It Could Happen Here Weekly 194

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Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

decisions.

Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here.

I'm Andrew Sage, or soon as Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm here with Smith.

It's James.

And honestly, I shouldn't say welcome to It Could Happen Here.

I should really say welcome to It Is Happening Here because

I mean, just a second with you, James.

How are you doing?

You safe?

I'm okay.

I'm, yeah, I'm safe right now.

We are living through wild times in the United States.

Every day is a new hell.

Indeed, indeed.

And although I'm not in the US, the flames of that hell definitely lick the rest of the world in ways big and small.

Yeah, they definitely do.

I was just talking to some people in Syria yesterday and like the Alevis, Alawites, whatever you want to call it Alevis, whatever you want to say it, are facing quite substantial persecution currently.

And like one of the larger refugee accepting countries in the world just isn't doing that anymore, unless you're a white South African, of course.

and like that has these massive trickle-down effects for everywhere um it's just one example of how like America so goes the US so goes the world you know indeed indeed and and not just in Syria are the flames of conflict tearing our world apart I think most people I now know about the situation in Palestine the way that Israel is carrying out a genocide there you know the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the civil war in Myanmar and Sudan, the struggle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and the Kashmiri people who are

left

on the way side,

the Tamil genocide taking place in Sri Lanka.

I mean, there's so many things happening across the world right now.

It's really difficult to keep up.

Yeah.

The friends in Myanmar would prefer the framing of revolution to civil war.

They're pretty explicit about that.

Okay, yeah, you're right.

You're right.

You're right.

I should be using that terminology.

Yeah, it's not appropriate everywhere, but in their case, there has been a civil war since 48 and there's a substantial change with the 2021 revolution.

Right, right, right, right.

Thank you for that, correct.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

I think now is a really good time to have a general, almost strategic discussion on anti-war struggle.

And so today I really want to look at how we can counter the propaganda around war, the actions that are possible to take against militarism at home, and how we can build solidarity across oceans and borders.

So to understand how to agitate against war, we first need to agitate against militarism.

And for those who don't know, militarism is the belief or policy that a nation should maintain a strong military and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote its interests.

It often involves glorifying military virtues and ideals and prioritizing military strength and readiness above other aspects of society.

So that's a basic Google definition.

My copy of the anarchist encyclopedia is the English version which is abridged sadly, but the original French has the full unabridged anarchist encyclopedia.

So with a bit of shaky online translation magic, I managed to pull its definition of militarism as well.

Militarism is a system that consists of having and maintaining military personnel.

Its essential and evolved goal is the preparation for war.

The recruitment of a standing army, the organization of the cadres of reserve army, the accumulation, the putting in place, the maintenance and a state of service of ever more modern, more perfected war material.

In short, it is the preliminary organization of war.

What are the implications of that?

Well, all over the world, I think we can see, you know, the consequences of statism, the might makes right pursuit of conquest, the fighting wars abroad or at home for strategic interests, ideological commitments, resource claims, whatever the case may be.

The rivalries within the ruling class and how that plays out and how it's that that blows back on all of our faces.

You know, the profits, the military-industrial complex, which keeps this whole system turning on, you know,

the blood of innocence.

Of course, the long-standing consequences and continued work of colonialism.

And of course, the ways that militarism gets turned inward with the suppression of strikes, of activism, of popular unrest, when the now militarized police aren't enough.

They often bring in the military itself.

And of course, with militarism, you also have the narrative component, you know, the building of patriotism that so

plants the seed of fascism.

You know, states can survive without militaries.

It's true.

The state typically depends upon

some effort or some attempt at a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a territory by some definitions.

But the states which do not have militaries often can do so because they have outsourced their military functions to another state and or because they have other systems in place to control dissent,

to develop a certain degree of social conditioning and pacify the population.

I've just trying to think of states without militaries.

Like in my experience, I guess you have like the the

Panama, right?

Doesn't have a military.

It has Sena Front, which are like the frontier protection, I guess, but essentially like a militarized border patrol.

And they do have Marines and stuff as well, I guess.

So they kind of do have a military.

But it's a kind of a renaming exercise more than anything.

Indeed.

The same thing with having a militarized police, but it's not a military technically.

Yeah.

Or having a militarized Coast Guard and it's not a military technically.

Yeah, yeah.

You have countries like the Republic of the Marshall Islands, which just outsources its

its militarization to the United States, right?

Like

the US.

Well, I think that is a distinct thing.

People in the Marshall Islands have seen the horrors of of war very closely.

And also the dangers of militarization, right?

Like the United States nuked the Marshall Islands, a country with which it had no quarrel, with which it was not at war.

just to practice in case it needed to nuke a country with which it did have a quarrel, I guess.

The legacy of that is very obvious and continues to this day there but if marshallese people wish to join a military they can join the us military and the u.s guarantees their security in theory but it's it's yeah it is i think distinct like for instance if you join the u.s military in the marshall islands wish to access your veterans benefits the easiest way to do so is take a five-hour flight to hawaii like like they don't have any any any benefits for actual veterans there so i guess in that case like maybe it does give people a different relationship to like state violence yeah it's i mean obviously different

places have different histories as to how they came to those arrangements, but you definitely see a relationship between colonialism and

the outsourcing of military functions.

Yeah, definitely.

Now, historically, anarchists have been anti-militarist.

The encyclopedias call this aspect of the anarchist struggle the aim to disqualify militarism, to denounce its terrible and painful consequences, to combat the warlike and barricad spirit, to stigmatize and dishonor war, to abolish the regime of the armies.

So abolition militarism looks like material relief from the oppression, military violence, the redirection of resources that go toward military, toward instead, things that actually benefit the lives of everyday people, you know, the reduction of pain and suffering throughout the world, the abolition of borders, which so often are the motivating force behind military exercise.

And while no anarchists will deny that armed struggle is necessary for defense, it's not the same as having an imperialistic or hierarchical ambition toward, you know, power over, toward dominating populations of people.

Yeah.

This reminds me of a discussion that happened in the CNT in Spain in the 1930s, previous to the Civil War, even before that, right?

Where they,

there was a very profound and obvious discussion on like how to defend the revolution, how to defend communities,

whilst maintaining anti-militarism.

And that's why we didn't see, like, there was not a senior, like, like standing army beyond

you had affinity groups, right?

And then you had like defense committees of six, six to eight people.

And those people like took on the role of organizing for a potential violent, like in order to defend the community, right?

Like to use violence to defend the community against violence.

But even as it became clearer and clearer that Spain was like spiraling towards conflict, they resisted the idea of establishing anything more militarized than that.

Yeah, and I think Civil War has been a really good place to look at for the way some experimental efforts or ideas would have played out, strategies would have played out.

And I think it's really important to take those experiments and see how we can iterate on them and build upon them.

Because, I mean, while I've always admired that we've carried on this anti-militarist torch, it's very important to remember the landscape has changed from wartimes past.

You know, we're not in World War times anymore.

Yes.

You know, the strategies and the discussions and the approaches that may have worked back then, it doesn't work in the same way now.

You don't even have to declare war officially anymore in this day and age.

You can just say that, oh, you're doing a special military operation or you can just send billions of dollars of aid to a country that you want to support and even troops to countries you want to support.

And technically, you haven't declared war yet.

And, you know, not only that, you also get to unleash generational trauma and poison upon generations of people.

But it's okay because you're going after some terrorists.

You know, you just get to push money and supplies toward this camp or that.

And where the US is concerned, it at least used to have to

seek congressional approval.

But as we see, that's not really a thing now, especially post 9-11.

You know, back in the day, people thought putting pressure on the elected officials to protest would be enough.

And, you know, there's a debate to be had to the extent to which that worked for situations like the Vietnam War.

But as we've seen with this song and dance again and again and again, the protests are not hitting like they used to.

You know, the response to the protests has been so routine at this point.

You know, you just send the police to bash some heads in or back to get the military

because the movers and the shakers aren't the people who can actually be reached with these protests.

You know, and no matter how peaceful we proclaim our protests to be, we're talking about moneyed interests here you know a military industrial complex that has to have line go up you know who yeah who doesn't have to give a damn about some people walking on the road you know the system has grown since the 1910s the 1940s it has grown in such size and complexity to the point where you know you don't have to care necessarily about a single moving part about a single action or protest

yeah and the two kind of combine and what like what we're seeing in the United Kingdom right now, right?

Like there's the complete dismissal of protests and this like, I'm thinking of a better word than imprecise, but like the vagueness of the definition of terrorism has allowed the government of the United Kingdom in combination with the absence of a bill of rights in the United Kingdom, right, to just be like, oh, Palestine Action are terrorists.

Like you are the same as the Islamic State.

uh because uh palestine action undertook it in a non-violent direct action right but it's ludicrous to suggest that that that that that was terrorism.

It doesn't need any reasonable definition of the term.

But

we're in a stage now where governments can declare anyone the enemy without any particular oversight.

And

that's the logical conclusion of two decades of this.

Yeah, I mean, to an extent that has always been the case.

I think what's different now is that they're not even really attempting to hide

behind any sort of consistent principles or consistent standards.

Because even back then, the anarchists anarchists were being called terrorists and being

true, you know, chastised for that.

Yeah.

I guess also, like, our class

system is more

entrenched than it ever has been, in a sense.

I'm just thinking, like,

wars are not fought by the mass of middle class and like the people who become senators for the most part, right?

I mean, in the U.S., sometimes senators will have done military service.

It can sort of boost their career opportunities.

I get that.

But like, it is not for the most part the sons of

the people who start the wars, who die in the wars, right?

It's

people of a different class, in a way that, like, even in a distinct way from like the era of the world wars, right?

When large numbers of people of the middle class, especially, maybe not the very privileged people,

did die in those wars.

And I think the memory of the First World War probably did have some impact on like the reticence of some politicians to dive into the second one.

But we don't really have that now.

Indeed.

So we criticize this particular approach of the protest.

And I know the inevitable question is, so what can we even do at this point?

And this is why I I consider it very important to take a step back and look at what is actually

keeping the system going, right?

And what's keeping the system going is, and it's always been, labor, right?

Not to say that labor and labor struggle is the be-all and end-all of our politics, but it is to say that if we want to

make a significant impact, That is what we have the greatest control over

our labor.

And so when I talk about things we can do to affect change, I always have to take it back to the ongoing process of social revolution.

The things you do to oppose and the things you do to propose.

You know, on the opposing side of things, that includes counter-messaging.

You know, even though we may not have the resources of mainstream media or government communications, we have word of mouth, we have trust between ourselves, and we have alternative media that can be, especially in this day and age, just as powerful if sparked right.

Especially considering the fact that the general sentiment, the populist sentiment has,

whether you're coming from a leftist direction or a rightist direction, the general sentiment has been moving toward anti-establishment politics.

The anti-establishment sort of momentum is what's growing right now.

And the issue, of course, being that sometimes that anti-establishment momentum can be hijacked, such as what Trump did, you know, to get himself elected the first time.

Yeah.

He rode that wave.

And, you know, this whole Epstein situation, we may see

that foundation of his base potentially crumbling apart a bit.

But we have to look at what is actually motivating people right now and

how they can be reached.

And alternative media with an anti-establishment

message is, I think, one of the better ways to do so.

Yeah.

You know, wherever you see it, you need to be out there, you know, on social media or through other avenues calling out the ridiculous cashist bellies used to manufacture consent for war.

You know, to be wary of potential false flags that can be used as a justification for military action, to consistently poke holes in the narratives that have allowed you know nationalist and xenophobic sentiments to become the force that they have become today.

And of course, even engaging in that messaging, of course, try not to let campism infect your counter-messaging either.

Yeah.

You know, that's how you get people who are, you know, they gung who about a free Palestine.

And then they start, when you ask them about Ukraine, all of a sudden, it's actually really complicated.

It's actually the fault of the US and the EU and NATO and...

not Russia, even though Russia is the one who actually invaded and is actively killing people and destroying infrastructure as we speak.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, there's conversation to be had about the US and about the EU and about NATO, obviously.

But it's very clear.

Yeah, it's very uncomplicated.

Who's actually killing people right now?

You know?

Yeah, there is one country which is taking children, right?

Like and trying to re-educate them, give them to families in Russia,

which is committing murders of civilians.

Like

we don't have to resort to like 10-year geopolitical trajectories to say that it's wrong and it should be opposed.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And also, I want to make this point about counter-messaging because it's a consistent gripe I've had.

In fact, one of the main reasons I started my channel in the first place with your counter-messaging.

Whether it's in person or on the internet or wherever, don't stay perpetually on the back foot.

In other words, don't just counter message.

Yeah.

You know, right now, and and this is what irritates me so much, the right wing sets the conversation.

Yeah.

You know, you have people, they say, oh, we want to talk about critical race theory.

And then everybody's talking about critical race theory because they talk to, well, they want to target trans people.

And all of a sudden, we have to scrabble to

respond to all their erroneous and ridiculous claims about trans people.

Yeah.

That counter message is important.

It's important, but it cannot be all that we do, right?

Yeah.

And this is a bit out of that field, but you know, of course, I'm not one who is partial to electoral approaches, but you can see some of that, not just counter-messaging, but also actively messaging taking place with Zora Mamdani's strategy.

Yeah.

You know, when you look at how he speaks, how he addresses some of the bad faith arguments that are made against him.

His rhetorical strength and popularity in part lies on his refusal to carry on the conversation on the enemy's terms.

Yeah.

You know, so they will go at him for something and he's going to spin it right back around to talking about the things that it's usually that really matters to people to set the conversation, to get people to respond to that.

Because a lot of the responses to what him have been trying to distract from his actual messaging and his ability to stay on message is something I find really admirable, despite, you know, my concerns about the investment of energy in electoral strategies.

Sure, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there are certain things we can admire about these people if we don't agree with everything.

And I do think like, in that sense, something I think about a lot with like messaging and counter-messaging, especially around war, it's like, you know, I spent some time in

the AANES and what people call Rojava.

And like...

One of the framings that I've consistently seen, and it's mostly in like the

lib-leaning mass media, I guess, is that people went to Rojava to fight against IS or Daesh or ISIS, whatever you want to call it, right?

And like in doing so, that is how the revolution in Rojaba is not understood by most people, right?

And they have taken the power away from it in their framing of it because people didn't just go.

Some people did go just to fight IS, right?

They went because they saw what IS was doing.

They understood it as inhumane and they wanted that to stop.

And that's admirable.

But people also went because they saw what people were building in Rojava, and they thought that was beautiful, and they wanted to defend it.

And that's admirable, too.

And sometimes the messaging around specifically Rojava, Myanmar, to an extent, right, there are international volunteers there too.

And of course, like folks from Myanmar who have picked up weapons who never thought they would.

And they didn't just do it to oppose the junta.

They did it because like in the despite all the horrible things about war, then like the it should be avoided at all costs, in the conflict they have built liberated spaces and they've experienced freedom and they have experienced how that feels and

they've built a revolution that is beautiful in spite of the war uh not not because of it and they want to defend that and i think that's a messaging that we should uh we should consider right like because the the the messaging that everything has to be against something bad always

sort of it it presupposes that there can't have been something good.

And in some cases, there has been something good.

And like we won't fully understand

what was happening there unless we understand that.

And I think we should push back on that messaging when we see it, especially in

legacy media.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And that really connects to the, you know, the other aspect.

of the social revolution paradigm because it's not just about opposing it's also proposing that that something different yeah and that is often far more energizing than simply talking about everything that's wrong with the world

yeah definitely and i think also for those who maybe have concerns about the risks of oppositional messaging there's another area where you can direct your energy to support the opposition without necessarily actively being involved in it you know because it's not enough to just oppose the system you have to to build something else.

And you could be part of that building something else, you know?

So when we're messaging, we want to be able to redirect people's energies to their actual frustrations and interests, you know, to recenter the conflict and the lens on the actual divisions of society, such as class, to make moneyed interests known.

And, you know, even though it's never been easy to be anti-war.

you know, especially in the center of empire.

And in many ways, the technologies of today have empowered much greater oppression.

You know, in Russia, individual and mass protests are met with severe oppression, massive fines, jail sentences, etc.

In the U.S., you can face police brutality, censorship, even deportation.

And in Israel, well, I haven't seen or heard anything from the Israeli populace in terms of resisting what Israel is doing to the Palestinians.

I know that those who do stand against the mandatory conscription do face jail jail time yeah for their refusal.

So it's not easy to be anti-war, especially in militarized and empire-building territories.

I get that stress and that worry that opposition is still necessary, but there's other things that we can be doing than just messaging.

You know, there are things that take on less risk, such as building an alternative, and there are things that take on more risk.

Now, protests, even peaceful protests, are no longer risk-free endeavors.

And I know when most people hear about, you know, we need to push back, they hear, okay, let's organize a protest.

Honestly, we could use a bit more imagination.

In this day and age, like I said, the protest is not hitting like it used to.

It's become like a pressure valve or a tool of pacification that could be tolerated for a time and then met with repression the moment it's time to wrap it up.

And there are a couple of reasons why protests are not

able to do as much.

They have the money to interests.

They can end up being divided according to various arguments over strategy.

And I'm sorry to say this, but protests as of late haven't accomplished very much.

besides getting people mutilated or jailed or worse in the past few years.

And in fact, a lot of of the resources that could be spent, you know, building alternatives are being spent instead on, you know, paying people's bonds and getting people out of jail, prison relief, that sort of thing.

Not to say those things are not necessary.

You know, don't leave your comrades to rot in jail.

But I think we need to consider the free data that we've basically been giving away.

to the ruling class in the form of pictures, names, addresses, identifying data that they can be used to repress or disrupt or infiltrate protesters and protesting organizations down the line.

As James Herrod, and it's another James, as James Herrod wrote in The Weakness of a Politics of Protest, where I've been getting some of these critiques of protests from,

he says, Thus, instead of powerfully concentrating our mental and physical energies on solving this problem to eliminate this obstacle to defeating capitalism, we are taken to the streets once again, merely protested, merely engaged in what is basically mindless activism.

End quote.

Later he says, it's easy to agree on what to protest against.

The list of things that need to be stopped under capitalism is long.

So long in fact we don't even need to agree.

There's plenty to choose from.

So just pick something that suits you.

Perhaps this is why so many activists got involved in protesting.

It's not so easy though to figure out what we want to replace capitalism with, to work out convincing arguments about how it will possibly work, and to set about creating such a social world, especially since so little energy is being devoted to the task.

End quote.

And, you know, I get why protests are popular.

You know, as he says, it has a low barrier to entry.

You just have to show up.

And in a society that has been so deliberately atomized, where mass collective action has been made so difficult, protests has become pretty much a very easy avenue to get those things done.

Yeah.

And, you know, protests can work in certain instances for limited goals, but I think that those uses are diminishing day by day

in the cost-benefit analysis.

Yeah.

I'm just thinking about like, um, there was a letter George Orwell wrote to one of his readers on the subject of anti-fascism, where Orwell was lamenting that, like, the anti-fascism that he was encountering in England, right, in between his participation in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, was always centered on hate.

And like, it's sort of an idea where we get the two minutes of hate later in 1984, right?

But maybe it comes from here.

And like, it never proposed an alternative.

It just said it pointed to something and said bad.

Something I've tried not to do in my journalism, right?

Very often we do this as journalists who we point to something and say bad.

We don't look for the ways that it could become better.

And so like

protesting can become such an identity for people.

Like you see it, I'm just thinking of like every time I get sent a link to Instagram, right?

Which is a platform I don't really participate on.

But

I will look at things and they'll be like, oh, San Diego protest news, San Diego protester, SoCal protester.

And like,

I think we should resist that being an identity because we want to build something beautiful as well as oppose what is bad.

And if we don't have

something beautiful to propose, what are we doing out there?

Exactly.

Exactly.

And, you know, there's room for protests.

I don't want to give off the impression that there isn't.

Yeah.

You know, but for all the lovely talk about peaceful protest, that works when there's an actual threat backing up those protests.

You know, you don't just do the peaceful protests.

You know, Gandhi didn't single-handedly win India's independence by marching peacefully.

Yeah.

You know, there has to be something backing us up or else it's going to be very easy to ignore and suppress.

Yeah.

And I think that protests should not be our default right now they are our default and i think they are better uses of our collective time energy and resources even though protests are very easy compared to some of the things that are more necessary right now you know um but if protests is where you're dead set on funneling your energy i would just say that you should at least learn dearst strategies you know there are resources online to get some information on that on de-arrest strategies you can look it up but if it's possible, if you see the situation playing out, you know, try not to sit by and let your comrades get pulled away.

You know, it is very possible, the numbers are on your side, to prevent the police from harassing, targeting, and taking away people.

You know, there's other stuff you can do as well besides protests that I keep alluding to because, you know, sadly, the media is no longer, you know.

a safe space to share things in depth

in some cases.

But just remember remember that the key is actual disruption.

You know, the media will not be with you.

It'll be trying to manufacture consent on everything that you do, manufacture consent against any action taken on the things that you do.

And the only way to counteract that is to maintain relationships on the ground, to maintain actual local solidarity.

Because once you have those local relationships and that local solidarity, there's no amount of things that the media can do, the media could stir up that could prevent the people who see that you're on their side, who see that you you stand up for them to turn against you, right?

Where the problem happens is when you don't have any relationships, you don't have any networks, you don't have any community building, you're just doing stuff, the messaging is unclear.

You know, that's where I think the media could really pounce on that.

I would also say, you know, sabotage, you know, hit their pockets.

And the main thing, the thing that I've been alluded to earlier, is to strike.

Yeah.

You know, to organize strikes, to use your labor power.

With this power still comes from our participation in production and the threat of withdrawing our participation.

We have to realize that in this time we're living in, even the effectiveness of strikes have come under threat in two ways.

The first way is that the permanence of employment is not what it used to be.

And with the rise and spread of AI, you have to ask yourself how long will strikes in certain fields be effective anymore.

You know, I have my doubt that AI will ever reach a point where it can replace people.

But honestly, for a lot of these companies, they don't necessarily care about whether it's capable of replacing people or not.

They will still try and use it to replace people.

So we have to be cognizant of the fact that this is the direction they're pushing things in.

And we have to be able to stand up against that before we reach a point where between AI and you know the nature of temporary work of the gig economy, it becomes harder and harder to organize ourselves.

The other thing that I've noticed that has made striking so difficult and that we have to be aware of is

the

pacification or the domestication of unions.

Right.

There was a time historically where unions were a powerful, influential, revolutionary event force.

Such is not the case today, unfortunately.

You know, there has been legislation put in place that many unions are terrified of crossing.

Every I has to be dotted, every T has to be crossed.

And so the things that would actually make union action the most effective are the things that unions nowadays will refuse to do.

sympathy strikes, general strikes.

And so what can we do if we are in an industry where the union is collaborating with management, where the union is utterly reformist, where the union refuses to actually step up and represent the people are supposed to be represented?

And this is where, historically, wildcat, illegalist strikes have had to come into play.

Strikes that do not depend upon legality, that do not sit back and waive permission, that carry far more risk, of course, that are far more difficult to organize, but are going to be necessary if we want to liberate ourselves from this constant capitulation toward the machine.

In the article Striking Against the Work War Machine by Jeff Shantz and T.J.

Lilly, they said, quote, wartime strikes and sabotage, partly because they're illegal and unsanct in nature, bring rank and file workers together outside of union structures.

Workers have to make crucial decisions whether in this strike directly in face-to-face meetings or on the picket lines.

Bureaucrats who are left to their fundamental role of brokering with the bosses can be relegated to the sidelines in such situations.

In Germany in 1917, illegal strikes helped to sweep the union structures right out of workplaces.

Strikes increasingly took on an anti-union as well as anti-boss character.

with wildcats occurring in growing numbers throughout the armistice and beyond.

So I wanted to of course pull on this example because this is not a unique issue, right?

Even historically, where unions have stood against the struggle of workers against war or against, you know, actually defending their class interests, the rank and file have had to organize themselves accordingly.

So that's also something to keep in mind.

And last but not least, I just wanted to touch very briefly on the proposed side of the social revolution equation when it comes to anti-war struggle.

And as usual, this is going to take solidarity materially, not just saying that, oh, we stand in solidarity with such and such and such, actually sharing aid, sharing notes, supporting refugees and going further.

Because this, I think, is where a lot of our energy needs to be right now.

Our efforts to oppose are going to be for the most part toothless as long as we don't have an underlying structure that we are building upon.

that we are seeking to defend and to expand.

You know, we are not at a position right now where we pose much of a threat yet.

And we also have to consider that merely posing a threat is not going to liberate us by itself.

So I want you to consider as we, you know, wrap up this episode what you can do to put forward that alternative, to actually try to create the new social arrangements that we think should replace capitalist, statist, militarist order.

And this is something that I talk about on my channel.

Of course, I talk about building the commons, building alternative media, alternative economy, and developing our powers, our drives, and our consciousness.

And so, you can check that out if you'd like.

Unfortunately, this is

happening here.

And don't forget, you can check out the YouTube, the Patreon, etc.

All power to all the people.

Peace.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here.

My name is Dan Al Kurd.

I'm a writer, analyst, and researcher of Palestinian and Arab politics.

I'm an associate professor of political science and a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington.

Today, we'll be speaking with Ushra Khalidi, the policy lead for Oxfam.

Our discussion will cover Oxfam's work in the occupied Palestinian territories and the current crisis in aid distribution.

We are recording the end of July, July 27th, 2025.

NPR NPR reported in May of this year that Gaza has already reached Phase 4 of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the IPC, which is coordinated out of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and an organization called the Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

So what does this all mean?

Phase four means emergency.

As NPR writes in their May report, Hardships deepen, food gaps widen, and people resort to really extreme forms of coping.

So the Famine Early Warning Systems Network does not have a presence in Gaza at the moment.

This is their best guess.

Phase five is when they declare a famine.

We're seeing very terrible images in the media and on our phone screens about the level of deprivation in Gaza at the moment because aid has been blocked off by the Israeli government.

Writing for Al Jazeera, just a few days ago, former UN official Munsak Khane accuses the UN of not declaring famine despite overwhelming evidence because he says officials are worried about their careers and possibly worried about antagonizing the US.

But regardless of whether it's phase four or phase five, the situation in Gaza is dire.

In July 27th, today, when we're recording, there's reporting that there might be airdrops, that the trucks on the Egyptian border are moving towards Gaza after the Israeli government has received a lot of pressure over the ongoing aid crisis.

But of course, that may be too late for many Gazans.

As I said, we're speaking with Bushrach Khalidi today, who will talk to us about her work from the vantage point of Oxfam.

Bushrach, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So let's begin with first describing Oxfam's work in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Yeah, sure.

We've been here since 1956.

We have offices in Ramallah and Jerusalem and in Gaza.

And Oxfam was originally set up as an organization to fight famine, you know, the first kind of famines that we've seen globally.

That's originally why Oxfam was set up.

And then, so a lot of its programming is around water and sanitation, food security, livelihoods, working with farmers.

A big part of our program is water and sanitation, helping, for example, farming communities, providing them with irrigation pipelines.

You know, it could be agricultural inputs needed for growing their crops.

It could be technical support to farmers to support them in growing, for example, vegetables.

How do you grow crops of vegetables around date trees you know so it's it's kind of that kind of work in terms of uh the food security component of it that we have a big part of our work is with women's organizations women's cooperatives women's farming cooperatives as well especially in um the west bank um and then a lot of a lot of work with kind of the the relevant ministries and relevant trade unions on, for example, agricultural insurance.

So getting, you know, trying to get insurance for farmers in case their crops are ruined or sabotaged or damaged, for example, by settler violence, et cetera.

So there is kind of like a piloting kind of program where we're looking at the potential of providing insurance to the farming sector here in Palestine.

Other things could be, could look like, you know, small grants to start a small kind of business, women, for example, ceramics, women's cooperatives in farming.

I mean, so a lot of it worked like this.

And most of our operations are actually run through partners.

So we have about 90 partners kind of across the occupied Palestinian territory and about 80 to 90 of our operations are actually completely implemented through partners.

But of course, after the 7th of October, our programming really drastically kind of shifted to fully humanitarian.

where we are now basically providing hygiene kits, food parcels, some agricultural inputs as well, where we could know, set in Gaza, it looks like setting up latrines, hand washing state, like mobile stations.

It can be like water trucking.

I mean, it's changed, you know, depending on the access that we've had.

So for example, since March this year, we've not been able to enter anything because of Israel's full total siege on Gaza.

So nothing kind of entered.

So our operations look like psychosocial support to women, young girls in shelters, trucking water from one area to another where we felt like these communities potentially needed water or had little access to water.

It looks like a cash for work.

We do a big, big, big, big, big part of our,

both now in the West Bank and in Gaza, is providing cash for work.

So, for example, we have daily workers that will remove solid waste with their bare hands, unfortunately, because there's no materials to remove waste in Gaza.

But then they would receive like kind of daily, daily rates in order to get paid.

And then there's like cash vouchers for the most vulnerable where they can you know have a voucher in a store and they can you know purchase items um that we've agreed for example with the store owner to that you know people can purchase with our with our kind of cards so it's very versatile versatile and especially in the last few years had to adapt and change you know very quickly and flexibly depending on the situation what's available in the markets but that's kind of like what our programming looks like across the territory yeah thank you for explaining that.

And it brings me to, I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but it brings me to a second question that I think is important for listeners to understand is

how has

the

war and post-October 7th really impacted the restrictions that the Israeli government is imposing?

So we know there's a siege in Gaza, but also in the West Bank.

Absolutely.

There is so much happening.

How has that impacted Oxfam's work?

It's completely restricted us.

And not just us, it's all of the international kind of sector, including UN agencies.

I mean, we know what they did with UNRWA.

Can we maybe explain that?

Yeah,

I mean, Israel, the government of Israel's kind of attacks, or let's say attacks on humanitarian and civic space, it's been a long-standing policy of theirs and started well before 7th of October.

It's gotten just, you know, much tighter, much more restrictive since.

But, you know, this goes back decades.

I would say kind of the most notorious development in shrinking space, we call it shrinking space, is 2021 when they declared six organizations, Palestinian civil society organizations, mostly our human rights organizations, some of the most notorious and well-known human rights organizations where they're designated as terrorist organizations.

So that was kind of the first big

development where many of those partners, those six partners, were actually partners of international organizations.

So we found ourselves kind of advocating for continuing our support to these six despite the designation by Israel.

And there was never, of course, evidence provided by the Israeli government as to what evidence they had, why would they deem these organizations terrorist organizations.

But, you know, they continue to operate under very, very difficult circumstances.

Their offices were raided, their assets were confiscated, but you know, they're still operational and we're still certainly supporting them.

And of course,

shrinking space or the restrictions on humanitarian civic space, it translates into

so many different restrictions.

It could be restrictions on permits, restrictions on what crossings you're able to use as a humanitarian,

whether you can go through that crossing or another.

It can be visa restrictions.

And we started seeing the visa restrictions even before the war.

And after the war, of course, everything kind of changed.

And now we're facing, and I'm talking more about like legal restrictions in terms of our work.

And then I can talk more about like the siege and the actual blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which is, you know, effectively completely restricted in our operations and has dismantled really the humanitarian sector in its entirety and has reverberating impacts to the rest of the territory.

But for us, I think the first kind of sign of turmoil turmoil was when there was already a decision, but nothing had been kind of formally communicated of a new registration process for international organizations.

That started already in 2024, where the

civil administration

announced to our respective organizations that there will be a new registration procedures.

The Israeli civil administration.

The Israeli civil administration.

And so it was only kind of 10 months later that the criteria was kind of presented to us.

And only a year later, that the criteria actually came into effect.

But in that time, where they were announcing these new measures, there were lots of visa denials.

Permits, of course, were completely non-existent for humanitarians.

For example, you know, I had a permit to Gaza for six months.

That, of course, stopped.

All of our staff in the West Bank had permits to travel both to Gaza and in Israel.

Those stopped on the 7th of October.

And same vice versa.

Our colleagues in Gaza who had permits to come to Israel to travel through the Alanbi Bridge because, of course, you know, Palestinians don't have an airport, so they have to travel through Alanbi to travel through Amman.

Those also stopped.

So that's one other kind of like, you know, measure that was taken against international organizations.

And then

when the new registration rules were made public and the criteria was made public, there was a new, there's a new ministry set up called the Ministry of Diaspora and something affairs.

I know, I know, diaspora affairs.

I forget the full name of the ministry, but it's an inter-ministerial committee that

is made of basically thugs.

If you look at the background of some of these people that are in the committee, I mean, you know, it's and they are now deciding of the registration of international organizations.

And the criteria is onerous, it's political, it's vague, and you know, even it it crosses some of our red lines in terms of organization.

I mean, one of the, I think, the most contentious criteria is submitting staff lists and all of the information of our staff to the Israeli authorities, which is something we've never had to do before.

It's not something that is actually in any other context, it's not abnormal for an authority or a country or state to ask, you know, who is your staff working for this organization you're seeking registration from.

But obviously, because of the unprecedented number of humanitarian workers that have been targeted and indiscriminately targeted as well, in Gaza, we've got more than 400 humanitarian workers killed.

At this point, we are unable to submit our staff list because of, you know, we have no guarantees of protection.

Even though we have guarantees under, you know, international law, this is not applied when it comes to Gaza and in Israel's conduct and

the hostilities against humanitarian workers in the humanitarian space.

So that's one of the criteria.

But there's also other criteria where, for example, we would be revoked our registration or not be registered if we are seen to support some of the designated organizations that were designated earlier on, which most of our organizations do.

So many of us are facing, about to face basically being deregistered in Israel and losing our presence in Jerusalem, which is, you know, has such a big implications, not because, you know, we're so desperate to have presence in Jerusalem, but because it says a lot about what the future of East Jerusalem means.

Because you're removing Ernerwa, you're removing the INGOs, and you're removing all the program and the support that goes to organizations that are operating in Jerusalem, providing legal services to people that are losing their homes, that are getting their homes demolished on a daily basis, legal services for settler attacks that happen also in East Jerusalem, and school provision of school services, educational items, educational activities, summer camps, you know, I mean, all, et cetera, et cetera.

The list goes on.

That will be removed.

And that's kind of, you know, it's working now in parallel with the annexation kind of plan that Israel has been threatening and implementing at the same time.

So, you know, everything is moving towards this annexation.

It also has vast implications because many of our organizations operate in Area C because the most vulnerable communities, you know, are in Area C.

And so we always, you know, we, as part of our programming, is obviously reaching the most vulnerable Palestinians and those that need to help to support the most and so annexing area c and deregistering at the same time deregistering us from israel means that we will also have very a lot of difficulty accessing these communities and accessing area c as humanitarian organizations we've not had visas for international staff uh for since the beginning of the war and then when you look at you know gaza so this is kind of like looking at the west bank and what is how it's evolving in the west bank but then you know uh the fact that we would be deregistered would effectively mean that we cannot operate in Gaza anymore

because you have to have an Israeli registration in order to be able to bring goods in inside Gaza.

And so if you're deregistered, you can't bring in goods into Gaza.

This triangulation of the humanitarian and civic spaces is all-encompassing in Gaza.

Of course, it looks like our materials have been systematically and deliberately denied, rejected, delayed, you know, over the course of the last 20 months.

But of course, adding to worse since March 2nd, when Israel imposed its total siege on Gaza and basically has completely sidelined the UN INGOs and Palestinian civil society.

And since then, we've not been able to enter anything in Gaza.

And I doubt that we will be able to enter anything moving forward, especially that the registration kind of window ends in September, beginning in September.

That's when we'll finally know who is going to be registered, who's not.

But I expect for an organization like Oxfam, that's part of the registration process.

It's very vague.

So we don't know how they will apply it, but there's something about basically calling, again, you know, calling out or speaking out or calling for accountability of individual soldiers and members of the IDF.

So what that means, I don't know, but we call for accountability every day because it's part of our mandate.

We're not just an operational organization.

We're a rights-based organization.

And so we have a mandate to also, you know, where we witness violations of human rights or of international law, it is our mandate to speak out on it.

And so there's no operations without that.

So that's where we're at right now.

It's an incredibly difficult space.

It is, of course, deliberate.

This is a deliberate policy of Israel that is, you know, it's carried out against

the kind of

humanitarian civic space for years.

It's also, there's another law, there's a law that's against the Israeli human rights organization where it will start taxing Israeli human rights organizations that are receiving foreign funding by 50 to 80 percent or something like that.

So it's just, it's, it's, you know, it's deliberate, it's thematic.

We have been the only ones in Gaza that have been able to actually report independently on what's happening in Gaza, like the humanitarians happen, not even the journalists, because of course, you know, I can argue that yes, Palestinian journalists are independent, but you know, the most of the world would probably disagree with that.

So really, I mean, the independent kind of eyes and the neutral eyes or let's say the impartial eyes, I won't say neutral, happen to humanitarians and UN agencies.

Sidelining us means that we'll also see a reduction of quality reporting on what's actually happening in Gaza.

So it's terrifying.

It's an attack on our ability to even understand the level of the problem

that is being left in the wake of this war, which of course is ongoing.

But also, I think it's really important.

I mean, the things you just described, I think it's really important for listeners to understand this.

The aid question, the question of these humanitarian organizations and what's happening to them, whether it's the registration through the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, and I think combating anti-Semitism is its full name.

That's it.

Sorry.

Should have remote.

So, yeah.

I mean, there are so many problems with this ministry and it has been even internally criticized by Tel Aviv University, for example.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or even actually members of the government itself, by the way.

I think there was a, yeah, there was something about somebody in the Israeli government not attending the inter-ministerial committee meeting, you know, because it was not wanting to be associated to it.

So yeah, there's

okay.

It's a very problematic committee.

But I mean, if this kind of committee is responsible for registering internet, you know, international organizations and humanitarian organizations, then there's all the blockade of aid.

All of these are parts of the same ethnic cleansing strategy.

What we're seeing in Gaza, whether you want to call it ethnic cleansing or genocide, you know, people are being eradicated.

We're seeing large-scale displacements in the West Bank.

And as you mentioned, if these organizations also stop existing in Jerusalem, we'll see Jerusalem next.

Not piecemeal the way that we've been seeing it, possible, absolutely.

You know,

more aggressive way.

And so I really think it's important to kind of underscore for listeners that this is part and parcel of an annexation, an ethnic cleansing plan that people from the religious Zionist Party have been saying since the early 2010s.

Vasil El Smotrich, finance minister today had the decisive plan that said you know you either surrender or transfer and we're we're at that level they are transferring they are making sure that that happens and they are in the west bank as well i mean you know it's quiet and right all eyes are on gaza but i mean we've seen displacement of entire communities in the last few weeks only yeah let alone the largest numbers of forcibly displaced palestinians since 1967 in the west bank this year and in the you know refugee camps that have been attacked exactly so you know, and again, I mean, you know, you can look at the history of smear campaigns against ONOWA by the Israeli authorities.

I mean, that's just in itself, you know, the services that ONAWA provides.

You know, we have to re-emphasize like education, health services, I mean, you know, shelter.

ONOWA provides key services that the Palestinian Authority has no ability to respond to.

What is going to happen to all of these people when, you know, and already UNOWA.

so listeners, electricity cut off in Ramallah.

This is our lives.

Yeah.

So we might have to restart some of that and certainly.

That's fine.

Yeah.

So did you want to pick up where you left off?

I was, yeah, I mean, the point is, is that this is, you know, a long-standing policy by Israel.

It's just like very much accelerated like every other policy of theirs when it comes to, you know, forcible displacement, collective punishment, you know, detentions.

I mean, everything is at a record high and and accelerating so quickly with this, you know, right-wing, far-right-wing government that's, you know, has zero checks and balances, zero, nobody holds them accountable to anything.

And so, you know, they're able to get away with all of this.

So, I mean, my sense is that, you know, very soon, you will no longer see kind of the long-standing organizations that have been here for decades that have very much understood the context very well and have understood that it's impossible to do the work that we do without also bearing witness and speaking out on what we're witnessing.

And I think the UN, and it's in that way, you know, even the United Nations, where in Palestine, has made sure that it stays committed to that mandate because of how important

it is to speak out on what you're seeing around you.

I think like that's purely, I think, like, you know, we're the only ones that are able to witness and record independently what we're seeing on a day-to-day basis.

And I think the UN has been incredible in keeping a record of that.

I mean, I think they started recording in 2008.

So it's like 18 years now almost of monitoring violations all across the territory.

And if it wasn't for the work that the UN has done in that, we wouldn't be able to say that there is a genocide being carried out in Gaza or that the risk of ethnic cleansing has risen risen exponentially in the West Bank.

The reason why we're able to say this is because we're able to see the patterns and the data.

And, you know, you can contest the data.

But, you know, even you were talking about the IPC.

The IPC is not even reflective of what's really happening.

And they say it themselves, but of course, the media, the way the media kind of focuses on what the results, because

you only have time for sound bites.

But if we read the IPC alerts, it's clear that one, they're always delayed.

So they're always talking about

a time that's already passed and we're way beyond that.

And two, it says that it doesn't have access to Gaza.

But look at the testimonies, you know, just like just reading the testimonies that some of our organizations have recorded in the last week, just talking about our own colleagues and how they are facing starvation themselves.

I mean, I think the testimonies speak to themselves on what is happening in Gaza.

And I don't need the IPC to tell me that there's a classification four or five.

It's never going to declare famine when it's not there.

Like there's never going to be a time where the IPC, because that's not even the role of the IPC.

The role of the IPC is not to declare a famine.

The role of the IPC is just to collect the data and publish the data.

And then it's the role of the UN or another international body to do so.

So we're not going to see a famine declaration because we don't have access.

And so, you know, we're not going to be able to say that.

with confidence because the IPC is never going to be able to publish that data.

But I don't think it matters.

I think what matters is what we're seeing on the ground, what's being reported.

And, you know, I mean, it's on, it's undeniable, really, by the pictures themselves.

I mean, the videos and the pictures that are coming out of Gaza just speak for themselves, really.

So it's definitely unprecedented times for us.

And it's going to be a very, very interesting and frightening, terrifying year, to be frank.

Yeah.

No, I mean, as I, as I said at the beginning, and there are, of course, critiques also of the limitations of the UN.

Yeah.

But this idea that

they are wanting organizations

as a condition of registering them to somehow not bear witness to what is happening and not to write reports about what's happening, it's a way of hobbling the ability of actually creating policies.

Like if you want to talk about famine or if you want to talk about poverty, as Oxfam does, how could you solve it without talking about the root cause?

In every way, in every direction, the Israeli government is attempting to hobble the ability of international organizations of the palestinians themselves to be able to solve the root causes of these problems yeah absolutely i mean it will have to be find creative ways just like you know our palestinian civil society partners that you know uh have been also designated have had to find you know ways to continue doing their work but you know i mean even them

you know, they've lost funding, they've had to reduce their operations, they've had to reduce their field officers that go to the field and do this work.

So, I mean,

it's so uncertain, but I think the fact that many of these organizations have been here for so long, understand so deeply the context.

I think organizations will also do whatever they can in order to ensure that they continue their important work here and find ways to continue to work.

I don't know how.

It's really a new time for us.

Like, we've never been there before.

So, we don't know what it looks like,

how we're going to be able to continue our work.

But we're committed to that.

So we will find, you know, whatever,

I don't want to say loophole because, you know, there are none, but we'll find whatever way to continue to continue kind of being here and being present and

remaining present because I think it's also part of our commitment to the work that we've been doing in OPT for decades.

So,

yeah.

Yeah.

I think maybe we should end on a discussion about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

I mean, I've already mentioned it in a previous episode, so I encourage listeners to look into that.

But I, you know, think it's important we discuss what is this foundation and what is the impact it has had on people in Gaza and on international organizations that are already doing this work.

Yeah.

Okay, the GHF or Gaza Humanitarian Foundation slash GHF, I don't like talking about it as such because it's the issue, of course, is that's one of the issues, but GHF is part of many actors, okay?

And it's not GHF.

GHF is a facade for many actors that, you know, the U.S.

and Israelis.

It's an Israeli plan.

And I don't think we need to, we cannot, you know, I know there's U.S.

military actors and GHF at, you know, the border and shooting at people, but this is an Israeli plan.

Okay.

And we have to dub it as such.

This plan actually came into, we started hearing about this plan a year and a half ago.

It was maybe in May last year.

We saw the General Islands plan on what they wanted to do in the north when they started the ethnic cleansing campaign in the north of Gaza, where they besieged the north and tried to force everybody south.

The idea then was already, they had already, we were already hearing about something called humanitarian bubbles.

And the bubbles are the sites of what it's what's what's become the sites, right?

But this idea has been floating around for more than 18 months, it's just that nothing kind of transpired until May, I guess.

That's when May the operation started.

So Israelis launched this as an authorization mechanism.

This is how it was originally kind of, and that would expand basically Israeli military control over how aid enters, moves within, and is distributed inside Gaza.

And of course, I mean, that on its own is a clear attempt to instrumentalize humanitarian aid.

So, you know, and I think

it's very important to clarify, you know, our organizations, we operate under extremely rigorous standards and mechanisms where we ensure the aid is not diverted.

And I think aid diversion, you know, it's been talked about like Hamas,

aid diversion exists everywhere.

It exists in every crisis we work in.

Like it's something that is

part of, you know, crisis mode.

Like this is where when there's a crisis, when there's chaos, that's where there's space for informal actors to start cropping up.

So, it's a symptom of every crisis around the world.

And so, you know, it's not just a Gaza thing.

So, we have protocols on how we can ensure that aid diversion doesn't happen in operations.

And, of course, as humanitarians, we would never accept military or profit-driven intermediaries overriding what we call principled aid delivery.

Because it basically means that you're expanding military control over aid operations by an actual party to the conflict, you know, which of course risks that aid will never reach the most vulnerable, you know, of course, at a time when it was most needed.

So, from our perspective, there is no scenario where we would accept any attempts to militarize and privatize humanitarian aid, whether it's in Gaza or anywhere else, because such actions actually violate international humanitarian law.

But also, they undermine the core principles of humanitarian law, which are impartiality, independence, and humanity.

These are principles that guide all of our work.

And of course, what is the most dangerous about this model is not only the massacres that have occurred near daily at these food distribution sites run by the GHF and other actors.

It's that it sets such a dangerous precedent where occupying powers around the world will now be able to dictate the terms of aid based on their political agendas and their military goals.

That is what's effectively now happened.

Is that if it's happened in Gaza, why can it not happen in Uganda, in DRC, and Sudan?

And I want to also take it a little back.

Let's talk about the peer.

The peer last year is exactly the same.

It's the same thing it's an international company called fogbo run by former u.s military uh veterans and and and and soldiers and others other actors that you know spent 320 million dollars on a floating pier that brought virtually nothing in And in fact, was used for one rescue mission, rescue operation by special forces, where they entered, I think it was the Waida camp, the refugee camp at the time, time, and were able to obviously, yeah, rescue hostages, but kill, I mean, you know, dozens in that operation using the pier.

And hence why we're like, we do not, we would distance ourselves and from the beginning, distance ourselves from the pier.

There's no difference with the distribution sites.

It's the same kind of idea that with logistics,

we can address a political issue.

The issue of Gaza is not an issue of logistics, something that UN or INGOs don't know how to do the work.

Palestinian civil society has been responding to the civilian needs in Gaza from before the war.

80% of the Gazan population was dependent on humanitarian assistance before the war.

So, I mean, you know, but it's not that we didn't know how to do it.

It's that we were prevented from doing it.

Right.

We were deliberately prevented from doing it.

So it's a political decision.

It's not a logistical decision.

that that prevents us from doing our work in Gaza.

And so granting Israel control over who receives the aid, where they receive the aid and from who has basically turned what is relief, what should be relief to the civilian population into actually a tool of coercion.

Because what we saw is massacres, people being shot indiscriminately at.

I mean, we've heard, we heard Dr.

Nick Maynard yesterday, yesterday, he came back from Gaza a week ago, where we've heard of children being shot in the testicles at these distribution sites.

You know, and not one,

he mentioned on the same day, he saw a half a dozen boys with the same injury.

Sniper shots, sniper shots in the testicles at food distribution sites.

Right.

So, what's happened now is that what Israel has done is that it blurred the line between what humanitarian assistance is, what a military objective is, and of course, putting the civilian, Palestinian civilians and aid workers as well, because aid workers, we know of some of our colleagues in different organizations that even themselves have had to go to these food distribution sites because there's nothing and we're unable to even support our own staff at risk.

And of course, I mean, this entire system has eroded any protections that are guaranteed to aid workers and humanitarian responses under international law and under the Geneva Conventions.

So it's not only that it killed people and that it's harmed Palestinians, but it actually, it's also a complete disregard.

for international law, complete disregard of international law.

And at the same time, I think what what people fail to remember is that at the same time as this plan of the distribution sites was being set up in the south, at the same time, Israel every two days was evacuating, forcibly displacing basically the population towards the south, right?

And in less than two months, we've got almost a thousand Palestinians that were killed, but also an immense movement of the population towards the south because that's the only place that they had food, right?

So, you know, this is not protection.

This is complete coercion.

You know, when you move aid into fence-supervised spaces under military, is really military control, frankly, and what we saw from the pictures, recalls some of the darkest chapters of humanitarian failure

of our history.

It's not protection, it's coercion.

And,

you know, no countries, nobody should ever support a model that is basically treating civilians as prisoners.

And that's not what humanitarian aid is about.

Humanitarian responses have to be guided by international law.

It has to remain voluntary.

It has to be grounded in the dignity of the people.

And it has to be delivered impartially, not shaped by Israel's occupation or Israel's siege or Israel's military control.

So not only has this scheme reinforced military control over the Gaza ship, it has completely dehumanized Palestinians by design.

Like Palestinians are only worth a box of food.

That's what basically, essentially what has happened is that

we have reduced a humanitarian response that addresses hospitals, medical care, water, sanitation, wastewater, shelter.

It goes right to dignity.

To a box of flour, you know?

That you can get killed getting.

Or you get killed.

And not only that, it's a first come, first serve.

You know, it's whoever's...

the strongest.

It's the survival of the fittest.

That's not what humanitarian aid is about.

We're supposed to meet the most vulnerable.

We need to reach the pregnant moms, the people with disabilities, the number, record number of amputees in Gaza, the record number of disabled people in Gaza right now.

Children, half of Gaza are children.

They are a part of some of the most vulnerable sections of society.

Aid should be going to them.

They shouldn't have to come to us, walk for, you know.

I mean, some people have said 20 kilometers they've had to walk to go to these distribution sites in the middle of the night in the sand dunes.

They have to duck because otherwise they might get shot by sniper shot.

And then when the gates of hell open of these, you know, fence zones, whatever you want to call them, I don't even like calling them distribution sites because they're not distribution sites.

It implies that there's some sort of like system to it.

There's no system.

It's literally the gates to hell.

And then everybody flows into the, you know, floods.

And we've heard of people carrying knives to protect themselves because they're getting looted because not enough, of course, right?

And then there are gangs that are being weaponized by the people.

And actually

what I was saying to people is that actually what GHF has created, it has created the perfect, it's the perfect recipe for armed gangs and aid diversion to occur.

Like it's actually like providing the perfect environment.

for these informal actors, gangs, criminals to prosper.

So, you know, this is, this is, you're creating that kind of environment.

Because let's just be very direct.

This is not about aid.

no of course not this no it's not coercion it's about coercion i mean as you mentioned at from the very beginning it was about sequestering palestinians yeah and they said it actually and and by the way they said it the israeli war cabinet has said that you know and it's like we have to take things at face value sometimes they said it they've been saying it for the last year we just you know waited until it happened on the ground to be able to now say it and confirm it.

But this was their plan from the beginning.

And there was nothing implied.

It was very explicit.

Right.

No, I mean, very, very clear.

And it really frustrates me personally because,

you know, Arab media, Palestinian journalists, Palestinians on the ground testimonies would say, we're being arrested at these sites.

They're using facial recognition.

They're very much politicizing aid.

And it took forever for us to be...

even be able to say it, to even be able to report on it until Western media sources confirmed.

Yesterday, a number of children were released

from being arrested at the aid sites.

And I couldn't mention that in things that I wrote because they didn't believe Palestinian testimony.

I mean, the GHF contractor themselves themselves have admitted to what is happening and everything that we've been seeing and saying and, you know, and warning.

I mean, you know, I'd like to say as well, I mean, I want to underscore actually humanitarians have been underlining this very, very explicitly to everybody since before they they were even set.

So, you know, I can speak with a clear conscience that we did what we needed and we could, you know, what we could do.

And we did warn that this would happen and this would be the result.

And now here we are.

Right.

No, I mean, it's it's absolutely important.

Um, Pauline.

So I want to mention to listeners, I will put in the show notes a lot of, you know, these citations, the UN reporting that close to a thousand people have died at these sites.

Yeah.

The doctor Nick Maynard speaking to Channel 4 News in Britain about what he saw.

I also want to point listeners to a volume that was released called Suppressing Dissent, edited by Zaha Hassan and H.A.

Hellier, because full disclosure, I do have a chapter in that book, but it's about the shrinking civic space prior to October 7th and

the dynamics that we have seen, you know, basically playing out at this point.

Thank you so much, Bushra, for coming and speaking with us under such severe circumstances and explaining, I think, really succinctly the dangers of this moment.

Because

what is happening in Gaza will change the world.

It will change everywhere.

And it already is.

I think, you know, I would tell listeners, go look at AP's article on Fogbo in Uganda and Sudan.

We're already seeing it.

It's not even that it will change the world.

We're already seeing the precedent that Gaza has set for other humanitarian crises and for these military actors and private contractors to profit from misery.

Like that's that's essentially what is happening.

It's happening.

So, you know, I would also direct you to that article from AP that came out a couple of weeks ago about the same companies operating in Gaza and, you know, being complicit in the atrocities that we're seeing unfold in Gaza,

now operating in other contexts and crises, humanitarian crises.

Really terrible, breaking world.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much.

And thanks, Dana.

Stay safe.

Thank you.

And hopefully, see you soon and talk to you soon.

Minchal.

Take care.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the podcast.

It's me, James, today, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Bryce from No More Deaths.

And what we're going to talk about today is this really excellent piece of data visualization and research that depicts a very sad topic, which is the deaths of migrants entering the United States.

And Bryce, I know, has done a lot of work on this.

So, welcome to the show, Bryce.

Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome.

I guess maybe we can start off.

I'm looking at this data visualization on a map right now, and we'll have links in the show notes for other people who want to look at it.

Can you explain

what this data set is?

Yeah, so we collected through a bunch of different sources: medical examiners, justices of the peace, sheriff's department, CBP's own data, just a bunch of data on individual migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico border.

And so this is different data through each source, but generally we tried to get a lot of demographic data, location data, cause of death, and at least some form of the incident narrative to kind of get a little bit of the context on how each of these people died.

Yeah.

If people are looking at the map, they can see various color dots, right?

And they can click on that dot and that that will give them the fiscal year, the border patrol sector.

In some cases, you'll see like

the type of death, maybe a gender and age, things like that.

I don't know, looking at it, like, it's one of those things that maybe is more emotionally difficult to view if you're more familiar.

Like, I can look at these dots and I can think of places I've been.

I can even think of the...

day I was there and it's quite i don't know it's impactful to see that all these people have died in places i know so well perhaps we can explain like the scale of this is huge right do you know how many exactly how many data points there are on here well i think there's something like 12 or 13 000 yeah it's vast which overall is like not a great sort of like indicator of of how many people have actually died or even of how many people could be reported to have died just because the texas data is so wonky but yeah let's get into that then let's talk about maybe the the sources for this data and then maybe perhaps how your estimates are much high, even with some of the emissions, like the data that you have tends to show under-reporting.

So, like, can you explain first, like, where does this data come from and how did you get it?

You were saying the Texas numbers are lower, but can you explain how there are these multiple jurisdictions and how you can't just ask someone for this information?

Yeah, there's a few people who are able to just ask for it.

Well, generally, it all comes from formal public records requests, from medical examiners when we're lucky, because medical examiners usually have really good, easily searchable data.

So that's what we did for San Diego County.

Yep, they're very good.

Kima County, the state of New Mexico, El Paso.

Other places have a coroner that are associated with your sheriff department.

And that's usually a little dicier.

They're a little more reluctant to give up records.

That would be like Imperial County or Yuma County.

And then Texas, it's just like a medical legal nightmare.

So there's if smaller counties don't have medical examiners, they just have justices of the peace, which are part of like the courts, and they'll go out and investigate deaths.

And if an autopsy is needed, they'll send it off to another county to get an autopsy.

There's a huge amount of counties in Texas like this.

So that data all came from this researcher, Stephanie Leuter from the University of Texas Austin, who is working on a different project, but was gracious enough to share everything that she had collected.

But that was like just a huge amount of legwork of physically going to each of these counties, looking at paper records from justices of the peace, writing down all that data.

There's some that comes from like sheriff's department, some that comes from various other sources.

So the Texas data, I mean, some of you, for example, Webb County.

medical examiner, they don't give up their data to anybody.

And there's a lot of issues with them potentially like not having actually performed autopsy on a lot autopsies on a lot of migrants and there's some potential focuses about that going on but yeah so texas is really messy and a lot of it you'll notice like texas has a lot of the purple dots yeah the purple dots are location data from uh border patrols database yeah and so that ends in 2018 so we have data past only in border patrol but not location data yeah and so a lot of texas on z being this

the Border Patrol data, unless we had

specific access to that place's justice to the peace data.

So the Texas data is pretty limited for that reason.

Yeah, you can see the sort of very few red dots, which are your other data sources.

in Texas, aside from it.

It's like maybe Brooks County, you're able to get Justice to the Peace data there because the density is profound.

Yeah, it's just the

Brooks County Sheriff's Department that actually puts together that data.

They're really keen on the whole thing.

Okay.

And partially it's because the data exists, but partially it really was just because you reached cluster of deaths in that area because a checkpoint south of there where people will get dropped off south of the checkpoint, hike around.

It's just like massive,

massive.

open graveyard in Brooks County.

Geez.

Yeah, I don't think I spent much time in that part of Texas, but certainly like some of these other ones I'm much more familiar with.

Let's talk about the CBP data, right?

You mentioned it there.

One of the things that you found was that CBP has a systemic issue with undercounting deaths, right?

Yeah.

So where does that come from?

So I've heard from, I guess for years, Key Mane Borders and Pima County Medical Examiner have been.

documenting this since at least 2014.

The major undercount on Border Patrol's data.

But something I hear a lot is just that it's cases where Border Patrol wasn't personally involved in the search and that they had like changed their counting system to only be counting cases where they were involved.

And I think that may account for some of it.

But in order to compare these deaths, Border Patrol's data is just really gnarly and messy and bad.

There's typos, there's misspellings, states are wrong, ages are wrong, genders are wrong.

So you really, in order to compare them, you really have to go person by person go down the list find the deaths and border patrol database look in the medical examiner data on the find the matches person by person so because we have so much of the incident narratives from the medical examiners we can actually tell when border patrol was involved and so we marked when border patrol is involved when they're not involved and then when that case doesn't actually get counted by border patrol okay and it doesn't actually really line up there's not a huge correlation there i mean there is some correlation like older skeletal remains, things like that, often won't get counted.

But generally, there are a lot of cases where they're directly involved or even they were the first responders on the scene to a distress call or any number of things where that person won't end up in border patrols database.

And then other cases where it seems like they had no involvement, and that person ends up in border controls database.

So, I mean, they've been in trouble with the GAO multiple times for undercounting or improperly counting or reporting these deaths.

And so they have access to medical examiner data.

Medical examiners send them the data.

They just don't use it.

We often also noticed that the causes of death really don't match up in a lot of like really specific cases.

Like for Wall Falls, for instance, was the most notable one.

There will be a huge amount of cases that medical examiner will say one force trauma, and then Border Patrol's data will say medical examiner undetermined or exposure or any number of other things, which like for the most part, causes the death scene to line up.

So the fact that for these wallfall deaths, it happens to not line up is like, you know, I don't want to assume they have bad intent, although obviously Border's bad intent, but

it seems like it happens regularly enough that it's hard to feel like it's not, at least somewhat intentional, that the cases that they're kind of choosing to change the causes of death for.

Right.

So like it obfuscates the lethality of the border wall rating, the amount of people who it kills.

Yeah, Yeah, I mean, to a huge degree, too.

I mean, the fact that border controls data is kind of our only source of data for migrant deaths, and then specifically for deaths caused by border patrol or like wallfall deaths, means that the amount of deaths that we, the public, has access to, like wallfall deaths, for instance, is just a drop in the bucket compared to what's actually happening.

So, all of the research and reporting and all the stuff that happens around these CMT-related deaths is drawing off of just like truly false numbers.

Yeah, yeah.

And that leads to people drawing like bad conclusions, right?

Right.

The

other thing that you found is that, like, there seems to be an under-reporting of in-custody deaths, right?

Or an under-counting of people who die in custody.

So, can you explain how you were able to ascertain that difference between the in-custody deaths recorded recorded by the Office of Professional Responsibility versus the ones that you found, right?

Right.

So the Office of Professional Responsibility is part of CBP, and they're supposed to be recording all of

CBP-related deaths, including, according to the Deaths in Custody Reporting Act of like 2013 or whatever it was, Army Deaths in Custody.

There's a really specific definition of what in custody means.

And so we tried to follow pretty strictly what that definition was to kind of make our own assessments using the incident narratives.

Yeah.

I'm curious, what does it mean?

Like, I'm thinking about door detention, right?

Like, does that count as in custody?

Yeah, so anytime if a person is in the process of being apprehended, if the person has been apprehended, if the person has been detained, if the person is physically in custody, border patrol, in a border patrol vehicle, in a CUT facility, all those things would count as in custody.

Okay.

It's just important because in at least one of the cases, the border patrol agent agent involved said the person wasn't in custody, he was just detained.

Which, for the purposes of reporting, there's actually no difference, right?

Yeah, but he said that clearly to not have it be labeled as an in custody death, right?

And what it seems like that ended up not being labeled as a in custody death.

So, it's definitely, I think they're they're aware of the fact that these are being reported and kind of trying not to have that be the case, not to have too many of them like appear.

Another interesting data, interesting is your own word, but another data point here was the amount of deaths caused by pursuit right or in pursuit i guess maybe just you should just explain like what pursuit is to people if they're not aware yeah so there's two kinds of pursuit we list them as the same here but on the database you can see the difference of there's chases in a motor vehicle and there's chases on foot so if for example a person's getting chased through the desert and collapses and dies they'll be considered a death either pursuit or if a person is like in el paso or san diego or imperial county more

is chased and ends up falling in a canal or jumping into a canal to escape and drowns that'd be a chase on foot um and then motor vehicle pursuits are yes if a person is being chased by border patrol and the government crashes and people are killed yeah use of force cases also include some of these chases through OPR standards and CBP standards.

If spike strips are deployed or if a vehicle is ran by a border control vehicle, that's considered use of force.

So, deaths where a person died due to that, we would call that a use of force death.

Yeah, so I guess those are the two to three different kinds of proceeds that they do.

And so, like, yeah, those are, as you say, they're broken down in the database, right?

But in the spreadsheet, they are combined.

What does this data show us about, like, I guess if we look at the last half decade or so,

let's go back to like 2016, right?

Border policy, like

what does it show us about, like, Title VIII, Title 42?

We're like a little too

close to the Biden asylum ban to have, I guess, like, like, good data on that yet.

But do you see a clear pattern in like

the border rhetoric and border quote-unquote enforcement and the amount of deaths or the type of deaths.

Oh, definitely.

Yeah,

it's immediately clear.

I mean, even Biden's asylum ban, I think there was an immediate effect.

I mean, even just with as a no more deaths volunteer, we started seeing people crossing the border, crossing the desert that just never would have made the attempt previously, you know, and then started to see those people reporting the death data too.

So I think all of that is pretty clear.

So with Trump's restrictions on asylum, I think that the biggest thing, honestly, was all the meteoring policies rather than just Title 42 or like protection protocols or any of that.

It was just the fact that people weren't allowed to access the border country.

Yeah.

Ended up kind of like going around to enter like other places in the desert, like the border to pick them up that all this started happening.

Yeah.

And so it's kind of like a trickle in 2019, 2020, a little bit more in 2021.

And then 2022, you suddenly see just huge amounts of people from countries other than Mexico, Central America starting to show up in the data.

And then also like people who clearly were trying to seek asylum showing up in this gap data all the way up until it slowed down after the end of 2023.

And then, but definitely continued through 2024.

Yeah, definitely.

Like speaking from my own experience on the border here, we saw the same thing, right?

Like people crossing who you wouldn't have seen making that crossing in places and times that they wouldn't have crossed, you know, before the Biden asylum ban.

And like, that definitely resulted in.

I mean,

there was a weekend in September where I think five people died, September 2024.

We had a heat wave and like, yeah, it immediately resulted in multiple fatalities that wouldn't have been the case previously.

I wonder, like,

what is this data set

in terms of like recommendations, right?

In terms of how we can use this data set.

Obviously, we're at a time when I guess the Trump administration had its complete asylum ban stayed, but we're back at like people can't, in good faith, like turn up to a port of entry anymore and just be like, hey, I'd like to claim asylum and really, really hope for the best.

Like, what does this data set tell us in terms of like what policies kill more people?

And I guess like, like, what recommendations arise from the data in terms?

Obviously, i guess the recommendation is to have laws that allow people to fucking enter this country and claim asylum without walking across the desert but that seems like it's too much to ask so like what do we learn in terms of like specific policies that are particularly fatal and like

the ways that those that that could be mitigated and if it's not already by like water drops and such yeah that's a hard question just because um talking to you know the older people and mammard deaths who've been around since like kind of the early years of prevention through deterrence, they talked about sort of feeling like you know, when they were first out there, being like, man, this is really unsustainable.

We can't be out here all the time like this.

Maybe like a few more years we could probably handle.

And then hopefully this prevention through deterrence thing will have like kind of stopped.

They'll see like this is unsustainable.

And then here we are all these years later and it's worse than it's ever been.

Yeah.

And the original prevention through deterrence policy is like this strategy of essentially killing people in the hopes you know people will stop trying to cross the border or something and um

kind of just is the original sin that it's really hard to get away from and yeah the fact that we're now applying the same the same strategy of death and suffering to asylum seekers is really horrifying so i think um yeah number one open up courts eventually to allow asylum seekers to seek asylum bring back like even the sort of minimum asylum protections that we had back then other things like how people are dying really matters.

Yeah.

So for example, in the El Paso sector, there was very, very few deaths in 2014.

The last couple of years, it's been the deadliest single small area in the entire border.

And a lot of that was just because the border has just become so militarized that even this like urban area where people are dying a mile from town, people are dying in town.

We, I was part of a recovery where we, this person was on a road, had been there for about three days, dead.

um it was about 40 feet from the busiest the busiest road in the entire town geez yeah

and that's just not something that really fits in with the ordinary narrative of like the venture through deterrence people getting pushed out to these more remote areas and uh i think just the level of militarization is just up to the level that it really is just deadly kind of i mean even yeah all these deaths in san diego as you know yeah also the so like all these wall tall deaths are pretty much all since like 2017 or or even more recently.

So the construction of all this new border wall, you can point very directly to a huge amount of deaths just caused by wall falls.

There's the canals in Imperial County and El Paso that kill a huge amount of people.

El Paso right now is in the process of redamping their whole canal system.

It'll be a great opportunity to add some sort of like safety systems in place so that people don't die.

Yep.

There's all the pursuit deaths, which now are not just being caused by Border Patrol, but also like the Texas Department of Public Safety, now that Operation Lone Star has popped up.

There's all these things where the kinds of deaths and the kinds of people dying and all that stuff has changed and increased really drastically in the last few years.

And you can kind of point to a lot of them, but also it's like, yeah, I don't know.

It's hard to really...

have any smart thoughts on it besides just like border patrol is unperformable and just needs to be disbanded entirely Yeah, and like this whole border regime, right?

The whole idea of like an iron border that we enforce in a physical space,

the point of it is to kill people.

Like the point of it is to deter people by

having perfectly innocent people who you'd be happy to have as your neighbor die in the desert.

Like that's that is that is the policy goal.

Like I'm just looking at like I'm looking at Pinto Canyon, which San Diego people will know.

It's pretty like don't if you're listening to this, don't go to Pinto Canyon.

You might die.

It's not a place to just go looking around if you're not experienced traveling out in the desert.

But, like, even Pinto Canyon is gnarly.

But looking along the wall, the wall kills way more people than this rugged and

difficult piece of terrain in the middle of nowhere.

Like, it's, it's things that we have paid a lot of money for that kill the most people.

Like, and that's pretty brutal to confront.

One of the other things that you guys were able to determine was that, like, a number of United States residents had died, right?

In this data set, yeah.

Can you explain that for people?

Totally.

So, yeah, like you said, there's people you'd love to have as your neighbor dying in all these places.

And not just that, but your actual neighbor.

The amount of people

whose main residence listed was was just in San Diego County, in Oceanside, in Bakersfield, in Indianapolis, places that we've all been to.

We were able to record for San Diego County and a few other counties a lot of where people actually lived and some of the circumstances for why they were crossing through the desert in the first place.

A lot of it is people who are very recently deported or who just traveled to Mexico because they had to get some paperwork done or wanted to visit family or things like this, just had entire lives in the United States and then passed away on the way back into the country.

Yeah.

Yeah, including, I mean, it's really heartbreaking to even see there's a lot of cases where the person who actually finds the body or recovers the body is that person's family members or their spouse or their children even.

which only happens because, you know, border patrol is generally not that interested in recovering bodies or or in looking for people who are lost.

So often, yeah, often it'll be, yeah, somebody's, somebody's spouse who comes and is actually the first person on the scene.

Yeah,

it's very common, right, for volunteers to be alerted via, like, you know, I know some of the search and rescue groups are alerted via like Instagram, for instance, that like

someone is missing, right?

It's not like there is,

like, despite this being massively overfunded, you can't just call and they won't just send out an ambulance.

Like a lot, a lot of

a lot of times it is either the family members or like a bunch of volunteers just driving out there in their trucks at the last night.

Like I can remember in running into some migrants in like 2023 and then being like, hey, there are some other people down there.

And I was like, where?

How'd you know?

And they'd found them on a Snapchat map.

Oh, wow.

And like that, that was the only thing that.

maybe saved those people's lives.

And yeah, it did pretty brutal to think that there's still really, there's no one.

Well, there are people you can call, come help you, but it's not the people who are getting billions of dollars.

Let's talk very briefly before we finish up about deaths outside of the United States.

I see you have some data.

Like, obviously, my familiarity is with the Darien Gap, which good luck getting, I don't think that data exists.

But like, I see you have a number of data points within Mexico.

Can you explain like how you came across those and to what extent that data is, if at all, like representative or complete?

Yeah, so it's not at all representative or complete.

It all comes from the National Institute of Immigration, the INM, in Mexico.

Yep.

Who

do water work in Grupos Federa are they're like the sort of like quote-unquote humanitarian aid group for migrants instituted by the government of Mexico in Mexico.

And so we, through the Mexican Orgum Public FOIA, you're able to get data from the Guinea Pospera, which throughout the years, there's been kind of like changing locations of offices.

So the data we have is just from where their offices are.

So it's usually just sort of like a number of deaths for that particular office for that particular year.

It's very, very limited.

And

there's many, many, many deaths that we then have

other data to show that doesn't exist here.

So it's really just kind of like, yeah, shouldn't be taken as any kind of like representative sample.

It's clearly just the one piece of Mexican data that we were able to quickly put on a map.

Yeah.

We did get other

data from like specific states in Mexico, but

we, through because of time and capacity and just the data itself, we weren't able to turn that into a map just yet.

But

we would able to do something with that.

Yeah.

And I think it still remains true that like the single deadliest mile of this journey is the United States border.

Like

at least from this data that you're seeing.

Would you say this data still supports that?

Probably.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah, probably.

I just don't want to say it because the data is just so bad in so many places, especially in Mexico.

Yeah, I'm thinking of like the Daddy Engine, right?

Like it's it's very deadly.

I've seen people die there.

Like

it's obviously a very, very difficult and rugged place.

But I think comparatively, probably more people die at the US border just because, A, there are more of them and

because people come.

Like people are, not everyone has to cross the Darien.

Like people can fly to Mexico or somewhere further south, right?

And then come up that way.

Where, if people want to find this data, or perhaps there's someone who's like a a ninja with data and data visualization and they want to offer to help, like, where can people find this and how can they reach out to Nomore Desk if they'd like to help in some way?

Yeah, so just on the No More Desk website, you can see the report and the map and all that stuff.

And in there, there's a link to the media outreach email, which in the next couple of months is my email.

And just feel free to send an email there.

And yeah, happy to give greater access.

I mean, right now, the data is pretty anonymized

for privacy and safety.

And there's a lot of the fields that we've kind of talked about that don't appear in the public database.

So happy to share that with researchers, activists, advocacy people, journalists, things like that.

And also, we desperately would love to help.

So if you're interested in looking at seeing spreadsheets,

yeah.

Cool, great.

Thank you so much for your time and for all the work on this.

I know this was a lot of work getting those records.

And I think it, I don't know, it gives us something to point to to show how many people this

ball of shit is killing.

This is it could happen here, a show about things falling apart.

I'm Garrison Davis.

This episode, I'm joined by Mia Wong.

Mia, I have some upsetting news.

Oh no,

Which is, frankly, one of the best ways to start this episode.

And one of the best ways to start the show.

So I'm pretty sure that I found this account called,

let's see, at Hale Hitler.

And I think he's posting some things that is a little bit fascist.

Oh, wow.

I have decoded some of at Hail Hitler's communiques

and I have uncovered a secret, a secret Nazi code.

Wow.

this is an incredibly unexpected revelation from Hal Hitler.

He has posted some pictures in like what I would assume is some kind of military uniform that looks like, I don't know, it's some kind of like Germanic military uniform.

But I've noticed that there are some runes on this uniform

that look very similar to the Odol rune.

So I'm thinking because of the rune, this guy might be a Nazi.

Thank you for your work, Garrison.

We could never have determined this.

That's right.

You can find me at OsintDefender online.

Oh, no, don't send people that.

OSINT Defender.

No.

That does it for us today.

And it could happen here.

Now, so this episode, we're going to talk about something that's been just slowly frustrating me the past few weeks.

And that is the misapplication of dog whistles.

And let's just get right into it.

People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in official communications

from the DHSGov online accounts, which now is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately, especially on X the Everything app.

But this extends outside of X the Everything app.

This extends outside of Blue Sky, the internet in general.

This is about how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how rhetoric and anti-fascist education works and ways that I think it's currently being misapplied.

So bear with me.

This is going to be kind of an odd episode, but I think it's worth it because I don't want us falling into the same traps that we maybe fell into eight years ago.

So

let's start by talking about some communications posted on the internet by at DHSGov.

A picture of a painting.

titled American Progress by John Gast,

captioned, A Heritage to Be Proud of, comma, a homeland worth defending.

So, on the surface, you know, maybe a slightly hashtag problematic sentiment here with a hashtag problematic painting, or at the very least, a painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and Indigenous people, specifically with like a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged white woman bathed in a white cloak, bringing forth the tide of quote-unquote progress as Indigenous people are forced to flee from the edge of the painting.

It's fun because this is a painting we literally.

When they had to explain Manifest Destiny, like colonialism good, this is the painting that was in my textbook in high school history class.

Like, it is like the er, the er, colonialism, good, genocide, good painting.

Genocide, good.

That's what the painting is.

But what I have found through some some hashtag research,

there might be a hidden code in

this communication from the DHS

already an agency that only has the best interests

of really all people who strive for human rights, the DHS.

So, if you count all of the words in the tweet, guess how many words there are in this tweet, Mia?

15?

No, so close.

So close.

14.

14 words in this tweet,

which might remind you of the 14 words, the Nazi signifier, which I should probably just explain.

Surely most people listening to this is familiar with the 14 words, since it seems everybody thinks they are an armchair expert on fascist rhetoric.

But the 14 words, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

This became a popular hashtag dog whistle, especially in the past, I would say, 10, 15 years,

usually by implanting 14s and usually 1488s with 88 meaning Howl Hitler, because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

This became a common Nazi tag.

You could see this in graffiti, you see this embedded into posts, see this in like Nazi artwork.

And going back to this DHS post, we can not only count 14 words in this tweet, this is actually a 1488 because

two of the H's in this post are capitalized unusually.

And that means Howl Hitler.

Wow.

Because H is the eighth letter.

Oh, but wait.

Actually, looking at this post again, there's actually other words in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized.

But don't worry.

Don't worry.

This is still a dog whistle because those other words that are capitalized in the first sentence are the letters A and D, which, if you convert those into numbers are one and four so it's actually another 14.

oh wow we're doing we're doing numerology we're doing uh gematria we're we've become qanon we're so back so if you cannot tell by my uh my my thinly veiled uh sarcasm in that last section i think this methodology is a little bit silly What are we doing?

What are we doing here?

We're converting capitalized letters in the first half of a tweet into numbers and then rearranging the order of those letters to get a 1488.

It's literally giantry on the title.

And then also counting the total words in the whole tweet while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four words for another 14.

What are we doing?

How is this the piece of evidence that sinks, sinks the Trump administration and finally proves that they're fascist?

You can just look at all of the fascist policies the Trump administration is enacting.

Instead of doing numerology on tweets, people people are thinking, ha ha ha ha,

I have decoded the secret Nazi message with A H H D 18814.

Nice try, Groupers.

Meanwhile, you can just look at the actual text of the post.

You can look at the painting.

Both of those things have an inherent fascist quality.

It's literally defending the concept of ethnic genocide, of manifest destiny.

While the administration, the DHS, is currently furthering ethno-nationalist policies.

They are doing this.

This is Homeland Security, right?

I don't know if people realize that ICE is a part of Homeland Security, but like, this is the agency that is literally rounding people up and sending them to camps.

We have camps in multiple countries now.

When I say they're being round up and sent to camps, it's genuinely unclear whether what I'm talking about is the fucking concentration camp in Florida.

Seacott in El Salvador.

Yeah.

I mean,

I think people have now escaped, so I can't technically call the Honduras one a death camp but like again they're sending people to South Sudan.

They're like they're just doing this.

Like what are we doing here?

So

this episode I want to focus on how people are misusing anti-fascist education or I would argue they're misusing anti-fascist education and kind of missing the forest for a cardboard cutout of trees.

Yeah.

Not even trees.

Kind of something that could be a tree if you look at it from one angle, but maybe isn't actually a real tree.

And you don't need to sound like a Da Vinci code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious.

Like dog whistles don't matter if the regular whistle is already fascist.

If they're just saying things openly and furthermore,

doing things.

What purpose does a dog whistle have?

What are they doing here?

And this is something that we're going to discuss.

I'm not just saying this and closing the episode.

We're going to get into these.

And I think part of what's happening here, everybody is so cooked by the paranoid style of American politics.

Everyone is so eager to decode the hidden messages that we're missing, what's right in front of us.

QAnon has a total victory.

QAnon does not really exist in the way that it did in 2018.

The QAnon cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular cultish project is kind of no more.

But QAnon has a cultural victory over the entire United States and not just on the right wing, not just on MAGA.

So much of American politics now is litigating who is and is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children, who can notice which events are staged, who can notice hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the internet.

And this is what like everything is.

And like the real turning point, I think, for the right wing was probably the 2020 election in like a massive fracture from reality in which they think that election was legitimately stolen.

And obviously there was many events leading up to that, which contributed to this.

And I think one of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump with people creating whole new alternate realities that that event was staged.

And because that door was opened, now I am seeing such a massive flood of things that I would label as blue and on conspiracy theories, which is kind of a nonsense term, but it gets the point across.

And I'm going to do a whole piece on Blue and On very soon.

I've been collecting Blue and On conspiracy theories for a while, but I want to do something specifically about this 1488 and like secret codes thing, because

it's so evocative of

cue drops.

And it's evocative of searching for Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have been doing for generations.

And we're going to talk about that more and read a little bit of an essay on that topic after this ad break.

And I will let you know, there's going to be two messages in the ad break that if you decode, you win a special prize at the end of the episode.

So make sure you listen to every single second of the ad in case you missed the code.

Okay,

we are back.

Speaking of the paranoid style in American politics, I want to quote a few sections to kind of frame what I'm talking about here.

This was an essay written in the 60s by Richard

Versenchron Hofstetter.

Hofstedter.

Richard Hofstetter.

One of the first modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics.

I have three paragraphs here that I selected as being relevant to the

current topic at hand.

Quote, there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing.

I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

Nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style.

Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.

⁇

And I like that section specifically because 1488 is a real dog whistle.

We can see this used.

There's aspects of people who are trying to search for this and trying to search for patterns in the communications of an admittedly fascistic government agency that I find sympathetic.

I can understand.

Because yeah, that is a real dog whistle.

I'm going to continue the quote.

Quote, the paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms.

He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values.

He is always manning the barricades of civilization.

He constantly lives at a turning point.

Like religious millenarianists, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days, and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as-of-yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader.

Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals.

And since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration.

Unquote.

Hofsteder is talking about something that me and Robert specifically have discussed a lot on this show before: how everyone in America wants to have access to secret information.

Everyone wants to have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything.

And having that informational exclusivity in a world of information saturation, right?

Of a vortex of meaningless noise.

It's such a romantic idea that I alone have the info or the clue to piece this together.

And it's my duty to inform the masses.

It's a very romantic notion.

And it's also one that is exactly perfectly anti-suited for the moment we live in, which is actually just a moment where everything that is happening is just

stunningly literal.

Like it's all out of the odor.

Like what is happening with the Trump administration?

Okay, in 2020, there was a massive uprising

to attempt to fundamentally change like the structurally racist nature of the United States to deal with its fucking class inequalities, to deal with the structural violence of the state.

This was reacted to by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade gaining power and then finally took power in the form of like a bunch of pissed off, petite bourgeois fucking car dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed by the richest tech company guy in the world, right?

And they came together to build fascism.

This is the most straightforward, like if

this is this is a conception of of how a fascist takeover works that is so thuddingly literal that it defies narrativization because it's just there there's no subtlety to it they're just saying it they just want to do it and they're doing it but everyone is convinced that there's like some kind of secret hidden conspiracy and it's like no they're just doing the thing that they're saying yeah you can argue that we have a groiper occupied government not because of counting words and posts, but because of not only who they're bringing on for Doge, but literally ICE and DHS, as of today, which I'm recording this on Wednesday, I think, because this comes out Wednesday night, are copying like Patriot Front style tactics of loading up ICE agents in U-Haul style rentable trucks to hunt down people to assault and kidnap.

Like they're just copying the Patriot Front playbook here.

The ICE director.

said that he wants an Amazon-like mass deportation system, calling it quote unquote, Amazon Prime, but with human beings.

They're saying this.

You can

listen to the actual words.

I'm going to read another quote here from the Paranoid Style of American Politics essay.

Quote, a final characteristic of the Paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry.

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows.

It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.

Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates quote-unquote evidence.

The paranoid seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

⁇

And I think that gets into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this Nazi code hunting.

It's actually a form of like self-coping, looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking at the brazenness in which ICE is operating.

And this is a self-preservation mechanism.

Someone on Blue Sky that I was talking to about this was like arguing, like, ICE doesn't need to dog whistle.

They have no reason to.

Like dog whistling is for trying to like sneakily get racists or fascists into power while signaling to a nationalistic base that they are like one of them, right?

But these guys are already in power.

Yeah.

And the base already knows that they're in power.

There's no point in dog whistling.

They're just using ICE to establish an ethnostate.

They're using explicit ethno-state rhetoric.

In a post from this morning, which has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 words.

Not 14, 10 words.

Wow.

DHS said, quote, serve your country.

Defend your culture.

No undergraduate degree required.

Defend your culture.

It's not about locking up criminal migrants.

It's about defending a culture from its destruction through ethnic demographic shifts.

They're not trying to obscure what they're doing in the slightest.

No.

And I want to return to something else that the Hofstadter said in that, in that second paragraph that you read about how like,

One of the central conceits is that like, you know, there's this giant conspiracy that's being unleashed and the American public doesn't know anything about it.

And like, yeah, you can, you know, it is distressing to a large extent, the extent to which people just don't know what the government is doing.

But also, like, if you look at any polling at all, but anything these people are doing, everyone hates it.

There isn't like a secret thing that you can say to convince people that they're, that all these people are Nazis because it's like, And that's not even a particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already.

Like trying to fight this in the realm of sort of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of in the realm of like, hi, I'm your neighbor.

You also fucking hate this.

Let's go fucking like do the shit people are doing in LA and like follow these fucking Ice fans around.

Right?

That is stuff that people are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like instant emotional gratification and register of trying to like accumulate hordes of secret knowledge.

So people do it less, even though it's less effective.

In my discussion of this like online on various cursed social media sites i've gotten a lot of pushback to my pushback of these tactics and what i what i see as a sort of like abuse of of anti-fascist education right because people like you know robert evans myself you know molly coner spent the past eight years trying to actually you know educate people about like nazi rhetoric like in like nazi signals and and dog whistles right and as an attempt to hopefully prevent them from expanding their power.

And

we may have succeeded in education, but we may have failed in the prevention

of them seizing power.

And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness of certain tactics.

And it's now very odd to see things that we've, you know, argued for visibility around to kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense.

And it's kind of like trying to tame a tame a monster that you've partially created.

And it's so frustrating to me because, I mean, one person who I was lightly arguing about this online was saying, like, this is not numerology.

And we don't have to be just okay with a clear attempt to normalize white nationalist rhetoric.

And like, first of all, like, codes aren't rhetoric.

Codes are codes.

And the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric.

What they're actually like saying, which has like proto-fascist or fascistic aspects, that is the rhetoric.

And they're doing it.

Is there somebody out there in 2025 who's going to finally realize that DHS as an agency has fascistic underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if you count words and turn certain capitalized letters into numbers, it makes a secret Nazi message?

Is there one person who's going to become convinced to us?

No.

That's not the purpose.

So trying to conceptualize this as like,

we have to make sure we call out the use of Nazi rhetoric, That doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're talking about.

Yeah.

And also, like, I think, you know, like,

I think we've sort of kind of just, to some extent, we've just failed on the normalization front.

Because, again, like, it's the president of the United States.

Yeah.

This is, this is the official account of the Department of Homeland Security.

It has already become normalized because they have power.

The only way to denormalize it is not actually to do media critique.

It's to like actually oppose them.

But that's scary.

That's scary.

That's scary, Mia.

Do you know what's easy?

Posting on X the Everything app.

Yeah, this is how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that there is a nearly all-powerful agency that controls an apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that it wants, right?

This is why it can stage things.

This is why it can rig elections.

This is why it can like, I don't know, like it can just like magically like disappear anyone.

It can replace them with anyone.

It can stage any protest movement it wants to.

Right.

And I think you've seen this a lot in the American case where like I see people who are like genuinely well-meaning leftists who are convinced that if you do anything to resist the American state, you will immediately be killed because the American state is all-powerful and irresistible.

And that's just fascist propaganda.

Yeah, you're falling victim to the phenoptico.

Yeah, but it's it's fascist propaganda that fits into the narrative structure of conspiracy.

And because the state is dangerous, right, and can hurt you, it's very, very easy to accumulate structures of evidence that support the emotional sort of core of this thing that is just literally fascist propaganda.

People are resisting the state every day, right?

Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking like hiding people in like fucking U-hauls to jump out and grab people?

It's because when they tried to fucking mask, we stomped them, right?

And when they drive around in their cars and you can see them through the window, everyone follows them.

People can follow them around and alert their community members on where ICE is.

Like, again,

motherfuckers and fucking Lululemon shit are like screaming at ICE agents when they're trying to arrest people.

Like, yeah, that's the actual condition we're in.

And, like, yeah, regular people.

And that's why I find some people who would be, you know, self-described as like anti-fascists or self-described as leftists almost falling into this trap, like more so than others.

And it's a little bit evident of something that like I've described as like the forever 2016, how we're all kind of stuck in the mindset of this 2016, 2017, 2017, 2018 era.

And we have this unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on the ground anymore.

We are actually not in Charlottesville.

This is a different situation.

This is 2025.

And one other like defense of this, you know, code hunting that I've seen people say is, quote, Nazis love playing games like this.

So it's important that we call it out.

And another person saying, quote, this is a fun little game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote.

And like, first of all, this is not a game.

This is actual people's lives who are being deported, who are being sent to foreign prison camps.

These are not games.

And I think that view of like anti-fascist education risks repeating the okay symbol debacle, right?

Where dog whistles end up being created or spread further due to this gamified version of like Easter egg anti-fascism.

It's kind of like the Barbara Streisand effect, where you end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing, which Nazis always have have that like frustrating impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology, I think, as Rat Limit put it, one of my favorite posters.

And like, I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be thoughtful and careful.

of how we do it to recap the okay symbol thing that was invented as like a fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing like the media and then having the media try to convince regular people that anyone who uses like the okay hand symbol is secretly a fascist.

And this scheme worked.

And eventually the okay symbol became an actual symbol used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic detachment because it was being talked about in the news as a secret Nazi symbol, even though this whole thing was like invented as like a joke online.

And I'm afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen with the 14 words dog whistle, with an increased use of the 14 words and invoking the 14 words among far-right accounts, specifically because of this whole debacle with the DHSGov account and their heritage to be proud of, homeland worth defending, American progress, like ethno-nationalist posting.

And I truly cannot say one way or another if that American progress post had a intentionally embedded 14 words dog whistle inside.

I can't tell you that.

And the point I'm trying to make is that it kind of doesn't matter.

But the way we talk about dog whistles does matter.

And as frustrating as it is, that sometimes this feels like we're just living in the meme where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling him a Nazi, that is how Nazis work sometimes.

And I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that they so badly want.

But you know what I do want right now?

Is it the products and services that support this podcast?

Another ad break.

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Be sure to listen for the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads.

All right, we are back.

To briefly take a small tangent here, I think there is something very important about like the fact that we're all stuck in 2016, which was sort of like the peak of irony, right, as a social life act, has left us really unprepared for now where everything is just sort of like,

you know, they're just doing it and saying it, right?

Yeah.

And it's not this sort of like irony pill deniability shit.

They just do it.

And people are just not prepared for that.

They're able to wage this war kind of on both fronts.

And I think they are still pushing this.

I'm going to quote from a friend of the pod, Rat Limit, one of my favorite mutes.

Quote, prediction.

The Nazi salute will become common within two years.

Right-wingers will half-ass it for plausible deniability, memeify the backlash, and then start fully doing it, quote-unquote, as a joke to quote unquote, troll the libs for being hysterical enough to think that they were doing it in the first place.

Fascism is a little bitch ideology because it's too timid to enact its cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as retaliation against others for anticipating it.

And this has been proven right faster than I think what Ret Limit predicted.

There's this current trend on X the Everything app

where white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style salutes and trying to memeify the backlash.

Several posts going viral of these like aspiring influencers either at the pool or cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog.

while having your arm in a Elon Musk, My Heart Goes Out to You, Nazi salute style fashion.

Yeah.

And I think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a Nazi salute makes sense, right?

He is like an actual person affiliated with the government.

But making a whole media blitz about random blue check Twitter girls, maybe not so much.

Maybe that doesn't have any actual value if a random,

like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is trying to garner backlash by doing a Heil Hitler salute in their kitchen next to their Instapot.

I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote about the original Nazi salute and about the ways that everyone,

you know, like one of the functions of capitalism is that everyone has been trained to experience the world and think in the image of action instead of like actually existing things.

That's what I want to talk about next.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's do this.

Let's do this.

Yeah, go for it.

Go for it.

No, I think part of this focus on like these hidden codes and even just like these like messages online is a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not necessarily the act itself.

It's carrying out deportations in a mode that seems not in line with like neoliberal governing.

And that's, I think, what a bunch of the backlash being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, like how they film like gaudy ASMR videos that they post from the White House account of deportations and use military planes.

Those are aesthetic differences.

And those differences may be important.

And they're bad, right?

I'm not saying these things are good.

Those things are still bad.

But when that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure act of deportation itself, that I think is evident of being trapped in this like capitalist realism, being trapped in this like, like, this neoliberal

spectacle.

Exactly, right?

Let's like in June, ICE arrested 30,000 people and did 18,000 deportations.

In May, it was 24,000 arrests and 18,000 deportations.

Since February, the Trump admin has averaged about 14,700 deportations a month.

The highest number of deportations ever was in 2013 under Obama, averaging 36,000 a month.

The Biden admin averaged almost 13,000.

When the Trump administration started using military planes for deportations back in January, mainly as an aesthetic choice, that triggered backlash and rejections from Mexico and Colombia.

Mexico refused to allow U.S.

military aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country.

Colombia also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later caved as Trump threatened punitive tariffs.

And you can see the same thing about deploying military to the border, something that Biden also did, but has a larger aesthetic backlash under Trump.

Do you have something you want to say on this image aspect?

I have some quotes from Fisher, and that's kind of all I have left.

Yeah, I mean,

it is very fitting of our styles of politics that you're going to Fisher here and I'm going to Benjamin.

Benjamin is quoted in these sections that Fisher is pulling from as well.

Yep, yep.

Because

I'm going to the source.

I'm not going through the fucking CRU bullshit

like Pop Marx's bourgeois running dog.

Mark Fisher.

But no, but like, you know, like one of the things that Walter Benjamin, who people genuinely really should read, he's one of the great original theorists of fascism, and he fucking died died trying to flee the Nazis.

And one of his arguments was that, you know, one of the cores of fascism is the replacement of politics with aesthetics, right?

That aesthetics would allow you to, you know, feel repetit, like feel representation instead of do the action.

And this is, this is an analysis that has been sort of like folded through.

a whole bunch of different analyses of how capitalism functions, right?

This is one of the three lines of the society of spectacle.

And it's this real issue issue that we're dealing with now because again, kind of in a sense, what has happened to everything, right?

And you can argue to some extent that like our channel being called CoolZone Media is sort of this, is that all politics from every side has been completely reduced to aesthetics.

And completely reducing it to aesthetics allows...

like allows the fascist mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of people who can sort of just now passively experience living through these sort of through this sort of collection of images and this emotional aesthetic.

Yeah.

And it also is doing the same thing to us.

But the thing is, they have the fucking state and we don't.

Right.

And so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit the sort of mirror world of aesthetic, of sort of like, of fucking living in images, right?

And, you know, go do the actual shit that the board is talking about in the Society of Spectacle, where you and all your friends form workers' councils and fucking start taking all of the shit back from all of the people who've been taking it from you, you're just going to live in the fascist nightmare forever.

I mean, you could look at the union resistance to ICE deportations, specifically in LA with restaurant workers.

That's literally doing that.

And like, I would argue, like, now,

it's not so much that fascism is politics as aesthetics, but especially now, it is an aestheticized politics.

And you can even see that insofar as it focuses on, you know, like race and like ethnic purity, like blood and soil.

That's why they're posting American progress, driving out the indigenous people with the Aryan white lady carrying the torch of progress.

It is an aestheticized politics on like a very pure level.

And again, to quote from my goat,

quote Mark Fisher in Capitolist Realism: Ultra-authoritarianism and capital are by no means incompatible.

Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist.

Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space, but contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions.

Unquote.

This is very similar to something that me and Mia talked about right as Trump got elected in terms of the state becoming more removed but hostile.

Yeah.

Although, although I see, again, I disagree with Fischl here because the neoliberals understood what they were doing to begin with.

They were never trying to wither the state away.

That was just the lies that they told the fucking basses.

Like, sure, I mean, that's what, contrary to their official hopes.

Yeah, yeah.

That's like, you know,

quote: such a blight can only be eased by an intervention that can be no more anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place.

Action is pointless.

Only senseless hope makes sense.

Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate.

Unquote.

This is part of what I conceptualize as this code hunting is almost a form of this hopeless superstition.

To continue, quote, The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road nor has it already happened.

Rather, it is being lived through.

There is no punctual moment of disaster.

The world doesn't end with a bang.

It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.

What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows?

Its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a maligned being, a negative miracle, a maladation which no penance can ameliorate.

The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist capitalist realism.

Unquote.

And yeah, that's what Mia is talking about with Guy DeBoer and Society of the Spectacle.

That's the trap that I think a lot of people are falling into right now.

And though it's arguable that living in a liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that still doesn't mean it's like good, right?

That's not what we're arguing here.

Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alain Badou, quote, to justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful, so instead, they've decided to say that all of the rest is horrible.

Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness, but we are lucky that we don't live in a condition of evil.

Our democracy is not perfect, but it's better than bloody dictatorships.

Capitalism is unjust, but it's not criminal like Stalinism.

We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Lomosevic.

We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda.

⁇

And already parts of this are slightly outdated.

Oh, yeah, no, because it's already

shit now.

Like,

but this is the thing, is both are tragedies where millions of people die, right?

One of them is through the aesthetics of neoliberalism, the other one is through aesthetics of racist nationalistic declarations, which the Trump administration is currently playing with.

That is what they've decided to do.

Yeah.

And so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note, not necessarily on this pure actual humanistic opposition to deportations as a process that is inhumane, that we should not allow at all.

Yeah, I see the logic of this all the fucking time talking to people where like we'll be like, okay, like no deportations.

And then you get a whole bunch of people being like, well, but what about criminals?

There's like some deportations.

What do you think?

This is the structural logic of the original like deportation blitz from Trump.

Creating a class of undesirables that you can then always add to and press the border on, like what Carl Schmidt talks about.

This is the structural logic of fascism.

But

everyone thinks about deportations this way now.

And they're mad that Trump is doing it and not Biden.

But, you know, until people actually break through the sort of

pure opposition to the aesthetics and actually start, you know,

having a kind of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this, we're just going to be stuck here.

And this is, I think, one of the limits of using anti-fascism as this like aesthetic code hunting is because a a few days ago, the DHS posted a Woody Guthrie song, his song America the Beautiful, with the DHS posting the promise of America is worth protecting, the future of our homeland is worth defending.

Notably, everyone in this video is all white people, which this sentiment is the same thing as the 14 words, except it has 15 words.

So therefore, not a Nazi dog whistle.

We're safe, guys.

We're good.

I counted the words.

There's 15 of them.

So you can disregard what the actual text is saying.

And I think that is the is like the prime,

the prime contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated.

So that's most of what I have to say about the limits of Nazi code hunting and the

aesthetics of superstition and the paranoid style in American politics.

Mia, do you have any final

wise notes?

The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one, has passed.

It is now time to end the episode right here.

That's right, it is.

We're late for a meeting.

Oh, and if you were able to decode the hidden message in the ad break, send the contents of the message via email to your local congressman to redeem your prize.

Bye-bye.

This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis.

This episode, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Tout, and Robert Evans.

We're covering the week of July 30th to August 7th.

Robert, what is Texas?

So, the original root word of the state's name is Tejas, which means friendship, a thing that no one in Texas has ever known because it's the angriest, meanest state in the country.

That's Texas, Garrison.

Up for some stiff competition these days.

Up for some stiff competition.

But it's still holding out, isn't it?

Everything's bigger in Texas, Garrison.

It's famed as being the second or third worst state that borders New Mexico.

So, you know, rarefied company.

Really, it can compete with all of the states bordering New Mexico except for Colorado.

But the states bordering New Mexico except for Colorado are Oklahoma and Arizona and Texas.

So

not high bars.

Texas has some of the finest air, bed, and breakfasts that I've ever stayed in.

That's right.

Including one with a deeply disturbing basement.

Okay, just because they had one torture basement, James.

So we're talking about Texas right now because a bunch of the Democratic state legislators just fled the state for Illinois, I believe is how the name of the state is pronounced.

Yeah, it's French.

It's French.

It's French.

Fact check for a real Illinois wrong.

This post fact checks by real Illinois.

So when you've got a legislature of pretty much any type, at least in the U.S., I'm sure there's other countries that don't do it this way, but you need what's called a quorum in order to actually do anything, which means of the total number of elected members of the legislature, you need a certain number of them.

Otherwise, you can't like do anything because there's not enough people there in order to actually have it be a valid vote.

And I probably don't have to explain the reasonings why.

There's some pretty obvious reasons why you'd want it to work this way.

But there are, however, some downsides to it.

You know, potentially, you can be, depending on whether or not your side is doing it, it's a downside or an upside, right?

Which is that if you have a side that is the minority in the government and they don't want a vote to go through, they can just bounce.

And if they bounce at the right time before the legislature has been called and like no one's there, then you can't get a quorum and nothing can get done.

And this is big news right now because, in order to stop a redistricting vote, a bunch of Democratic legislators have fled.

But this is a thing that has been going on for well over a century, and it is a thing that both sides of the aisle have engaged in with substantial regularity.

I'm not an expert on any of this.

The earliest example I can find of anyone doing this is in Texas.

I'm not saying that means it's the earliest example example of anyone in the U.S.

doing this, but the earliest example I found in my research was from 1870.

So there's an article on this by the Texas State Historical Association called Understanding the Rump Senate of the 12th Texas Legislature.

And the Rump Senate is a term applied to the 15 radical Republican members of the 12th.

Texas legislature who fled in 1870 to stop a vote on a militia bill.

And this bill gave the governor power to declare martial law.

It gave him the power to establish a state police force.

It increased the appointive power of the governor.

A bunch of stuff that's not all that interesting to us today because governors, like every state does this today, right?

Like there's state police everywhere.

Every state governor has the power to call a militia, you know, a National Guard or whatever.

Like this is not controversial today, but it was back then.

And it's important that I note that while it was 15 radical Republicans who fled in 1870, those were conservatives, right?

Like the radical Republicans were conservatives in 1870, right?

So this is, this is kind of a reverse.

If you're just sort of looking at things from a liberal or conservative point of view, this is kind of a reversal of what's happening right now in Texas, although it's happened a lot of other times since, right?

So this is 1870, and I should note, it didn't succeed, right?

This is, however, one of the fairly rare times when this kind of thing happens, if it goes on long enough, every time the governor basically will declare an arrest warrant for the legislators who have left.

And as a general rule, this does nothing, right?

Like the governor has the ability to fine them a certain amount per day and it has the ability to call out an arrest warrant, but it's not like a real arrest warrant.

Like if you murder a guy and then flee to another state, an arrest warrant will be issued that.

law enforcement in that state has to abide by, right?

Because you murdered somebody.

This is not a real crime.

Basically, if you flee back, if you wind up back in the state that you left, you can be taken into custody by law enforcement in the state, but they can't leave the state to get you.

And almost, I would say like 90% of the time when something like this happens, nobody actually gets arrested.

However, in 1870, several conservative members were held under arrest for like three weeks until the Senate could pass the legislation.

So as is usually the case, whenever stuff like this happens, it only succeeded in kind of delaying.

the inevitable.

It didn't succeed in actually stopping things.

And this has happened a number of times in Texas.

Most recently, Texas Democratic lawmakers broke quorum in 2021.

And I want to quote here from an article in ABC News, quote, Texas state lawmakers last broke quorum in 2021 when Democratic House representatives fled Texas to prevent measures restricting voting options.

The measures eventually passed after internal Democratic fissures led to enough representatives returning to form a quorum.

And this is the kind of thing where Governor Abbott allowed the sergeant of arms or command of the sergeant of arms to arrest the members within Texas.

Weirdly enough, a couple of them did return.

The first was Philip Cortez, who like briefly came back to Austin to handle personal business.

And there was a civil arrest warrant signed, but then he fled the state again before he could be arrested.

There were warrants signed for the 52 remaining absent legislators, but law enforcement didn't arrest or detain anybody.

Eventually, enough Democratic legislators came back into the state for like personal reasons.

Some of them had like shit to handle like in their own life.

Some of them had other things they wanted to push through in terms of like legislature.

And so they were like, I guess I'll come back and let this happen.

And eventually the House reached quorum and this past Democrats did not face the $500 a day fine that they'd been threatened by the governor and nobody was arrested.

Now we've been, I've been talking about Texas here, but this happens all over the place.

In fact, when this story first broke, the immediate thing I thought back on was what happened very recently in the state of Oregon and has happened a couple of times in the state of Oregon.

Yeah, that was mine too.

They do this all the time.

They do this all the time.

Four months.

Yes,

this is a common thing in Oregon.

It has started, and this is both parties have done this, I should note, right?

Both Democrats and Republicans in Oregon, as in Texas, have done walkouts.

They don't even have to leave the state.

They don't even have to leave the state.

Although they have recently.

This seems to have started in Oregon, I think, in the 1970s.

There's actually a really good article that's

like an overview of a bunch of different states' history of doing this in

Central Oregon Daily News, although it's an AP press article.

So I guess Central Oregon Daily just is licensing this thing.

But anyway, in Oregon, the most recent case of this happening was in 2023, after Republicans staged a six-week boycott, which is the longest so far in Oregon legislature history.

over a rule, a law the Democratic Party was pushing to protect abortion rights and gender, the right to gender-affirming care for transgender people.

This, again, did not succeed.

This was passed in the legislature, and there were actually some consequences, although it hasn't been enough time to see how serious there will be because there was a different GOP walkout over climate change legislation, which also failed in 2022.

And as a result of that 2022 walkout, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution in Oregon, which barred lawmakers from getting re-elected if they had more than 10 unexcused absences in a single annual legislative session.

And as a result of the walkout the next year over abortion rights and gender-affirming care, 10 Oregon Republican lawmakers were barred from seeking re-election.

Again, as I stated, this is something that very rarely.

actually does anything.

There's a 2021 case in New Hampshire where Democrats walked out in protest of an anti-abortion bill.

The Republican House Speaker locked the doors to maintain a quorum.

I'm going to quote from that Central Oregon Daily article.

I'm locking the doors right now so that everybody in the chamber will stay stay in the chamber, shouted House Speaker Sherman Packard, who later refused to let Democrats back in to vote on the bill.

It's just fucking like representative politics.

It's just schoolchildren shouting at each other.

I want them to fight the canes.

They should be fighting with Kanes.

Agreed.

Give them nerfs.

Give them all a nerf.

Let them fight it out.

I would say 90% of the time, nothing is, at least from the reading I've done, nothing is achieved except for a delay, which is not to say that that's nothing.

And also, I do believe, like in the case of the Democratic Party, Party, I don't think what the Texas Democrats are doing will stop the redistricting.

Like the Republicans are going to win this fight.

It's worth fighting.

I'm glad they're fighting it.

However, very rarely.

is the actual law stopped or is anything but a delay achieved.

One of the rare cases in which something more was achieved is in 2011 in Wisconsin.

Democratic state senators fled to Illinois as a protest against Governor Scott Walker.

He was attempting to strip public workers of their union rights.

And this, you know, this walkout was staged at the same time as a mass pro-union demonstration at the Capitol.

And after several weeks, they won a partial victory.

Republicans weakened the legislation, which is like significant, right?

Like the fact that they actually got concessions over this.

And sometimes the delay can be significant.

The same year that that all went down in Wisconsin, Indiana Democrats also left.

For whatever reason, Illinois is where you go if you're doing this.

No one wants to come get you.

No one wants to come get you.

No one's coming to Illinois.

It's just not worth it.

I've been to, fuck Illinois.

Sorry, Illinois is the hero of this story.

We love you, Illinois.

Yeah.

Chicago's fine.

Chicago's fine.

For whatever reason, this is the state you go to.

If you're a Democrat doing this in the modern era.

If you're in Wisconsin, it's not that far away, I guess.

Well, this is Indiana, too.

It's also not very far away.

Yeah, it's also not far.

Yeah, they couldn't make it to California, you know.

It's further now that Texans are doing it.

Yeah.

But Indiana Democrats left in 2011 to prevent Republican law that would have stopped unions from levying mandatory fees on union members, which would kind of make, could potentially make it impossible to do a union because nobody wants to pay for a union, but everyone wants one, right?

Yeah.

Every worker does.

You want the union protecting you.

You don't want to have to give up your money.

So it's the kind of thing you could, I think the Republican plan was use the natural greed that people have in order to hamstring unionizing efforts.

Many such cases.

And

the Democrats left, which left the House short of its quorum and threatened to stay in the other states until they were promised that the bills would not be called.

Republicans successfully passed the bill, but they had to wait until the next year.

So, again, every now and then you eke a win out here, or the side doing this ekes out a win, and everyone does it, and everyone has been doing it for more than 150 years.

Nothing about this is new, with the exception of the fact that they actually look to be pushing some serious legal consequences.

The most I've been able to find in the history of this is what happened in 1870, where a number of people were arrested and held in custody for a few weeks.

Usually no one is arrested and usually the fines aren't even actually levied, right?

Now, this does cost money.

The last Texas walkout, Texas Democrats were spending like 10 grand a day on, you know, food and board, you know, paying for their hotels or whatever, which was, I think, Beto O'Rourke raised most of the money through his PAC, which is what covered it.

A few hundred grand.

Yeah.

Like $600,000.

So, you know, this does cost money to do because you've got to put these people up, but generally, you're not really hiding them.

And generally, the legal consequences are more of a threat than a reality, right?

And that might not be true in this most recent

case.

Yes.

And we're going to throw to you, Garrison.

But first, you know who does force serious, life-changing legal consequences on people.

Jay Pritzker?

Yes.

And the products and and services that support this podcast, which are entirely, we're actually backed entirely by J.B.

Pritzker.

From your mouth to God's ears, Robert.

Not like knowingly.

I stole his debit card.

And boy, that guy has a high daily spending limit, let me tell you.

Yeah, well, he has a lot of shadow companies.

Anyway, thanks, JB.

Please don't change your password to your online bank.

Garrison.

Hi, we're back.

So, as Robert said, Republicans in the Texas legislature are trying to gerrymander Texas to increase their total power over the state, proposing a redistricting map that would add five more Republican seats.

And in an effort to prevent or delay this, this past Sunday, 62 Texas Democrats fled to Illinois to deny quorum in the Texas House, and only 12 need to return in order for the redistricting to go through, with the main goal right now being trying to stay out of the state until November.

In terms of consequences, new House rules adopted back in 2023 after the 2021 quorum can impose a $500 fine per day for missing lawmakers, not just from the governor.

Now, on Monday, the Texas House Republicans voted to issue civil arrest warrants for the lawmakers, empowering the sergeant of arms and the Texas state troopers to locate, apprehend, and transport the rogue legislators back to the Capitol.

Governor Greg Abbott announced he had mobilized the Texas Department of Public Safety to return the Democrats to the chamber.

Now, these warrants really only apply within state lines.

These are civil warrants.

They're not facing criminal charges.

Though, back in 2003, during a similar quorum break due to gerrymandering efforts, federal resources were used to track planes with suspected rogue Democrat lawmakers.

And Abbott has already proposed trying to declare their House seats vacant if they do not return, a tactic which would probably prompt some lengthy legal battles and require new special elections to take place to fill the seats.

So that still would delay this process.

That's not a quick solution.

But there has been some breaking news as of this morning, recording Thursday.

On Thursday morning, Texas Senator John Corbyn announced that the FBI would now be investigating and working to locate the Texas House Democrats, saying in a press release, quote, I thank President Trump and Director Patel for supporting and swiftly acting on my call for the federal government to hold these supposed lawmakers accountable for fleeing Texas.

We cannot allow these rogue legislators to avoid their constitutional responsibilities, unquote.

So the extent of the FBI's involvement in tracking down, locating, or apprehending the Democrats is currently unknown.

The FBI has declined to comment, but this is something that's going to develop in the next week.

Which they always do on ongoing cases.

Like,

sure.

If you email or whatever the FBI about any ongoing case, this is what they do, period.

It's been their policy for forever.

Yeah.

So it doesn't tell you anything.

Just saying that in terms of like, we do not know what the extent of their involvement is going to be at this point.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

And they might not even know either.

Yeah.

This could just be a cash patel TikTok.

Yeah.

there's a good chance they're internally scrambling to like, what are we going to do?

This would be unprecedented, sending a federal like law enforcement arm to, to, to physically apprehend and return lawmakers.

That is certainly an escalation from using like federal resources to track planes like they did in 2003.

This would be a whole new ballgame.

Yeah, as I noted, it's uncommon for them to be arrested inside the state by the sergeant-at-arms.

Yeah.

Sure.

I mean, like, arrest just means, you know, you'd like accompany them back to the capital or force them to return to the capital.

You're staying here.

You're not going to leave to the state.

Yeah.

And you've got a guy called Sergeant-at-Arms involved.

It's not serious.

But even that's pretty uncommon.

Yeah.

No, I mean, like, most quorum breaks fail because legislators just choose to return, whether to do personal business, whether to do political business.

It takes a lot of discipline to not return to your home for a period of like three to six months.

Yeah, you got stuff to do.

Most people, a lot of people have what are called

families, famalies, something like that.

Families.

I don't know what that is.

I think it's a new concept.

Yeah, we're still working at CoolZone to get a handle on it.

We'll have a report on whatever that is soon.

Don't worry.

They've got to get back to the polycule or whatever.

But

they haven't violated a federal law, right, lately.

No.

So federal.

They haven't violated a Texas law.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not a law violation.

It is literally the governor saying, I'm sending guys for you.

Yeah, this is some old-timey parliamentarian shit.

Yeah.

And like, you know, as I was saying, it's like, again, it isn't, this could just be a cash patel TikTok op, but also.

God, I hate the way that sounds.

What a fucking way to describe our federal law enforcement.

Oh, it's on Hinch.

This is genuinely.

Okay, I'm going to take a very, very slight detour, which I've said this before, but also like the thing that gives me the most hope about all of this is that like,

look, they found the right-winger to put in charge of the American Secret police and he doesn't want to do his job because he just wants to be a podcaster hey understand

look yeah you make me director of the fbi and i promise to be more or less the same

yeah but you know but if this is actually a thing right and federal agents are suddenly grabbing lawmakers out of illinois that is that's a big deal yeah that is a massive escalation and that's why as people fully supported by pritzker's private militia we will be on the front lines defending the texas lawmakers that's right.

Yeah.

Saluting the Chicago flag.

Yes.

As Governor Pritzker recently stated, blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne.

Classic Pritzker.

I need you need to do some Pritzker, not even slander here, some just fuck you tiny bit of fuck you Pritzker news, which I was going to talk about a little bit anyways later, but Pritzker has

basically allowed a bunch of hospitals in Chicago to stop covering gender-affirming care for minors, even though it's like illegal under Illinois state law.

So fuck him for that.

Eat shit.

We will unfortunately oppose the Khanate of the Great Plains.

And what's the reasoning there?

Has he given any?

He was just like, oh, well, they're going to lose funding.

Oh, no, it is over.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's over.

So it is over the threats.

Yeah, a number of states have been, have been, something similar is brewing in Oregon right now.

Yeah.

Yeah, we've, we've, yeah, this has been happening in Oregon.

We, we just had an episode about people resisting this in Pennsylvania.

This will be a continuing ongoing struggle, but I fuck you, Pritzkre shit.

I do have two science stories for this middle segment here.

First one, I'm going to call on everyone's,

I don't know, probably my least favorite Kennedy, RFRFK Jr.

Wow,

controversial.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of bad Kennedys.

After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH and FDA, HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risk than benefits for these respiratory viruses.

That's why after extensive review, BARDA has begun the process of terminating these 22 contracts totaling just under $500 million.

To replace the troubled mRNA programs, we're prioritizing the development of safer, broader vaccine strategies.

Sure, sure thing, sure thing, Mr.

Kennedy.

Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.

Yeah, that sounds true.

And not like we're throwing away a holy grail of medical miracles.

Literally won the Nobel Prize.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So

this is some devastating news where he is removing 22 contracts from researchers and universities that are developing new mRNA vaccine technology.

And earlier in that video, which I'm not going to play because it's just him basically lying,

but he was lying about how mRNA technology has been ineffective against upper respiratory infections because it only targets a single protein, which not only becomes obsolete due to mutations, but actually accelerates the mutation process and prolongs pandemics.

This is not true.

No.

No, it's not true.

This is not true.

And one of the most unique aspects of mRNA technology is that the vaccines can be developed at a much faster pace to be deployed against mutations.

And even if a vaccine does not 100% prevent an infection, that doesn't mean they still won't decrease the severity of symptoms.

He's trying to coat his

decades-long like anti-vaccine advocacy in this scientific language while actually just stripping away all of the funding and removing access to vaccines.

And this is stuff that he promised not to do in his confirmation hearings.

He said that he would not take away vaccines and he would not change who's on the vaccine advisory panels.

He has done both both of those things so far.

Two months ago, he fired all 17 members of the advisory panel.

I talked with Kave about this, and he replaced them with eight anti-vaxxers.

And not only did he remove a multi-million dollar contract from Moderna to continue mRNA vaccine research, he now canceled these 22 other contracts totaling $500 million of technology.

People are going to die and get sick because of these changes.

Yes.

Which doesn't just affect like COVID and the flu.

It also affects all of the other ways that mRNA technology can be utilized.

A lot of these research projects are about expanding the possible use of this technology beyond upper respiratory infections.

So this sucks.

Yeah, this is real bad, SGV.

I am very nervous about the development of the HIV vaccine and cancer vaccines, things that we were getting so close to

now being put into jeopardy because this fucking clown is in charge of health and human services.

Ton of this work done at the Salk Institute in San Diego, actually.

It was reported earlier this week that some Republicans and Trump himself might actually not be happy about this.

And Trump has a meeting scheduled with RFK Jr.

today to discuss these cancellations.

So we'll see where that goes.

In some other science news, Sean Duffy, interim NASA administrator, who also is the Secretary of Transportation, who directed his employees to prioritize funding and grants towards demographics with high marriage rates.

He announced that he was expediating plans to launch and operate a 100-kilowatt nuclear reactor for the moon.

Great.

Look, there's a lot of people living on the moon, and power outages have been a constant problem there, Garrison, if this science fiction novel from the 1960s is accurate.

I talked with a friend of mine who is an anonymous NASA contractor.

She gave a quote, quote, I need a cigarette, unquote.

Great.

Cause he just got fucked.

It's also worth noting that all of this is coming in the context of the largest, really, like the largest cuts in the history of American science across the board to anything that's actually like

even remotely doing science.

Like, yeah, sorry.

I just want to go on it.

Especially space science.

Like, Duffy is trying to manufacture this new space race and prioritize like manned moon missions, all while cutting by at at least 50 percent all nasa science missions and and just like absolutely crippling nasa's capacity to actually develop technology now duffy said at a press conference announcing this new directive on tuesday quote we are in a race to the moon

a race with china to the moon

and to have a base on the moon we need energy unquote is that fucking 1950 what are you talking what are you talking about that is the time when the greatness happened garrison so they they want to go back to that The NASA contractor I spoke with said, quote, NASA is already down at least 20% of its workforce and behind on its previously announced lunar missions and objectives.

See the Lunar Gateway and Artemis 3.

I just don't immediately see a world where NASA does this successfully.

Even if they go the route of contracting it out, if the success, specifically the lack thereof, of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program and the Commercial LEO Destinations Program has any indication for how this will go, it will be mirrored in failure and many years behind schedule at best.

Unquote.

So, this new NASA directive from Sean Duffy calls for a fission surface power program executive to be named by the end of August, who will then implement

and oversee the project while reporting directly to the NASA administrator.

The directive reads, quote, since March 2024, China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to place a reactor on the moon by the mid-2030s.

The first country to do so could potentially declare a keep-out zone, which would significantly inhibit the United States from establishing a planned Artemis presence if not there first.

Unquote.

And this is, I think, a big part of why Duffy is wanting to do this.

And the contractor I spoke to said, quote, if they're able to extend some quote-unquote exclusion zone around a reactor on the surface where other countries aren't allowed to land, it's not difficult to imagine that they may try to use this to de facto claim areas of the moon for the United States.

Unquote.

Hell yeah, we have colonized the moon.

And there's even more troubling use cases.

Part of the directive reads that this would, quote, encourage dual-use civil and defense operational architectures for deployed fission surface power systems in coordination with interagency partners.

Moon base.

Unquote.

Space Force finally getting its moment in the sun on the moon, I guess.

This really is just like the pure unspeakable tragedy is unspeakable farce version of colonialism because it's like the moon is the one place that is actually pteranolis and there's nothing there and there's nothing to gain from being there.

There's just nothing.

But, you know,

we gotta colonize it.

Yeah, but the sun never sets on the American Empire if you've got the moon on it as well.

So you got that going for you.

It's just

the pure drive of colonialism detached from its actual

material motives.

Having failed to gain Greenland, we will pivot and take the moon instead.

I mean, you know, the moon and Greenland are both similarly habitable territories.

It's true.

But you can't do backflips in Greenland.

So

like, this is the plot of despicable me.

Like, that's what we're doing here.

We're doing the plot of despicable me.

Yeah.

science fiction movies have predicted this.

Please send them all to us.

Yes, as was noted by Robert Heinlein, the moon is indeed a harsh mistress.

Wait, what is that I hear?

Is that the tariff songs?

Oh, God.

Every time.

Every time it's good.

Let's talk turf tariffs.

There are so many of them.

The tariffs have gone into effect.

So, all right, we're going to do a full episode about this on Monday because there is so much tariff bullshit that it quite frankly needs its own actual episode in which we're going to be talking about shit like, for example,

the U.S.

has

maybe on accident, maybe on purpose, recognized the junta Myanmar is a legitimate government to the tariff stuff.

We're talking about that on Monday because we don't have time for that shit.

What we instead have time for is the just massive array of tariffs on a list of countries so long that we just genuinely can't read them all.

Okay, this is a very, very confusing raft of tariffs in a lot of ways.

It's simpler than the other ones, but okay, so Percy and N, if the U.S.

runs a trade deficit with you and you're not also in one of the other special categories where we have imposed a really high tariff on you, it's like 15%.

if we have a trade surplus with the country we imposed a 10 tariff this doesn't make any sense sure okay so it's like in terms of the stated motives of the tariffs it it doesn't make any sense except in terms of like raising money which these raise very little actual money relative to like the amount of money the u.s spends i mean right-wing commentators have have stated that the end goal of of this massive tariff program is to abolish income tax because we can fund the government through tariffs actually

great Yeah.

And

just know that, no, you can't.

Like,

no.

This is just.

Yeah, at the same time, it's a driving the deficit into the fucking sky.

Like.

Yeah.

And we've talked about the sort of rifts that this has caused with like the sort of true believer deficit hawks versus these just completely unhinged,

fund the government with tariff weirdos.

But comma, there have been a huge number of countries that now we have 15% tariffs on.

We've also gotten a formal like announcement of the 100% tariffs on semiconductors unless you invest, do some kind of significant investment in the U.S.

It's deeply unclear what the fuck that means.

Apple hasn't pledged to invest $100 billion in the US.

There's this very, very weird thing on the right where

they think that you can make iPhones here.

You can't.

You just simply cannot.

We do not have the labor force.

We do not have the technology.

Yeah, but Tim Cook did just bribe Trump with a

nice plate, a golden iPhone, a big

ingot of gold.

So, oh, I thought it was a gold iPhone.

There was some glass involved as well.

No,

it was a plate that was on a gold brick base.

I love that.

Yeah, that's the way we do it now.

Really subtly, we slide it under the radar.

You have to give gold with gold.

You have to bribe the supreme ruler by giving gifts of gold to grand good favors.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

It's like fucking smorg, whatever.

Like if he has this pile of gold that he's going to be sitting on.

Oh man.

It's going to be Scrooge McDucking in that shit by the end of four years.

Oh don't don't get us started on DuckTales.

Oh no.

No, no, no.

All right.

Thank you.

Yeah, that'll really inflate the length of this episode.

That's what they call a layup in sports ball.

Mia, what's the terrorists up to?

They're calling me the fucking Wembin Yama of

fucking inflation shot blocking.

Fuck this.

We're talking about chip infrastructure.

People have been trying to develop like the infrastructure developed ships for a long time.

Now the Biden administration did this.

The Chinese government has been pouring a bunch of money into it.

And it's basically impossible to actually develop domestic ship infrastructure other than the kinds of infrastructure the U.S.

already has because

the really short version of it is that it's not just a technological problem and it is it's really hard to actually develop this technology this is why almost all of the like direct production stuff they're trying to replicate basically just happens in taiwan it's not just a problem of the technology is really hard.

It's a problem of the machines to make the machines that you need to make these things exist in like one place in the world in Switzerland, right?

So in order to actually scale up production of this, which is which is in theory what these 100% imported semiconductor tariffs are supposed to do, right?

You have to go up.

three layers of the supply chain.

You have to make the machines that make the machines that make the machines that make the semiconductors, right?

That's like the simplest way to explain it.

We can't fucking do that.

Like, Apple could throw a fucking hundred billion dollars at that point.

They won't do shit, right?

So they're chasing just a ghost, but you know, our entire sort of like trade policy is just being run by the just weird fascist miasmic phantoms of all of these trade policy people.

Now, it's also worth noting that there's been, you know, another, I guess, kind of tariff that's been enacted other than hilariously, the the countries that tried to negotiate with Trump got worse rates than the ones who just waited until he imposed a 15% rate generally

that's kind of funny but also so Trump has been threatening anyone who buys oil from Russia and also I think Venezuela although it's been less press on that with 50% tariffs right now he's threatening India with 50% tariffs because India has been buying oil from Russia that India's tariffs are currently at 25%

he has also just straight up imposed a a 50% tariff on Brazil for refusing to release Bolsonaro.

There's been some updates on that front where Lula is just straight up refusing to do direct talks at the U.S.

Lula had an exclusive interview with Reuters where he said, quote, we had already pardoned the U.S.

interventions in the 1964 coup, said Lula, who got his political surroundings.

Listen to the Lula episodes we did.

They're very good.

More Lula, quote.

But this is now not a small intervention.

It's the president of the United States thinking he can dictate rules for a sovereign country like Brazil.

It's unacceptable.

It's worth noting that this is actually a pretty massive change for like Lula's specifically relations with the U.S.

Lula actually had very good relations with George Bush, but he is writing a massive tide of Brazilian anti-like anti-American nationalism.

And he's attempting to spread this tide elsewhere, right?

He's been specifically saying that he's calling on organized resistance from particularly India and China, but the rest of BRICS, which is a

well, okay, BRICS was originally a category of assets that's now kind of vaguely a political alliance whose main members are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

It's unclear if this will happen.

I kind of, I don't know.

But Lula's the first person really, really seriously trying to organize resistance to this outside of the EU.

The EU is also under threat of 30% tariffs if they don't just sort of like accede to Trump's demands.

But like, you know, again, India also negotiated a deal with the U.S.

and then immediately got their tariffs, like is now being threatened with 50% tariffs.

So you can't negotiate with him to escape this.

So I don't know, Lula, maybe this is the beginning of sort of organized, like large-scale organized tariff resistance to the U.S.

being framed in this sort of like collective struggle versus the U.S.

thing.

That's an interesting political trend that we'll be following as all of this continues.

Okay.

And the rest of the unhinged amount of tariff news we're going to be covering Monday, I will make a brief note that the Yale Budget Lab is is estimating like a $2,400 increase for the average family just in terms of like inflation prices for this, especially on things like clothing.

They were specifically, I think there's a CNN article about it there, specifically talking about

running shorts and shoes and anything, any goods from South Asia, massively increasing in price.

They're talking 30% increases very quickly.

So

now, Obviously, all of this news is, I don't know, the stock market has kind of like accustomed itself to tariff news.

Yeah.

But, comma, we got a really, really bad jobs report last month.

And well, actually, well, well, I don't know if that's true.

I think the jobs report could be completely faked.

Yeah.

Who can say?

Oh, Jesus.

If the president says it, it has to be true.

It's a Biden.

Did you have a Biden appointee?

Oh, that's crazy.

Crazy.

The auto pen.

has issued this jobs report.

So, yeah,

Trump has fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for releasing this report.

We are just, we are just truly fully into the deep end of shit now.

The report just showed that we didn't have very positive job growth.

And like anyone who's trying to get a job right now can confirm that.

It's like a nightmare.

Yeah.

And we're just like, we're just like fully going to be in.

Like, you know, it's unclear exactly how fast American data collection capacity is going to degrade.

It is worth noting, this is the thing that kind of happens at at the end of dictatorships when they really start going to shit, is that they lose the ability to trust their own statistical apparatus.

Yeah.

I mean, like anything that happens that Trump just doesn't like, you can claim it's fake and rigged.

Whether that's losing an election, whether that's

his good close personal friend, Jeffrey Epstein, or if that's a Bureau of Labor Statistics job report.

It's all rigged.

It's all a hoax.

Yeah.

But to tie this back to Lula for a second, I think it's actually really, a really interesting historical parallel that's worth noting that Lula's rise to political prominence came off of a series of strikes that was held because

a bunch of economists that were working with inside the Brazilian labor unions figured out the military dictatorship of Brazil had been faking their inflation numbers.

And like, this is one of the things that caused the end of the dictatorship.

So, you know, you can only lie about the inflation rate for so long before like someone goes like, hey, you've been lying about this the whole time.

And I don't know,

this has brought down military dictatorships before, and that's why we have to hold Archive of Our Own accountable for faking those inflation numbers.

I agree with you entirely, Garrison.

I don't get paid enough for this.

You've lost me, I'm not following.

And yeah, that has been Tariff Talk.

You know what will continue to be available to our listeners at an excellent price, despite tariffs.

The products and services that support this podcast.

That's absolutely correct, Garrison.

Well done.

All right, we're back.

So back.

And also back is the United Kingdom, where a poll shows that more than half of Britons think there are more migrants in the UK illegally than legally.

This isn't true.

No, but feelings matter way more than facts, James.

Feelings matter.

Yes, they do.

The actual data, even at the highest estimate of undocumented people, shows that it's around 10 times more foreign people who are in the UK with documents.

This is indicative of a broader issue, right?

That the discussions that we're having around immigration are nearly all based on massive amounts of misinformation.

Misinformation by omission was extremely common in legacy media.

until very recently, right?

Like there were simply not people covering immigration in a serious fashion.

Like even in the in the Biden administration,

the reporting that was done was atrocious.

This comes as the Labour government's disapproval rating in the UK hit 67%

in a YouGov poll, which I think is very indicative.

Like what Labour did, right, was try to adopt right-wing culture war positions to get people to vote for them.

And it does not work and it is not working for them.

You can look at their policies towards trans people, right?

They're atrocious.

And it's not buying them the favor they wanted to.

Moving back to the United States, Yon-su-go,

she's called Su by her friends, has been released by ICE after being detained at a routine hearing.

A 20-year-old young woman is a Korean national, South Korean, evidently, right?

And the daughter of a priest.

So she's here

on a visa as a dependent of a religious worker.

There are religious worker visas, and she's here as a dependent.

She is, I believe, in the process of transitioning to a student visa.

She had another at the hearing, her case wasn't like dismissed or revoked.

She had another hearing set for October.

ICE claimed that she overstayed her visa.

Her lawyer says that claim is not true.

I'm particularly interested in this case because of the intervention of the diocese, the Episcopalian Diocese of New York.

And so it was the Episcopalian Diocese of New York's legal team who fought for her release.

She was very quickly moved to Louisiana.

We know that ICE ICE likes to do this, right?

It likes to move people to places where it feels like it has a favorable circuit court.

The diocese legal team was able to secure her release, but they are still working on the release of a 59-year-old Peruvian asylum seeker who has been detained after having her court date moved up.

So in her case, they said, hey, we've got a hearing that's opened up.

Why don't you come in on Thursday?

And then detained her, which is just reprehensible.

It is really good, I think, that these big religious organizations are getting involved directly in these cases and they are taking on responsibility like they're using their pulpits as a place yeah to to oppose this i think that's good i think regardless of your stance or an organized religion you should be happy about that these these are institutions that have power in this country uh talking of institutions that have power detainees in florida's alligator alcatraz are being denied their right to file court documents because federal courts are claiming they're not under federal jurisdiction.

State courts are claiming they're not under state jurisdiction, which is fairly reasonable given that they have not been charged with or accused of, in many cases, any crimes in the state of Florida, right?

They're not being held.

They were not detained by, well, sometimes they were detained by Florida law enforcement, I guess, but only in their capacity to enforce federal immigration law.

Yes,

with the special like deputized status.

Yes, yeah, it's deputized, which we're about to talk about.

There have been some very funny outcomes of that.

This isn't it, like I've seen it reported as a loophole.

It's not a loophole.

It's extremely fucking clear that they were detained by the federal government for immigration reasons and they have every right to representation in immigration court, right?

This is not a loophole.

They're just denying people their rights.

And I think reporting it as a loophole is entirely ridiculous.

A judge has ordered a document showing who is contracted by whom at the facility be produced as part of a civil rights lawsuit.

So what that will do will obviously document that the federal government is paying for some of this.

I know Rick DeSantis had wanted to use FEMA money for some of this breaking news.

So federal judge Kathleen Williams has ordered that construction, new construction, halt.

They won't be allowed to do any new filling, paving, or infrastructure building for the next 14 days, temporary pause.

They can still continue to hold people, right?

Like this is not going to stop those people being denied their rights, which is what's at stake here.

So we talked a little bit about those Florida deputies, right, who have been, I guess, seconded to ICE or they've been cross-sworn to do ICE work.

ICE is recruiting very heavily right now.

It's offering $50,000 sign-on bonuses.

It has reduced the minimum age, and it seems to have no maximum age cap, from what I can tell.

Border Patrol has been issuing all kinds of waivers for years, right, for all kinds of things that it's supposed to have as like standard through its recruiting.

So, this isn't particularly new.

ICE has been known for a while as kind of if you want to be a Fed and go around and carry a gun and you can't get hired to do gun stuff for the Feds or other agencies, ICE is probably the place you're going to end up, right?

Like, like if their standards are lower than other agencies.

And now they're like specifically selecting for the most

online, unhinged right-wing freaks to join their agency as like a national police force.

Yes.

And that's like what they're doing in their messaging online.

And also some news this week, Dean Kane has joined us.

Yeah, yeah.

It's most likely in like a promotional capacity,

but still worth noting.

Yeah, you might get chased by a middle-aged Superman.

So let's talk about what ICE is doing to recruit.

First of all, it is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on big trucks.

We know Donald Trump himself is a fan of big trucks.

Many pictures of him enjoying big trucks over the years.

ICE has spent $196,000 on Ford Raptors for recruiting purposes.

The Raptor, for those you're not familiar, is like a tricked-out F-150.

They were issuing Raptors to field agents for a while.

They're not the best vehicles.

Like I've heard plenty of agents complain about the Raptors.

Yeah, they're not good.

Yeah, they're not.

And the BP had a special, like, lowest possible trim of the Raptor.

They're popular now because people will buy them used as government surplus and make them good.

But they, yeah, the Raptors they had didn't work too well.

They also bought a gmc yukon for a hundred and one thousand dollars which is a very expensive gmc yukon i have also noted that ice is recruiting from the police who have been cross-sworn into doing ice enforcement this has resulted in some very funny beefs between agencies including uh can i share this video can i screen share yeah yeah let's watch the video and then what has happened is ice has sent emails to i don't know how many agencies, but I know several agencies.

I've talked to several sheriffs that their deputies have received these,

this request.

And basically, it's a recruiting tactic.

It's, hey, we got your email now.

You got certified.

And it's something like, dear colleague, you've shown an interest in this and that.

And we want to let you know that we are offering a $50,000 bonus paid $10,000 at a time.

And it's for five years, obviously.

Man, is that not bite in the hand that feeds you?

We went through all of that, took our time utilizing our local resource, not ours yet, but local resources.

And then they try to recruit you right out from under you using the very emails that we give you.

Finally, they found something bad.

Ice has done.

This is a new low, even for ice.

Yeah.

Sheriff Chip Simmons

calling ICE out for their poor form.

Sheriff Chip finally found something that shows the

compromised heart of ICE.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where will they stop?

Well, let's talk about where they will stop or at least start spending.

ICE has been spending some money this week.

Some of this, I think, like some of the sort of reporting on NFC isn't hugely responsible.

So like ICE signed a sole source contract with BI2 Technologies, for example, for quote, licenses for the inmate identification and recognition system and the mobile offender recognition and information system.

They call these IRIS and Morris based on their initials, right?

These are for EROs, so that's their enforcement and removal operations branch.

The I2 pictures IRIS is being able to identify people with no physical contact based on the tears in their iris.

This technology has been used by police for a while.

So you'll notice it was called the inmate identification.

So the way they would obtain these Iris scans would be scanning people who were detained, right?

CBP will also have Iris scans.

So will USCIS, right?

This is one of the pieces of biometric data that's sometimes collected from migrants as part of their process of moving into the United States and getting their documents, etc.

What Morris will do is allow them to search a registry of previous offenders.

In 2024, Niagara County Sheriff's Office were the first sheriff's office to add iris to their vehicles.

But I think it reported as this is as a CBP office or ICE officers are going to be scanning people's irises with their phones.

I don't see any evidence of that technology existing, either in the contract that the government has or on the website for the company that makes it.

And guessing what this will do is if they have somebody who, for instance, has previously been detained, somebody who has done time and come out, then they will use this to like as a way of identifying them, right?

When after they've detained them, before they take them to wherever.

The big issue here, right, is that BI2 owns this database of scans.

So this database includes Morris, right, which is previous people who have previous offenders.

They have a sex offender registry within it.

They also have databases of seniors who are at risk for going missing.

So that's, I think that's people with dementia that people can voluntarily sign up to.

And they have a database of missing children as well.

BI2, interesting company.

They also They offer a bunch of services for detention companies.

They previously partnered with the Support Our Sheriffs Foundation to provide lower cost prescriptions to sheriffs and deputies.

They're pretty embedded in this law enforcement world.

Other contracts I saw for ICE, NewTek solutions for fingerprint scanners.

Again, fingerprint information is routinely taken from migrants.

People getting green cards, people getting visas, people getting citizenship.

Yes, yeah.

Anyone who has in any capacity and really engaged with USCIS, like all those categories you mentioned, Garrison, will have already done this.

They did also purchase Grey Key, which is more concerning.

Which is for breaking into cell phones, locked cell phones.

Yes, it's for trying to get around the lock on your cell phone.

I've written about Grey Key before for Input Magazine.

Generally, the way they do this is that

they try and make a copy of the cell phone and work on a copy so they don't get locked out of your cell phone.

But Greykey is an extremely nefarious piece of technology for breaking into people's phones, which you otherwise wouldn't be able to access.

So yeah, that is what I have for ICES spending spree this week.

For our last story, I would like to also talk about technology, but technology in the news,

some AI incidents that have broken into people's

news gathering process.

Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo has shared a fake AI video of AOC giving a speech in Congress, calling out the Sidney Sweeney American Eagle ad as racist.

God damn it.

I gotta see this.

Why does it have to all be so stupid?

I was tweeting today and saw a clip of AOC saying that Sidney Sweeney ad was racist.

And so I replied to it and I said, why do you care about this and ignore what matters most?

Why in all the times that you've called on Israel to stop, why have you never told Hamas to stop?

Told Hamas to surrender?

Why would you ignore the St.

Louis attack on that Jewish guy who had his car bombed?

AOC tweeted back and said, dude, that's a deep fake that Sidney Sweeney ad.

You suck.

suck in so many words.

And she was right.

They got me.

She was right.

I suck.

Oh, he has been owned.

Oh, that's not bad.

That's pretty good.

That's funny.

I chose to cut off the clip there because I think it gets the point across.

Yeah, yeah.

That's the right place for it to go.

On this AI video of AOC, it is clearly like embossed into the video itself.

This is an AI video from

chat GPT memes plus AI art on Instagram.

Oh, what a fucking car.

This guy is being elevated as a fucking journalist.

Jesus wept.

He later said on NewsStation, on his show, they got me AI.

It was really good, and it did seem like something she would say.

I'm going to now play the AI video in question to see if you think this is something that AOC would say.

Sidney Sweeney looks like an Aryan goddess, and the American Eagle Jeans campaign is blatant Nazi propaganda.

I mean, fuck.

Watching that sultry little temptress squeeze into a Canadian tuxedo, three sizes too small, with her bouncy little fun bags on the screen, staring at you.

That's right.

Okay, that's enough.

It's not.

Oh my god.

I don't know.

No more.

No more.

End the episode.

What the hell are you going to say?

I

Oh man, what a one of our greatest journalists.

You know, AI really has to be,

you know, we've hit AGI if it can, if it can crack a mind as keen as Chris Cuoma.

It was really good, and it did seem like something she would say.

I don't even know her voice sounds.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

This is one of the most unhinged things I've ever seen.

Just to watch that and then wonder why she hasn't commented on her mask in the same breath is truly an indication of where our country's at.

That AI video is 80 seconds long.

It gets so much crazier, but we don't need to say anymore.

The other incident of AI in the news, former CNN Chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta interviewed an AI avatar impersonating a school shooting victim.

Oh no.

Oh my gosh.

Is this one of those things that like every town or someone was doing?

Yeah, yeah, yes, I caught this when it happened.

Here's a video.

I would like to know what your solution would be for gun violence.

Great question.

I believe in a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support, and community engagement.

We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen and heard.

It's about building a culture of kindness and understanding.

What do you think about that?

I think that's a great idea, Joaquin.

That's not even an answer.

That's not an answer.

This is one of the grossest things I've ever seen.

Create a culture of kindness and understanding.

Yeah, that'll fix it.

Thanks.

Incredible human evil.

Not a person.

That's someone's child.

That's not someone's child, right?

Jimmy Costa wrote.

No, it's just a generic.

Well, no, it's like it's...

It's not a person.

This isn't a human.

Yeah, but they've attempted to reanimate through cringe AI someone's kid, and they look like a character and it's a small world.

The parents are involved in this process.

Jim Acosta wrote on Blue Sky at 4 p.m., I'll have a one-of-a-kind interview with Hakeem Oliver.

He died in the Parkland school shooting, but his parents have created an AI version of their son for a powerful message on gun violence.

Unquote.

You did not interview Jakeem Oliver.

That's not him.

You did not interview that person.

No, you did not.

You didn't interview anybody.

You have helped to spread a fake puppet of someone without their knowledge and consent just as just as gross as doing it for like movie actors right who have who have died this is and and you know more more gross actually actually like significantly more gross yeah it didn't even suggest like it it wasn't even like like willing to be like ban ar-15s or whatever yeah like there was no

nothing suggested here.

Like I can't believe how milquetoast for a dead person who was killed by an AR-15, it wasn't even willing to, it it was just like vaguely new gun control and also a culture of kindness.

But like, can't even be specific, this ghoul that you've made.

You're putting fake words in someone else's like death mask mouth.

Yeah.

It's, yes, it's so, it's so unethical.

Like, I don't even know what to say.

He doesn't work at CNN anymore.

But my God, like, this is not journalism in any way, shape, or form.

No.

I don't want to like punch down on the I and I don't understand.

Like, I know parents who who have lost children right through my work.

I've talked to lots of them more than I'd like to.

And I understand the desire to get your kid back in some form.

And if

whoever the fuck came to them and said, we're going to make an AI of your child so it can argue with journalists about gun control is a fucking ghoul.

Pure evil.

No, the fault here is on the people promoting technology.

And in effect, that's what Jim Acosta is doing here as well.

Yeah.

Totally.

No, because the journalist is totally irresponsible.

And profiting off of it.

It's so gross.

So anyway, that was our AI news to close the episode.

Sorry we couldn't end on the AOC ad.

Instead, we had to end on a bit of a more

sour note.

Yeah.

I genuinely want to know where that AOC ad goes.

I'm going to watch it.

Oh, I'll send it to you, James.

Yeah.

Okay.

We reported the news.

Yeah, I guess.

We reported the news.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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