaker 9: of leftist transcendement. So let's let's sucking get their war.
Speaker 4: And yeah, if you're in England, enjoy burning ship tonight.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I in America, enjoy burning ship tonight.
Speaker 2: You wake up before dawn. This was once abnormal for you.
Speaker 2: Bet Ever since the election, you found it harder and
Speaker 2: harder to sleep. You just barely drifted off when the
Speaker 2: sound of shouts wafted in from across the street. Reflected
Speaker 2: sirens bounce off your bedroom window. Through a fog of sleep.
Speaker 2: You reflect on the last few days. Voting went better
Speaker 2: you'd feared. It's what happened in the days after that's
Speaker 2: kept your spine at a constant eerie tingle. Several Republican
Speaker 2: led states are refusing to certify their election results. Most
Speaker 2: analysts say the blizzard of lawsuits launched on behalf of
Speaker 2: Trump have no chance at winning, But that didn't stop
Speaker 2: the candidate from declaring victory and promising to carry out
Speaker 2: his own inauguration. No matter what the courts decide, it's
Speaker 2: all absurd, laughable. But you live on the border of
Speaker 2: a majority red county and your sheriffs just announced support
Speaker 2: for the real winner of the election. Your local pd
Speaker 2: have been notably silent, while right wing provocateurs online have
Speaker 2: started circulating allegations of election fraud that the sheriff has
Speaker 2: promised to look into. That was yesterday to day, Just
Speaker 2: after five, You're jolted awake in your bed by the
Speaker 2: sound of breaking glass and screaming. You stay low and
Speaker 2: crawl to your front window to peep out across your
Speaker 2: yard and into the street. Before you, three police cruisers
Speaker 2: are stacked up in front of your neighbor's house. You
Speaker 2: can't imagine why. You know he did some volunteer canvassing
Speaker 2: a few weeks back. He volunteered at a voting precinct.
Speaker 2: Could they be there because of that? You try a
Speaker 2: few different search terms on social media to puzzle out
Speaker 2: the truth. It looks like a few people around the
Speaker 2: country are reporting similar raids, but most of the posts
Speaker 2: register is deleted before you can click on them. There's
Speaker 2: more shouting from inside your neighbor's house, and within seconds,
Speaker 2: a pair of birdly deputies drag him out in front
Speaker 2: and into a waiting squad car. It's dark outside, but
Speaker 2: you think you might see blood on his face. Your
Speaker 2: heart starts to pound. You feel the urge to call someone,
Speaker 2: but the cops are already here. Who else is there?
Speaker 2: As your mind raises, one of the officers stationed outside
Speaker 2: turns back and looks towards your window. Recognition sparks his eyes,
Speaker 2: He sees you. He starts to walk over. You, turn back,
Speaker 2: drop the shades, and with a pounding heart, retreat to
Speaker 2: your bedroom. Maybe he won't knock, Maybe he just wanted
Speaker 2: to scare you. Maybe hello, everyone, hand welcome to It
Speaker 2: could happen here. I'm Robert Evanson. Back in early twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: I released the first season of this show. It wasn't
Speaker 2: a daily news and politics podcast back then. Instead, it
Speaker 2: gave a focused argument for why a new US civil
Speaker 2: war was more frightening and possible than you might guess.
Speaker 2: Over the last few years, that belief has become unfortunately mainstream.
Speaker 2: It is no longer fringe or unique to talk about
Speaker 2: a new civil war as a real possibility. There was
Speaker 2: a blockbuster movie earlier this year based around presenting what
Speaker 2: it called a realistic picture of such a possibility. Leave
Speaker 2: my thoughts on that for another time. A Marist poll
Speaker 2: from earlier this year showed that forty seven percent of
Speaker 2: Americans consider a second Civil War likely or very likely.
Speaker 2: This is a massive shift considering where things were when
Speaker 2: I wrote this podcast series in twenty nineteen. That number
Speaker 2: includes an expected fifty three percent of Republicans, but also
Speaker 2: forty percent of Democrats and forty one percent of independence.
Speaker 2: Depending on how you want to see it, I've either
Speaker 2: been vindicated as much as as possible for someone in
Speaker 2: my line of work, or I've played an outsized role
Speaker 2: in creating a particularly dangerous eggregre in the collective unconsciousness
Speaker 2: of our nation, effectively talking this possibility into being. I'm
Speaker 2: really not sure either way. My conscience has been troubled
Speaker 2: on that matter ever since the first episode started coming out.
Speaker 2: If you'll remember, midway through the first season, we dropped
Speaker 2: an extra episode I hadn't initially intended as part of
Speaker 2: the run, just trying to stop people from panicking, and
Speaker 2: ever since I've kept that as a particular goal in
Speaker 2: my head. However you want to, you know, think about this.
Speaker 2: The first season of It Could Happen Here undoubtedly helped
Speaker 2: to make my career today. Sophie and I run an
Speaker 2: entire network that employs several dozen people, largely on the
Speaker 2: strength of that series, and yet I have no issue
Speaker 2: telling you that I don't have any idea how election
Speaker 2: Day is going to go. You know, we've had a
Speaker 2: lot of polls lately that seem much better for Harris.
Speaker 2: A number of pollsters are starting to shift. You know,
Speaker 2: there's a good chance that they were hurting in the
Speaker 2: direction of Trump because they didn't want to underestimate him again.
Speaker 2: But there's also a good chance that you know that
Speaker 2: sells her poll is an outlier, and now these guys
Speaker 2: are hurting in the direction of Harris winning because they
Speaker 2: don't want to be embarrassed. I really have no idea
Speaker 2: what's going to happen. My official stance is that it's
Speaker 2: probably pretty close to a coin flip, although maybe one
Speaker 2: that favors Harris now you know, more than one that
Speaker 2: favors Trump. Whatever happens, I don't know what's going to
Speaker 2: had happen, let alone what's going to happen the day after.
Speaker 2: And as I sat down to write this episode, which
Speaker 2: is going to air on the day of the election,
Speaker 2: I went back and forth as to where the focus
Speaker 2: should be. I did consider doing another Don't Panic style episode.
Speaker 2: Perhaps that would have been the call. You know, depending
Speaker 2: on how today goes, people might either be listening to
Speaker 2: this and you know, relaxing or listening to this and
Speaker 2: in a heightened state of panic. You know, it really
Speaker 2: depends on where things are and where things are and
Speaker 2: the counting of votes by this period of time. My
Speaker 2: reasoning on what I decided to do is pretty simple,
Speaker 2: which is that I think there's a good chance we
Speaker 2: either know or have a strong inkling of how this
Speaker 2: election is going to shake out by the time this
Speaker 2: episode airs, And at the time I write this, the
Speaker 2: indicators do look better for Harris than for Trump, enough
Speaker 2: that I'd say the election leans in her direction. And
Speaker 2: so I think there's a lot of value in talking
Speaker 2: about what might happen in the aftermath of that. If
Speaker 2: Trump tries to protest the election, and if he goes
Speaker 2: particularly trying to protest by force, and if that's the case,
Speaker 2: if that's the direction he lands in, I think these
Speaker 2: shooters that we have to worry about. And I mean
Speaker 2: that in the figurative sense, right, you know, people who
Speaker 2: support him, who will put skin in the game in
Speaker 2: order to try to force him into office. I think
Speaker 2: they're different than they were last time. I don't think
Speaker 2: the threat here is that a bunch of proud boys
Speaker 2: and the like raid the capital next January. I think
Speaker 2: the threat here has a lot more to do with
Speaker 2: licensed law enforcement officers who have already declared themselves in
Speaker 2: the tank for Trump. We ran an episode just the
Speaker 2: other day about the Constitutional Sheriff's movement. There's a lot
Speaker 2: to say about that. One in four law enforcement officers
Speaker 2: today report to a sheriff. They make twenty percent of
Speaker 2: all arrests in the country. Earlier this year, Wired published
Speaker 2: an article on the far right sheriff's ready to disrupt
Speaker 2: the election. It focused heavily on dar Leif, who sits
Speaker 2: on the board of the Constitutional Sheriffs in Peace Officers
Speaker 2: Association ORPOA. Leif, a Trump supporter and sheriff in Berry County, Michigan,
Speaker 2: has spent the lead up to this election investigating the
Speaker 2: twenty twenty election. He's tried to seize voting machines and
Speaker 2: run militia training courses where he offers to teach potential jurors, homeschoolers, ladies,
Speaker 2: and gentlemen how to form an ad hoc posse, each
Speaker 2: member armed with quote a standard Air fifteen type military
Speaker 2: grade weapon and at least five hundred rounds of AMMO.
Speaker 2: Speaking of five hundred rounds of AMMO, he probably can't
Speaker 2: buy that from our sponsors.
Speaker 4: But here they are.
Speaker 2: We're back, and we're talking about a constitutional sheriff who
Speaker 2: sits on the board of that organization named dar Leaf
Speaker 2: Leif has already promised to have his posse patrolling stations
Speaker 2: in Barry County to watch for evidence of fraud and
Speaker 2: the legal immigrant voting in what expected to be one
Speaker 2: of the swing states this election might hinge on. Deeply
Speaker 2: reported articles like that Wired piece have warred in my
Speaker 2: own personal paranoia with troubling accounts on social media. The
Speaker 2: day before the election, which is when I wrote this,
Speaker 2: I came across a post on the Pennsylvania subreddit from
Speaker 2: a Philly voter titled my dad just got harassed by
Speaker 2: a police officer about the election.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 2: He was driving down the Old Lincoln Highway when a
Speaker 2: trooper stopped him and asked him if he was voting tomorrow. Trooper,
Speaker 2: will you be voting tomorrow?
Speaker 4: Dad?
Speaker 2: That's none of your business, trooper. Who are you voting
Speaker 2: for tomorrow?
Speaker 4: Dad?
Speaker 2: None of your business, trooper, Oh, sir, you're illegal now.
Speaker 2: The poster's dad, who is Hispanic, stated that he didn't
Speaker 2: have to answer that and asked if he was being detained.
Speaker 2: The trooper let him go, but later, according to the poster,
Speaker 2: this happened when my dad went to the precinct. There
Speaker 2: were three other people there to report the exact same story.
Speaker 2: Election harassment at a traffic stop. Turns out the officer
Speaker 2: or officers doing it arn't even from Bucks County or Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: Their new Jersey State troopers wiled across state borders to
Speaker 2: harass people driving down the highway. In the lead up
Speaker 2: to the twenty twenty election, we were all deeply worried
Speaker 2: about the dangers of different far right groups, militias, and
Speaker 2: organizations like the Proud Boys who wore right wing death
Speaker 2: squad patches and threatened to throw leftists out of helicopters
Speaker 2: when their god Emperor won reelection. Today, most of those
Speaker 2: figures are either a spent force or something that cannot
Speaker 2: act on its own, reliant upon the backing of groups
Speaker 2: like the aforementioned constitutional sheriffs, or being empowered by a
Speaker 2: Trump controlled White House if they want to have any
Speaker 2: hope of being directly relevant again. The positive side of
Speaker 2: this is that it allows us to triage our fears.
Speaker 2: The downside is that independent paramilitary actors are in fact
Speaker 2: something we can easily combat as individuals and communities. Portland
Speaker 2: proved that when it eventually won its five year street
Speaker 2: battle to oust these sundry right wing groups from constant
Speaker 2: occupations of the city. Groups like the Proud Boys cross
Speaker 2: the line into outright violence, it is legal to meet
Speaker 2: them with defensive violence, and they can and have been
Speaker 2: beaten this way. That's simply not something the extant left
Speaker 2: wing community defense organizations and political groups in this country
Speaker 2: can say and do against. For example, law enforcement entities
Speaker 2: hell bent on executing a purge against the left. In
Speaker 2: rallies prior to the election, Trump has often merged promises
Speaker 2: to prosecute his political opponents US with promises to use
Speaker 2: ice to deport twenty million illegals and descend in the
Speaker 2: military or federal law enforcement to clean up cities. I
Speaker 2: want to quote now from an article in The New
Speaker 2: Republic reporting on a rally earlier this year in Wilmington,
Speaker 2: North Carolina. Today, I am announcing a new plan to
Speaker 2: end all sanctuary cities in North Carolina. And across our country,
Speaker 2: said Trump, no more sanctuary cities. As soon as I
Speaker 2: take office, we will immediately surge federal law enforcement to
Speaker 2: every city that is failing, which is a lot of them,
Speaker 2: to turn over criminal aliens. And we will hunt down
Speaker 2: and capture every single gang member, drug dealer, rapist, murderer,
Speaker 2: and migrant criminal that is being illegally harbored. The article
Speaker 2: goes on to note Trump has previously vowed to militarize
Speaker 2: US law enforcement to restore law and order to our cities,
Speaker 2: which he claimed to have become cesspools of bloodshed and
Speaker 2: crime under President Joe Biden. Trump has argued that additional
Speaker 2: federal funding and forces would help supplement supposedly defunded police departments,
Speaker 2: but that extra help would only go to cities that
Speaker 2: complied with ice. Now, this is scary stuff, and it
Speaker 2: would necessitate some sort of response if it were to happen.
Speaker 2: But I don't really know how to tell you to
Speaker 2: organize against it right now. There are so many unknowns
Speaker 2: that one would need to factor into any plans. I
Speaker 2: could theorize about underground railroads to help people avoid deportation
Speaker 2: or to avoid being raided for their past political activism,
Speaker 2: and I could base those theories on, for example, how
Speaker 2: activists in Nazi Germany helped hide people from the Gestapo.
Speaker 2: But those heroes of yesteryear existed in a world where
Speaker 2: the technological tools available to the enemy were primitive beyond
Speaker 2: compare to what exists today. Perhaps the most chilling article
Speaker 2: I read this year had nothing to do with ice
Speaker 2: or right wing paramilitaries and everything to do with the
Speaker 2: technology that has been standard among law enforcement for years.
Speaker 2: License plate recognition systems like Motorollas dr in use optical
Speaker 2: character recognition technology to identify the text of a vehicle's
Speaker 2: license plate and put it in a searchable database. The
Speaker 2: policing implications of this are obvious and not all negative,
Speaker 2: although it's far from clear if they actually work too.
Speaker 2: The idea is that if someone carries out a drive
Speaker 2: by shooting, or assaults a woman on the street, or
Speaker 2: is seen fleeing some other form of dangerous crime by
Speaker 2: someone who gets the car, make and model and maybe
Speaker 2: the first couple letters of the plate. Dn r's database
Speaker 2: of more than fifteen billion vehicle sidings, built from automatic
Speaker 2: recordings of license plate reading cameras on police cruisers and
Speaker 2: tow trucks and the like might well help identify and
Speaker 2: stop someone before they hunter kill again. Now their serious
Speaker 2: reason to question whether or not this system action works
Speaker 2: this way. I'm not claiming to take a stance on
Speaker 2: this one way or the other. I'm not an expert
Speaker 2: on this, but the issue here from a privacy standpoint,
Speaker 2: when we imagine what might happen in a future Trump
Speaker 2: dominated government, is that you can't train a system like
Speaker 2: this to only pay attention to license plates, nor is
Speaker 2: there any benefit to Motorola in doing so. In recent
Speaker 2: investigations conducted by a private detective with access to dn
Speaker 2: r's database for her work have shown that someone with
Speaker 2: access to this database can search based on more than
Speaker 2: just license plates. They can look up signs supporting political
Speaker 2: candidates and match them to front yards and thus to
Speaker 2: people's addresses. They can find individuals who were captured by
Speaker 2: these cameras, and there are again billions of these photos wearing,
Speaker 2: for example, planned parenthood shirts. This is not an idle fear.
Speaker 2: This is a weapon that could very easily be used
Speaker 2: by the enemy within months of you listening to this.
Speaker 2: This is also a weapon that in an event like
Speaker 2: the one I forecasted at the start of this episode
Speaker 2: could be used to crack down on activists and voters
Speaker 2: in counties that are loyal to Trump in some sort
Speaker 2: of national schism situation. Police officers already misused databases like
Speaker 2: this with comic regularity. In twenty twenty two, a different
Speaker 2: Wired investigation showed that hundreds of ICE employees and contractors
Speaker 2: had been caught abusing similar databases made via license plate
Speaker 2: recognition systems. Some had used them to stalk citizens. Stuff
Speaker 2: like this pairs forebodingly with threats made by emboldened pro
Speaker 2: Trump cops earlier this election season. I'm talking about something
Speaker 2: that happened in September when Ohio Sheriff of Portage County
Speaker 2: Bruce Szukowski posted a screenshot of a Fox News segment
Speaker 2: criticizing the current president over his immigration record and the
Speaker 2: impact of Haitian migrants on Springfield, Ohio, from an article
Speaker 2: in The ap by Michael Rubacam likening people in the
Speaker 2: US illegally to human locusts Zukowski wrote on a personal
Speaker 2: Facebook account and his campaign's account, when people ask me,
Speaker 2: what's going to happen if the flip flopping last Hyena wins,
Speaker 2: I say, write down all the addresses of the people
Speaker 2: who had their signs in their yards. That way, Zukowski continued,
Speaker 2: when migrants need places to live, we're already have the
Speaker 2: addresses of their new families who supported their arrival. Now,
Speaker 2: as the full context of that statement makes clear, Zukowski
Speaker 2: was not technically threatening Harris voters. But it's pretty much
Speaker 2: impossible for me to take that as anything but a threat,
Speaker 2: just one dressed up enough for plausible deniability and an
Speaker 2: environment where the future ability of Zukowski and those like
Speaker 2: him to punish Democrats is still unclear. And we're going
Speaker 2: to talk more about that. But first here's another ad break. Now,
Speaker 2: I don't mean to make it sound like that there's
Speaker 2: nothing that can be done to fight against technological tools
Speaker 2: in the arsenal of repression like this, but I have
Speaker 2: no doubt that if the Republicans do take total power,
Speaker 2: they will read any positive election for them as a
Speaker 2: mandate to punish the left and purge the people. Trump
Speaker 2: is already repeatedly called the enemy within, and I worry
Speaker 2: that in the event of any sort of national schism,
Speaker 2: either where there's an extended period of time where Trump
Speaker 2: is claiming to have been the winner, or if there's
Speaker 2: a situation where he just has himself inaugurated in Florida
Speaker 2: and you have a bunch of these counties and states
Speaker 2: around the country sign up for Trump, that the first
Speaker 2: thing we'll see law enforcement do in these areas is
Speaker 2: punished the enemy within, especially if they declare themselves on
Speaker 2: a war footing with the rest of the country. These
Speaker 2: are all things that are maybe not the likeliest possibility here,
Speaker 2: but they are something to keep in mind, and they
Speaker 2: are something that represents a real danger at this point.
Speaker 2: I don't think anyone who's paid attention to the kinds
Speaker 2: of thing the Republicans have been saying lately can deny that.
Speaker 2: Now it is important to remember that whatever plan these
Speaker 2: people try won't work as well as they hope. We've
Speaker 2: been watching them for years, and if there's one thing
Speaker 2: you know about all of the people around Trump, it's
Speaker 2: that they're fuck ups. That doesn't mean they can't win,
Speaker 2: it doesn't mean they're not dangerous. It just means that
Speaker 2: they're going to make mistakes. Now, those mistakes aren't going
Speaker 2: to be survivable for everybody that we care about, which
Speaker 2: is something that should be on your mind. Bruce and
Speaker 2: most of the Trump aligned police, local and federal still
Speaker 2: feel a need to couch their threats in deniable terms, though,
Speaker 2: but many on the far right have been less careful.
Speaker 2: And one thing we've seen is this election has lurched
Speaker 2: closer to its conclusion.
Speaker 6: Is a lot of.
Speaker 2: People, people like particularly Elon Musk, have absolutely taken their
Speaker 2: masks off.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: I think this had a lot to do with the
Speaker 2: fact that Trump was looking more like the favorite a
Speaker 2: couple of weeks ago, and they felt like after years
Speaker 2: of having to do what Bruce did, having to cover
Speaker 2: up their outright eliminationist impulses, they no longer had to
Speaker 2: do that now. Obviously, some influential people on the far
Speaker 2: right have been masked off from much longer, and this
Speaker 2: is something that should concern you as well. One of
Speaker 2: the most sinister examples of this is Jack Pisobic, a
Speaker 2: former US Navy intelligence officer whose recent book Unhumans is
Speaker 2: framed as a secret history of communist allusions. From an
Speaker 2: article in Mother Jones quote they they being. Pisobic and
Speaker 2: his co author claim for as long as there have
Speaker 2: been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also
Speaker 2: been the ugly liars who hate and kill. And these
Speaker 2: people of anti civilization have always gone by different names communists, socialists, leftists,
Speaker 2: and progressives. The pair contend that these folks, be they
Speaker 2: the Bolsheviks of Russia or the BLM activists of this decade,
Speaker 2: are better called unhumans. It's a hard edged message. The
Speaker 2: foes of conservatism are not merely misguided souls pushing the
Speaker 2: wrong policies, but people who seek to annihilate civilization. They
Speaker 2: rob and kill. Pisobic and Lyssek, his co author, maintain
Speaker 2: they don't believe what they say. They don't care about
Speaker 2: winning debates. They don't even want a quality. They just
Speaker 2: want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse
Speaker 2: to destroy you. Now, Jack has been a laughable character
Speaker 2: for much of his career, but his outright eliminationist rhetoric
Speaker 2: has had an audience in the Howls of Power. Jd
Speaker 2: Vance himself provided a blurb for the book, claiming it
Speaker 2: shows us what to do to fight back. Steve Bannon
Speaker 2: meanwhile wrote the forward. Now, I started this episode with
Speaker 2: a fictional vignette imagining what might happen if Trump chooses
Speaker 2: to contest the election without right force, and he might.
Speaker 2: The good news is I think that such an effort
Speaker 2: would be doomed to fail if he sticks to the courts.
Speaker 2: Trying to refuse certifications and kick the election to the
Speaker 2: House is a better chance at succeeding, and it is
Speaker 2: possible that isolated thefts of ballots and arrests of poll
Speaker 2: workers could play into a broader effort like this, but
Speaker 2: doing so is a big risk. My gut tells me
Speaker 2: that moving so openly resorting to violence first creates a
Speaker 2: situation in which the Biden administration and the incoming Harris
Speaker 2: administration would have to respond with force. There would have
Speaker 2: to be consequences, and given that they currently control the
Speaker 2: arsenal of state power, I think they would win even
Speaker 2: in the event that you have all of these sheriffs
Speaker 2: break for Trump in some sort of insurgent situation develop.
Speaker 2: If that were to happen, having backed this insurgency would
Speaker 2: put Trump in real jeopardy, and it would put a
Speaker 2: lot of his backers in jeopardy as well. It might
Speaker 2: even force consequences for provocateurs like Sobic and even Elon Musk.
Speaker 2: Backing an outright violent coup is almost the only thing
Speaker 2: I can imagine putting Musk behind bars. There are pieces
Speaker 2: of this logic train that I find comforting, but there
Speaker 2: are also pieces that aren't. Many of us, me included,
Speaker 2: made the mistake of assuming that after January sixth, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, Trumpism might finally be a spent force. He'd
Speaker 2: gambled too much and he'd lost too big. But despite
Speaker 2: the existential threat, he presented himself as being The Democratic
Speaker 2: Party and the Merrick Garland Justice Department largely chose mercy
Speaker 2: for the main players. I suspect anything short of armed
Speaker 2: insurrection will see a similar reaction from them this year.
Speaker 2: I don't believe Musk's fears that the Democrats will throw
Speaker 2: him in prison if Harris Winds are real, or that
Speaker 2: instead as his own predictive justification for the violence he'd
Speaker 2: like to support against his political enemies. That desire won't
Speaker 2: go away just because Trump rides off into the sunset
Speaker 2: and the Republican Party has to go searching for another feurer.
Speaker 2: If we defer their dream, it will simply sit under
Speaker 2: the floorboards and waiting for the next opportunity, and that
Speaker 2: won't take long. Kamala will inherit a broken system and
Speaker 2: a world where climate change and conflict are on the rise.
Speaker 2: Low information voters less literate by the day, will continue
Speaker 2: to swing back and forth. The feral beast we've heard
Speaker 2: growling all year long will surge forward, all the hungrier
Speaker 2: for being made to wait. If you've kept up with
Speaker 2: our election coverage this year, you've probably noticed that we
Speaker 2: haven't endorsed any candidates, and I haven't wasted any time
Speaker 2: advising our listeners to vote. I happen to be someone
Speaker 2: who does think a Harris win represents substantially less harm
Speaker 2: than a Trump win to a lot of people. But
Speaker 2: I don't think that the folks who listen to our
Speaker 2: podcast are waiting for me to make that decision for them.
Speaker 2: I don't agree with the anti electoralist side of things
Speaker 2: on every matter, but one place where I do agree
Speaker 2: with them is that a Harris win won't fix what's broken.
Speaker 2: It represents the historic equivalent of jinking out of the
Speaker 2: way and a dog fight. Necessary maybe, but not something
Speaker 2: that guarantees future security. Hey everybody, Robert here, I've changed locations,
Speaker 2: so sorry if it sounds a little bit different. I'm
Speaker 2: currently in a cabin waiting out the election trying not
Speaker 2: to think too much about it. But I wrote a
Speaker 2: new ending to this because I just thought that what
Speaker 2: I had there was incomplete. Now, when it comes to
Speaker 2: what does work in the long run to beat these people,
Speaker 2: my mind is drawn back constantly to perhaps an odd place.
Speaker 2: A twenty eleven article in the scientific journal Nature titled
Speaker 2: the Evolution of over Confidence.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: The gist is that this was an attempt by two
Speaker 2: scientists to solve the evolutionary mystery of the Dunning Krueger effect.
Speaker 2: It seems to be extraordinarily common for people who know
Speaker 2: very little about a subject to overestimate their competence in it.
Speaker 2: This is probably why so many Americans think they could
Speaker 2: win a fistfight with a bear. Such a phenomenon seems
Speaker 2: profoundly maladaptive. How could overestimating our abilities provide any kind
Speaker 2: of benefit to evolutionary fitness? The explanation devised in this
Speaker 2: paper is that overconfidence is beneficial more often than not, because,
Speaker 2: in a hypothetical situation where two organisms are competing for
Speaker 2: a resource and evenly matched in the event of a fight,
Speaker 2: the organism that is more confident is likelier to reach
Speaker 2: for that resource if they do. One of three things
Speaker 2: can happen. They fight and win, they fight and lose,
Speaker 2: or the other organism backs away insecure in its chances
Speaker 2: of victory and they get that resource without even fighting
Speaker 2: for it. Such a scenario favors the overconfident individual so
Speaker 2: much so that it might explain why many of us
Speaker 2: seem to have a build in tendency to irrationally judge
Speaker 2: our own capabilities.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 2: I first became aware of this research almost a decade
Speaker 2: ago when I started work on my first published book,
Speaker 2: A Brief History of Vice. At the time, I found
Speaker 2: it interesting because it posited a likely adaptive basis for
Speaker 2: a kind of bad behavior, and that's what my whole
Speaker 2: book was about. In the years since, though, I've come
Speaker 2: to see it as the fundamental underlying explanation for how
Speaker 2: fascists win. It's well established that fascist regimes and individuals
Speaker 2: themselves are bad at threat modeling. We can bring up
Speaker 2: examples as varied as the invasion of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 2: or that proud boy who got shot in Portland after
Speaker 2: picking the wrong fight, and of course January sixth. There
Speaker 2: are many examples to choose from, but as often as
Speaker 2: they fail, the success of these movements is also based
Speaker 2: entirely on their willingness to dare and the fact that
Speaker 2: liberals in particular are often too frightened and cautious to
Speaker 2: confront them. We are still dealing with Donald Trump and
Speaker 2: his foot soldiers in twenty twenty four because no one
Speaker 2: quite had the guts to confront him to the degree
Speaker 2: he needed to be confronted. Doing so would have meant
Speaker 2: taking unprecedented legal steps and risking right wing backlash that
Speaker 2: likely would have included acts of terrorism. In the end,
Speaker 2: most people with any say in the matter chose to
Speaker 2: either back away or pull their punches until after the election.
Speaker 2: On other episodes of this show, our correspondent Mia and
Speaker 2: I have talked about the actual path destroying the far
Speaker 2: rights organizational and electoral base. We are up against a
Speaker 2: coalition a fused car dealers, supplement salesman, multi level marketing goals,
Speaker 2: sheriffs taking blatantly unconstitutional stances on their own power, and
Speaker 2: churches that, by any decent measure lost their justification for
Speaker 2: tax exempt status years ago. These are all forces that
Speaker 2: can be targeted and neutered through the courts in the
Speaker 2: legislative system with consistent activism and pressure applied to elected
Speaker 2: leaders sitting here. I think that the odds the Democrats
Speaker 2: embrace such as strategy are exceptionally low, but we do
Speaker 2: have to try to make them because when you're sitting
Speaker 2: across from a monster, one that's fattened on over confidence,
Speaker 2: and you see him start to reach again, the only
Speaker 2: same response is to swallow your fear and take a swing.
Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen here. On today's episode, we
Speaker 1: have Robert Evans, Harrison Davis Mio Wong, James Stout, Margaret Kildoy,
Speaker 1: and I'm Sophie Lichterman. This is the post election episode.
Speaker 2: Robert, Yeah, it happened here, is happening has continued to
Speaker 2: happen here.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This has been a podcast from the beginning about things
Speaker 2: falling apart, which is a great business to be in,
Speaker 2: I guess because they keep doing that. I want to
Speaker 2: start by kind of talking about yesterday's episode, the one
Speaker 2: that I dropped before the election because I thought a
Speaker 2: lot about like what to put out on the day
Speaker 2: of the election, and I kind of made the call,
Speaker 2: which I don't know regrets the wrong word. I made
Speaker 2: the call yesterday that like, okay, we've got this new
Speaker 2: poll from Selzer, people are starting to feel like, you know,
Speaker 2: some of this late breaking news is good for Harris.
Speaker 2: Some of the posters are hurting back in that direction.
Speaker 2: I probably should do something to kind of like pump
Speaker 2: the breaks on enthusiasm and remind people that even if
Speaker 2: she wins, there's still a lot of dangers out there, right,
Speaker 2: because that's what I saw as like the big threat
Speaker 2: model is Harris is likely to win, and then people
Speaker 2: are going to forget about these constitutional sheriffs and all
Speaker 2: these different kind of like right wing gules that will
Speaker 2: still be a problem if we don't take care of them, right,
Speaker 2: if we don't do anything to actually like hamper their
Speaker 2: ability to exercise power. So I wrote that episode with
Speaker 2: that in mind, and it turns out I was being
Speaker 2: overly optimistic, and I think it was being overly optimistic
Speaker 2: in part. You know, I tend towards pessimism, which is
Speaker 2: why this show exists in the first place. You Know,
Speaker 2: one of the things that's happened is we've gotten bigger
Speaker 2: and more people have listened, and is whenever like shit
Speaker 2: happens in the world, we get bombarded on the subreddit,
Speaker 2: and just like in emails to myself with people saying
Speaker 2: versions of like I don't know what to do, using
Speaker 2: language that's like very worrying sometimes about how hopeless they feel.
Speaker 2: And so I've kind of felt a growing responsibility to
Speaker 2: like spread calm and hope. And I think that merged
Speaker 2: to a degree with the you know, after my dad died,
Speaker 2: this desire to like not just be sad and de doomer,
Speaker 2: and I think it led me to have I guess,
Speaker 2: more of an optimistic like I forced myself into an
Speaker 2: unreasonably optimistic frame of mind just because I thought that
Speaker 2: was the responsible thing to do. And I guess I'm
Speaker 2: kind of like evaluating that now, like what should I
Speaker 2: have done differently, you know, if I'd been in a
Speaker 2: more logical state of mind. And I guess the answer
Speaker 2: is I don't know how to be in a more
Speaker 2: logical state of mind. Like the problem is there's so much,
Speaker 2: you know, you've got this hyper object of a political
Speaker 2: real life happening in our country in this very dark
Speaker 2: direction you're also trying to deal with and I'm sure
Speaker 2: everyone listening is dealing with versions of this on their own.
Speaker 2: You know, people you care about getting sick and dying
Speaker 2: and you know, losing jobs or having to start new
Speaker 2: ones and embarking, you know, starting to become a parent
Speaker 2: or whatever. Like everybody's got all these massive things in
Speaker 2: their own lives, and like trying to keep a completely
Speaker 2: rational perspective on the political happenings in this country while
Speaker 2: remaining unaffected from like the way in which your own
Speaker 2: life is going to color your optimism and biases is
Speaker 2: probably a hopeless cause to some extent, which I guess
Speaker 2: is part of why we're here to try and as
Speaker 2: a collective offer people our most reasonable, sort of averaged
Speaker 2: opinion about what's going to happen. So I guess that's
Speaker 2: what we're going to try to do here. That's what
Speaker 2: I've got to start with.
Speaker 1: I mean, hope is illogical, but it is necessary, and
Speaker 1: I think that's really where we have to start. I'm
Speaker 1: going to toss over to Margaret real quick about hope.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Margaret, fix this for you.
Speaker 1: Well, just to say, just to say, I woke up
Speaker 1: today with some hope, and I think a lot of
Speaker 1: that is from my friendship with Margaret, and I don't
Speaker 1: think there's a better person to talk about that than her.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Margaret, I appreciate that.
Speaker 10: I often make the joke about the fact that I
Speaker 10: named myself killed Joy in my twenties and then became
Speaker 10: a professional optimist. But that and I think that actually
Speaker 10: it could happen here, and I think folks here do
Speaker 10: it really well. Sometimes determination is almost sometimes the right
Speaker 10: word instead of hope, right because or like optimism is
Speaker 10: always the right word because you're like, well, bad things
Speaker 10: are happening, and they're going to happen, and they're going
Speaker 10: to keep happening, right, And so sometimes we look at
Speaker 10: like like climate change, for example, which is the broader problem.
Speaker 10: You know, you're like, well, no matter what we do,
Speaker 10: it's going to get worse. And so the immediate electoral
Speaker 10: problem in front of us, like, no matter what happens,
Speaker 10: it's going to get worse before it gets better. But
Speaker 10: we need to stay aware of that and stop pretending
Speaker 10: like the bad things aren't coming. Will then still looking
Speaker 10: at saying like, well what can we do? And for me,
Speaker 10: the thing that I focus on I have a therapist
Speaker 10: friend who talks about how agency is the opposite of trauma,
Speaker 10: you know, and that the more that we act with
Speaker 10: agency while bad things are happening the less that they
Speaker 10: destroy us emotionally, and so I think that focusing on
Speaker 10: what can we do is just incredibly useful and necessary.
Speaker 6: And also the fact that.
Speaker 10: Things are in turmoil right now and that means lots
Speaker 10: of bad things are happening and the old status quo
Speaker 10: is gone. We saw that with the defeat of the Democrats.
Speaker 10: Their whole thing is that they doubled down on the
Speaker 10: old status quo, and people don't want that. People want
Speaker 10: something different, and Trump offers something different, a very horrible
Speaker 10: nightmare thing that's different, and the Democrats did not offer
Speaker 10: something different. And so I actually think, in a weird way,
Speaker 10: we are in a good position to on a grassroots
Speaker 10: level build something different and say that people want something different.
Speaker 10: And I think that by working towards something different and better, well,
Speaker 10: it's the best way to keep our own spirits up.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks mac buy, I absolutely agree, James. What's your
Speaker 1: perspective here.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Like it goes without saying that like Trump's proposed
Speaker 8: border policies are horrific, and his propos migration policies are horrific.
Speaker 4: Houses were also bad.
Speaker 8: I think like that that doesn't mean that that trumps
Speaker 8: are acceptable or the same they're not. But also, like
Speaker 8: I think, having spent as much time as I have
Speaker 8: with refugees, having spent as much time as I have
Speaker 8: with people who have gone through things that are horrific
Speaker 8: and like state hostility, state violent, civil war, et cetera, Like.
Speaker 6: I have a lot of hope that.
Speaker 8: Like, like Margaret said, right, there's this quote from Di Riti.
Speaker 8: It probably isn't real about how like we're not afraid
Speaker 8: of ruins, and we've lived in ruins our lives, and
Speaker 8: we'll build our future in the ruins of the old world.
Speaker 8: But like, when I think about the next four years,
Speaker 8: like the state will be absent or hostile right now,
Speaker 8: absent at best and hostile at worst. It's been that
Speaker 8: way at the border for a very long time. Yeah,
Speaker 8: And we've built our little community and our little world.
Speaker 8: And like when I am sad, when I'm despairing, when
Speaker 8: I'm scared, I think about the things that we did
Speaker 8: in the last year, Right, we fed tens of thousands
Speaker 8: of people by ourselves, and in doing that, we demonstrated
Speaker 8: how powerful we are in the absence of the state,
Speaker 8: because the state wasn't there, or the state was actively hostile.
Speaker 8: We were able to step in and from nothing, we
Speaker 8: were able to build something that took care of people
Speaker 8: who needed to be taken care of, and that like
Speaker 8: we're not special or unique, you know, we didn't have
Speaker 8: like some incredible structure here before. People just showed up
Speaker 8: to help people, and like more people will need to
Speaker 8: do that now, and that mean that there are more
Speaker 8: people in difficult places who need help, right, But that
Speaker 8: doesn't mean that you can't do it. If we can
Speaker 8: do it, you can do it. And having done it
Speaker 8: has made me less. I just I'm not as scared
Speaker 8: as I would be if I felt like I was
Speaker 8: on my own, or if I felt like that we
Speaker 8: can't deal with this, because we can, and I know
Speaker 8: that because we have and I want Obviously that's something
Speaker 8: we're going to focus on.
Speaker 4: Right we have between now and the middle of January.
Speaker 8: I have no idea how many weeks or days that is,
Speaker 8: but it's a lot of time to organize, and it's
Speaker 8: a lot of time to put aside some of the
Speaker 8: differences we might have, some of the petty disagreements we
Speaker 8: might have, some of the shit that people have said
Speaker 8: on Twitter dot com and like get together and organize
Speaker 8: and build a way of taking care of each other
Speaker 8: that doesn't rely on the state, because that's always been
Speaker 8: what we needed and we need it now even more so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of of what we need, now here's some ads.
Speaker 1: Oh, Robert total tone?
Speaker 4: What else was?
Speaker 6: Just can't stop him?
Speaker 4: That was just physics. There was no other way for
Speaker 4: that to go. An object in motion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that was like the oceans forming after the
Speaker 2: moon hit the Earth. Well, whatever happened to make oceans?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I don't know how oceans came about.
Speaker 8: Even they call him Robert tectonic plate effants.
Speaker 1: All right, welcome back to it could happen here where
Speaker 1: it is happening here, And Robert still can't help himself
Speaker 1: to make strange ad transitions. Garrison, what do you got
Speaker 1: for us?
Speaker 6: Yeah? I don't know.
Speaker 7: I I feel like I am not an optimist, and
Speaker 7: I also put a lot of work into not being
Speaker 7: a doomer. I try to be pretty realistic about a
Speaker 7: whole bunch of my like thoughts and analysis on this
Speaker 7: sort of thing, and I tend towards survival as kind
Speaker 7: of when I'm my main priorities, And I'd like to
Speaker 7: talk a little bit about kind of some of what
Speaker 7: we actually saw on election night and some maybe some
Speaker 7: small like misconceptions going around, mainly this kind of idea
Speaker 7: that the country has like wildly swung to the right,
Speaker 7: like people have like overwhelmingly, like more so than ever before,
Speaker 7: have have voted for like far right figures, have voted
Speaker 7: for far right like bills, basically wanting this this complete
Speaker 7: like nationalistic takeover. If you look at you know, their presidency,
Speaker 7: the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, and I mean
Speaker 7: the final count is still coming in. We are recording
Speaker 7: this Wednesday afternoon. It's noon on the West coast right now,
Speaker 7: and Trump has almost the same number of votes as
Speaker 7: he gotten twenty twenty. I think it's a little bit
Speaker 7: under at this point. Now there is some demographic just
Speaker 7: certain groups may have leaned more towards or against Trump
Speaker 7: than in past elections, but the final like averaged popular
Speaker 7: vote number is at this point pretty much the same.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 7: Kind of why this has happened, why he's still kind
Speaker 7: of sweeping all of these swing states is we've kind
Speaker 7: of had a collapse of trust in the Democratic Party,
Speaker 7: and you could attribute this to a lot of things.
Speaker 7: I don't think it's a single thing. It is obviously
Speaker 7: a confluence of events. I think one of one of
Speaker 7: the big things is like nine percent inflation is kind
Speaker 7: of hard to beat if people, to Margaret's point earlier,
Speaker 7: they're looking for something different, and Harris meaningfully was not
Speaker 7: offering anything like substantially different. Was She's the VP, right,
Speaker 7: Like it's she has that legacy. I don't think Biden
Speaker 7: could have done much more to alter the inflation, but
Speaker 7: like that that doesn't matter. People people feel this and
Speaker 7: that's and that's very strong, and there's other reasons why
Speaker 7: people have kind of lost faith in the Democratic Party
Speaker 7: or aren't as willing to come out in as high
Speaker 7: numbers as we saw back in twenty twenty. And crucially,
Speaker 7: but back in twenty twenty, in a lot of the
Speaker 7: swing states, the vote was very close. Although the popular
Speaker 7: vote swung pretty heavily towards Biden in a lot of
Speaker 7: the crucial swing states, in some of the states he
Speaker 7: was only like twenty thousand votes ahead, Like it was
Speaker 7: a pretty tight race in some of those states.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Now, the other thing I'm kind of seeing, which kind
Speaker 7: of reflects this idea that like the country hasn't wildly
Speaker 7: like the average people haven't wildly become a more fascist.
Speaker 7: It's that even in states that have elected Trump, they
Speaker 7: have also passed like a decent number of progressive initiatives,
Speaker 7: including abortion rights. Voters in Arizona and Missouri approved ballid
Speaker 7: initiatives that will serve to protect abortion rights until further
Speaker 7: laws are in the books. And in Maryland, in Montana, Nevada,
Speaker 7: and New York where abortion is legal, and Colorado, where
Speaker 7: there's no laws restricting abortion, they all passed measures that
Speaker 7: enshrine those rights into law. Now, Florida unfortunately was not
Speaker 7: to do this due to the super majority rules. Even
Speaker 7: though majority of people did vote for this in Florida,
Speaker 7: they did not reach the sixty percent threshold, so that
Speaker 7: did not pass in Florida.
Speaker 2: But fifty seven percent very close close, and it was
Speaker 2: an outright majority.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So people are willing to vote for these types
Speaker 7: of things, even if they're unwilling to vote for a
Speaker 7: Democrat at the top of the ticket, and like, this
Speaker 7: is something that is worth considering when trying to figure
Speaker 7: out what exactly happened here and consider why people have
Speaker 7: kind of lost faith in the Democratic Party as a
Speaker 7: reliable institution to improve their lives or represent the things
Speaker 7: that they believe in, the Gaza issue being kind of
Speaker 7: the prime example of this in the past year. One
Speaker 7: other thing I was thinking about this morning when trying
Speaker 7: to kind of look forward and imagine what the next
Speaker 7: four years would look like, specifically with the concern of
Speaker 7: figures like Elon Musk and RFK Junior being put into
Speaker 7: pretty important positions of government. Right the idea that RFK
Speaker 7: Junior is going to be in charge of the CDC
Speaker 7: and Herman public health policies for the country is a
Speaker 7: very worrying prospect. Having Elon Musk in a senior advisory
Speaker 7: role in some kind of governmental department of efficiency doesn't
Speaker 7: sound great. But as I was having my coffee next
Speaker 7: to a beautiful river in the mountains of North Georgia
Speaker 7: this morning, I was thinking about Steve Bannon because my
Speaker 7: brain is just fucked up like that, but specifically how
Speaker 7: Trump used Steve Bannon to get elected back in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 7: even though Bannon's actual tenure at the White House was
Speaker 7: quite short lived for whatever reasons, like personality clashes with
Speaker 7: Trump happen all the time and he loses friends and
Speaker 7: advisors at a pretty frequent rate. And I think because
Speaker 7: Trump is just like petty and you know, ablest and
Speaker 7: a bad guy, he might just find RFK Junior and
Speaker 7: Elon Musk annoying to be around. Considering rf K Junior's
Speaker 7: speech impediment and Elon Musk's apparent neurodiversity, Trump just might
Speaker 7: not want to be around them. So, even though he
Speaker 7: did utilize both these figures to get elected, albeit slightly
Speaker 7: later on in the campaign, it took a while for
Speaker 7: Musk to kind of worm his way into Trump's orbit.
Speaker 7: I am not convinced that they will have direct access
Speaker 7: to Trump for very long.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 7: This could happen, but if you look at Steve Bannon,
Speaker 7: who was similarly a worrying figure, he did not last
Speaker 7: very long beside Trump. So something like this could happen now,
Speaker 7: I don't think it'll happen the exact same way. Elon
Speaker 7: Musk has been positioning himself to have the government be
Speaker 7: reliant on him for contracting, and he'll probably continue to
Speaker 7: exist in some form in that regard, But in terms
Speaker 7: of his like direct influence on the White House and
Speaker 7: controlling sectors of government, this won't necessarily be a four
Speaker 7: year thing. I think that is most of what I
Speaker 7: had on this topic.
Speaker 6: I guess. I guess.
Speaker 7: The other thing is, like it turns out in Harris's
Speaker 7: efforts to kind of court independent and court like Republicans
Speaker 7: that largely that largely failed.
Speaker 2: Massive failure, massive failure.
Speaker 7: I mean again, it turns out when you have a
Speaker 7: party that's running as kind of like a mini fascist party,
Speaker 7: and then you have another party that's running as just
Speaker 7: a conservative party.
Speaker 4: We've got Dick Cheney.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's not a solid opposition party. Why like this
Speaker 7: hasn't worked for like the second time in a row.
Speaker 7: The stats are almost identical to twenty twenty on this
Speaker 7: issue of Republicans voting for the Republican Party. In fact,
Speaker 7: it was slightly fewer of them voted Republican back in
Speaker 7: twenty twenty. More of them voted Republican in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 7: I think it's by about one percent.
Speaker 1: Trying to court the conservative vote means that the Conservatives
Speaker 1: are going to vote for conservative.
Speaker 7: Maybe we should have an actual opposition party if you
Speaker 7: believe in electoral politics.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, like the lesson people should take from
Speaker 2: trump Ism Trump did not get where he is by
Speaker 2: courting the conservative vote. Now Trump took over the Republican
Speaker 2: Party and made it the Trump Party, and yeah, like
Speaker 2: that is what worked, right, Like, and that's that's the
Speaker 2: actual lesson. Like the reason why Dick Cheney was fucking
Speaker 2: doing appearances with Kamala Harris was because conservatives, what we
Speaker 2: had known as conservatives prior to Trump coming to power,
Speaker 2: largely are out of the picture, right, Like the new
Speaker 2: crop of guys are all weirdos that have molded themselves
Speaker 2: in the image of Trump since his rise to power. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: And one of the things that is, like, the lesson
Speaker 2: is not we need to make our own Trump, although
Speaker 2: by god, some people are going to take that lesson
Speaker 2: out of this. The lesson is that, sure, you have
Speaker 2: to come to people with a vision, right, Like, you
Speaker 2: don't come to people by saying, well, what if we
Speaker 2: put a Republican in our cabinet? Right, what if it's
Speaker 2: basically the same as this last thing that you're not
Speaker 2: really that happy with, but instead with more Cheney.
Speaker 6: Right, it turns out that doesn't drive food or enthusiasm.
Speaker 2: And hey, like that, you know, I'm hitting the Libs
Speaker 2: pretty hard because this is like the most catastrophic failure
Speaker 2: of any political party in living memory. Right, so they
Speaker 2: do deserve to be hit. But it's not like the
Speaker 2: left accomplished anything right, either electorally or otherwise. Right, there
Speaker 2: is no organized national left wing movement that is worth
Speaker 2: talking about in any kind of building power way, Like
Speaker 2: it simply doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: And ignoring the blind loyalty that people have for Trump
Speaker 1: was a mistake. Yeah, not considering like targeting that audience.
Speaker 7: It doesn't seem like all of the January sixth ads
Speaker 7: did anything at all.
Speaker 1: No, did fuck all.
Speaker 7: I mean, in fact, in fact statistically they did they
Speaker 7: did nothing. They did nothing to hurt Trump. Yeah, right,
Speaker 7: if Trump gets essentially the same total number of votes,
Speaker 7: they didn't do anything to hurt him like that, Like
Speaker 7: that strategy was not that was not successful.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you have to offer something.
Speaker 7: And just the large swath of like electoral nihilism that
Speaker 7: that the Democratic Party keeps keeps running up against continues
Speaker 7: to be its most like existential threat.
Speaker 1: Robert Garre and I at the RNC talked to a
Speaker 1: variety of people who did not give a flying fuck
Speaker 1: about Trump's record.
Speaker 6: Well, of course not.
Speaker 1: All they cared about was no, they had blind loyalty
Speaker 1: timp I posted this on Twitter dot com, and I'm
Speaker 1: thinking specifically of the woman that was like compared Trump's
Speaker 1: evil for lack of a better word, oh, sometimes he's ridiculous,
Speaker 1: like my husband, and that blind loyalty and the Democrats
Speaker 1: weren't gonna fucking flip those people. That was not gonna happen.
Speaker 1: They took a gamble, wasn't even really a gamble. They
Speaker 1: took a gamble on the wrong crowd, and like that
Speaker 1: that's not effective, but you know, it's not really here
Speaker 1: or there at this point. It happened kind of like
Speaker 1: now what, Yeah, we haven't really heard from me much,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna I'm gonna shoot over to me A yeah, and.
Speaker 9: I mean I think I think where I'm at is
Speaker 9: that Okay, we're in this moment. Are one of our
Speaker 9: biggest advantages is that we're not the Democrats. Right, this
Speaker 9: has been a fairly comprehensive referendum on the failure of
Speaker 9: the Democrats to offer anything. We also like screwed up
Speaker 9: offering a better world.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 9: This is you know, I look, if you look at
Speaker 9: what happened to twenty twenty, and you look at the
Speaker 9: places that we actually sort of like I mean took
Speaker 9: power as a strong word, but like there are places
Speaker 9: where we ran the cops out and we screwed up
Speaker 9: making those places like a world that was like ideologically
Speaker 9: compelling it off to spread, and like we're not going
Speaker 9: to get like a third do over of that, right.
Speaker 9: We have to be able to sort of like when
Speaker 9: the moment arise, we have to be able to actually
Speaker 9: create a world that is better enough than this one
Speaker 9: that we can move. But that's not impossible. Yeah, I
Speaker 9: think what we have right now is we have a
Speaker 9: period of time before Trump takes power, and we have
Speaker 9: this time to washer beasts. We have this time to organize,
Speaker 9: We have this time to plan and I think of
Speaker 9: the at least part of what we need to do,
Speaker 9: and we'll we'll get into this more like in other
Speaker 9: episodes and later too. You know, there's there's there's the
Speaker 9: obvious tasks of organization. There's getting people involved in things,
Speaker 9: there's getting into meetings. I also think, and this is
Speaker 9: something that's I think easier to do, like literally immediately,
Speaker 9: is that we've been fighting completely defensively on the cultural
Speaker 9: front for four years and it's been a complete disaster,
Speaker 9: and we need to have a large scale cultural offensive.
Speaker 9: There needs to be something other than fucking TikTok Mormonism,
Speaker 9: like we need we need some alternatives to trad wife ship.
Speaker 9: We need alternatives to this like terrible, like the fucking
Speaker 9: influencer sphere. There needs to be something else. We need
Speaker 9: to create that very very fast, anarchist tradwife stuff like Christ.
Speaker 6: That's what's gonna say us.
Speaker 2: All right, yeah, everybody, everybody go buy a sun dress
Speaker 2: right now, get out.
Speaker 4: There, both of you to assume we don't have them,
Speaker 4: Robot and.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna pull Robert everything. Speaking of buying things,
Speaker 1: it's time for our last ad break. All right, we're back,
Speaker 1: and I do want to get I do want to
Speaker 1: get into, you know, a little bit more specifics of
Speaker 1: what can we do now, And I just want to
Speaker 1: say a fucking lot. The cards are on the table.
Speaker 6: It's going to be a busy four years.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: I intended Margaret's book books signing last week, and I've
Speaker 1: attended lots of our events. And one of the questions
Speaker 1: and q and a's, and one of the questions that
Speaker 1: gets asked all the time is how do I get involved?
Speaker 1: How do I how do I find how do I
Speaker 1: meet people? How do I do this things? And you know,
Speaker 1: I want to get into that. I also want to
Speaker 1: give some very basic tangible advice. You know, don't post
Speaker 1: stupid things on the internet.
Speaker 2: If somebody tells you we need to go out and
Speaker 2: engage in revolutionary activity, maybe sit at home right now.
Speaker 2: You don't want to come into this thing with a
Speaker 2: criminal record. Nobody is making good plans right now. Go
Speaker 2: make good ones. Don't just reactively show up and follow
Speaker 2: someone with a clipboard in the streets.
Speaker 1: Don't post actionable threats on the internet.
Speaker 7: Don't post that picture of that comedian that gave that
Speaker 7: really funny joke. Just don't do it. There's no reason to.
Speaker 7: It's not cool. Yeah, Like, don't if you know what,
Speaker 7: if you know what comedian I'm talking about, you'll get it.
Speaker 6: You'll get it.
Speaker 2: If you're going to, you know, get messed up. Use
Speaker 2: substances in order to cope with things. Log out of
Speaker 2: social media on all of your devices first.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sounds like that's some advice you were giving yourself.
Speaker 2: Sober as a church mouse, Sophie, just just coffee and
Speaker 2: clean Mountain Air for me.
Speaker 1: A very basic recommendation that I have for people is
Speaker 1: to get delete me.
Speaker 4: Yeah mm hmm.
Speaker 1: It is worth the investment. It is a good product,
Speaker 1: That's what I'll say.
Speaker 2: Yes, delete me is a service that helps purge aspects
Speaker 2: of your public record from the internet.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of different site like, yeah, you have
Speaker 2: been involved if you are a person who participates in
Speaker 2: the economy through the internet. Right, if you buy things
Speaker 2: through the internet, your shit has been leaked.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: Their you know tagline is your private information is no
Speaker 1: longer private. Right, And so essentially what they do is
Speaker 1: they scour the Internet and remove your personal data from
Speaker 1: online and they don't do that once. They continuously do it.
Speaker 1: This is like a fantastic plug for the product. They
Speaker 1: are not paying us. Yeah, let's just say the Churchier
Speaker 1: Scientology could not find me. Hell yeah, So.
Speaker 7: I will say there is some alternatives to delete me
Speaker 7: that are trying to get up the running. We might
Speaker 7: do a full episode on data removal in the future.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we definitely should.
Speaker 7: It does require you to also do manual inputs. There
Speaker 7: are certain sites that delete me when they send takedown
Speaker 7: requests to data brokers. Certain sites will not comply. You
Speaker 7: have to send requests manually. It's pretty simple, but they
Speaker 7: will give you a list of certain sites as well
Speaker 7: to do to go through this process manually. But I
Speaker 7: think like kind of the last thing we want to
Speaker 7: talk about is like we have seventy five days right
Speaker 7: to like prepare for stuff. We have seventy five days
Speaker 7: to prepare for the next four years. In some ways,
Speaker 7: it's going to kind of be like twenty seventeen to
Speaker 7: twenty nineteen again, which was a very busy time. Kind
Speaker 7: of all of the right wing gouals that have been
Speaker 7: hiding under the rocks the past few years because of
Speaker 7: the liberal doj will probably start coming out of the woodwork.
Speaker 7: There's going to be, you know, a lot more stuff
Speaker 7: going on, and you know, those of us that are here,
Speaker 7: we're able to make it through those years. Some of
Speaker 7: your friends probably weren't able to, and it is up
Speaker 7: to us to take care of each other to try
Speaker 7: to ensure that ourselves and people we know have a
Speaker 7: better chance of making it through these next four years.
Speaker 7: And I think kind of lastly, I'd like to kind
Speaker 7: of just go around talking about like what that will
Speaker 7: look like and how to kind of start that process,
Speaker 7: especially during these first seventy five days. Like brunch is over.
Speaker 7: Brunch has been over for a while, bunch of brunch
Speaker 7: should have never started. Yeah, but brunch is over now,
Speaker 7: So what can what can we do in these next
Speaker 7: to seventy five days?
Speaker 1: It's share your black coffee with friends.
Speaker 2: Time, share your black coffee with friends.
Speaker 4: Maybe cork the champagne.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, cork the champagne.
Speaker 4: You've drinking that orange juice though you don't have enough
Speaker 4: vitamin C.
Speaker 10: Or when you and your anarchist tradwife friends get together
Speaker 10: for brunch, just make sure to actually talk about real
Speaker 10: radical things you can do.
Speaker 6: Because if you already have a way of gathering with.
Speaker 10: Your friends, you should just turn it into talking about
Speaker 10: more than just how.
Speaker 6: Your day is.
Speaker 9: Absolutely, Yeah, I feel like I need to put on
Speaker 9: the record that what I said, that what I was
Speaker 9: trying to say is we need feminism, not an anti tradwife.
Speaker 9: I don't know how that was conveyed.
Speaker 6: I was trying to recruit you into my tradwife called.
Speaker 1: No, thank you for clarifying. Yeah, but that was very
Speaker 1: much understood. But being a little bit literal right now.
Speaker 6: Is not bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there, so true. I just think about like the
Speaker 1: ways that I've found my people and the way that
Speaker 1: I have made my community. Obviously, like the taglines of
Speaker 1: you know, talk to your neighbors and things like that
Speaker 1: are absolutely important, but the recommendation you know, obviously joining
Speaker 1: orgs are great. Sure, that's a great talking point, but
Speaker 1: that's not really how I met my community. The people
Speaker 1: that are essentially my family now, I met by going
Speaker 1: to content and different creators, shows and music and different
Speaker 1: events where we had mutual interests, even if that meant
Speaker 1: that I had to drive pretty far and found people
Speaker 1: that liked the things that I like. And it turns
Speaker 1: out a lot of the people that like the things
Speaker 1: you like believe the things you believe, and if they don't,
Speaker 1: they're usually pretty open to hearing you out. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think it's super important to listen to your friends
Speaker 1: and also, like I've said this quite a bit, support
Speaker 1: your friend's weird hobby. Yeah, that's super crucial. Listen to
Speaker 1: the people around you, And it's not easy. I had
Speaker 1: basically no friends for a very long time because I
Speaker 1: did not have the right people around me, and it
Speaker 1: took a lot of effort to find my core humans.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not recommending this, and several of us
Speaker 1: did do this. I moved to a different state. You
Speaker 1: save up for it. It's definitely not affordable thing to do,
Speaker 1: definitely not an easy thing to do. But I don't
Speaker 1: know where I would be without those people, and I
Speaker 1: love them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, politics and culture do go hand in hand in
Speaker 7: so many ways, and kind of cultural engagement and ways
Speaker 7: to kind of grow your social network, especially you know
Speaker 7: in places where there's probably where there's I mean in
Speaker 7: my case, you know, like trans people, queer people, people
Speaker 7: that I'm kind of around, and people who I'm like,
Speaker 7: you know, concerned about, like personally, people are like no,
Speaker 7: you know, going into these next four years, I guess
Speaker 7: like the biggest thing I was kind of thinking about
Speaker 7: last night is like, yes, these next four years are
Speaker 7: going to suck, and in many ways it'll just be
Speaker 7: like everything will just get slightly worse. But like I
Speaker 7: know that myself and those I know like immediately around
Speaker 7: me will be fine, Like we will be okay. Things
Speaker 7: will be worse, but we already have networks, We already
Speaker 7: have community. We have these things built up to take
Speaker 7: care of each other and provide the things that we need,
Speaker 7: and this is something that we'll be talking more about
Speaker 7: in the kind of the next few months. Like we
Speaker 7: have we have that, and that's taken effort. That doesn't
Speaker 7: just happen by itself. It requires effort, and it requires
Speaker 7: resistance to this idea like community nihilism, this kind of
Speaker 7: belief that like community is like not a real thing
Speaker 7: that doesn't actually exist, which is a very privileged thing
Speaker 7: to believe, because there's people out there who rely on
Speaker 7: this and will continue to rely on this even more
Speaker 7: in these next few years. But there are those without that,
Speaker 7: and and that's the people I'm most concerned about. Yeah,
Speaker 7: it's queer kids, it's trans kids who do not have
Speaker 7: those networks, do not have those communities, people who are
Speaker 7: isolated like that is who I am most concerned about that.
Speaker 7: And I understand the impulse to kind of isolate and
Speaker 7: just go online because that's safer than having to go
Speaker 7: out into the real world, or at least it feels safer,
Speaker 7: But I don't think that's actually real. I think that
Speaker 7: leads to its own forms of detrimental harm. So like
Speaker 7: it requires like a getting off discord and like a
Speaker 7: going into your community and trying to make friends, which
Speaker 7: can be scary, but it is like incredibly crucial. I
Speaker 7: think we should talk about like joining actual orgs as well.
Speaker 7: I think some other people on this call can speak
Speaker 7: more to that and like the utility of those as well.
Speaker 7: But I think first and foremostly even getting a network
Speaker 7: of friends outside of orgs, it's also a very is
Speaker 7: a very good it's not even it's just like a
Speaker 7: life support system that it's going to be super important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'd like to throw it to Margaret for
Speaker 1: a socond because she looks like she really wants to
Speaker 1: say something.
Speaker 10: Oh and I don't actually disagree with anything that they're saying.
Speaker 10: I think, no, not at all.
Speaker 6: It's absolutely crucial.
Speaker 10: I wanted to just say that, like, I think there's
Speaker 10: actually a weird blurriness in the lines between an organization
Speaker 10: and a friend group, right totally. And the problem isn't
Speaker 10: necessarily subculture. The problem is a sort of if we
Speaker 10: have this idea that there's a hegemonic subculture, like in
Speaker 10: order to be a radical, you have to be part
Speaker 10: of our click, right, And that's a problem. Whereas if
Speaker 10: whatever click you're already part of or already subculture you're
Speaker 10: already part of you turn that radical. I think that is,
Speaker 10: you know, it's what Sophie was talking about. But then yes,
Speaker 10: there's a lot of people who have no access to
Speaker 10: any of that, and some of it, as I think
Speaker 10: you're saying, is well, if you only hang out with
Speaker 10: your friends on discord, like maybe it's time to start
Speaker 10: meeting up in person, and even if that's very complicated
Speaker 10: to do. But I also think that there's a huge,
Speaker 10: huge importance to open door organizing and organizing. Like when
Speaker 10: I say orgs, I don't mean like go join PSL
Speaker 10: or any authoritarian cult, right, or that there should never
Speaker 10: be a one organization that says this is the strategy
Speaker 10: that we have to use to fight this. But instead,
Speaker 10: if you get together with the people that you want
Speaker 10: to get together with and say, this is the problem
Speaker 10: we're dealing with, how do we deal with it? And
Speaker 10: that is how you can create an organization. And if
Speaker 10: you do that, many of those organizations, I would hope
Speaker 10: would have open door policies and be public because there
Speaker 10: are so many isolated people who want to be involved
Speaker 10: who don't have any kind of like cultural cachet with
Speaker 10: which to get into a more subcultural group. I think
Speaker 10: this is why churches are very good at recruiting unfortunately
Speaker 10: depending on the church, but like because you can just
Speaker 10: show up and they will be like, okay, you have
Speaker 10: a community now, right, And that is what people desperately want,
Speaker 10: I think right now. And we have to be careful.
Speaker 10: We don't want to just be like, oh, therefore we
Speaker 10: should replicate what they do. But I think that overall
Speaker 10: what our movement needs is instead of gatekeepers, we need ushers.
Speaker 10: We need people to help people find their way into
Speaker 10: the movement, to help bring them in and figure out like, hey,
Speaker 10: what are you good at or what are you interested
Speaker 10: in being good at? Here's how you can apply it.
Speaker 10: And I want to really quickly use a case study
Speaker 10: that happened from the last Trump election that I think
Speaker 10: was actually fairly useful. It was living in a small town,
Speaker 10: a small city with a fairly vibrant to anarchist community,
Speaker 10: and when Trump was elected, we called for anarchist assemblies
Speaker 10: and they were open door and they were places where
Speaker 10: you don't get together to plan crime. But all of
Speaker 10: these different mutual aid groups would come and bring representation.
Speaker 10: People would say this is what we're working on. This
Speaker 10: is what we can use help with. And they weren't
Speaker 10: decision making bodies, they were information sharing bodies. And a
Speaker 10: lot of different groups spun up out of it that
Speaker 10: are still around, like herbal clinics and different mutual aid
Speaker 10: organizations because we just said, hey, everyone who cares about this,
Speaker 10: let's get together and talk about what we want to do.
Speaker 10: And I found that to be an incredibly useful thing.
Speaker 10: And it's like the kind of thing I would pitch
Speaker 10: to people is not necessarily and if you're not an anarchist,
Speaker 10: don't do it as the anarchist thing. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 10: what I care about. That's what I'm excited about.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I just wanted to offer, like, first of all,
Speaker 8: like get outside if you can, like touch craw and
Speaker 8: touch grass. Can be very condescending, and I don't mean
Speaker 8: it like that. I just like I was feeling stressed
Speaker 8: last week and I went off and I climbed to
Speaker 8: the top of a mountain and I sat there by
Speaker 8: myself for a while and it was nice and it
Speaker 8: was so quiet. I could hear like this little hawk's wingspeeding,
Speaker 8: and that was really good for me. That's what I
Speaker 8: like to hear. It would not have changed the outcome
Speaker 8: one bit if I had stayed and sound twister dot
Speaker 8: com for four hours instead of doing that. So I
Speaker 8: want you to all take time for yourselves and do
Speaker 8: things that kind.
Speaker 6: Of make you feel hopeful.
Speaker 8: I want to build a for what Margaret said, there
Speaker 8: are so many skills that all of you had that
Speaker 8: you could share with someone. I think when I started
Speaker 8: being an anarchist, it was largely because I was going
Speaker 8: to a bike co op and like, people shared their
Speaker 8: skills with me, and I shared my skills with them,
Speaker 8: and we all shared our stuff with each other, and
Speaker 8: I worked out that we could just rely on other
Speaker 8: people for that shit and they didn't need to be
Speaker 8: hierarchical or based on some transfer of material goods.
Speaker 4: People just want to help each other.
Speaker 8: And a lot of people have messaged me saying that,
Speaker 8: like they know that I participate in mutilae and they
Speaker 8: want you to. If you can't see it, then you
Speaker 8: have to start it, and that's okay. You can change
Speaker 8: the world if you make a caller full of sandwiches
Speaker 8: and give them to people who are hungry. I guarantee
Speaker 8: if you start doing that shit, you will find other
Speaker 8: people and they will say hey, what are you doing?
Speaker 4: Oh I'm feeling people? Why because they're hungry? Can I help?
Speaker 8: Yes, it's that easy, and like we can build from there.
Speaker 8: We don't have to agree with them on everything, first
Speaker 8: of all, but we can build from there, and I
Speaker 8: think it can be really scary, But like now, it's
Speaker 8: the time to start, not once things get worse, you know,
Speaker 8: four eight years ago was the time to start. But
Speaker 8: we can't go back, and I want to kind of
Speaker 8: finish up with that that we can't go back. I
Speaker 8: don't care where someone was yesterday. I don't care where
Speaker 8: they were last week. I don't care where they were
Speaker 8: last year, like all the malices, where they are now,
Speaker 8: and we can build forward from here. We cannot go
Speaker 8: back and change things. And it is not worth doing
Speaker 8: endless recriminations. It doesn't matter it's happened. It's on us
Speaker 8: to decide how we react now. And you can react
Speaker 8: in a way that strengthens our communities and that builds
Speaker 8: ways are taking care of each other, which aren't way
Speaker 8: they of controlling each other. That that's all that you
Speaker 8: need to do to make this so much less despairing,
Speaker 8: so much less terrible, and so much less deadly for
Speaker 8: some people. And I know that we're doing that here.
Speaker 8: Check in on my friends. I'm in the Daddy and Gap.
Speaker 8: I'm checking in on my mutual aid friends. And if
Speaker 8: you don't have that, I want you to build that.
Speaker 8: And I promise it's not something this out of reach,
Speaker 8: like you can do it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I want to add one last thing.
Speaker 6: I think a lot of people think they don't have skills.
Speaker 6: You do have skills.
Speaker 9: The thing that I did when I started organizing was
Speaker 9: I moved chairs around so that people could have meetings
Speaker 9: by moving chairs. And I have helped take care of
Speaker 9: people's kids that like, helped put posters up right. People,
Speaker 9: people can do things. You have things that you can do,
Speaker 9: and it's it's time to lock in. That's that's that's
Speaker 9: what we have from here. It is time to lock in.
Speaker 9: It's time to organize, and it's time to get prepared to fight.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is just the first episode after the election.
Speaker 1: In the coming weeks, coming days, coming months, we're going
Speaker 1: to go into very specific detail on things. We are
Speaker 1: going to provide different information and resources and continue to
Speaker 1: defend against disinformation and misinformation. And this is a fucking
Speaker 1: daily show.
Speaker 7: We will we will be getting into all of all
Speaker 7: of these topics, especially in these next to seventy five days,
Speaker 7: to help prepare topic by topic.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's going to be. It's gonna be a long
Speaker 6: four years.
Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen? Here a podcast about things
Speaker 1: crumbling and how to pick up the pieces wooing.
Speaker 4: We love to crumble.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And part of that is understanding what is
Speaker 1: going to happen and how it is going to happen,
Speaker 1: and obsorbing that knowledge and what you can do with it.
Speaker 1: So today James is going to tell us about Trump's
Speaker 1: plans for migrants.
Speaker 8: Yep, yeah, I guess in terms of what's going to happen,
Speaker 8: we don't know, right. Trump said a lot of stuff
Speaker 8: in his first term and kind of didn't stick the
Speaker 8: landing a lot of it he tried. But they're more
Speaker 8: experienced now and I think crucially they have a much
Speaker 8: more favorable Supreme Court and then probably will have an
Speaker 8: even more favorable Supreme Court by the end of this term.
Speaker 8: So a plan to deport up to a million people
Speaker 8: this year was one of the very few concrete and
Speaker 8: tangible promises that the Trump campaign made. Right, they had
Speaker 8: a lot of vibes, nasty vibes, but like in terms
Speaker 8: of like we will do X by y. This was
Speaker 8: one of the very few. Now, Trump tried to deport
Speaker 8: a lot of people in his first term.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: The one consistent part of his policy ever since he
Speaker 8: rode sideways down an escalator in twenty fifteen and then
Speaker 8: shit talked to Mexican people, has been an anti migrant policy.
Speaker 8: He didn't really stick the landing on mass deportations in
Speaker 8: his first term. In fact, Biden deported more people in
Speaker 8: twenty twenty three than Trump did in any year of
Speaker 8: his first term. In fact, Trump also fell behind Obama
Speaker 8: in terms of deep ortations per year. None of that
Speaker 8: means that he won't be able to do that this time, right,
Speaker 8: I'm just trying to put some numbers on his promises
Speaker 8: the last time. So I want to look first at
Speaker 8: how he could go about his promise in his second term.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 8: One thing that he said he will do is use
Speaker 8: Title forty two again. So if people have not listened
Speaker 8: to the series I did last May or June on
Speaker 8: Title forty two, I would like to direct them there.
Speaker 8: Title forty two is a reminder, it's a public health law.
Speaker 8: And it's public health law that, in this interpretation, allowed CBP,
Speaker 8: specifically Border Patrol to immediately return people to Mexico without
Speaker 8: processing them first. Sometimes they call it catch and release.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: What it resulted in was these are not technically deportations.
Speaker 8: But when Trump said something, I don't think he's considering
Speaker 8: the exact meanings of what he's saying. Right, So if
Speaker 8: we look at Title forty two expulsions, if he's going
Speaker 8: to bring back Title forty two, reaching that one million
Speaker 8: per year number is pretty easy. In fact, that happened
Speaker 8: in twenty twenty two, again under Biden. Right, So if
Speaker 8: he considers those to be deportations and that's within his
Speaker 8: one million per year goal, it's reasonable that he will
Speaker 8: reach to say that he will be able to reach that,
Speaker 8: and he will be able to do that with the
Speaker 8: current infrastructure, right without massively upgrading CBP, ice, ice, detention facilities,
Speaker 8: immigration judges, all those things. Yeah, So, like, if we
Speaker 8: consider those to be deportations, and one million a year
Speaker 8: is very much something that we might.
Speaker 1: Well see, do you know where we're at this year
Speaker 1: or it hasn't been released yet.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 4: In twenty twenty two was the last stats I could find.
Speaker 8: I linked to the CBP If people want to look
Speaker 8: at the title forty two and title so Title eight.
Speaker 8: It's the immigration law under which people are normally received right.
Speaker 8: Title forty two ended in May of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 8: mayle elevens twenty twenty three with the end of the
Speaker 8: COVID nineteen emergency, because the reason they were using public
Speaker 8: health law as immigration law was because of this health
Speaker 8: emergency right now. Obviously it was used extremely cynically. For instance,
Speaker 8: there weren't exemptions for vaccinated people, but nonetheless that's why
Speaker 8: they were using it. And when the federal emergency for
Speaker 8: COVID nineteen ended, so did Biden's.
Speaker 6: Excuse for using Title forty two.
Speaker 8: That I will link to the CBP data center in
Speaker 8: the notes so people can see Title forty two versus
Speaker 8: tight late over the last few years. As I pointed
Speaker 8: out last week, the US can also fund deportations of
Speaker 8: migrants further south, and it's done this at Panama. I've
Speaker 8: had a series from there last week. People hadn't listened
Speaker 8: to it. I would love them to do so, but
Speaker 8: the numbers that they've been able to achieve there are
Speaker 8: pretty low. And I don't think that's really going to
Speaker 8: meaningfully impact his target. So let's talk about what everyone
Speaker 8: is most afraid of, which is mass deportations of people
Speaker 8: who are already living in.
Speaker 4: The United States.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 8: That is definitely what his right wing trolls have been
Speaker 8: sort of hyping up, certainly over the last few weeks, right,
Speaker 8: the idea that they are going to come to your
Speaker 8: house and find you if you're an undocumented person in
Speaker 8: the United States. So to talk about this, I want
Speaker 8: to talk about, first of all, like the real nuts
Speaker 8: and bolts of how he would be able, if he
Speaker 8: would be able to.
Speaker 4: Do this, right.
Speaker 8: And I draw very heavily here on a report by
Speaker 8: the American Immigration Council who did some calculations on the
Speaker 8: cost of a single ice detention, right, the cost of
Speaker 8: a single raid, the amount of agents that will be
Speaker 8: required to meet this kind of capacity. And there are
Speaker 8: two models that they use, and those are the models
Speaker 8: I think are most relevant. If we look at people
Speaker 8: who are in the United States without permanent legal status,
Speaker 8: we make an estimate for numbers, we're looking at about
Speaker 8: eleven million undocumented people. That's not going to be perfect,
Speaker 8: but if we use that as a ballpark, and then
Speaker 8: two point three million people who have entered since the
Speaker 8: end of Title forty two, and they're on various forms
Speaker 8: of bail or parole, a bond, and they don't have
Speaker 8: a permanent status here either rent, So we're looking at
Speaker 8: somewhere in the region of thirteen million. If Trump wanted
Speaker 8: to all of those.
Speaker 6: People right now.
Speaker 8: To do that, he would need to massively expand ICE
Speaker 8: detention facilities. About half of ICE's staff aren't Countrary to
Speaker 8: what you might believe about ICE kicking in people's doors
Speaker 8: and deporting them, half of ICE's staff work for something
Speaker 8: called homeod Security Investigations. It's not that those people don't
Speaker 8: do deportations. They do, but they mostly focus on human trafficking,
Speaker 8: drug trafficking, transnational crime. Now sometimes as people also do deportations.
Speaker 8: People might be familiar with the big HSI raids on
Speaker 8: certain employers who are employing a lot of undocumented people.
Speaker 8: Those still result in deportations, but that's not their primary tasking,
Speaker 8: and HSI has historically preferred not to do the deportation
Speaker 8: work because they feel that that makes it very hard
Speaker 8: for them to do the other work of like monitoring
Speaker 8: human and drug trafficking, because evidently migrants are going to
Speaker 8: be scared to go anywhere near HSI if they know
Speaker 8: that HSI could deport them, right, So they're not going.
Speaker 6: To talk to them.
Speaker 8: Now, it would be very easy for Trump to retask
Speaker 8: those those agents, right That would obviously undermine what it's
Speaker 8: done to prevent drug trafficking and human trafficking. Whether or
Speaker 8: not he cares is a question that's I think I
Speaker 8: probably have an answer for that. I guess up for
Speaker 8: debates somewhat. So Trump has already called in addition to
Speaker 8: potentially re equipping those HSI agents, he said he wants
Speaker 8: to employ ten thousand more Border Patrol agents.
Speaker 4: Right now.
Speaker 8: BP agents can do deportations, but it's not BP agents
Speaker 8: who are coming to your door in Chicago and coming
Speaker 8: after you, right that that's ICE Immigration and Customs enforcement.
Speaker 8: He's also said he wants to give Border plot agents
Speaker 8: a ten thousand dollars retention bonus and a ten percent raise.
Speaker 8: Just to put it in the perspective, there are twenty
Speaker 8: thousand BP agents right now, so that would be about
Speaker 8: a fifty percent increase.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: This is not something he can do quickly. They need
Speaker 8: to go through the academy. They need to be recruited, trained,
Speaker 8: back and check, et cetera. Border Patrol has a lot
Speaker 8: of waivers right now, so you can, we can waive
Speaker 8: requirements that other law enforcement agencies would have few to
Speaker 8: work for them, if that makes sense, right, be it
Speaker 8: a GED or a college degree or another language or whatever.
Speaker 8: They are offering waivers a lot right now. They can
Speaker 8: increase that number of waivers to recruit more people, right,
Speaker 8: but that would still take a long time. So the
Speaker 8: estimate the American Immigration Council has is that to remove
Speaker 8: all of those thirteen million people in that sort of
Speaker 8: in the one mass deportation as opposed to a million
Speaker 8: people a year scenario, would require between two hundred and
Speaker 8: twenty and four hundred and nine thousand staff Jesus Christ.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, that is a lot of people.
Speaker 2: So I mean, like, for comparison as to how many
Speaker 2: that actually is, the United States military active duties about
Speaker 2: a million people.
Speaker 8: Yes, that was exactly. That's a comparison. Not the Army,
Speaker 8: not the Navy, the military, yeah, like all of it. Yeah,
Speaker 8: this would put DHS at like substantially more personal than
Speaker 8: like the Marine Corps, right, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not that people don't want to do. It's just
Speaker 2: like it is. Actually, we've talked a lot about how
Speaker 2: there are not guard rails on Trump like there were
Speaker 2: last time. That is true, and that is a very
Speaker 2: realistic thing to like be worried about and scared about.
Speaker 2: But that we're not just talking about guard rails. We
Speaker 2: are talking about a logistical hurdle. It is not a
Speaker 2: simple or necessarily possible thing to make an agency like
Speaker 2: that that much larger and have it actually function Like
Speaker 2: just this is just physics we're talking about here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's the same with anything. If cool Zone suddenly received
Speaker 2: one hundred billion dollars from Jeff Bezos and he said,
Speaker 2: do anything you want with it, we could not scale
Speaker 2: up to half a million employees like.
Speaker 8: We have.
Speaker 2: We have absolutely no capacity to handle that.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Like, I think what people have to remember is
Speaker 8: that every doual kicking ice agent needs to enable us, right.
Speaker 8: They need paid they need health insurance, they need human resources,
Speaker 8: they need training.
Speaker 6: This would make a very long time.
Speaker 2: Sorry, it's one point three million or so, Okay, I
Speaker 2: think it's a little less. That's twenty seventeen data, so
Speaker 2: it's probably as closer to a million now but slightly
Speaker 2: over a million, but.
Speaker 8: This is close to that's close to half, right, Yeah,
Speaker 8: that's in addition to what they already have.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the four hundred and ninety plus whatever they have.
Speaker 8: It would also, of course mean like substantially increasing their
Speaker 8: investigative capacity, because most deportations right now, when ICE arrest
Speaker 8: someone happen when someone else has already arrested that person.
Speaker 8: So like the person who's in detention federally or on
Speaker 8: a state level for something else that they did and
Speaker 8: they're undocumented, that's when ICE can take them and deport them, right,
Speaker 8: So they'd have to also increase their ability to search
Speaker 8: out and find people, not saying they can't, but you
Speaker 8: can't take you know, fucking Tim Poole, bring him into ICE.
Speaker 8: He's not going to instantly know how to find people
Speaker 8: where to find people, right, So like this, this will
Speaker 8: take time.
Speaker 6: There is a practical.
Speaker 8: Constraint on him doing this, even if there aren't other
Speaker 8: constraints within the balance of powers. So Stephen Miller, dude
Speaker 8: with the giant head, I'm sorry, but you're going to
Speaker 8: have to be more specific when we talk about like
Speaker 8: conservatives who are about to come into power, who have.
Speaker 4: Like a weirdly huge head.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Okay, that's like, find me a Californian who has strong
Speaker 8: opinions on gluten.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's me. I'm a pro glue yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8: So Stephen Miller is he is the guy who's crafted
Speaker 8: a lot of Trump's nefarious border policies.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: It was Miller who who sook out Title forty two.
Speaker 8: And I want to talk about this a bit later.
Speaker 8: One thing that Miller did effectively, I don't want to
Speaker 8: say well, because it was objectively horrible. But one thing
Speaker 8: that Miller was good at was finding this obscure piece
Speaker 8: of public health law and mobilizing it against migrants.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: I think if you'd spoken to me in twenty fifteen
Speaker 8: and said what do you think Trump's going to do
Speaker 8: against migrants, I wouldn't have said, Oh, it'll be Title
Speaker 8: forty two, the United States Code, you know, that regulates
Speaker 8: public health. He or people within his team were very
Speaker 8: effective at finding that and using that effective and the
Speaker 8: Biden administration kept it for three years after the Trump
Speaker 8: administration did it for one year, Right, And so Miller
Speaker 8: could find some niche kind of law. What he wants
Speaker 8: to do is use the National Guard from cooperative states, right, yeah,
Speaker 8: and to use a national Guard from cooperative states in
Speaker 8: states that are not cooperative and where local law enforcement
Speaker 8: would not cooperate.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: So, some quote unquote sanctuary states, I think there's probably
Speaker 8: an overstatement. They don't in theory refer and documented people
Speaker 8: they arrest to ICE for deportation. Right now, What federal
Speaker 8: fusion centers do is allow for that even if it
Speaker 8: is a sanctuary state. Actually, but in theoretical terms, a
Speaker 8: sanctuary state would not at least contact ICE about every
Speaker 8: undocumented person they're arrested.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 8: So Miller's plan is to use the National Guard. Again, like,
Speaker 8: that's not what the National Guard does right now. They're
Speaker 8: not really trained up for doing that either, Right. I've
Speaker 8: seen plenty of National Guard folks on the border. I
Speaker 8: it's a bunch of scared eighteen year olds, right who
Speaker 8: are trying to get money through robat And I have
Speaker 8: met Texas National Guide.
Speaker 4: They're kids. They're kids.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, to be fair, that's not saying they're like innocent
Speaker 2: or inherent Like every group of soldiers who has done
Speaker 2: any good or bad things, and often but usually both
Speaker 2: at the same time, it's a bunch of scared eighteen
Speaker 2: year old kids. Yes, that's been the case for ten
Speaker 2: thousand years. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 8: Anytime you have conflict reporting, you it's always shocking how
Speaker 8: young people are.
Speaker 2: It's always just like, oh, okay, all wars are fought
Speaker 2: by children. There's no non child soldiers, with the exception
Speaker 2: of I mean, that is the weird thing about the
Speaker 2: Ukraine War, right yet, Like I remember the first time
Speaker 2: I wound up at the front there, it was like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is actually it is actually old men fighting this war,
Speaker 2: old men who repeatedly told me it's either me or
Speaker 2: my kid shows up here. And I already fucking lost
Speaker 2: my soul in Afghanistan, Yes, like I literally had that
Speaker 2: interview with people.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's crazy to me people who are
Speaker 8: in Afghanistan and fighting again. Yeah, I mean I think
Speaker 8: those guys are probably out now. There's uptop back fifty. Yeah,
Speaker 8: I think twenty twenty four, so it's forty years later.
Speaker 4: I'm sure they're too old now.
Speaker 8: But Robert talking of being too old, I unfortunately I
Speaker 8: am not too old to be obliged to transition to advertisement.
Speaker 4: So that's what we're going to do.
Speaker 2: You're never too old for that. James and in fact,
Speaker 2: the older you get. It's kind of like how if
Speaker 2: you reread Moby Dick at different points in your life,
Speaker 2: it's a completely different novel, every ten years, different book.
Speaker 2: The same thing is true with Ulysses, and the same
Speaker 2: thing is true with these advertisements. That's right, Save them,
Speaker 2: record them on your home device, and every couple of
Speaker 2: months listen and you'll you'll learn something new from jumpa
Speaker 2: Casino every time.
Speaker 8: All Right, we're back, and I hope you've downloaded that
Speaker 8: chump of casino at for later in the event of
Speaker 8: a great down scenario, you could have a whole library
Speaker 8: of those to listen to. So talking of obscure legislations,
Speaker 8: we did right. Trump and his team have mentioned this
Speaker 8: thing called the Alien Enemies Act. It sounds like alien
Speaker 8: Ant Farm, but it's not in any way related.
Speaker 2: Sadly, not nearly as good as for one thing, it's
Speaker 2: cover of smooth Criminal, terrible, terrible.
Speaker 8: Yeah, no, nowhere near the same standard. That's a joke
Speaker 8: for people who are over thirty.
Speaker 2: Yes, anyone who tries to dance to that alien Ant
Speaker 2: Farm song today not only has to think about the
Speaker 2: fact that Michael Jackson was definitely a pedophile, but also
Speaker 2: their needs no longer work.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's a loseless just sadly shuffling along, properly moonwalking
Speaker 8: while crying, uh, taking iberprofen. No. I was at a
Speaker 8: street light show in Portland that was all millennials and
Speaker 8: every time like the pit was crazy, but also it
Speaker 8: sounded like a cement mixer when everybody's knees got going,
Speaker 8: doling out hyberprofen and the way out. So you're going
Speaker 8: to need this tomorrows. So the Alien Enemies Act, it
Speaker 8: hasn't been used since the United States used it in
Speaker 8: the Second World War for in tournament camps, right, which,
Speaker 8: at least for many of US, is are part of
Speaker 8: national shame. I guess like a pretty terrible fucking thing
Speaker 8: that United States did. Obviously, for some folks in the
Speaker 8: Trump administration, this is something that they're kind of aspiring to.
Speaker 8: I guess Trump has said that he would like to
Speaker 8: use this to deport gang members. That's not really what
Speaker 8: it's for. And like even sources within DHS have pointed
Speaker 8: out that they would have to prove that these migrants
Speaker 8: were sent by a foreign government, right, or someone that
Speaker 8: the US is at war with. This is going to
Speaker 8: be hard, because, like if we look at Venezuelans, who
Speaker 8: are representing a larger and larger proportion of migrants since
Speaker 8: the elections there, they will actively shit talk the government
Speaker 8: of their country at the first opportunity. I have met hundreds,
Speaker 8: if not thousands of Venezuelan migrants in California and in
Speaker 8: the Dallian Gap, and yeah, you're not going to find
Speaker 8: people who you can plausibly say were sent.
Speaker 4: By Maduro that way.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but Miller's pretty good at finding these obscure laws
Speaker 8: and ways of doing things. So we would be fully
Speaker 8: to write this off entirely. But I don't think that
Speaker 8: will make up the bulk of these mass deportations. So
Speaker 8: I want to go to that American Immigration Council report,
Speaker 8: which our link in the show notes. Right, assuming a
Speaker 8: million deportations a year, which is what jd. Vance said
Speaker 8: to The New York Times, that's the sort of steady
Speaker 8: deportation scenario as opposed to the mass deportation of thirteen
Speaker 8: million people scenario, which a steady one is is more
Speaker 8: realistic in terms of practicality. Right, the cost of that,
Speaker 8: assuming that twenty percent of undocumented people decided to leave
Speaker 8: on their own would be about eighty eight billion a year,
Speaker 8: which is a large amount of money.
Speaker 4: We'll talk in a little bit about what you could
Speaker 4: get with that money.
Speaker 8: A one off massed deportation would cost about three hundred
Speaker 8: and fifteen billion. The detention costs alone for that one
Speaker 8: off massed deportation of eleven to thirteen million people would
Speaker 8: be one hundred and sixty seven point eight billion dollars,
Speaker 8: which is probably why private prison group geo groups stock
Speaker 8: sawed this week. Right if Trump wants to deport people,
Speaker 8: the average deportee is detained for fifty nine days before
Speaker 8: they're deported, and so they are going to massively have
Speaker 8: to increase their capacity. Right now, their current detention contract
Speaker 8: includes a minimum of twenty nine thousand, seven hundred and
Speaker 8: ninety beds between like increases and other facilities they have
Speaker 8: access to, and early twenty twenty four, accralling to the
Speaker 8: American Immigration Council, they detained thirty nine thousand people. Astute
Speaker 8: listeners will notice that eleven million and thirty nine thousand
Speaker 8: are quite quite desparate as numbers go. So, ah, yeah,
Speaker 8: I mean you're talking about a huge percentage of Like
Speaker 8: we'll get into this later, But in California, Texas, and
Speaker 8: Florida it's between five and six percent of the population
Speaker 8: are undocumented. Right, you're talking about building prison city. If
Speaker 8: you were to detain that many people, then one fell
Speaker 8: swoop Again. That takes time. But in this case it's
Speaker 8: private sector actors like Geogroup. They can tend to move
Speaker 8: a little bit faster. Right, So to put that cost
Speaker 8: in terms of things that the government could do with
Speaker 8: the money instead, Right, a decade of one million deportations
Speaker 8: a year means foregoing forty four hundred and fifty elementary
Speaker 8: schools or two point nine million new homes, or funding
Speaker 8: the head Start program for seventy nine years. A single
Speaker 8: year of mass deportation would cost nearly twice the National
Speaker 8: Institute of Health's annual budget, or eighteen times a global
Speaker 8: annual expenditure on cancer research. So I guess that's shit
Speaker 8: that we could have instead. But that's not all because
Speaker 8: undocumented households, contrary to what you might have heard, paid taxes.
Speaker 8: And if we deported every undocumented person in the United States,
Speaker 8: we look at twenty twenty two numbers, undocumented households paid
Speaker 8: forty six point eight billion in federal taxes and nine
Speaker 8: point three billion in state and local taxes. That's a
Speaker 8: huge amount of tax revenue forgone right, absolutely, yeah, that again,
Speaker 8: that won't be the end of it, because some industries
Speaker 8: like construction and agriculture rely heavily on undocumented labor. And
Speaker 8: if you're worried about the cost of your groceries, now
Speaker 8: if people voted for Donald Trump, because that egg costs more,
Speaker 8: shit will cost an awful lot more if we deport the.
Speaker 4: Undocumented people working in agriculture.
Speaker 8: Right, sectors of that industry do not function economically without
Speaker 8: underpaid migrant labor. And this is something that migrants are
Speaker 8: very aware of. Actually I broadcast interview with one of
Speaker 8: them last week. But they know that they will be
Speaker 8: underpaid because they're undocumented, but they still think that that's
Speaker 8: worth it for them to be safe. Right, So for
Speaker 8: going that, I don't think Trump has not proposed a
Speaker 8: solution to this, right like these sort of this long
Speaker 8: form thinking is not what he does certainly in his speeches,
Speaker 8: but that would have a massive impact on the economy.
Speaker 8: What he would also certainly need to do is persuade
Speaker 8: the countries that these migrants come from to take them back,
Speaker 8: and that has historically been something that has been extremely difficult.
Speaker 4: The State Department.
Speaker 8: Doesn't see the sort of process of persuading people to
Speaker 8: accept migrants as really within its remit, and it certainly
Speaker 8: sort of bristle that having to do this the last
Speaker 8: Trump administration. I think a mass deportation like this it
Speaker 8: would trigger some nations refusing to take people back, for instance,
Speaker 8: to Venezuela. Right, Venezuela is already not taking people back
Speaker 8: from Panama. You at the US funds deportations for Panama.
Speaker 8: Venezuela and Panama have ceased relations after the election in
Speaker 8: Venezuela and Panama rightly claiming that that was a fraudulent election,
Speaker 8: and as a result, Panama is now looking for a
Speaker 8: third country to deport these people too. If the US
Speaker 8: attempted to deport potentially millions people to Venezuela again, there's
Speaker 8: no guarantee that Madua has to accept them back.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: I can hear a lot of people saying, how is
Speaker 1: that allowed.
Speaker 4: To not accept take them back?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 8: I mean if international law is like it's a unicorn,
Speaker 8: Like you know, if everyone agrees that they see it,
Speaker 8: and they see it, but it's not real, right, So
Speaker 8: like who is going to make them? I guess, like,
Speaker 8: like whether it's allowed or not, it's kind of immaterial.
Speaker 8: Madua is not allowed to steal the election, right, you're
Speaker 8: not allowed to abuse human rights. Migrants are allowed to
Speaker 8: cross any country they want and claim asylum anywhere that
Speaker 8: they feel safe. But like here we are so Yeah,
Speaker 8: in theory a country should accept its citizens back and
Speaker 8: practice will it?
Speaker 6: I don't know, certainly.
Speaker 8: It becomes like a bigger issue when you have millions
Speaker 8: of people, right, And if we have millions of people
Speaker 8: deported back, then like if we can't deport them, where
Speaker 8: are we going to detain them? That gets back to
Speaker 8: the cost of detentions, right, talking of costs should probably
Speaker 8: cover the costs of our podcasting set up here by
Speaker 8: pivoting to adverts again, Yeah, we are back, and for
Speaker 8: the final segment here, I want to talk about who
Speaker 8: Trump could pursue with these deportations. Right, there's two major groups.
Speaker 8: The obvious starting point would be the two point three
Speaker 8: million people who cross between January of twenty twenty three
Speaker 8: and April of this year before Biden signed his Asylum band.
Speaker 6: To be prescribed.
Speaker 8: That to two million two hundred and sixty four eight
Speaker 8: hundred and thirty. Those people don't have permanent immigration status.
Speaker 8: Those are the people who you've heard from on this
Speaker 8: podcast who are in cucumber right, the people who we've
Speaker 8: interviewed for the last year and a bit now. They
Speaker 8: have various immigration status, but none of them are permanent.
Speaker 8: None of them have permanent residency. All of them are
Speaker 8: obviously registered right. They normally have a notice to appear
Speaker 8: in court, which would make them easy to find and
Speaker 8: potentially easy to deport.
Speaker 6: The other group of people.
Speaker 8: Are the documented migrant who have been here for longer
Speaker 8: than that. Many of them have most have been in
Speaker 8: the country for more than a decade. They're working, They
Speaker 8: often have citizen children right because of birthright citizenship. Most
Speaker 8: of the pay taxes. Most of these people have some
Speaker 8: form of revocable legal status, so that might be something
Speaker 8: called a temporary protected status. We talked about a temporary
Speaker 8: protected status last week as well, but it applies to
Speaker 8: people who are already in the country when it's granted
Speaker 8: and it allows them to stay for a designated period
Speaker 8: of time while it's not safe to deport them to
Speaker 8: their home country. Let's say there's been a war or
Speaker 8: a natural disaster, right, it's not safe to deport them,
Speaker 8: but it gets renewed two months before the end of
Speaker 8: that period. Let's say it renews every eighteen months, and
Speaker 8: you find out two months before the end of that
Speaker 8: period if it's not going to be renewed. If they
Speaker 8: didn't renew those TPSS, those people could either change status
Speaker 8: or would become undocumented.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: The TPS has existed since nineteen ninety and they're about
Speaker 8: eight hundred and sixty thousand people on TPS right now.
Speaker 8: The other major category that people will probably be more
Speaker 8: familiar with are Dreamer, people who came to the United
Speaker 8: States as children and are undocumented, but they benefit from
Speaker 8: something called Darker Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and about
Speaker 8: eight hundred and thirty four thousand young people benefit from this,
Speaker 8: which allows them to receive a renewable two year period
Speaker 8: of deferred action from deportation. Trump did try and go
Speaker 8: after this in his previous term in twenty eighteen. He
Speaker 8: ended up in a two year court battle which sort
Speaker 8: of finished up with NAACP versus Trump, and that ran
Speaker 8: out the clock on his term and Biden reinstated Darker,
Speaker 8: but again because people have to register for darker, their
Speaker 8: whereabouts are easier for someone like ICE to potentially find.
Speaker 8: Then after that, we have people who entered without being detected.
Speaker 8: We have people who overstayed their visas. Those people might
Speaker 8: be harder to find. The model of the undocumented migrant
Speaker 8: that people have in their head comes across the border
Speaker 8: with carpet shoes, sneaks past a BP checkpoint, and then
Speaker 8: lives in the United States without ever encountering migration authorities.
Speaker 8: That's actually not the majority model, but those people do exist,
Speaker 8: and that they would be harder for ICE to find potentially.
Speaker 8: Trump is also vowed to end parole programs that allow
Speaker 8: Ukrainians and Afghans to enter the USA and work. I
Speaker 8: would think that some of those would be pretty unpopular.
Speaker 8: People have been much more broadly in solidarity with Ukrainian
Speaker 8: migrants than they have with other migrants in other parts
Speaker 8: of the world. They'll say, but it would be an
Speaker 8: easy one again for him to end.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 8: The last thing he's really said he wanted to do
Speaker 8: is to end birthright citizenship.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 8: That is I spoke about this before in our Agenda
Speaker 8: forty seven episodes. That's pretty clear in the fourteenth Amendment.
Speaker 8: They have some kind of fringes on the flag. Legal
Speaker 8: theory around this, but like I would think that that
Speaker 8: will require a constitutional amendment, but who knows, because he
Speaker 8: might have both houses and the Supreme Court on his side,
Speaker 8: so he might just be able to get away with
Speaker 8: doing that. This obviously wouldn't rescind citizenship from people who
Speaker 8: have previously have said children who are citizens. Talking of
Speaker 8: people have children as citizens. They are about four million
Speaker 8: mixed status families in the United States, so this deportation
Speaker 8: plan could potentially separate parents from children and children from parents,
Speaker 8: children from their older parents who they take care of.
Speaker 8: It could destroy these families, right, Deportations always destroy families.
Speaker 8: I've seen this happening myself, and it's horrible. The states
Speaker 8: where this would most likely happen the states of the
Speaker 8: highest documented population at California, Texas, and Florida. California thus
Speaker 8: far retains its sanctuary policies. Texas of Florida very much
Speaker 8: do not, right, and so those would be the states
Speaker 8: where they will be the highest risk of this happening.
Speaker 8: That's between five and six percent of their population, and
Speaker 8: that's kind of where I want to finish up today.
Speaker 8: I've got some more stuff I wanted to say about
Speaker 8: his border policy, but I think I'm going to say
Speaker 8: that for another episode, because the border and immigration are
Speaker 8: different things, and I think sometimes this is something that
Speaker 8: a lot of legacy media doesn't understand. They have immigration
Speaker 8: reporters who report immigrant law, the stuff I've spoken about today,
Speaker 8: but the border is not somewhere that they go and
Speaker 8: it's not something that they cover very well. If you've
Speaker 8: been listening for a while, you'll know that I've spent
Speaker 8: a lot of time at the border on the ground,
Speaker 8: in the mountains, in the desert, and that's something that
Speaker 8: we've covered in great depth here, and I'm pretty happy
Speaker 8: that listeners have a really complete understanding of it.
Speaker 1: Would California actually be able to enforce being a sanctuary
Speaker 1: state or.
Speaker 8: Now, yes, in the it's law enforcement doesn't have to
Speaker 8: call ice right, the federal government cannot compel local law
Speaker 8: enforcement to state law enforcement to do its work.
Speaker 6: That is very well established.
Speaker 8: Again, nothing's off the cards when you have both Houses
Speaker 8: of Congress and the Supreme Court. But again that would
Speaker 8: take time and it would take a court battle. So
Speaker 8: what they can do now is not report those people, right,
Speaker 8: not say hey, we got someone here. He came in
Speaker 8: because we found him with a bag of weed. He's undocumented.
Speaker 8: You know, he was driving thirty five and a thirty
Speaker 8: he's undocked, invented. These are things that people who are
Speaker 8: undocumented have to worry about, right Like, for those of
Speaker 8: you who don't have undocumented folks in your life, Like
Speaker 8: it's a speeding ticket, it's the most minor in it's
Speaker 8: not paying a parking ticket and ending up in court,
Speaker 8: right Like, this shit is so minor to so many people,
Speaker 8: but it could tear someone's life apart. And so I
Speaker 8: want to like finish up by saying that, yeah, Texas
Speaker 8: and Florida are going to be the places where we
Speaker 8: see this. Yeah, five percent of the population is a
Speaker 8: large amount of your population. If he even attempts half
Speaker 8: of that, people are going to see this. It's going
Speaker 8: to happen in your community. Now, I'm not saying he will,
Speaker 8: but if it does, Like the time to start organizing
Speaker 8: to protect people you care about is now. Be that
Speaker 8: with their nations, to groups like Alo Torolalo, who have
Speaker 8: successfully sued the Trump and buy An administrations for my
Speaker 8: goods rights. Be that with organizing such that your undocumented
Speaker 8: friends don't end up in court because they couldn't pay
Speaker 8: parking ticket, right, even if that means you paying someone
Speaker 8: at giving someone fifty bucks for a parking ticket, so
Speaker 8: that it doesn't ruin the rest of their life.
Speaker 6: Whatever it is. The way that we.
Speaker 8: Prevent this is through strong communities. We have to start
Speaker 8: putting those now. I know we've said this a lot
Speaker 8: this week, but we're probably going to say a lot
Speaker 8: for the next three months. Like a lot of people
Speaker 8: have reached out to me since the Tramp election, which
Speaker 8: was two days but also like seven years ago, because
Speaker 8: that's how time works, saying that they want to participate
Speaker 8: in mutil aid at the border. I would love for
Speaker 8: you to come and join us, of course it would.
Speaker 8: And I think people have heard a lot about our
Speaker 8: mutual aid setup because of something I do a lot,
Speaker 8: but that I don't want you to come here and
Speaker 8: do mutual aid tourism, like I want you to come
Speaker 8: here and understand and learn what we do and then
Speaker 8: do it yourself, or just do it yourself, like there
Speaker 8: was a time when this didn't exist and people started
Speaker 8: it right, and you can start it to And I'm
Speaker 8: not going to tell you, like the specifics of what
Speaker 8: I think you should do, because I don't know. I
Speaker 8: don't know what the legal environment will be. I don't
Speaker 8: know what the legal environment will be in your state.
Speaker 8: But whatever the legal environment is, it will be better
Speaker 8: if we have strong and cohesive communities to look after
Speaker 8: one another. Right, If you're looking to donate your money,
Speaker 8: I've said it before, ALOTLAO where I would suggest it,
Speaker 8: it's a L O t R L A d O
Speaker 8: dot org. They've done really valuable work in defending migrants
Speaker 8: rights in court. Haitian Bridge Alliance would be another great
Speaker 8: example of that.
Speaker 1: Will you link that?
Speaker 4: I'll put them both in the show notes. Yeah.
Speaker 6: But the way we confront this is together.
Speaker 8: And it's super important that now in the next three
Speaker 8: months off there are and document people in your life
Speaker 8: so that you check in with them, that you talk
Speaker 8: with them about what the best plan is. We don't
Speaker 8: know what's going to happen. I've outlined some scenarios here.
Speaker 8: None of them may happen, right, we don't know yet,
Speaker 8: but we have these three months and we'd be foolish
Speaker 8: not to use them.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 8: Yeah, talk to your friends, begin organizing The solution is
Speaker 8: not to spare. Solution this community, and I know it
Speaker 8: can be really to spend. If you're listening and you
Speaker 8: are and documented, I understand how petrifying this is. And
Speaker 8: just know that, like we're all thinking of you and
Speaker 8: hopefully there are people in your life who are there
Speaker 8: to help you and to help you get through a
Speaker 8: difficult time.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: now find sources for It Could Happen Here listened directly
Speaker 1: in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.