It Could Happen Here Weekly 186

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Speaker 31 Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today, and I'm joined by my friend and yours, Charles McBride, documentary filmmaker, humanitarian activist, writer.

Speaker 31 And you've just been in Palestine. Is that right, Charles? Yeah, just got back like a week and a half ago.
Nice. Welcome.
Welcome to America, land of the free.

Speaker 31 Damn, that's a rough transition, actually. Thank you for

Speaker 31 joining us so soon after you got back. So there's a lot to talk about, right? Like, I feel as if in like

Speaker 31 legacy media, when there is less discussion of Palestine recently, maybe just because I'm seeing so much domestic U.S. coverage like 24-7, right? We're in another like Trump news cycle.

Speaker 31 But especially with reference to the West Bank, actually, like, can you like update people on the last maybe, you know, maybe in the time you were there on what's especially what's happening in the West Bank?

Speaker 31 Because I think that's getting even less coverage. Sure.
So I've taken two trips to the West Bank in the past year. Yeah.
So August of last year, May of this year.

Speaker 31 I noticed a rapid deterioration just between those two time periods. So, I mean, it was bad last year when we went.
That was.

Speaker 31 Right when I was when my team went there to begin our documentary, they had just launched this new operation in the West Bank, which was pretty much the largest ground operation they'd launched, the Israelis had launched since the second Antifada.

Speaker 31 And it was targeted at the northern refugee camps of Tulkarim, Nurshams, and Jenin. A lot of people know Jenin.
They've heard that in the news. You know, it's relatively familiar.

Speaker 31 Not a lot of people realize that the situation in Tulkarim and Nurshams is quite similar. And those three camps in particular were targeted by the IDF operation.
On the second trip,

Speaker 31 we couldn't even get to those those places, not with the UNRWA personnel that we were supposed to go, with our documentaries on UNRWA, the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

Speaker 31 And last time we were there, they were able to bring us to the camp. They showed us where the Israelis had, you know, bulldozed their facilities and done various airstrikes in the camp.

Speaker 31 This time, they couldn't even take us there. So we went to other camps instead.

Speaker 31 Everyone's spirits were low. Lots of people were talking about West Bank annexation as if it seemed like an inevitability.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I actually spent some time inside 48 on this trip.

Speaker 31 And I went down to Jaffa and to Tel Aviv and interviewed some longtime kind of liberal journalists from Haaritz.

Speaker 31 And they were just talking about how the shift in Israeli society over the last year has been quite marked as well, particularly around the question of just generally ethnically cleansing Gaza, which was something that was,

Speaker 31 according to his telling, like really only heard in very right-wing circles, like Khanist circles over the past couple decades.

Speaker 31 It is now just pretty routinely heard across the spectrum in Israeli society that the best solution to this is to just deport everyone from Gaza. Damn.
Yeah, that's pretty bleak. Like,

Speaker 31 I mean,

Speaker 31 I guess the process of manufacturing consent has been

Speaker 31 pretty successful and pretty complete in that sense. And like, just the dehumanization of Palestinian people has been pretty successful, at least there.

Speaker 31 I guess if people aren't familiar, we should just explain that Palestine is,

Speaker 31 well,

Speaker 31 the areas which are now legally allotted to Palestinians, I guess, are not contiguous, right? Gaza and the West Bank are different areas separated by Israel.

Speaker 31 And the bulk of what you have seen in the last two years has been Israel's war on the people of Gaza.

Speaker 31 But the West Bank is a different and larger area, which has also seen significant Israeli military aggression and violence from settlers, right?

Speaker 31 Like paramilitary aggression, I guess you could call it. People, I think, maybe will have heard of UNRWA or maybe will at least be familiar with seeing it.
Can you explain like what the agency does?

Speaker 31 It's a unique agency, right? Like it doesn't work anywhere else in the world. It's quite a unique thing to this Israel-Palestine context.
Yeah. So UNRWA is probably the most controversial UN agency.

Speaker 31 And that has everything to do with the context in which it was founded.

Speaker 31 It was explicitly set up in coordination between the United States, the newly founded state of Israel, and the Arab League coming to the United Nations and presenting a plan to deal with the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians from their home as a result of the Nakba in 1948.

Speaker 31 So out of that context, it's designed as a temporary aid refugee organization.

Speaker 31 It actually, it's set up before UNHCR, so it's mandated specifically for the Palestinians, and the Palestinians don't end up falling under UNHCR when it's established.

Speaker 31 So there's a lot of particularities about UNRWA that make it different from other UN agencies, which is also something that the Israelis like to highlight because they're engaged in a multi-decade credibility campaign against UNRWA.

Speaker 31 But to the extent that it is

Speaker 31 almost entirely staffed by Palestinians,

Speaker 31 it is quite different than other UN agencies, which typically involve multinationals, international personnel.

Speaker 31 Now, a lot of the higher leadership at UNRWA is still kind of your same international diplomats.

Speaker 31 But in the words of the Zionist academic that I interviewed for this documentary, most of those have quote unquote gone native. So most of the international diplomats

Speaker 31 do tend to, you know, obviously be quite sympathetic to the conditions which the Palestinian staff are working under. So my documentary is

Speaker 31 an investigative documentary to some extent, and it uses the frame narrative of the Israeli allegations that UNRWA had been infiltrated by Hamas and that UNRWA personnel had taken place in the October 7th massacre.

Speaker 31 It uses that as a hook and a frame narrative to talk about what is this organization?

Speaker 31 Why did it go from something that was set up as a temporary relief organization to 77 years later, it is responsible for maintaining the livelihood and well-being of 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees, not only in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but also in Syria, in Lebanon, and in Jordan.

Speaker 31 So the politics of it get very hazy very quickly. But it's kind of an inconvenient thing for everyone because the organization was explicitly designed to end after a few years.

Speaker 31 But the assumption was after a few years, there would have been a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There has not been.

Speaker 31 And here we are 76, 77 years later, and we're still at that point. So UNRWA still exists.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 One of the ironic things we found when filming this documentary is that everyone involved in this process wants this organization to go away. Yeah.

Speaker 31 The Israelis, the Palestinians, the staff themselves. The only thing they disagree on is when and under what conditions, why? Yeah.

Speaker 31 I think it's, yeah, UNRWA is very interesting, like as refugee agencies go, because like, just I was recently reading Sally Hayden's or rereading Sally Hayden's book about about refugees in Libya, right?

Speaker 31 It's called My Fourth Time We Drowned. It's an excellent book.
If people haven't read it, they should read it. Very good audio book as well.

Speaker 31 They incorporate some of the voice notes you got from the refugees, which I think is good.

Speaker 31 And as is typical of United Nations refugee workers in many areas, the bulk of them end up living or spending a lot of time in Tunisia, right? Like not in Libya.

Speaker 31 And coming in, like in, you know, the typical image that you see of the United Nations is like a bunch of people in white land cruisers, right?

Speaker 31 And they pull up and and they do their thing and they leave. They're not either part of the population or even with the population.
And they're often criticized for this around the world, right?

Speaker 31 And they're very susceptible to like state narratives, right?

Speaker 31 Like in Libya, there's all kinds of accusations of corruption or like sort of state capture, I guess, of an agency that's supposed to be international and supposed to be impartial.

Speaker 31 And they're supposed to, above all things, advocate for refugees, right? And sometimes you even see a tension between the IOM and the UNHCR over this kind of shit. It's different with UNRWA, right?

Speaker 31 Like

Speaker 31 they are, from what I've heard from Palestinian friends, like more respected by Palestinian people because of the work that they do and the value that they provide.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, I would say like trust in UNRWA is probably

Speaker 31 higher than in the Palestinian Authority. The PA is largely seen as a contractor, subcontractor for Israel.
Right.

Speaker 31 And UNRWA is seen, you know, as flawed.

Speaker 31 I mean, there are a lot of Palestinians who are deeply critical of UNRWA, particularly the constant efforts it takes to sort of remain neutral on all of these political questions. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And, you know, inefficiencies that are going to come with any multinational institution, NGO. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 31 But in general, they seem to, I mean, at this point, we've interviewed dozens of people who had various relationships.

Speaker 31 Either they had gone to UNRWA schools or they had taken, you know, they had been to UNRWA health clinics. And by and large, they preferred these and they saw the value in UNRWA.

Speaker 31 They liked the UNRWA schools. They liked the UNRWA health clinics.
UNRWA is largely responsible for the fact that Palestinians are one of the most literate populations in the Middle East.

Speaker 31 And many of them speak English incredibly well. I mean, like,

Speaker 31 it's wild talking to an eight or nine-year-old girl who grew up in a refugee camp.

Speaker 31 And she's speaking to me in perfect English, talking about how she wants to move to Los Angeles and become an actress. And it's just, it's wild.
And that's kind of a testament to what UNRWA has done.

Speaker 31 And that's very inconvenient for Israel because when you educate a lot of refugees who can then learn English and turn around and speak to the world in very eloquent ways about the nature of their oppression and their suffering, it becomes an ideological barrier to your particular political project.

Speaker 31 Right. And this is one of the things that has distinguished the genocide in Gaza in terms of like how it's been perceived in the US, at least, right?

Speaker 31 Is that like, you have a very literate population that is able to articulate what is happening directly directly via social media and to traditional media, right?

Speaker 31 Like to people like yourself making documentaries. Like this is distinct from populations,

Speaker 31 like I think of the Rohingya, right? Like, you know, I speak to Rohingya people pretty often, but I don't think most Americans see Rohingya folks if they go on TikTok or Instagram.

Speaker 31 And, you know, as a result, I think people would have cared as deeply.

Speaker 31 You know, people would have been in the streets for that, but

Speaker 31 communication wasn't there. And yeah, it is extremely inconvenient if your project is an ethno-state, right?

Speaker 31 And you're willing to cleanse areas of other ethnicities to build your ethno-state in it, which is what's happening, then it's very convenient if those people you're trying to cleanse can talk to the world in a language that the world understands and very eloquently and make their case for not being ethnically cleansed.

Speaker 31 Dead. No, it is tribute to the work that Anra has done.
You know what, I guess we should do? I guess we should take an advertising break right now.

Speaker 31 So let's do that. And we'll come back.

Speaker 31 All right, we are back. Let's talk about the alternative to UNRWA.
Alternative is a wrong word.

Speaker 31 Let's talk about the attempt to make an end run around UNRWA's existence by installing this farcical NGO, I guess you could call it an NGO or like aid provider.

Speaker 31 This is the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, for people who aren't familiar with. Synthetic UNRWA, UNRWA alternative.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is

Speaker 31 the institute. This is like the Zin of UNRWA, you know.
Yeah. Okay, so what's going on with the Gaza?

Speaker 31 Let's talk about what it is and what it claims to do first, and then we'll talk about how it's not doing it very well. Sure.
At all. Like people are fucking dying in droves.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 Mile high view, UNRWA maintains most of the aid going in and out of Gaza. Everyone I know in the humanitarian world has had to interface at least to some degree with UNRWA during the aid process.

Speaker 31 And that's difficult because UNRWA has essentially been declared a terrorist entity by the Israeli government and has been banned from operating inside what Israel considers to be its territory, including occupied East Jerusalem.

Speaker 31 And increasingly in the West Bank, they're trying to limit its operations. And in Gaza, they say they can't work with them because they're Hamas.

Speaker 31 So the UNRWA people are quite confused because they've had to de-conflict with the Israelis for this entire time.

Speaker 31 And recently, as a result of this law, it's actually become illegal under Israeli law for the Israelis to coordinate with UNRWA.

Speaker 31 And so the UNRWA people don't haven't actually, they don't really understand what's going to happen. There's been some limited coordination, but still they...

Speaker 31 I mean, we talked to people who are very high up in the organization, and they essentially had no idea what the Israelis were planning to do to replace UNRWA or to coordinate with them in Gaza.

Speaker 31 And so they just kept kind of doing their thing until the Israelis literally made them stop in certain instances. Right.
You know, my documentary is called The War on UNRWA.

Speaker 31 And part of this war has been the propaganda efforts and the Israelis going after this organization.

Speaker 31 And everyone in the humanitarian aid world has sort of been asking the question, well, what are you going to do to replace it?

Speaker 31 This is an organization that deals with like 2 million people in Gaza and like 3 million in the West Bank.

Speaker 31 Not all of those are registered with UNRWA, but it's dealing with all the refugee camps there. And Gaza itself is a refugee camp.

Speaker 31 Yeah, like it only exists as such as a result of the NACBA because it's where they put all of the displaced people who weren't in Jordan. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And so the Israelis basically had their backs against the wall and they're like, okay, well, we have to come up with some alternative to this because we can't come out and say, actually, our main goal is to depopulate Gaza and settle it.

Speaker 31 And so they cooked up this idea of the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, which was kind of this public-private partnership backed by the Israelis and the Americans. And

Speaker 31 the intention was to entirely subvert not only UNRWA, but the entire UN infrastructure that goes into the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 31 For instance, every UN agency in the world actually piggybacks off of the World Food Program because they're always the first ones in.

Speaker 31 So it's WFP infrastructure, trucks, you know, vehicles, everything like that, that goes in first. And then UNHCR, UNICEF, all those things, they're piggybacking and coordinating with WFP.

Speaker 31 In this instance, WFP is coordinating with UNRWA. The Israelis wanted to not only bypass UNRWA, they wanted to just cut the entire UN system out of that.

Speaker 31 So to do that, they formed this sort of collaborative partnership under the management of the Israelis, which was supposed to be kind of an amalgam of

Speaker 31 all of these different private NGOs.

Speaker 31 And I don't want to get too much into the specifics of like who sort of was involved in that, but a lot of people kind of took them at the face face value that they wanted this to be a real solution.

Speaker 31 And so they offered to help and kind of set up this system, which was supposed to be overseen entirely by the Israelis and the Americans from a security perspective.

Speaker 31 One of those was Jake Wood, who was the founder of Team Rubicon, which is an organization that does a fair amount of excellent work all around the world.

Speaker 31 He resigned from the Gaza Humanitarian Fund a day before it launched and went on record saying,

Speaker 31 we cannot actually do this while keeping to humanitarian principles of humanity and neutrality, which was a signal to the world that this was a highly politicized project, which is precisely what the World Food Program,

Speaker 31 under the leadership of radical leftist activist Cindy McCain, has been saying about this from the start.

Speaker 31 And, you know, UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, said this is a clearly politicized event.

Speaker 31 UNRWA is the only, or the UN system is the only one capable of actually dealing with this in a humanitarian way. All those concerns were brushed aside.
American contractors were brought in. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And the results were relatively predictable. We've seen at this point two pseudo-massacres.
I mean, the first one was that four Palestinians were killed.

Speaker 31 And just this morning, 27 Palestinians were killed at a GHF distribution after gunfire was opened up on them. Yeah.
We are recording on the 3rd of June. So that was when this second massacre occurred.

Speaker 31 And yeah, like, I mean, just today, as we're recording this, I've seen that Boston Consulting Group, again, like, not exactly like a bastion of wokeness, has terminated its relationship with the Guard Humanitarian Foundation, right?

Speaker 31 Like the kind of conceit that this is a replacement for UNRWA to begin with was somewhat farcical, right?

Speaker 31 But people who were prepared to go along with that, either because they can make money doing it or because they thought this was the only way to stop people starving are still deciding that having seen the way this is run, it's not worth it, right?

Speaker 31 Right. And there's also some political heavy-handedness going on with this.

Speaker 31 One of the most obvious features being specific aid distribution points in the south of Gaza, which are designed to bring, you know, whereas UNRWA and the WFP were going to people, they were trying to get food through as much of the Gaza Strip as possible, including people who wanted to return to their homes in the north.

Speaker 31 The GHF is like, nope, you starving population will need to make the journey to this distribution point and this distribution point only.

Speaker 31 which, you know, has the political effect of depopulating these areas that, you know, Israel is operating in.

Speaker 31 which of course has also met criticism. There are some videos going around showing Palestinians celebrating

Speaker 31 the relief efforts of the GHF. I think some of them have been verified by Reuters.

Speaker 31 Israeli media is making hay of that. People praising Trump in Gaza,

Speaker 31 which these people are starving and they're very happy to get aid. Yeah, that doesn't mean that everything is above board and cool.

Speaker 31 It means that the people who needed food got food. Yeah.
I mean, and that's the political complexity of the situation situation is that the people of Gaza have just been abandoned by everyone, right?

Speaker 31 I mean,

Speaker 31 there's a lot of criticism to be had of how Hamas has handled this.

Speaker 31 There's a lot of criticism to be had of, obviously, the way in which Israel has behaved and the UN system and the international system.

Speaker 31 So, I mean,

Speaker 31 I'm glad that like some of them are getting food. Yeah.
That is, that is an improvement off of none of them getting food, but everyone.

Speaker 31 in the aid world is starting to go on record saying the main problem is is israel preventing aid from going into the gaza strip and i I actually, I want to harp on that a little bit because the reason that has been given primarily for that is that Hamas is stealing the aid.

Speaker 31 Every time they're asked about this, they go back to, well, we want to get aid to the people of Gaza. Unfortunately, Hamas keeps stealing the aid.
And so we can't allow it.

Speaker 31 We need to allow it just to trickle in. That's interesting for two reasons.
First of all, they've yet to provide any evidence that that's actually occurring.

Speaker 31 And second, because all humanitarian experts agree that even if that was the case, say everything Israel said about Hamas was true and they were stealing 90, 95% of the aid that's coming in and selling it back.

Speaker 31 The humanitarian solution to that would be to flood the strip with so much aid that it would literally be impossible for them to like to stop that, which we can do.

Speaker 31 Like, it would be possible for us to flood the Gaza Strip with so much aid that it would be like an abundance of food. So, the decision not to do that is a political one.
Yes, definitely.

Speaker 31 Like, I was going to say, on the face of it, it doesn't matter. Like, there are lots of situations, to be clear, where people steal aid.
It's undesirable. Of course, it is.

Speaker 31 But yeah, the solution is more aid, not like, oh, unfortunately, the aid has been stolen, so now the children must starve.

Speaker 31 Yeah, that only works if you're prepared to accept the outcome in which little children die of starvation, which the Israelis are.

Speaker 31 Like, they're, they're perfectly, I mean, yeah, this new was it, University of Pennsylvania poll about saying 84% of Israelis are in favor of the IDF just simply either killing or displacing everyone in the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 31 84%.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it's wild to see, like,

Speaker 31 it's been such a strange couple of years in that sense, right? Because

Speaker 31 more people in this country are aware of the plight of the people of Palestine than ever have been, and more people are engaged with it. That is mostly good.

Speaker 31 Some people have been engaged with it in a way which is far from good, right? Like, I don't think there's really very much to be gained.

Speaker 31 Fucking throwing Molotov cocktails at people in boulder is not making anything better for anyone. It's just making everything dangerous, more dangerous for everyone.
And it's fucking stupid.

Speaker 31 And I would extend that to gunning down

Speaker 31 Israeli couples outside the Jewish Museum in DC. I don't think that's necessarily the best way to help people in Gaza.

Speaker 31 No, like, yeah, standing outside the event for Jewish people and fucking shooting random people is not. That does, again, it doesn't make anyone safer.
It makes all of us less safe.

Speaker 31 And like, it does nothing to stop people dying and starving in Gaza. And that's...
That's not the crux of the problem, I guess, but that is a problem, right?

Speaker 31 The people are engaging with Gaza, but nothing is helping. People here know how bad it is that children are starving in Gaza, but that hasn't changed the fact that children are starving in Gaza.

Speaker 31 In fact, like, you know, I've said this a lot of times, like I moved here in 2008 and I had engaged with the movement before that in the UK, right?

Speaker 31 And the situation in Palestine, to be careful, was very different then. But like, it wasn't something people had heard of here.

Speaker 31 for the most part unless you were within like certain leftist or sort of people of maybe their like Middle Eastern extraction would know about it, of course.

Speaker 31 Now people do know, and all over the world people know, and we've seen huge marches, right? Like the situation is worse than it's ever been. I mean, not ever.

Speaker 31 I mean, the knockbill was pretty fucked too. But as the world looks on, right, like the genocide continues and people continue dying.

Speaker 31 And seemingly, the acceptance of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation by

Speaker 31 states of the world is really troubling, right? Like we're concentrating this starving population in a small area.

Speaker 31 It's contrary to everything that humanitarian principles stand for.

Speaker 31 And oh, no, we don't see, I mean, there is a very ready alternative. It's whether anyone is willing to step up and tell Israel to stop stopping aid entering the Gaza.
Like, this could end,

Speaker 31 in my estimation, like very quickly, right? We have enough aid and even aid in the region to feed all those people right now if we needed to. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 31 There's tens of millions of pounds of food rotting in warehouses in Jordan and Egypt right now, just waiting to go across the border. Yeah.
And people dying.

Speaker 31 It's the lack of political will, mostly on behalf of the United States, you know, but also, I think, the members of the Abraham Accords and the EU. Yeah.
It's a devastating indictment.

Speaker 31 And I think the interesting thing about it is it truly pulls the mask off of the quote-unquote rules-based world order. Yeah.

Speaker 31 the U.S.-led rules-based world order, because you just, I mean, it's just so obvious that no matter how many people want this terrible thing to end, that we're saying this very obvious genocide is being live streamed to our phones, the powers that be are too invested to let it stop.

Speaker 31 You know, they're into the hill. We've already seen the degree to which the United States is compromised in

Speaker 31 its media and government storytelling.

Speaker 31 in relation to Israel-Palestine, the long unwillingness of people to speak up about this, followed by the very rapid turnaround of people who are now rats fleeing the ship.

Speaker 31 They're seeing the unmistakable reality of this genocide. And,

Speaker 31 you know, it's like everyone says, once this is done, everyone will pretend they were against it from the start. And you're now starting to see that.
Right.

Speaker 31 You know, with like the former White House press secretary. Yeah, yeah, Miller, right? Yeah, Miller was like, yeah, they've been committing war crimes and they were doing it while I was there.

Speaker 31 But I didn't speak on my behalf. I was speaking on behalf of the United States government.
Right. Yeah.
The old, uh, the old Nuremberg offense.

Speaker 31 Yeah, that like I was just doing my job thing, which like it's not actually

Speaker 31 an excuse for for participating in war crimes and like shouldn't be an excuse for apologizing or excusing them either. Right.

Speaker 31 I know that you guys have talked about, and we'll have spoilers for this, but I know you guys have recently had a series unpacking Andor, which is my favorite TV show. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And I was just so happy that they snuck that one line in about when Cyril asks what they're doing here and she just says following orders. Yeah.

Speaker 31 How often are we going to hear that in the next few years, I guess?

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 It's so predictable, right? Like every time this happens, right? Like this isn't the first time the United Nations has basically allowed a genocide to happen right under its nose. No.

Speaker 31 And it probably won't be the last because, as you said, right, like the idea that we have a rules-based world order, it's a lie. It's a myth that exists to make people

Speaker 31 feel better

Speaker 31 and feel like this stuff couldn't happen again. But, like, you know, we have ICC warrants for people who are traveling freely around the world.

Speaker 31 It doesn't matter that the ICC can't enforce its own warrants, right? Like,

Speaker 31 you can say something to war crime. It doesn't matter.
Like, no one's, you know, the war police aren't going to go and arrest all the people doing it.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 It's mostly just kind of a, yeah, it's kind of a placebo. I'm not really sure what the function it serves.
I mean, I'm not a big

Speaker 31 international institutions enjoyer. Like I'm deeply skeptical of the United Nations in almost every one of its aspects.

Speaker 31 My team and I have talked several times about the point that this documentary has had us weirdly like, it's improved our trust.

Speaker 31 in international NGOs just because we're seeing like the degree to which UNRWA is operating on increasingly less budget every year and still managing to be effective.

Speaker 31 I think a huge part of that is, again, it is staffed by the local population who are from these areas and they have a duty and a commitment to care to their people.

Speaker 31 But in general, no, I mean, I don't understand what the point of the UN is if you don't give it the U.S. military.

Speaker 31 Like, I mean, if I, as an anarchist, I don't believe that this is a great solution to things, but like, if you wanted to enforce the UN, you would need the world police.

Speaker 31 Like, you would need to just use the United States to like hunt down these people and utilize its 800 military bases in every country to enforce these rules.

Speaker 31 And we don't really, yeah, we allow these things to happen. But yeah, I'm not a big international institution to enjoy it either.

Speaker 31 Like I've seen the UN be fucking useless in most continents that people live on. I would really like it, though, if they would do something to stop the suffering of the people of Palestine.

Speaker 31 Like I would, it doesn't mean I wouldn't be happy. It doesn't mean I'm not happy.
When I speak to guys from PK Gaza, who we've had on our show several times, right?

Speaker 31 Like when they talk to us about like where should we send money, they'll be like, oh, UNRWA were able to get my family some food this week or whatever like i'm happy to hear that yeah and uh i'm glad that they're there oh i'm glad that they were there at that time i guess

Speaker 31 so like what does the future hold for the gaza humanitarian foundation seems to be falling apart within a very short period of this whole thing being stood up um which is unsurprising right?

Speaker 31 Can you explain, like, what does it take for aid that lives up to basic humanitarian principles to get in there?

Speaker 31 I think that's a really difficult question to answer because we have tried so many options. Yeah.
I mean, truly,

Speaker 31 I mean, the last time I think I was on this podcast, it was to talk about my colleagues at the World Central Kitchen who got killed in Gaza.

Speaker 31 That was an attempt to try and alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people, and it had predictable results.

Speaker 31 You know, there's all these groups have been operating in there to the extent that they can, and the result has been too little, too late.

Speaker 31 And everyone is saying, from Cindy McCain at the World Food Program to Philippe Lazzarini to, you know, Jose Andres, like in the from the private sector, everyone is saying the reason this is a problem has nothing to do with mosques.

Speaker 31 It has everything to do with the fact that Israel is restricting the amount of egg going to the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 31 And now everyone's waking up and asking the obvious question of like, well, why are they actually doing that?

Speaker 31 And the answer corresponds to those polls we see that indicate that, you know, 50% of Israeli society is open to killing everyone in the Gaza Strip, 84% are open to displacing them all.

Speaker 31 This is just what Israel wants. And I think the humanitarian world is slowly swallowing that very difficult pill.
And I don't,

Speaker 31 I can't really tell you what comes next outside of a political resolution. Yeah.
which seems harder and harder to come by in the current international climate.

Speaker 31 Like, certainly it's not coming from the U.S., right? Like, yeah, I mean, like, something to watch would be that Senator Welch from Vermont introduced a bill to immediately refund UNRWA. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 And it has, it has a house, uh, a correlate with, uh, I think, yeah, Congresswoman Jayapal and a few others who are trying to kind of push that through.

Speaker 31 I mean, the United States funds $300 million, which is about over a third of UNRWA's annual budget. And we've restricted that funding for the past year and a half.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 So if we restore that, I think that would be a big signal to Israel that like we're not playing ball anymore. Yeah.

Speaker 31 I just think when you have a rubber stamp Congress and a fascist president, that's probably unlikely to pass. That's a big reach.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 I actually think this is an area where elected officials are to the right of Trump supporters on this one, I think. Like, you know, I spent a lot of time in rural East County San Diego, right?

Speaker 31 Like I talk to people who have very different politics to my own. Yeah.
It's a nice way of saying that.

Speaker 31 But like, I've had people who straight up, I'm sure, voted for Trump be like, man, they're letting little children starve. Like, what the fuck is wrong? You know, like, I think it's an area where

Speaker 31 a more sensible politics would be able to build consensus, but here we are. Right.
Yeah. I mean, and there's, there is no opposition.
Like, the Democrats are not an opposition party.

Speaker 31 They're just happy being like the junior partners in fascism now.

Speaker 31 Yeah, they're having a little party today where they're giving out tacos because they're trying to somehow encourage Trump to go ahead with more sanctions and tariffs and, I don't know, more genocides, I guess.

Speaker 31 Like, I don't quite know what the Trump always chickens out thing. Like,

Speaker 31 I'm glad he's chickened out of the tariffs.

Speaker 31 Isn't that a good thing? Yeah. Like, yeah, like,

Speaker 31 what are you trying to say here? I think maybe I don't want to confront what they're trying to say. But this is a thing that, like, at the current time, like, it needs state action to stop it.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 We do not have an organization which, which is able to mobilize people in such a way that they can stop it. Like, and that is, it's really desperate if you care, right?

Speaker 31 Because the states of the world very clearly for decades and decades and decades have been unconcerned with Palestinian people and their well-being. And they're not doing shit about it now.

Speaker 31 I think there are still people who are able to make a meaningful benefit to the lives of people in the West Bank, right?

Speaker 31 I understand why people are hopeless when they look at what's happening in Gaza and I understand why it seems bleak and it seems

Speaker 31 like there's nothing you can do. Are there things that like

Speaker 31 concrete actions, organizations, groups that you think people can engage with? And we've heard from some of them on the show before, right? To be in solidarity with or to help people in the West Bank?

Speaker 31 Yeah. You know, I think like, I honestly, I think there are people who could probably better answer this question for me who've actually gone and done protected presence operations in the West Bank.

Speaker 31 I know that they're like the people in Masafar Yatta are often asking for foreigners to come and do that.

Speaker 31 And a lot of people will go through like Jordan Valley Solidarity or ISM or something like that.

Speaker 31 I'm usually one to discourage foreigners from jumping feet first into a war zone with great intentions and no knowledge of the language or everything that's going on. Yeah.

Speaker 31 But there does seem to be a genuine call from amongst the Palestinian community and the West Bank to have people who are willing to physically get in between, you know, Palestinian villages and settlers and the IDF.

Speaker 31 Yeah. So that is a concrete thing you can do.
That's a dangerous thing to ask somebody to do. Yeah, I don't think it's something people should rush into.

Speaker 31 We've interviewed people who have been shot doing that. Yeah.
Exactly. Young woman was killed doing that.
Yeah. Aisha Naraghi,

Speaker 31 she was shot

Speaker 31 feet away from my friend who was just in the West Bank. And he just got banned from the entire territory for 99 years.

Speaker 31 And I was talking to him about that because I wonder about like, you know, my work.

Speaker 31 And sometimes I feel like I'm not going far enough in my solidarity because I'm doing this investigative documentary and I'm not physically putting my body on the line. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 31 But I can still go to the country. Like

Speaker 31 my support for the Palestinians is still ongoing. So I think people need to ask themselves, do I want to take one drastic measure to like show

Speaker 31 my solidarity with Palestine in an instant? Yeah. Whether it's joining a flotilla that might get airstrikes

Speaker 31 or setting yourself on fire outside the Israeli embassy. Or do I want to like contribute in the ways that I can as best I can? I mean, I'm a storyteller, right?

Speaker 31 So I said, I need to find a story that I can tell about the Palestinian that will humanize them in the eyes of people who are not naturally sympathetic.

Speaker 31 And I think a lot of people think that they need to be putting their body on the line. Or it's like, I talk about this with disaster relief all the time.

Speaker 31 Like disaster happens and people see you on the TV, they're like, I need to be wearing a high-vis vest and distributing a box of aid to someone.

Speaker 31 It's like, no, you probably don't, actually.

Speaker 31 Like the thing that you can best do to help people is probably the skill that you've been perfecting in your own career, as well as like in your own life, right?

Speaker 31 If you're good at spreadsheets, you can help people get access to housing. Yeah, 100%.
You know, if you're good, if you're good at lifting things, then maybe you should be lifting boxes.

Speaker 31 But like, I have a friend who's the Emmy Award-winning director of photography, and he's like, I have a truck and I can lift heavy things and like, show me where to go.

Speaker 31 And he was hitting me up the entire first two weeks of the LA fires, being like, Where should I go? And I was like, mate, you're an Emmy award-winning videography.

Speaker 31 Tell the story of the fires, find the survivors, like bring their stories to life and let the world see what our community looks like. And he did that and it went amazing.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 So like, I think people should think about when they want to help. You know, if you are a ceramicist or you sew or you're a musician, write a song about Gaza.

Speaker 31 Like there's so many ways to help that don't involve physically putting yourself in between a settler and their M4 and a Palestinian family whose language you can't speak. Yeah, I totally agree.

Speaker 31 Like there's, and we see that with border stuff, right? Like everyone wants to hike out to the border and drug water, or, you know, everyone wanted to,

Speaker 31 in Hokumba, right? Like, a lot of people wanted to help us, and people did help us, and it was amazing. It was really beautiful.

Speaker 31 But, like, people were also able to help the skills they had, like making jewelry and selling it, or maybe doing a benefit gig, right? There's a long tradition of anarchist benefit gigs.

Speaker 31 Like, it's a thing that we do: do a zine. Yeah.
Like, do a punk concert, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
Many, many such cases.

Speaker 31 Like, within doing that, there's the intangible benefit of showing people that people care about them, like all around the world. I remember,

Speaker 31 you know, just recently, I saw people from the Kareni Nationalities Defense Force, right?

Speaker 31 So one of the revolutionary organizations in Myanmar making a statement about solidarity to the people of Palestine and to their children and, you know, that they too have experienced their children being killed.

Speaker 31 They too have experienced these bombing runs and state oppression and that like they see them and they care about them.

Speaker 31 And even in their own time of war, like the front in karini state is hot right now that they are still thinking of the people of palestine you know i saw palestinian people were very touched by this right like it does obviously you can't eat someone's good thoughts but like there are things you can do like because yeah you can't be down there right now giving people a sandwich as much as you'd like to and for some people that's either not possible or maybe just not the best use of their time and like I think it's a really good message that everyone's good at something.

Speaker 31 You like find the thing that you're good at and use that to help people, I think is really valuable. Is there anything else you'd like to share with people before we finish up here?

Speaker 31 Yeah, I just think I would, um, this was a dark conversation because I don't really see a way out of this humanitarian situation, but I think there's a degree to which that's been the case from the start, right?

Speaker 31 Yeah, the real trick of the imperial thought machine is that the pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it. Yeah, to quote uh theory twink Karasinimek,

Speaker 31 but don't lose hope, right? Because

Speaker 31 the world does care about palestine more than it ever has yeah and they they feel that they the the people there feel our love they feel our solidarity

Speaker 31 and that is not valueless right like yeah no human is useless who lightens the burden of another i was depressed as hell coming back from this recent trip to palestine And I went to the mountains and met with a bunch of people who were just really energetic about like Palestinian solidarity and really cared about it.

Speaker 31 And it was like, it was so nice to go from that and just be able to tell my Palestinian friends, like, hey, by the way, we just spent an entire week talking about what we can do to alleviate to some small degree the suffering that your people are going through.

Speaker 31 That matters. Yeah.
Like every small act, every little thing, right? The small deeds of ordinary folk. That's what keeps the darkness at bay.
Yeah. And that's really prescient.

Speaker 31 Often like refugees will say to me or Asina Peaks will say to me in the last six months now, I guess, that they think Americans don't care about them anymore.

Speaker 31 And that really fucking breaks my heart, like more than I can express with words, because I care about those people so much. And

Speaker 31 like, it does make a difference when they see people doing things and they can be small things, but like, I know how much that lifts up somebody in dark times, like,

Speaker 31 because I've been with them in pretty dark times. So yeah, it does make a difference.
And like, if that's what you can do, then people shouldn't think it's valueless. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And also, I'm like, pressure people, you know, know continue to make people embarrassed for yeah for believing in genocide call your congressmen and remind them that they are they're shills and cowards i think a lot about you know you mentioned like 19 you mentioned world war ii earlier yeah i mean if we had had tick tock in in the age of dachau and tripolinka and and auschwitz i think about like we the american government knew about the final solution.

Speaker 31 We knew that the boxcars were going to these

Speaker 31 extermination camps and we refused to bomb them.

Speaker 31 We focused on military targets.

Speaker 31 If we'd been able to live stream, you know, some from inside Auschwitz and we were also able because of ProPublica or whatever to find out that FDR was choosing not to bomb the concentration camps, there would have been outrage.

Speaker 31 There would have been a huge amount of outrage, I think, in the American population, as there is in Gaza. And that's an important thing.
It's something we have access to now.

Speaker 31 We can put that external pressure onto people and make them uncomfortable.

Speaker 31 that's what brought down south african apartheid like these like it's the it's the bcgs pulling out of the gaza humanitarian fund yeah basically british companies just got so embarrassed to work with south africa that they just eventually stopped and that's what brought down right yeah and because people wouldn't shut the up about it right they wouldn't let them do other stuff and be like we're not talking about that today and like people in the case of south africa wouldn't play sports with south africa until it stopped doing its apartheid, right?

Speaker 31 Like, uh,

Speaker 31 I was going to say there was global economic boycott, it wasn't quite global. Israel was not boycotting apartheid South Africa.

Speaker 31 But yeah,

Speaker 31 that stuff does make a difference. Charles, when's your documentary coming out? Where can people find it? What can they view it on?

Speaker 31 I'm still in the editing phase, so I think give me two months and I will have a better idea of when it's coming out. I'm hoping like before autumn 2025.
It is a time-timely piece, right?

Speaker 31 It has some relevance that's time-sensitive.

Speaker 31 But you can follow it on Instagram. It's just at the war on UNRWA, U-N-R-W-A.

Speaker 31 And my personal account also posts a lot about it. That's Charles McBride with a Y.

Speaker 31 And it's the same on Substack, TikTok, YouTube. Yeah.
Like Charles said, you don't have to be there getting an M4 pointed at you to make a difference.

Speaker 31 And so like, yeah, I would encourage people to do the little things too. They're not that small, actually, but just, yeah, the things that aren't going to Palestine necessarily.
Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And like, take heart, you know, don't despair. Yeah, yeah.
Find some joy.

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Speaker 31 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which, if you are paying attention to the news today, is Los Angeles.

Speaker 31 Not just LA, but largely LA right now, which over the course of the last couple of days, while we were off for the weekend, has broken out into

Speaker 31 a series of protests and cop riots that are kind of consuming national news. The federal government has activated the California National Guard and asserted federal control over them.

Speaker 31 Governor Newsom is kind of pushing back against that, although not in a way that I am convinced or I've seen any evidence of matters at this point.

Speaker 31 The United States Marines, a group of, I think, about 500 from Camp Pendleton, which is down near San Diego, have been activated as well, which is a probable violation of Pase Comitada, so that's kind of unclear to me the extent to which they're in theater at this point.

Speaker 31 Largely, all of these actions have been ineffective in making the protests go away at this point.

Speaker 31 What sparked them was a series of ICE raids that took about 2,000 people into custody and brought a bunch of Los Angeles out in Paramount, California, who were met by the police, the LAPD, providing crowd control to Homeland Security HSI agents.

Speaker 31 Yeah, and that's the gist of what went down. Things have just kind of escalated from there.
Yesterday, probably 4,000 to 6,000 people in the street, as opposed to 500 or so the day before.

Speaker 31 So things have continued to escalate. And the LAPD and their police have had no real luck in containing the demonstrations.
We'll see how long that situation lasts.

Speaker 31 But yeah, that's where we are right at this second, more or less. Things are continuing to evolve today.
We'll have evolved since.

Speaker 31 Yep. Yeah, by the way, we're recording this on Monday.
This will probably be coming out like Monday night, Tuesday morning. Yeah.
So who fucking knows what will have happened by then?

Speaker 31 This is like about 1 p.m. Pacific time when we're recording this.

Speaker 31 I want to start also by going back to that National Guard deployment because that national, the federalized National Guard deployment is hideously illegal. Oh, yeah.
Like unbelievably illegal.

Speaker 31 Like, I cannot emphasize enough, this is like constitution-shatteringly illegal. Yeah.
And the way this is being reported in the media is fucking hideous. They are just straight up lying about it.

Speaker 31 So, okay, so Trump has not declared the Insurrection Act yet, right? No, they activated a directive that Trump signed, cited 10 U.S.C. 12406,

Speaker 31 which is a specific provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services.

Speaker 31 That provision allows, or part of that provision allows, for the federal government to deploy National Guard forces, quote, if there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States.

Speaker 31 So basically the claim being made by the administration here was that the federalization of the California Guard was justified by the fact that the people of Los Angeles, which at the point this was done was somewhere less than a thousand of them.

Speaker 31 500 people, yeah. Had were an open rebellion because they had yelled at a bunch of ICE officers for a while.
That was the situation.

Speaker 31 Yeah, well, and also, but it's worth noting, too, even, even, even if there was a rebellion, which there isn't, he also can't use that section because it's in coordination with the governor.

Speaker 31 You can only do it if the governor is working with you and the governor, like...

Speaker 31 Newsom is being a real piece of shit about this for again, like the president. The LAPD's been.
Yeah, the LAPD.

Speaker 31 Yeah, but it's like he's been sending the LAPD out, but he hasn't given permission for the federal government to like use the California National Guard. They're just doing it, right?

Speaker 31 This is like they've just stolen a state National Guard. And Newsram's response has been, because he fucking hates protesters so much, has been like, oh, this is bad.

Speaker 31 Am I going to like do anything about the fact that like, again, every single law about how the National Guard is supposed to be used has just been torn the fuck up? No.

Speaker 31 Like fucking NPR and like a bunch of the mainstream media reporting about this has just been saying that, oh, well, he used this provision. And it's like, no, he didn't.
Like, he did not.

Speaker 31 He explicitly, every single part of the thing that lets you use this provision, none of the conditions have been fulfilled, which means he's not using it. He's just saying shit and doing it.

Speaker 31 Yeah, that's exactly right. And the activation of the U.S.
Marines is based on like Hegseth posted a tweet.

Speaker 31 being like, I've got Marines ready in Camp Pendleton, which like there's absolutely no constitutional justification for especially since the National Guard had just been put in for deploying active duty U.S.

Speaker 31 Marines into this situation. Absolutely not.

Speaker 31 It's all super, like, for one thing, the situation that they're in right now, in terms of like what we've seen from the National Guard yesterday, was like, they're not very effective at this. No, no.

Speaker 31 Right. They fairly quickly, after being deployed, started using, you know, firing impact munitions at the crowd, attacking the crowd in the same way that the LEPD had done.
Nothing that was like,

Speaker 31 I would say, an escalation beyond how the fucking cops were active, right? But National Guard is bad at handling these kind of things, right?

Speaker 31 Their force organization is not meant to be able to be split up into small enough units the way the cops are in enough areas. Like they're, they're just not meant for this sort of thing.

Speaker 31 It's not how they're like meant to be deployed to counteract protests. So you wind up just kind of keeping them in this big blob.

Speaker 31 of guys who you don't have good like they're sleeping on floors in government buildings right now because the quartering act exists yeah which is amazing and because there's not much in the way of organization uh behind deploying them and they don't know they're not there i mean neither are the police generally well trained with their impact munitions but these guys certainly aren't and they freak out at the drop of a hat like they're like worse at it than the lapd and the lapd is you know not good at it.

Speaker 31 They're just good at hurting people. So you've just kind of got this large brittle group of guys who you can plunk down in an area while protesters continue to gather in groups all around the city.

Speaker 31 And the more stories of shit like a blob of National Guardsmen fucking up protesters you get, the more people are coming out and the less controllable the situation becomes.

Speaker 31 And it seems like we're seeing the very beginning stages of people actually learning tactical lessons from 2020 and 2020 and 2024 with the Palestine encampments. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Which is that like, yeah, like if you concentrate all of your people in one spot, police departments are very, very good at massing a whole bunch of people and rolling you over.

Speaker 31 And we've known this since 2020. If you are at a whole bunch of different spots at the same time, they're terrible at responding to that.
And that's kind of what's been happening. Yeah.

Speaker 31 There's been a bunch of protests popping up in different places.

Speaker 31 It's been very effective at sort of like preventing that kind of like one giant sweep mobilizations that were like destroying the student encampments. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And I'm looking at based on reporting from CBS News, about 700 U.S.

Speaker 31 Marines have been activated from the 29 Palms Base near San Diego, which is, per Jim Laporta, who's a defense reporter, widely considered to be one of the worst bases to be stationed at in the entire military, are being deployed to Los Angeles right now.

Speaker 31 So that's just great. Yeah.
Someone asked Trump, what would it take for him to use, to like authorize the deployment of the U.S. military on American soil?

Speaker 31 And he said, that's just, that's up to me, which is not how any of this works.

Speaker 31 Like, that's just pure military dictatorship stuff. If Trump is just able to, like,

Speaker 31 use the military, just do whatever the fuck he wants. That is just that is the Constitution gone.
That is the pretense of democracy gone.

Speaker 31 It is

Speaker 31 real bad. Now, it hasn't happened yet, but there has been a bunch of extremely alarming other shit that's happened.

Speaker 31 So the cops arrested the president of California SEIU, which is the service workers union in California, very, very large union.

Speaker 31 Not a super bilitant one.

Speaker 31 No, and David Huerta isn't who you'd call like a particularly militant leftist. No, he's just like a, he's just like a kind of like a Democratic Party labor guy.

Speaker 31 And they just like arrested him outside of, outside of one of the, the initial protests where he was. Injured him quite badly, too.
Yeah, yeah, like beat the shit out of him.

Speaker 31 And then he's still being held in, in, in, in, in a federal detention building.

Speaker 31 They're charging him with a feder with federal felony conspiracy to impede an officer. And again, this is, this is the count, this is the head of like one of the largest unions in California.

Speaker 31 No, and they're, they're justifying it in part based on the charging documents because they saw him texting on his phone yeah outside and assumed he was texting to like a protester to give them orders right like it's like fucking cartoon clown shit but like the actual effect of this again is that they have like one of the they have like the president of one of the largest unions in the state like yes in in a federal detention building So, I mean, there's obviously been like unions are pissed about it.

Speaker 31 There hasn't been any kind of large-scale mobilization from them yet, but if there was one possible thing you could do to actually get SEIU Alpha's ass and and like show up to shit, it's this.

Speaker 31 We don't know exactly what's going to happen.

Speaker 31 The reporting that I've seen so far has suggested that there is actually a kind of heartening degree of cross-union support for like, holy shit, the feds like just grabbing the president of a union is in fact bad.

Speaker 31 We're going to have to see exactly how that plays out. But like he's still fucking in there.
Maxine Walters like tried to enter the facility to check on him.

Speaker 31 This has happened with a bunch of different Congress people who have tried to enter this one in LA and a couple of other detention facilities. They are all being denied, which is unhinged.

Speaker 31 Yeah, especially since they have oversight over facilities like this. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Other news from today that's just come out in the last less than a day, the government has deployed MQ-9 Reapers. Jesus.
I think at least two of them over Los Angeles.

Speaker 31 These are the drones that we were using overseas to shoot hellfire missiles at people. That's not what they're being used for here.
They're being used for surveillance.

Speaker 31 The last time this was done was in Minneapolis in 2020. Yep.
Outside of their use for surveillance over the border, but there's MQ-9s over an American city surveilling protesters.

Speaker 31 Speaking of that, there's also just been like the threat of surveillance being used against protesters.

Speaker 31 Kind of the most chilling example from yesterday was an LAPD helicopter flying low over a crowd, shining a spotlight on them and saying, like, I've seen, we can see all of you.

Speaker 31 We're going to come, I'm going to come to your houses later. Like, you're all on camera and I'm like specifically, I'm going to cut, we're coming to your houses later.
Yeah, it's police state shit.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it's police state shit now. Do I believe that they actually have the ability to no, they don't actually, but yeah.

Speaker 31 That said, like wear, if you're going to one of these protests, wear a fucking mask. Yes.
Like,

Speaker 31 I don't know, like, both for COVID, but like also, Jesus fucking Christ, like, they're flying predator troats over these protests. Like, wear masks.

Speaker 31 Good lord. Do you know what else wants you to buy masks? Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast, perhaps.

Speaker 31 And we're back.

Speaker 31 Yeah, so. I also want to talk a bit about the specific conditions that caused all of this stuff, because I think the reporting on it has been really bad.
So

Speaker 31 there were 2,000 arrests from ICE on Tuesday. They arrested 2,000 people on Wednesday.
I think these are like national numbers. The numbers like very specifically in LA is at least several hundred.

Speaker 31 People have been being held in just horrifying conditions.

Speaker 31 You know, some of them are being held in federal detention centers, but they're also just being held in like the basements of these fucking buildings because there's not enough room to hold this many people.

Speaker 31 You know, I mean, even the conditions in the regular detention center are terrible, but like the immigration lawyers who people were able to reach and talk to are talking about hundreds of people in rooms designed for 30.

Speaker 31 There's no cots. They're sleeping on the ground.
Sickness is spreading. There's not enough food or water.

Speaker 31 Conditions are fucking horrifying.

Speaker 31 A lot of the people who are in there, you know, the ones that we've been able to get any kind of contact with from their lawyers, a lot of these people cannot be deported because they are people who have been granted stay of deportation by the U.S.

Speaker 31 government, which means they cannot be deported. But ICE has just fucking kidnapped them anyways.

Speaker 31 There's videos you can see from the protesters outside the buildings and there's something i remember from occupy ice

Speaker 31 in 2018 that's just fucking harrowing is that like when you're outside these buildings sometimes you can hear the people inside shouting and it's it's fucking harrowing and with these ones there's a bunch of videos if you can see that the people inside the buildings are trying to like shine lights out of windows so that people know that they're inside it's fucking horrifying and i and i think just how bad this is like how bad it was that like all of these fucking people in their fucking tanks just rolled up and started kidnapping people has just kind of been lost in all of this discourse about the protests it's like no this is what was happening like this is straight up soldiers are just taking people in the night like that's what this is yeah you know and this has been happening all over there was also a huge sort of protest sort of started at this home depot where okay so this is where this is where we would get into the the point where like it's kind of difficult to say what's going on ice claims that they were just staging a bunch of people the department homeland security said to the bbc that there was no raid on this home depot planned yeah and that they were just staging there i don't believe that because these people lie for a living it is their job they are police it is their job as a cop to lie to you it is a constitutionally protected thing that they have according to the supreme court which is absolutely ridiculous but I am pretty sure they're lying about that.

Speaker 31 But regardless, there's, you know, like their protest started off and then like the cops just started tear gassing the people who were protesting. Yep.
This massive rage at a Home Depot.

Speaker 31 Now, there was another kind of noteworthy event is when ICE showed up in force. They got, there were kind of two different actions.

Speaker 31 There was one down at a federal building where people attacked and disassembled barricades at the same time as people showed up. to go after the ICE caravan.

Speaker 31 ICE officers were pelted in their vehicles with a number of objects.

Speaker 31 And again, this is the kind of thing that makes it a lot more difficult. I mean, that just appears

Speaker 31 operationally to be true for them to crack down when they're expecting

Speaker 31 action in one direction and it comes in multiple at the same time.

Speaker 31 There was another instance earlier in the protest where ICE officers were surrounded by a crowd and cut off for about eight hours while the LAPD refused to respond to them.

Speaker 31 And they eventually had to land a blackhawk on the street in order to resupply because they were out of like water and I think running low on munitions, which they then used with reckless abandon.

Speaker 31 So,

Speaker 31 yeah, there's also, as I'm looking right now, just about as about two hours ago, a U.S. Marine AH-1Z Viper attack helicopter was filmed flying low over Los Angeles.
So

Speaker 31 it looks like we've got active duty U.S. Marine Corps forces in the city.
Unclear if they're directly engaging with anyone. I haven't really heard of a lot of activity today, but yeah.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 My guess is things will intensify, you know, as the day goes on and as we sort of roll into night, because as some people sort of start getting off work and when temperatures start coming down a bit, that's the open question, right?

Speaker 31 As to like what's going to happen. The last couple of days, we saw numbers escalate, but now it's Monday.
People have work and there's more. It's like,

Speaker 31 it's not clear to me that that's going to happen, that this is going to be like a... Yeah, we'll see.

Speaker 31 I'm seeing a lot of early comparisons to 2020, and it's not clear to me that that's going to happen.

Speaker 31 One thing to note is that kind of at the top so far, we've had 4,000 to 6,000 people out in the street in L.A.

Speaker 31 Which is not, you know, compared to 2020 numbers. And while we've seen some sympathy demonstrations, I mean, here in Portland, I don't think it got larger than 40 or so people.

Speaker 31 There was another, you know, somewhere less than 100 people in San Francisco that some a good chunk of whom got kettled the other day.

Speaker 31 But not mass demonstrations yet in other cities.

Speaker 31 Yeah, yeah. It hasn't it hasn't like really kicked off everywhere yet.
And it's also interesting because like these protests are kind of coming off of the back of a couple of

Speaker 31 like scattered things. We talked about this on executive disorder, but there was a

Speaker 31 there was a very big confrontation in Minneapolis last week. There's another one in Chicago where they like attacked a bunch of Chicago aldermen, which was a time.

Speaker 31 The way it's been going is like you get a giant raid and it pisses people off and there's a flare-up. And the flare-ups have been getting larger, but it hasn't been like a sustained thing.

Speaker 31 It's largely been reactive to these kind of large raids. And, you know, that's not necessarily like the recipe for a sustained thing.
However,

Speaker 31 the Trump administration, their target goal for the number of arrests a day is 3,000.

Speaker 31 So like they're trying to intensify the number of raids they're doing and how sort of like aggressive and like militant they are.

Speaker 31 And I think that might be a thing that causes this to accelerate as we go as we head into like next weekend. Yeah.
Because if they're still doing this, right? Like if feds are, if suddenly like

Speaker 31 hundreds of feds are in Chicago again and they're like grabbing people out of like Logan Square, right? Or, you know, they're, they're trying, they're doing this in like in New York.

Speaker 31 They're doing this in like other places. I think it could

Speaker 31 start to escalate. But right now, it's still very much unclear.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 I mean, and that's where I stand too on this is like, I don't actually know what's going to happen with this demonstration, but I think that, you know, one possibility is certainly that this continues to escalate and that you just get more and more people out consistently.

Speaker 31 The other is that it kind of peters out from this point.

Speaker 31 If it continues to escalate, then the state is or the feds are in a situation where they have committed to continuing the escalation chain.

Speaker 31 And there's not much for them to go once they've got active duty soldiers in the streets, but just actually shooting at people with live rounds,

Speaker 31 assuming that they can't stop the demonstrations with a show of force.

Speaker 31 And likewise, there's not much else for people to do, but either back down and stop coming out, at which point the administration will take a victory lap and say that, like, look, this works and this will become their standard go-to whenever a city erupts is immediately nationalize

Speaker 31 the state National Guard, bring out live troops, right? That's what will happen everywhere. That's going to become the new norm.
Yeah. Or people will continue escalating.

Speaker 31 And yeah, like in that case, the situation is like, do people escalate to deploying more force? Do they have that real option? Right.

Speaker 31 Or does the kind of stress of responding with that sort of force largely with soldiers that this is not the primary thing they signed up to do, do they start like stop obeying orders?

Speaker 31 You know, these are the kind of things that we would then

Speaker 31 be looking at to see, right? Like that's, that's kind of where there's a couple of different different places it can go from here.

Speaker 31 You know, another possibility is that, like, if we see an instance of like, okay, in order to try and crack down on this, they authorize the use of deadly force against a chunk of demonstrators and people get killed.

Speaker 31 Yeah. Then do you see it this kind of thing erupt in cities all around the country, like we saw in 2020, right? Yeah.
In which case, again, things get very

Speaker 31 because there's not, there's not a lot of the U.S. Army, really.
No. There are a lot of cops, but compared to the U.S.
population, there's not even that many cops, right?

Speaker 31 And widespread enough dissent like this, you know, would force some very difficult decisions from

Speaker 31 the federal government and from the administration, right? And that's kind of our best case scenario: is that you get enough people out in enough cities that, like, it is just crashing the U.S.

Speaker 31 economy, right? Yeah. Like, and there's, there's no real way to lock down the unrest.

Speaker 31 And you start getting National Guard refusing to respond to deployment orders, as well as active duty soldiers like refusing to respond, right?

Speaker 31 Like these are, these are the kind, that's the kind of thing that we're looking at in terms of like a potential best case scenario here. I don't know where things are going to head.

Speaker 31 I think maybe a likelier possibility is not that we hit that

Speaker 31 situation right now, but that we start to see like as this kind of peters out, the administration puts out a victory lap, and then we start to see demonstrations responding in other cities.

Speaker 31 And maybe there's kind of a slower tempo of escalation here.

Speaker 31 But I don't know.

Speaker 31 I want to say that my hope is that they overplayed their hands here, but I just don't know that that's clear in part because we haven't seen the scale of mobilization by people that is clearly going to be impossible for them to respond to.

Speaker 31 I am still expecting that we're going to get a really large escalating series of protests this summer. It's June,

Speaker 31 you can tell how out of it I am. It is June 9th as we're recording this, right?

Speaker 31 It is going to be a long, hot summer, right? Regardless of whether this is the one or whether it peters out here.

Speaker 31 I think it is absolutely possible that this peters out and this isn't the one.

Speaker 31 I don't think it's very likely that this peters out, the Republicans take a victory lap, and then we don't get more protests this summer

Speaker 31 at this scale or larger. Yeah, I think that's very unlikely.
We should take an ad break and then I want to talk a little bit about some of the tactics we've been seeing because they're very funny.

Speaker 31 Ah, and we're back.

Speaker 31 I should probably note very quickly that like, obviously, one thing that happens when shit like this goes down is that you get people posting on the internet their thoughts about this.

Speaker 31 One of the more prominent posters on Twitter in the new Musk era has been the menswear guy who made a couple of statements that I don't entirely agree with about, like, I mean, in general, we support the protests, but like, I don't support, you know, violent protests, what I would call some kind of misinterpretations of the civil rights movement, but also like not something I would, I don't, I don't care that much if people are wrong on the internet.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, he did have a straight-up poster meltdown where he was like yelling about someone's like breakup to say that they're they're insufficiently devoted because they didn't stay with this person to like keep them in the country there is meltdown base shit but like

Speaker 31 what matters yeah people people melt down posters melt down what what i think what matters is that like he he made a post later a longer one talking about the fact that he was undocumented his family was undocumented because you know they came to initially canada after the tet offensive and entered the u.s through a porous border and talking about the way in which being undocumented has like affected his entire life and now the vice president yeah and the dhs account put a picture of like spy kids of a kid with like a little like computer tracker thing on his eye.

Speaker 31 Jesus Christ. And JD Vance made a post being like, basically, we're going to deport the menswear guy for his posts.
Yeah, which is fucking hideous.

Speaker 31 Which is, it's just like, again, another example of the ridiculous level of government repression that we're looking at here. Like,

Speaker 31 where the federal government is like targeting themselves based on posts that make people angry. Yeah.
And well, specifically posts on Twitter, too.

Speaker 31 Like, and like, that's also an important thing of like, if you're not on Twitter, Twitter, it is harder to get the eye of the state on you. If you are on Twitter,

Speaker 31 like the vice president can be posting fucking unhinged reply images to someone talking about deporting you. Like,

Speaker 31 Jesus fucking Christ is a, is a horrifying level of oppression. The sort of mirror to this is the stuff we've been seeing on the ground, right? There's a video going around of

Speaker 31 a pretty right-wing, like, Australian journalist who's just like talking about the protests. And like maybe 20 feet, their back turned to a police riot line.
It's more like 15.

Speaker 31 The guy at the end of the riot line just like turns and shoots her. Very casually.
No protesters close to her. Absolutely no question.
No, no. No chance that he was aiming at someone else.

Speaker 31 Zero chance. No chance that he thought that she was attacking him.
Just shot a lady in the back of her thigh with an impact mutation for no reason.

Speaker 31 The most unhinged part of this, well, okay, the most unhinged part of this was that they fucking did this.

Speaker 31 The second most unhinged part of it was that her fucking, like, her fucking outlet in the description of the video said that they appeared to be targeting a protest.

Speaker 31 Yeah, like appeared to be targeting a protester. It's like, no, they weren't.
No, man.

Speaker 31 There's this really amazing thing with the American press where like they are incapable of objectively describing the thing that a cop does because if they describe the thing that the cop does, it looks like anti-police.

Speaker 31 Everyone can see. Yeah.
Yeah. And so they have to just lie about it and be like, oh, it's Connie Crush.
Like, no, with your own eyes, you can see that the headline is lying. This is not questionable.

Speaker 31 This is not an arguable point. This is not debatable.
No. The footage is objective and obvious.
Watch the video. It's like, okay, guys.

Speaker 31 He just shot her because he wanted to, because he thought it was funny. Like, that's why he did it.
We know. Yeah.
And like, this kind of shit just continues to happen.

Speaker 31 Like, the press has learned nothing from 2020. They're still doing all the stupid snography shit.

Speaker 31 There's actually been shit the cops have done in this protest that I've never actually seen before, which is a new one.

Speaker 31 Cause like, by the time I was like a few weeks into 2020, I had seen basically everything right. Like I've been doing this for like fucking ages.
I've seen the cops trample people with horses before.

Speaker 31 I had never seen them trample a guy and beat him with the same person on a horse. Yeah.
Beating a guy and trampling them with the horse at the same time. That's a new one.
Good fucking God.

Speaker 31 That's also, and I think it's actually, is this worth understanding? Is it like, that is the point of police horses? Like, the reason they have them is so they can trample people with them. Yeah.

Speaker 31 It's to run people over with them. Yes.
Yeah. And it's, it's real fucking bad.
That's, that's hideous. And shit like this has been happening this whole time.

Speaker 31 There's been a bunch of journalists who have really been really severely injured by impact munitions already. Yeah.

Speaker 31 One guy who got shot in the skull with a, you can tell it's a 40 millimeter round because of the indent that left in his skull. Yeah.
Those things are like the size of your fist.

Speaker 31 And yeah, they just, they're, they're massive. And they're not, they're not even meant to be fired directly when you're shooting at people.

Speaker 31 You're supposed to shoot them up at the ground and bounce them into people. Yeah.
Now, no cop has ever done this. They don't use them that way.
I've had them used on me. Like, I'm sorry.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 This, this munition has never been used like that. No, no.

Speaker 31 And that's the general truth of riot munitions. And actually, I don't know if this guy was shot

Speaker 31 with a rubber round or a foam round. I think they probably shot him with a grenade, which you're also not supposed to shoot at people.
But again, they do all the time. Which also kills people a lot.

Speaker 31 This guy very nearly died in Portland a few years back from that. Only his bike helmet saved him.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Like this is, this is a, this is one of the most common ways people get killed in protests is by the cops shooting them yeah like tear gas canisters specifically especially like in turkey this was a huge thing like a bunch of people got killed by by getting hit with tear gas canisters yep

Speaker 31 however comma there has been a bunch of extremely funny and like pretty effective tactics people have been using um one of which i've never seen before that is fascinating is people were calling wimos which are these like driverless yes yes yeah and so they would use the app to call wimos to places they wanted to set up roadblocks to stop police cars going through and stop ICE cars going through.

Speaker 31 And then they would light them on fire. And

Speaker 31 they did this to so many of these cars that the LAPD called WIMO and told him to shut it down because they were like, literally,

Speaker 31 it's a self-driving flaming barricade.

Speaker 31 Well, and I think why people were doing it is in part because like they like the word started spreading that like the police were getting footage from WIMO, right? Yep, yep, yep.

Speaker 31 So they were like, well, these are surveillance machines. And yeah, if you, if the, they show up, you light one on fire and there's this flaming barricade.
Yeah. Yep.

Speaker 31 And then, and then people figured out that you could just like, oh, we can just bring these to places like this. This, this is a self-deploying flaming barricade.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And, and the other thing that that's interesting about it, too, is it's another one of these examples that you see in protests of like people, people have this tendency to think of riots as these like, really spontaneous things that nobody's like thinking about a lot.

Speaker 31 But the thing about WIMOs is that like, if you've like walked in a city that has these things, these things have tried to run you over at least once. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Like, there's a surveillance angle. There's also the angle that these things are trying to fucking kill you all the time.

Speaker 31 And so, and this is like, you know, this is a very common first thing that happens in the riot is like people burn down the thing that has been trying to fucking kill them this whole time. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And so this is this one, except they figured out how to turn it into flaming car barricades.

Speaker 31 Yeah. So I don't know.

Speaker 31 I guess we should end this with assuming things do kind of get bigger or assuming things get bigger later and you're watching this and either you head out soon and wind up, you know, being at a protest or that happens later.

Speaker 31 There's a couple of things to keep in mind.

Speaker 31 One of them is, especially as we hit the summer, there's always trade-offs when we talk about like different kinds of body armor that you may or may not want to have, right?

Speaker 31 You know, the two broad types are soft ballistic armor and hard ballistic armor.

Speaker 31 When we talk about like ballistic body armor that can, that is resistant to bullets, the downsides to both of those are expense no reliable body armor and i'm talking about nij certified body armor which you should always shoot for none of that is ever cheap some is cheaper than others soft body armor is really all you need for riot munitions It doesn't stop the pain as much as hard body armor.

Speaker 31 I've been hit in hard body armor by impact munitions, by like foam rounds and stuff, and barely felt it. Whereas being hit with them in soft armor is still pretty painful.

Speaker 31 However, hard body armor, like the stuff that stops rifle rounds, can shatter when hit by impact munitions.

Speaker 31 And again, because it's a significant expense means you might not have that hard body armor anymore. The other thing to keep in count is that when you're talking about like armor for your body,

Speaker 31 if you're worried primarily about impact munitions, it doesn't have to be ballistic. Stuff like football pads, hockey pads works very well against soft munitions, right?

Speaker 31 Again, there's a huge trade-off and potentially a safety trade-off.

Speaker 31 If it's 110 degrees where you are, like the danger of wearing any body armor and how much it slows you down and how, you know, the odds of it causing you to have heat stroke or whatever can be significantly higher than like whatever you'd gain in protection.

Speaker 31 However, there are some things you should never go into a situation like this without in terms of armor. One of those is a helmet.

Speaker 31 Again, there are ballistic helmets that are resistant to pistol rounds. There are no helmets that exist that will reliably stop rifle rounds at my close range with a rifle.

Speaker 31 We're talking within a couple hundred meters, right? Those don't exist. They can stop maybe a ricochet or a glancing blow.
They're good for shrapnel. They're good for for pistols.

Speaker 31 That's what helmet ballistic helmets are for. And those are great for police riot rounds.

Speaker 31 A ballistic helmet is a really good thing to have if they are shooting rubber rounds or shooting grenades directly at people.

Speaker 31 It is not, however, the only thing you need or the only thing that could provide safety.

Speaker 31 It's not ideal to have like a bump helmet or a bike helmet as opposed to a ballistic helmet or like a bike helmet as opposed to a bump helmet. These are different things.

Speaker 31 A bump helmet is higher rated than like a standard bike helmet. A motorcycle helmet is also pretty robust.

Speaker 31 A bumper motorcycle helmet is better to have if you're being shot at with non-lethal or less than lethal, whatever you want to call them, munitions.

Speaker 31 But all of those, any kind of helmet is better than your bare skull when police are shooting into a crowd. So wear something, even if it's a $10 fucking bicycle helmet, if that's all you can get,

Speaker 31 wear that. Don't go into a situation like this without a helmet.

Speaker 31 Bring something like a fucking camelback or whatever that you can can have on your back and drink water from regularly, as well as bottles of water that you can use to wash out tear gas.

Speaker 31 Only use water to wash out tear gas. Only water.

Speaker 31 And if you catch people being like, milk works, tell them you are wrong. Don't use milk.
No, friends, comrades, lovers. for your family, ye can be the generation that stops using milk for tear gas.

Speaker 31 You can do this. You don't need to make cheese in your eyes.
Only you.

Speaker 31 Only you can prevent people.

Speaker 31 For the love of God, it doesn't work. It doesn't work.

Speaker 31 And if somebody starts talking about, well, no, you know, actually, it's just like if you eat something spicy and no comes to you, no, no, no, no, no, none of that. That's right.

Speaker 31 I'm telling you, none of that's right. Now, some people do use something called law, which is like a mixture of, I think it's an anaster or something like that.
I forget exactly what's in law.

Speaker 31 And yeah, that can be effective, but don't use it. Just use water.
Use water. Use water.
No, just use it. Just use water.

Speaker 31 If you have some degree of like professional medical treatment and you decide law is better, do whatever you want, doctor, right? But like, don't you listening use water, right? Just water.

Speaker 31 Look, melt the ice into water. Only use the water on your eyes.
I use clean water.

Speaker 31 Ideally from something like, anyway, whatever. When it comes to mace,

Speaker 31 water eventually will get mace out. Mace is way different from tear gas.
Tear gas with water, you can be back to functional in a couple of minutes, right?

Speaker 31 If you wash your eyes out, I've been tear gas like 200 fucking times, and I'll tell you, it never takes that long to get your eyes functional again.

Speaker 31 Assuming the other thing you want to note is that if you're going into a tear gas situation, if you wear contacts, don't. Glasses only, right?

Speaker 31 Because you do not want to have mace or tear gas in your eyes. When you have contacts, it can cause permanent, debilitating damage, right?

Speaker 31 They may need to surgically remove your fucking contacts, wear your goddamn glasses.

Speaker 31 You can, and I have worn contacts with like a full face respirator or a full face gas mask, but there are still dangers there, including that if you are wearing a full face mask or a gas mask or something like that, and the police catch you, they will pull that up and mace you underneath your mask.

Speaker 31 It's happened to a bunch of people I know. And if you're wearing contacts under there, you can get in very bad shape.

Speaker 31 There are easy ways to make glasses holders if you've got a spare pair of lenses inside a mask like that. Anyway, the other thing to note is that mace is not the same as tear gas.

Speaker 31 Mace fucks you up for much longer. You are going to be out of commission for at least probably 20 to 30 minutes with mace in the best case scenario.
Enough water will eventually wash out mace, right?

Speaker 31 It will eventually deal with it, but not on any kind of short time frame, right? It's going to take you a while to get enough mace out of your eyes that way.

Speaker 31 Ideally, you get to a place where you have access to something like a faucet or a hose and you use dawn dish soap as the best thing to use. That's going to remove the surface thing.

Speaker 31 There's a better thing for this, but but I'm talking about if you don't have access to specialized things or like baby shampoo, right? Something like that. Ideally dish soap.

Speaker 31 Next would be something like a baby shampoo, right? With a good amount of water. Now, the very best thing for mace is a specific wipe that's made to be used for this.

Speaker 31 And this does also help for tear gas. It's called pseudocon wipes, S-U-D-E-C-O-N.
You can buy it off of Amazon right now. They're not expensive.
You can carry a couple of packs.

Speaker 31 You generally want to like take what's in there in two different pieces and use one to kind of wipe away from your eyes and then the other to clean your face up afterwards once you've removed the bulk of the material.

Speaker 31 Pseudocon wipes are the best thing to use with mace.

Speaker 31 Anyway, that's a quick and dirty guide to what kind of stuff is useful for this. And as always, water, water, water.
Yeah, and the one last thing I want to add is that

Speaker 31 there is one more scourge that you can end in this generation. Stop getting kettled on bridges.
I swear to God, don't cross the bridge. Do not.

Speaker 31 Don't be like my action action is we're going to hold a bridge. Every single time there's one of these goddamn protests, like 10,000 people get arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.
It happens every time.

Speaker 31 The thing with bridges is that if the police cut off both ends, you are now stuck on the bridge. Don't go onto the bridge.
Simply do not.

Speaker 31 Like, I'm not even going to give, normally the speech that I give here is about like, oh, well, if you're on a bridge, make sure you can hold one side of it.

Speaker 31 No, no, no, no, no. Fuck that.
No bridges. Don't go on bridges.
We can stop. As a society, we have the technology to don't get kenneled on a bridge.
It is so fucking easy.

Speaker 31 You simply don't go on the bridge. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Okay. And that's the episode for today, everybody.
Use water, don't get kettled on bridges. Yeah.
Good luck, everyone.

Speaker 31 Good luck.

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Speaker 31 Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today, and I am lucky to be joined again by Mick.

Speaker 31 We're going to talk today about Libya, and just like right off the top, this is going to be a sad episode. Not much good happens to migrants in Libya.

Speaker 31 a lot of bad stuff happens and if you someone who prefers not to hear about like violence or sexual violence or incarceration

Speaker 31 it's probably some other stuff i'm overlooking this might not be the episode for you and that's fine uh but mick how you doing Hi, James. I'm good.
I'm good. That was an uplifting intro, wasn't it?

Speaker 31 I felt like that was a really like positive way to start the show. Yes, definitely, definitely, but probably very warranted because it's not going to be a fun episode.

Speaker 31 Like there's torture, there's imprisonment, there's enslavement.

Speaker 31 It's horrible.

Speaker 31 Libya is probably one of the worst countries in the world to be a migrant at the moment, if not the worst. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And you have a whole industry, a whole part of their economy that is predicated on enslaving migrants,

Speaker 31 selling people.

Speaker 31 and all of the other kinds of violence that come from that. Exactly.
There's, I think, over 20 or 30 different facilities with varying degrees of government involvement in those facilities.

Speaker 31 And it's very hard to pinpoint exactly like where does the government end and where does this human trafficking business begin. Right.

Speaker 31 Similar to like early mid-Soviet Union, where there was so much organized crime happening within the government that it was also impossible to distinguish like where one began and where the other ended.

Speaker 31 Yeah, like which was which exactly it was under breznev i think but don't don't quote me on that yeah

Speaker 31 so yeah so give us a load on luby first of all it maybe i guess if people have been not listening why are we talking about lubya uh well on on may 8th that it was reported that the trump administration was uh considering deporting migrants to this north african country which is a new low yeah like the bar is buried and these motherfuckers just grab the shovel.

Speaker 31 I don't think it's possible to exaggerate just how cruel this would be if it were to happen. As I said earlier, Libya is probably the worst country in the world to be a migrant at the moment.

Speaker 31 And to illustrate that, I'm going to briefly quote from this 2022 Amnesty International article. Men, women, and children returned to Libya.

Speaker 31 Returned in this case, meaning that they tried to cross the Mediterranean and were picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard.

Speaker 31 Returned to Libya, face arbitrary detention, torture, cruel and inhumane detention conditions, rape and sexual violence, extortion, forced labor, and unlawful killings.

Speaker 31 Instead of addressing this human rights crisis, the Libyan government of national unity, now called the GMU,

Speaker 31 continues to facilitate further abuses and entrench impunity, as illustrated by its recent appointment of Mohamed Al-Koha as director of the Department for Combating Illegal Migration, which we will be referring to as the DCIM from now on.

Speaker 31 To make that entire list somehow worse, there has been extensive documentation from human rights groups that strongly suggest that the DCIM works together with non-governmental militias, making the latter responsible for at least six unofficial detention centers, although it is reasonable to assume that there might be more.

Speaker 31 so reporting out of libya is hard to understate it yes sally hayden has an excellent book called my fourth time we drowned that like one of the things i like about it is it explains like her journalistic process and it's people who are detained in places where they can't get out

Speaker 31 clubbing together to get one message out on the one phone that one person smuggled in in parts right like someone had the battery someone had the the screen or whatever and someone else had a SIM card.

Speaker 31 And

Speaker 31 that way they could get a message out.

Speaker 31 But it's everything that we hear about, we can assume that there is probably a lot more of it happening that we haven't heard about, or at least some more of it happening that we haven't heard about.

Speaker 31 Yeah, the worst part about this is that it's knowing that it's probably worse and it's probably more extensive than we know because...

Speaker 31 Yeah, as you said, Libya is a hard country to do this kind of reporting. And I am assuming that it's not very safe for journalists to just go there and go talk to people.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 31 And like, at the end of the day, you're not just, as I'm sure you'll explain, you're not just fucking with the Libyan government.

Speaker 31 You're fucking with

Speaker 31 the

Speaker 31 European Union is absolutely complicit in this. And like, they ain't coming to save you.
We'll get to that. How the EU is complicit in both funding and in actions.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 So, but let's first get this all into the proper context. We're going to dive a bit into the history of Libya because that plays a major part in how this situation is right now.

Speaker 31 So we'll start by talking about the former dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.

Speaker 31 He took control of Libya through a military coup d'état and ruled it from 1969 up until he faced mob justice in the Libyan civil war in 2011. He is or was

Speaker 31 accused of human rights violations and cracking down hard on dissent and opposition.

Speaker 31 Initially, he was on the list of states which sponsored terrorism, but from 2004 onwards, he slowly began to rekindle ties with a number of countries, with one of the main champions for rehabilitation being Italy, the former colonial power that had occupied Libya.

Speaker 31 So, to no one's surprise, we're bringing in colonialism here. Now, James, you get three guesses as to what one of the cooperations was between Libya and Italy.

Speaker 31 Well, I could guess many things, Reggie. There's some stories about Gaddafi and Berlusconi, but

Speaker 31 we won't talk about those. Was it preventing migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea? Yes, that is true.
Yeah, something the Italians love to do. It was happening back then as well.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 It's a really weird relationship between Italy and Libya. That's also kind of fascinating, but then we're going to get all the way off topic if we dive into that.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 31 So

Speaker 31 somewhere between 2004 and 2005, Libya was supplied with money and equipment to help stem the flow of illegal migration coming from Africa.

Speaker 31 Gaddafi himself said in 2010 that this was to prevent the loss of European cultural identity to a new black Europa after Libya was paid 50 million Euro for this purpose that same year.

Speaker 31 Yeah, yeah, based anti-colonial. Yes.
I'm sure there's a Gaddafi Did Nothing Wrong movement that exists on some corner of Reddit that I I haven't

Speaker 31 plummeted into yet. But yeah, this guy was a turd.
I cannot find a stick long enough that I would touch that community with, to be honest.

Speaker 31 That's fair. That's also something that plays in here.
And that I think if you read a lot of human rights reports, you come across it.

Speaker 31 But there's also like a distinct form of racism for sub-Saharan or like Eastern African peoples. Definitely, yep.
That's also going to play into this.

Speaker 31 It's just a smorgasbord of bad stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 31 I mean, for people who perhaps perhaps grew up in the United States, you know, thought of their own, received very little education in school about African geography and politics, like this can be hard to grasp, right?

Speaker 31 Like, Africa is

Speaker 31 sometimes perceived as a country, not a continent, in sort of discourse in the United States. And that's, again, like, that's not people's fault.

Speaker 31 Like, it's a nature of our education system failing people.

Speaker 31 But yeah, if you're not familiar, right, Livios, of course, in North Africa, and like great replacement-style racist conspiracies absolutely exist in North Africa about people from sub-Saharan Africa, i.e.

Speaker 31 the parts of Africa that are beneath the Sahara Desert and in the, which you can find by looking at the map. But yeah, like just because this is in Africa, like racist shit is absolutely going down.

Speaker 31 No, I think it was highlighted a bit when the president or prime minister of Tunisia was cracking down on migration, that there was also like a very distinct racism against sub-Saharan Africans.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 At least it's a global thing because racist is a social construct and it's not like an inherent thing that

Speaker 31 you'll hear this a lot. You know, I've worked in Hispaniola a lot, right?

Speaker 31 The island that contains Haitian Dominican Republic, the island which receives millions of dollars from the United States to reinforce the border between the two nations that make it up.

Speaker 31 You will hear this reference to Haitian people as black from Afro-Caribbean Dominican people, right? And this idea that like there's this racial distinction between the two.

Speaker 31 That is a nature of race, right? It's a social construct between mobilized to create a power dynamic.

Speaker 31 Yeah, that's a whole nother topic of discussion because identity and race are so intermingled, but also so fluid

Speaker 31 that you could talk for hours about it. But that's not why we're here.

Speaker 31 Warming up ties with Libya was a pragmatic approach from the EU as it lies just on the doorstep of Fortress Europe, but also marked the start of a set fortress to start externalizing its borders into Africa, slowly working towards keeping migrants and refugees from setting foot on European soil, which would entitle them to apply for asylum.

Speaker 31 So even

Speaker 31 that step that's encoded in European law, we're trying to circumvent by just making sure that they don't cross the Mediterranean.

Speaker 31 Sometime later, when the civil war began during the Arab Spring, Libyan dissidents got rid of the sex pest that was Muammar Gaddafi. So the world became a slightly better place after that.

Speaker 31 Currently, there are two major factions fighting over power in Libya, although there are numerous other groups involved.

Speaker 31 To dive into this would probably take up most of the episode, so I will leave that aside.

Speaker 31 The first of the major factions is the GNU, the Government of National Unity. led by Prime Minister Abdul Amid Dedeba.
He controls the northwest of Libya, including the capital, Tripoli.

Speaker 31 The other faction is led by U.S.

Speaker 31 Libyan National Khalifa Haftar, who commands the Libyan National Army, or LNA, who expressed loyalty to the elected governments and are therefore often referred to as the HOR, the House of Representatives.

Speaker 31 I will try to be consistent with those acronyms, but no guarantees.

Speaker 31 Unsurprisingly, Haftar was mentioned in accusations made in 23 for his militia's treatment of migrants, with some reports indicating that they or he may be profiting off of the smuggling.

Speaker 31 So we pretty much got a warlord over there with an army at his disposal who's not disincentivized to not treat migrants as things for his own profit. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 31 Another fun fact that reveals how absolutely fucked up the situation is, the capture and subsequent release of infamous warlord Osama al-Masri by Italy.

Speaker 31 Al-Masri had outstanding warrants from the International Criminal Court due to him having the Tripoli branch of detention centers backed by the Special Defense Force, both of which are accused of atrocities and war crimes during the civil war.

Speaker 31 He was captured in Turin after a soccer match. The ICC requested he be arrested, but a Turin-based tribunal declined to

Speaker 31 approve it, after which Al-Masri was released back into Libya. Jesus.
So

Speaker 31 we love our ICC and then not following through on it.

Speaker 31 Yeah, right. Like the ICC does not, in fact, have an army that it can send after people who completely ignore it.
Yeah, it's a body that doesn't have any power to really enforce its decisions.

Speaker 31 I know that the current Dutch prime minister said of Benjamin Netanyahu that they could just ignore the outstanding warrant for his arrest and Netanyahu could just visit the Netherlands, which...

Speaker 31 Like,

Speaker 31 I don't even know what to say about that. Yeah.
I mean, this is the nature of what you're talking about, an extent, right?

Speaker 31 Like, the ICC's rulings and all human rights only exist insofar as they are convenient to the powerful states of the world. It's very much a rules for thee, but not for me, kind of attitude.

Speaker 31 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I find it extremely disheartening.
And I feel myself growing more cynical because of this world that I grew up in. And I'm slowly seeing.

Speaker 31 that all the rules and all the great things that I was taught in school are kind of not rules, but more like guidelines. Yeah, and that only apply to certain people.

Speaker 31 It's really heartbreaking to see like, I mean, I've heard it a lot from people, right? But especially from Burmese people, they really educated themselves on international law.

Speaker 31 When they were going out to protest at first, they talk about the R2P, like the responsibility to protect, which is, it doesn't matter, it's a concept in international law, that would have allowed someone to intervene.

Speaker 31 And like, They just thought this is the international law. It's the world law.
So someone's going to do it.

Speaker 31 And like no it you know over the months that they were in the streets over the thousands of deaths that they've seen now

Speaker 31 they've come to realize that look that that that law isn't there to protect them that there's no one who's coming to save them and that's led to them building a very unique and beautiful revolution but at the same time it's cost thousands of innocent lives and it's heartbreaking to see their faith being misplaced in this institution that doesn't care about them.

Speaker 31 We can talk very high in my t about all these laws and whether in war or whether about refugees, but in the end, very often they just seem worth as much as the paper they're written on. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 31 It's okay to become cynical after that realization. Yeah.

Speaker 31 So while the conditions for migrants were getting noticeably more horrible in the aftermath of the 2011 intervention by NATO, it was, as we said earlier, by no means the start.

Speaker 31 Gaddafi very much used migration as leverage to gain concessions and standing among European governmental bodies. Exploitation of migrants was already reported by Human Rights Watch back in 2009.

Speaker 31 In a similar vein, the fact that the Libyan Coast Guard routinely picks up migrants in international waters to return them to Libya has also been documented as early as 2009.

Speaker 31 How Frontex is involved with that, we'll get to that later. These processes and dynamics were very much already in play prior to Gaddafi meeting his maker.

Speaker 31 This kidnapping of migrants, because I don't think there's a better or a harsher word for it, is an explicit violation of international European and Italian law.

Speaker 31 Non-refoulement, which is the principle in these laws, means that no refugee shall be returned or expelled to a territory against their will where their freedoms and life are threatened.

Speaker 31 From January 1st, 2019 to June 30th, 2020, Libya received 61.6 million euros as part of the European Union Integrated Border Management Assistance mission mandate with an explicit focus on establishing state security structures in the country.

Speaker 31 Funding is meant to help stem migration to Europe through strengthening the border management, law enforcement, and criminal justice systems of Libya.

Speaker 31 Emphasis is placed on disrupting the networks that operate the smuggling and trafficking of persons.

Speaker 31 We already discussed these institutions are directly or indirectly contributing very often to the exploitation and enslavement of refugees.

Speaker 31 So that's 61 million euros that is indirectly gone through those very systems that enslave and torture people.

Speaker 31 But many Libyan authorities often have direct links to militias or organized crime groups. that engage in these practices.

Speaker 31 Authorities in the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior, the Department to Combat Irregular Migration, the Libyan Coast Guard, and the Special Deterrence Force have all been implicated.

Speaker 31 It has gotten so bad that even the Ministry of Defense employs Coast Guard units that are made up of militias who profit from these human rights abuses. Yeah.

Speaker 31 It's fascinating to think that you could throw some money at this problem and not just

Speaker 31 more empower these people. Yes, it's even, I think, when we talked last year about this, I think Rose from Migrate mentioned it.

Speaker 31 But the Libyans get paid twice because first they get paid to make sure that to return these migrants back to Libya, but then they can also get paid for selling them into slavery.

Speaker 31 What do you even say to that? Yeah, I think it's genuinely unfair for a lot of people. In 2025, people are absolutely being captured and sold into slavery.
Like that is occurring.

Speaker 31 Yes, I've read some Human Rights Watch accounts of people who were imprisoned for sometimes years and then made to work in one way or another for whoever ran that particular detention center and the the one that i'm thinking of right now after six years i think that person was able to buy himself away from the the authorities then his boat was captured within 30 minutes

Speaker 31 after

Speaker 31 he got off the boat libya got back to a different detention center where he spent four days and i think after that he got another chance on a boat I think he was rescued by a volunteer or human rights organization who are also patrolling the sea north of Libya.

Speaker 31 Yeah, we've interviewed some of them. Talking of patrolling the seas, maybe

Speaker 31 this is an adverb for a boat.

Speaker 31 Yes, there will be a Frontex ad right now for all the European listeners.

Speaker 31 All right, we are back. So we left off with just briefly mentioning how the Libyan state functions as part of this almost an organized crime syndicate that profits from the abuse of innocent people.

Speaker 31 And this is, in a way, not really surprising.

Speaker 31 Back in 85, academic Charles Tilley already argued that the state as a form of social organization is pretty much indistinguishable from an organized crime group.

Speaker 31 I'll make sure that the source is in the description below if anyone is interested.

Speaker 31 But for those who don't want to read it, it's very short. They're both major organizations over which you have very little control.

Speaker 31 And if you don't pay them the taxes or protection money that they want, then people will show up to break your legs. That's the two-sentence explanation of that article.
Yep, I like that.

Speaker 31 After the principle of non-refoulement has been violated, refugees are brought to detention centers. In theory, under the supervision of the DCIM, in practice, this does not hold up.

Speaker 31 There are no official or verified numbers of how many centers there are or how many people are even held captive there.

Speaker 31 Libyan numbers suggest somewhere between 17 to 35 facilities holding over 7,000 people.

Speaker 31 Human rights groups have questioned these numbers and argued that the number is likely between 10,000 and 20,000 people being held captive. The reality is that we simply don't know.

Speaker 31 Yeah, we don't know exactly how many facilities there are to hold these people, and we don't know how many people are in them.

Speaker 31 Human rights watchers or UN delegates often don't get the full picture, even if they go there to visit and inspect the places.

Speaker 31 There was one part of what I read where they would only be allowed during the day, but then at night is when most of the horrible stuff happens.

Speaker 31 So still, there's very much a process of trying to not show what is being done there.

Speaker 31 People in these these detention centers are held indefinitely and lack any sort of legal processes or procedures to determine their status.

Speaker 31 In fact, according to a 2019 UN report, there is no official procedure to assess asylum status in Libya,

Speaker 31 meaning that in the legal sense, this category is absolutely meaningless.

Speaker 31 On top of that, there's also a lack of a process for exiting detainment. So that's an entire procedure that is just done at the whim of whoever happens to control that particular facility.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 And that could be someone who has just

Speaker 31 seized it by arms from whoever controlled it last, right? Exactly. There is sometimes facilities are abandoned and they can become official.

Speaker 31 There's also been reports of the government raiding like unofficial centers, but then recapturing those people and putting them in official centers. Great.
That'll make it better.

Speaker 31 It would be funny if it wasn't so fucking horrible. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 31 And then it's it's bleak the dcm closed down five centers that had a history of human rights violations uh this act however had little effect on halting abuses uh reports of beatings and torture continued as some official centers closed by the dcim quickly became unofficial sites god reopened and operated by militias yeah for example The Buisa official detention center in Zawia

Speaker 31 was ordered to close due to reports of sexual abuse taking place. It reopened a day later and operated under a new name, managed by armed groups.

Speaker 31 Detainee exploitation was seamlessly transferred from official to unofficial banners, helping empower militants and criminal actors in the region.

Speaker 31 So we're now going to take a deeper look at these centers.

Speaker 31 I found an amazing article by Nadia Aldayon, Aaron Anfinson, and Graham Anfinson in the, and James, this is real, the Journal of Human Trafficking, which is an actual academic journal that exists.

Speaker 31 Jesus. Yeah.
I mean, I guess, yeah, if there's a thing, someone has written their PhD dissertation about it. So it makes sense.
I imagine this journal is just one or two articles.

Speaker 31 And for the rest, it's just pictures of Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Tate, just back to back to back.

Speaker 31 Because

Speaker 31 again,

Speaker 31 would be funny if it wasn't so fucking legal.

Speaker 31 Yeah, yeah i can't i can't imagine working as the editor of the journal of human trafficking is a job that like you have that it's like the uh like the special forces selection course of mental health yeah like you you are facing all the challenges that can be thrown at a person oh oh yeah

Speaker 31 i'm sure there's like a psychologist like on standby at that journal just to make sure like that that the people running it are all right yeah so uh these academics distinguish between three types of centers official meaning they are run by the state, insofar as that means anything, of course.

Speaker 31 Then there are the two unofficial types, which I will call semi-official and officious.

Speaker 31 Semi-official centers are those run partially by state forces in cooperation with local groups, militias, or other non-state actors.

Speaker 31 Official centers are those run entirely by non-state forces, while conditions in official centers are air quotes better than the latter two it's by no means a good place to be none of these three three categories are exempt from all the violence being done to people.

Speaker 31 All three have been named and implicated in abuses and violations.

Speaker 31 According to the authors, there are about 21 official sites, 12 semi-official, and 22 official sites, with one reportedly being run by ISIS in Nafalia back in 2015. Cool.

Speaker 31 ISIS had a stronghold in Libya back in the day. Yeah, they did, yeah.
And the fact that ISIS might have been involved in human trafficking is the least surprising thing here.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, they were trafficking people into the Islamic State, into their so-called caliphate, right? Yeah, this is progress. They're now trafficking people away from it.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 This is small victories. Of all these sites that I just mentioned, a remarkable amount is in Tripoli, the capital of Libya.
Sometimes these sites overlap with areas with known prostitution rings.

Speaker 31 The researchers found at least nine such networks, with the majority of the sex slaves being from sub-Saharan regions and East Africa.

Speaker 31 They are mostly women, but it also happens to men. Libya has no laws or procedures to criminalize male sex trafficking.
While men are still the minority, I do think it's worth mentioning.

Speaker 31 Yeah, absolutely. That is also something that happens and most likely underreported on.
Yeah, I think it's something you'd really struggle.

Speaker 31 the nature of masculinity and like in its toxicity makes it hard for people to come forward to you and say, this is happening to me. Right.
Exactly.

Speaker 31 And it makes that that process becomes even harder if there's no legal framework to stand on.

Speaker 31 Yeah, exactly. There's like, there's nothing to say.
Like, this is

Speaker 31 at least you can say what's happening to you is wrong. It's perceived as a crime.
Right. Like, if that's not there, if there's no, like,

Speaker 31 how can I support this person, right? Who do you direct that person to? Like, exactly. Anybody who has been trafficked and forced into sex work.

Speaker 31 Like, and I've spoken to migrants for for whom that has been the case. Like there's a great deal of stigma they have to overcome, which they shouldn't have to.

Speaker 31 None of what's happened to them is their choice. But it's very difficult for them to talk about it.

Speaker 31 And it's very unlikely for them to really be able to get any form of accountability for the people who did this to them. And that's in settings outside of Libya.

Speaker 31 Like in Libya, fucking good luck, I imagine.

Speaker 31 I think that's just a problem in general, not just in Libya. Yeah.
It's arguably much worse in Libya, but

Speaker 31 even in countries that we're much more familiar with, this is happening and it's still very hard to obtain the accountability from the perpetrators that

Speaker 31 in a better world would be happening.

Speaker 31 So I am now going to quote from the article for the next batch of horrors. For women and girls, various degrees of sexual violence were commonplace.

Speaker 31 Facilities that did allow some NGO access barred visitations at night, which is when many severe abuses occurred.

Speaker 31 Detention center operators performed systemic rape on women and teenage girls on a nightly basis. Those that resisted were threatened with death.
Others were killed by severe sexual assault and rape.

Speaker 31 Impregnations by detention center officials also occurred.

Speaker 31 So, yeah.

Speaker 31 I'm going to briefly cite the account of someone who has been through that. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Afni, which is a pseudonym,

Speaker 31 an 18-year-old Somali woman, told me very softly that she was gang raped by smugglers multiple times near the end of the two years she spent confined in a smuggler warehouse in Kufra.

Speaker 31 Released from the warehouse and dispatched to Tripoli to fend for herself when she became pregnant, Afni gave birth to a little girl, depending on handouts and help from strangers to survive.

Speaker 31 She told me that when she decided to attempt a sea crossing with her daughter, they ended up in another nightmarish smuggler warehouse where one of of the smugglers refused to find food for her baby unless Afne had sex with him.

Speaker 31 Her daughter died when she was seven months old. God.

Speaker 31 What a fucking leak thing. Yes.
The entire article that that quote was from is like rife with crimes like this. Yeah, right.
It's horrific stuff.

Speaker 31 I'll make sure that it's in the notes below if you would want to read that.

Speaker 31 And absolutely no shame if people don't want to read this because it is fucked. Yeah, yeah.
You don't have to expose yourself to all this.

Speaker 31 You don't have to know every detail of this to care about people. Like it's okay not to read it.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 So I want to close this particular century by just brutally driving this point home. But like women and teenage girls are being raped to death over there.

Speaker 31 on a systemic level. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And I'm fucking disgusted with the fact that the EU is still sending money there that is indirectly facilitating this.

Speaker 31 Yeah. I've been fucking while it gets on its high horse about like gender and equality and women's rights and such things.

Speaker 31 And then like, unless it's the inconvenient gender equality of migrants, right? Or the rights of migrants, which. Yeah, I need a cigarette now.

Speaker 31 Fuck.

Speaker 31 It's the fucking worst thing that I deal with talking to people about work as like people who have survived sexual violence or like people who can reasonably expect to encounter it and are making this journey because they think that it's their only option anyway.

Speaker 31 Yeah,

Speaker 31 it's not that people who undertake this journey to a better life that they want are unaware of the risks. It's despite the risks that they're doing it.

Speaker 31 Yeah, and that's the same in the Americas, right?

Speaker 31 People understand that they're, you know, I mentioned this in my Darien Gap episode, but like that very young children are subject to sexual violence, which also sometimes results in their death.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 And like they understand that the world is at such an exaggerated level of inequality that people are willing to take those risks because that's the only way they feel they can secure a safe future for their children.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it is a level of courage that I cannot fathom. Yeah, yeah, me neither.
The best I can do is just acknowledge that I can fathom it, but that's also like a very bitter pill to swallow.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it is. Like I,

Speaker 31 you know, like I attend wars for work sometimes. And

Speaker 31 the women who take on the migration, especially when not the men are not subject to sexual violence, they are, but it's probably more likely for women to experience it.

Speaker 31 The women who take on the migration journey alone or with their children, like those people's bravery, like I can't fathom being that brave. I can't.

Speaker 31 imagine how one can be that courageous, that dedicated to one's child. And we talked in our podcast recently about Primrose, who came with her daughter.
And like, that's someone I'm still like

Speaker 31 just in awe of. You know, like you don't see that kind of courage and dedication and

Speaker 31 just like

Speaker 31 ability to push through things that are horrific with this goal in mind of reaching the United States.

Speaker 31 Like it's, I don't know, it continues to be something that I struggle to find words to express, obviously, but it's really something. I want to say something, but

Speaker 31 just speechlessness. Yeah, there's not much to say.

Speaker 31 You know who else should be speechless?

Speaker 31 Is it the

Speaker 31 products and services that support this podcast? Oh, I sure hope so. Just two minutes of silence.
Yeah, hopefully, this will just be a little moment for quiet contemplation for all of you out there.

Speaker 31 All right, we're back.

Speaker 31 We've had a glass of water and

Speaker 31 we're going to keep doing the podcast anyway.

Speaker 31 Yes. Rehydrates a bit.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 So in terms of like explicit accounts,

Speaker 31 that was it. Okay.
Yeah. So if someone had to skip over that part, that part of the episode should be done.
You can start listening again.

Speaker 31 So as of this recording, the Missing migrants project who tracks migrant deaths and those who become missing between air quotes approximately 32 000 people are either dead or missing and presumed dead in the mediterranean that have been confirmed jesus the overwhelming majority of these people drowned while attempting the crossing 2,582 of these cases were registered in 2024,

Speaker 31 last year. Roughly 70,000 people attempted a crossing, according to statistics from the European Commission.

Speaker 31 This may not appear as a lot of deaths compared to the crossings, but this figure does not take into account deaths on the journey towards the crossing.

Speaker 31 I was not able to verify how the number of 70,000 was made up, as the EU website I got it from is a collection of data from different countries and agencies who register it.

Speaker 31 What do you think is safe to assume, and let me emphasize, assume here, is that people captured by Italian, Maltese Cypriot or Libyan coastal authorities is included in this number.

Speaker 31 So those are people who've attempted the crossing and then are taken back to Libya,

Speaker 31 possibly undertaking the journey again. Yeah, right.
Because, yeah, I know you've stressed this a few times, but... And number one does not mean that it's just a single person.

Speaker 31 It can be the same person who tries to cross multiple times, yeah, right. People will repeat crossings.

Speaker 31 I think we reach a point where the numbers are not, and not that every one of these people is a person, right? But like, I wouldn't be any less pissed off if it was 50,000.

Speaker 31 Like, after a certain amount, it just becomes a number because, yeah, we just can't imagine how many people that is. Yeah, like we shouldn't ever have to conceive of 32,000 people drowning, right?

Speaker 31 Like, that's not a thing that in the fucking 21st century that we should allow to happen as a society. And, like, yeah, this shit, like, you know, I've participated in mutilated along the border.

Speaker 31 I'm very familiar with death at the border. But the scale of this is unfathomable.

Speaker 31 Even to someone who's spent a decent amount of time across the migrant trails of the Americas, that 2,582 deaths in a year. Like, that's a small village.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 31 On a yearly basis. Yeah.
It's a decent-sized city if you take

Speaker 31 that 32,000 number. Yeah, yeah.
It's like a mid-sized music festival of people who didn't need to die. Yes.

Speaker 31 I checked a website called Info Migrants, and they estimate that the Libyan Coast Guard alone has returned,

Speaker 31 again, air quotes, around 21,000 migrants caught during a crossing attempt.

Speaker 31 So the vast majority of these people end up back in the detention centers we discussed earlier. So that's around one for every three and a half people being captured.
Jesus. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Yeah. There was at some point a video making the rounds and it was this African woman on a boat filmed with like a mobile phone.

Speaker 31 And she was just crying and just saying, like, hey, if the Libyan Coast Guard shows up, I'm jumping overboard. No way am I going back there? Yeah, I've seen that.

Speaker 31 That is one of those statements that I'll immediately believe. Yeah.
Yeah. People have self-immolated in those detention centers.

Speaker 31 Like,

Speaker 31 such is their

Speaker 31 misery and their desire for the world to see them, I guess. Like, I can understand why someone would just rather stop being.

Speaker 31 So, the little calculation I just made that leaves us with 49,000 people making the crossing, of which 2,582 died, resulting in 46,400 people entering Europe through the Libyan routes.

Speaker 31 Again, these are approximations. More exact numbers, we'll never know.

Speaker 31 I tried to track money and expenditures a tiny bit to see how the EU is dealing with this.

Speaker 31 It's not one of my strong suits. I want to be upfront with that.

Speaker 31 I was able to find that between 2020 and 2023, the EU granted at least 105 million Euro under the European Integrated Border Management Assistance Mission.

Speaker 31 This is money that is directly going to Libya for assistance in managing our border.

Speaker 31 This number does not include money directly or indirectly given to Libya from individual member states or from the budget of the EU's border agency, Frontex.

Speaker 31 The latter has seen an absolute massive increase in their budget

Speaker 31 from around 250 billion in 2016 to over 840 billion in 2023. God.

Speaker 31 Yeah, that's a vast increase. Yes.

Speaker 31 And what's relatively recently been happening is that rather than have their own vessels in the sea, they are using air reconnaissance in the form of drones or other airborne vehicles to

Speaker 31 spot boats for dinghies with migrants. And then they give that information to the Libyan Coast Guard.
I've heard this.

Speaker 31 They can pick them up.

Speaker 31 And this is where where the EU is, I would say, directly complicit in the abuse that's happening in Libya. Yeah.
I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

Speaker 31 Because we know what is likely to certainly going to happen to the people that are picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And if you're saying, like, hey, Libyan Coast Guard, come over here, pick up these people. You know what's going to happen to those people.

Speaker 31 Like, and it's not good. And they keep doing it despite it being more than a decade of evidence at this point.
Abuse of migrants.

Speaker 31 Italy, in particular, as the country receives a lot of migrants from Mediterranean crossings, is keen on helping Libya in terms of training, material, and funding.

Speaker 31 Additional agreements between the two countries shed another uncomfortable light on the dynamic. There was first the EU-Libya slash Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2017.

Speaker 31 It saw an enhanced enhancement of military insecurity related to trying to prevent migrants from making their crossing, advertently or inadvertently, trying to make Libya their final stop and trap them there under the conditions that we just discussed.

Speaker 31 That agreement is a continuation of the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation that was signed by Libya and Italy back in 28,

Speaker 31 which described the cooperation in detail vis-à-vis combating illegal migration from Libya to the EU.

Speaker 31 We also have the Malta Declaration from 2017, which only strengthened UN-backed governmental organs within the EU, as well as a commitment to further assist Libya in training, in providing funding and technical assistance.

Speaker 31 Those are the main purposes of those agreements, which is to prevent people from passing the prestigious gates of Fortress Europe.

Speaker 31 because politically we'd rather add them to the mortar with which those walls are built. Jesus.

Speaker 31 And it is these conditions that Washington ghouls thought would be a suitable place to send migrants to who do not speak the language, know the people, have legal representation, or assumably even have the money to do anything.

Speaker 31 We've barely spoken of the civil war that is still going on there.

Speaker 31 With like fighting in the capital of Tripoli that happened like two weeks ago.

Speaker 31 We haven't spoken about any legal or law-related issues that these people would invariably run into were they to be deported to Libya.

Speaker 31 It's the umpteenth example of colonialism, militarism from states, warmongering, and the transfer of problems to another place or to another generation.

Speaker 31 Very much like climate change, actions such as these will have immense direct and ripple effects that our children and grandchildren will learn the consequences of. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And that last bit I've added because let's hope that no one is going to be sent to Libya from the States.

Speaker 31 But I can very much imagine that those people will face the same horrors, that they will have to create their own little communities just to be able to get by. Yeah.

Speaker 31 I can imagine some people

Speaker 31 might run into ISIS over there and become radicalized. We could also get like small pockets of people who just try to survive, but are still stuck there and grow resentment.

Speaker 31 There is no real way to estimate what the consequences are going to be of deporting people there other than that like the cruelty is happening that Washington ghouls are aiming for. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 31 I think that the point is to hurt these people as much as possible at the moment. And then there isn't really much of a long-term thought process beyond that.

Speaker 31 Like, I guess, like, I would like to say that people were enraged at the thought of the United States sending migrants to Libya. And they should be.

Speaker 31 I'm glad that they were, but they should also be enraged at the reality of the European Union doing it every single day.

Speaker 31 Yes. Way more than 12 people.
And like, you should care about that too, especially if you're in Europe. Like, you know, obviously I am a person from Europe.
I think there's, it's easy.

Speaker 31 like for people to get this kind of smug social democracy kind of like oh look at the americans they're so fucked up they're saying things aren't fucked up here they are but like the EU is doing some fucked up shit to migrants.

Speaker 31 And like

Speaker 31 people in Europe should be in the streets about that too. Definitely.

Speaker 31 This is just the biggest of all the issues, but there's also abuses and human rights violations happening in the Balkans for the people who take that crossing.

Speaker 31 There's people who try to cross through Morocco to Spain

Speaker 31 who also encounter, again,

Speaker 31 not as bad as the things we just talked about, but by no means good. Yes, definitely shouldn't be happening.
I don't even want to use words like good or bad because

Speaker 31 they tend to lose all meaning. Yeah.
Like less bad doesn't necessarily mean good. Yeah, it absolutely doesn't.
It means less worse.

Speaker 31 And yeah, there are places to make that crossing that are less worse than Libya, but still. Yeah, that doesn't mean that any of it is desirable.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 Or like that we should accept any of it. No, no.
People should be fucking mad about all of this.

Speaker 31 And I also would like to go back a little bit about what you said about the smug European social democracy.

Speaker 31 That's definitely an attitude that's not uncommon

Speaker 31 among Europeans. But then again, we very often fail to look into our own backyards.

Speaker 31 And also, Europe just tends to be politically a few years behind the US, but we've also seen a rise in autocratic regimes like Viktor Orban,

Speaker 31 massive example.

Speaker 31 Maloney in Italy is another one.

Speaker 31 But also in my own country of the Netherlands, they tried to bypass parliament in order to make an emergency law to make sure that migrants wouldn't enter the Netherlands.

Speaker 31 And as we speak, they're threatening to stop the government formation. if no stricter measures against migrants are being taken.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 So it's these little seeds of like autocracy that are almost more worrying because it's these little

Speaker 31 steps that happen. And before you know it, things are getting worse quick.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 Like anyone who pays attention to the US can see that the vehicle on which fascism was delivered to us, or is being delivered to us, a better way of saying it, is

Speaker 31 anti-migrant sentiment, right?

Speaker 31 Like, like that is how this this country built the toolkit that is now being used.

Speaker 31 And,

Speaker 31 you know, the rest of the world should pay attention to that, I hope. Yeah, we should see it as a warning sign, not as a manual.

Speaker 31 Yeah, that's exactly a good way to put it. Yeah, unfortunately, it's being used as a manual by certain European governments.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 So.

Speaker 31 Thank you for sharing that traumatic piece of

Speaker 31 reporting with us. That's rough.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I would say you're welcome if it wasn't so fucking grim to say that at the end of all that. Yeah.
No, I'm happy that I read a lot and put it together.

Speaker 31 I'm also going to have to find a puppy and cuddle the puppy for a few hours.

Speaker 31 Yeah. So yeah, that's all I have for now.

Speaker 31 Great. Yeah, that's all I got to.
Thank you very much.

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Speaker 31 Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that was originally about the theoretical possibility of mass civil conflict and a coming militarized authoritarian regime, and is now about the reality of that happening to different communities at different speeds all around the country.

Speaker 31 And right now, Los Angeles is where we're focused on. Yeah.

Speaker 31 As you've probably heard from the news or from the episode we did earlier this week, Los Angeles, California has been in a state of what the president declared insurrection, what most people would declare fairly small protests based on the overall size of the city, topping out at maybe 4,000 to 6,000 people on Sunday.

Speaker 31 And the president is called a National Guard. He's called in the Marines.
And we called in James Stout to head up to Los Angeles and look at the scene. James.
That's right. Yeah.
Hi.

Speaker 31 It's me, the alternative to the United States Marine Corps. Yeah.
So I've just got back from LA. I was there on Monday night, obviously covering the protests.
I got there mid-morning, I guess.

Speaker 31 But at that point, the SEIU were having a rally. Yeah.
And the rally was for the release of David Huerta, who was released on bail, I believe, after that. Like, not while the rally was going on.

Speaker 31 And from there, like, I basically sort of started walking around downtown LA, I guess.

Speaker 31 There was this really weird kind of phenomenon where you'd like go down to a place and you'd see a hundred people shouting at

Speaker 31 cops, feds, troops, or some combination of the three, right? Pretty often around the federal building. It's weird.

Speaker 31 The front entrance, like where the entrance was, you had like a initial presence of like the front line with National Guard with maybe...

Speaker 31 It looked like it was maybe like NCOs or something who had loaded service weapons. And then

Speaker 31 other

Speaker 31 soldiers had shields in them, like old school wooden button sticks, right? Just a long, long ass stick, basically. Around the other side, you had LAPD at the front and National Guard behind them.

Speaker 31 And then across the street from that, you had California Highway Patrol and their riot squad. And then in another location, I think it was at City Hall, you had LA Sheriffs.
So like literally

Speaker 31 every agency that can claim any jurisdiction, right? There was also DHS RPF, FPS, like

Speaker 31 literally every federal and local agency that could send cops sent cops.

Speaker 31 It wouldn't surprise me to hear that there were more than a thousand cops, like maybe it was hundreds, but it was hard to get a handle on that because every street you went down, every corner you turned, you ran into another wall of cops, right, with 10 or 15 cars behind them.

Speaker 31 They were constantly driving around until, you know, I stayed until about two in the morning. And as protests, obviously, like, as I'll explain later, kind of escalated, I guess.

Speaker 31 And as police violence escalated in the evening, you'd see these convoys of cop cars just hauling ass through downtown periodically, every hour or so, like running lights and sirens, like

Speaker 31 a dozen or so cop cars just booking it through downtown. Yeah.
So it's very hard to get a sense of like who they are, what they were doing.

Speaker 31 They closed all the freeway entrances and exits, which like I took the,

Speaker 31 I took the train up. trying to be a bass transit enjoyer and it made it a fucking nightmare to get anywhere.
Right. Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 31 Like anyone who lives or works in downtown LA will have experienced this already, but like it's and then throughout the fucking evening, right, you've got people coming up to you being like, hey, I live in little Tokyo.

Speaker 31 I can't get back because there's a wall of cops and they keep throwing tear gas grenades. Any suggestions? Yeah, I can't get home.

Speaker 31 Yeah, like, and unfortunately, like, you know, not much we can suggest.

Speaker 31 And then on top of that, because it's Southern California or, you know, the United States, really, people who can't can't afford a place to live are sleeping on the street and they're getting tear gas too, and they're getting flashbang too.

Speaker 31 I remember like we were up by LAPDHQ at one point, and

Speaker 31 I seen this guy sleeping on a bench, and the cops were pushing up the street. And I was just trying to sort of take a position where I could take a photograph, you know, and I saw him sleeping.

Speaker 31 And I was like, oh, should I wake. wake this guy, you know, I don't want him to get a nasty surprise and wake up to a wall of robocops.

Speaker 31 And at that point, the cops opened up with whatever they were shooting at that time 40 millimeter 37 millimeter yeah most of what i've heard is like a mix of pepper balls and yeah 40 millimeter

Speaker 31 yeah grenades and rubber rounds some foam yeah some foam i found some safari land 37 millimeter foam casings on the ground oh nice yeah and uh

Speaker 31 Yeah, mostly what it was, you know, LAPD have those green 40mm launches with the EOTEX on top, and that was what it looks down the barrel of a few times. And

Speaker 31 so as the evening went on, right, you'd get larger groups and they'd become like, you know, more vocal, I guess, in their protesting. At one point, people having like a street dance party.

Speaker 31 Occasionally, people would throw a firework or set off a firework.

Speaker 31 And then sporadically and like without really any clear kind of signal, at some point, clearly the whole area was declared an lawful assembly, I'm guessing.

Speaker 31 It's very hard to actually hear when they're saying stuff on the LRAD unless it's directly pointed at you. But I heard some sign kind of LRAD, rad an awful assembly announcement at some point and uh

Speaker 31 yeah periodically you'd come around a street corner there'd be like 100 150 200 people protesting right and then the cops would toss a flashbang or a tear gas loose off a few rounds push 30 yards and then stop and then do that again 10 15 20 30 minutes later And they keep doing that.

Speaker 31 And then they push people back past these various buildings, which had cops like stationed in place, like like on the parapet of the building or in the courtyard outside, who would then also fire at them.

Speaker 31 So the protests never really got a chance to centralize. People didn't really get a chance to centralize in one place.
And

Speaker 31 to have a sense of how many numbers of protesters there were was hard because every corner you turned, there were more people and there were more cops. So like it was a bit

Speaker 31 broken apart. And I think that was the goal of the policing operation, right? To flood the city with cops, to shut it all down, to make it hard to get there.
Yep. Make it hard to gather there.

Speaker 31 I still don't get the sense. And this is what it sounds like from what you've said, that most of what is being done effectively is not the National Guard and certainly not the Marines.

Speaker 31 It's the federal and local police.

Speaker 31 And their game plan here is if they, assuming things calm down in Los Angeles, which I think is probably the safe bet right now, every time they get over a certain threshold of protesters, a couple of hundred, a thousand or so in a city, you know, do do the same thing, right?

Speaker 31 Like deploy the military national or federalize the National Guard, get them out there, right? Like that's, that's where they're headed. Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 31 Like, I don't know if LA will back down, to be clear. Like, LA is a city of what, like, like 4 million people.
And 18, 19 million in the greater Los Angeles metro area. Yeah, like, it's, uh,

Speaker 31 I have no right, like, I had these, I had good conversations with a lot of people who are out there protesting.

Speaker 31 One thing I should add, like, is that we were really well received by everyone, which was nice. Like, it wasn't the same crowd as folks I've seen in 2020.
Like, no one was in Black Block.

Speaker 31 Right, of course. And then it was very young people.
And a number of them approached. I was for a time I was with Charles McBride and like some other

Speaker 31 colleagues and friends, like people I've known for years, right? We cover the same kind of shit. And people would come up to us and just be like, hey, it's good that you guys are here.

Speaker 31 Thank you for staying here after we got fucking tear gassed. Like people should understand that what's happening.

Speaker 31 Like unprompted, people would would come and say thank you which was nice you know and like we didn't really face any any hostility for being there but people when i spoke to them like there was a lot of a lot of people i spoke to were very young and they would say that they were the citizen kid of parents who either were you know like permanent residents or visa holders or you know that they're various i'm sure some of them had undocumented parents i can't remember speaking to anyone who said that but i'm sure that given the numbers of people and the number of times i heard like, I'm the citizen child, so I should be here showing up for my family and my community.

Speaker 31 Right. Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah. And like, it's going to be hard to back those people down because they were fucking angry.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 A real palpable sense of like, fuck you, was like very present throughout. People were also afraid.
Like, it's not people who are necessarily used to this, right?

Speaker 31 And like you said, the police response is an overwhelming use of violence. Right.
Indiscriminately. Shooting at people from what?

Speaker 31 What's the furthest distance you were seeing them fire at people from i mean i

Speaker 31 probably saw them taking 100 meter shots i'm guessing yeah like which is very long range for this sort of stuff yeah i mean so at one point when we got pushed back past la pdhq there they had the whole sort of front face of it and they let off a bunch of shots towards myself and some others i just sort of got down behind uh some cover there and started filming and then there was a group of young people who were in one of those kind of classic la

Speaker 31 three-corner open quad mall things. Yeah, so they're basically in a U-shaped container, right, with only one way in and

Speaker 31 one way out. And

Speaker 31 there's glass stores around it, like you know, there's all the shopping bits people go shopping, and uh, there's pillars in the middle, and the cops are just unloading from a distance of maybe 100 meters from LAPD HQ, I think, into these people who are effectively like in a like fish in a barrel, right?

Speaker 31 They're in a container where the only way out is the direction the cops are shooting from. There was a small outlet on the other side, which eventually they were able to take.

Speaker 31 That meant they had to cross across like a four-lane road while being shot at by the cops. And the cops just kept shooting at them there.
Like it wasn't like they shot a couple of times.

Speaker 31 They clearly shot, reloaded, shot, reloaded. And

Speaker 31 I was filming from the other side, but you could see these projectiles whacking out like reinforced glass in the front of these businesses at head height, not breaking the glass and falling on the ground, punching a hole straight through.

Speaker 31 You know, they're coming with serious force, even at that distance. And like those people were presenting a threat to anyone, right?

Speaker 31 Like, they had retreated into that building after the cops shot their first volley and the cops just kept shooting at them.

Speaker 31 I saw a lot of that throughout the night. Like, it didn't seem like anyone was like, okay, now is the time for you guys to fire.
You know, like they just sporadic pot shots throughout the evening.

Speaker 31 Yeah. well, we're gonna continue talking about what's going on in Los Angeles and what we think is going to happen next.
But first, here's some ads.

Speaker 31 And we're back. So, if you read like the manuals these people are supposed to follow, how they're supposed to utilize the riot control weapons that they use, there's a couple of things that you see.

Speaker 31 One of them is that there's supposed to be like a bladder of escalation before which they start utilizing force at range.

Speaker 31 And the other is that there's certain ways they're supposed to use these munitions.

Speaker 31 Like, for example, you're not supposed to shoot people with rubber bullets, You're supposed to bounce them off of the ground and into people because otherwise they're not really less than lethal.

Speaker 31 Yeah. Yeah.
We're seeing a lot of cases of people who've had at least several that I can count, I think three of people having surgically removed different like rubber and foam rounds.

Speaker 31 And it doesn't look like they're abiding by kind of any of the rules by which per their own documentation they're supposed to practice. Right.
I mean, yeah, that's what I saw.

Speaker 31 Some of them even have EOTECs like on their launches, which I don't know why you'd want an EOTEC if you were skipping it off the ground.

Speaker 31 I don't know if maybe there's a different rounds they're using, but like,

Speaker 31 yeah, the overwhelming what I saw was just like zero to 100, right? Like they'd push, they'd throw a tear gas or a flashbang, and then you'd just hear like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Yeah.

Speaker 31 There's a bunch of them unloaded. And like raising the 40 millimeter launcher to the shoulder and pointing it at someone two feet away.
Like like, I saw a lot of that. Yeah.

Speaker 31 You know, we'd be going down these streets trying to find a different angle, trying to find where we could stand and do our jobs as press, right?

Speaker 31 And come around a corner and just get a 40 millimeter pointed at you. I didn't see any skipping shit off the ground.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 I did see businesses getting their windows punched out by things that the police were shooting at people.

Speaker 31 Yeah, which I'm sure will wind up getting blamed on protesters. Yeah, exactly.
Right.

Speaker 31 I mean, I saw CNN, CNN last night, was picking up fucking phone baton rounds and being like, these are what they're throwing at the cops. Like,

Speaker 31 it's just remarkable.

Speaker 31 i mean i i did see lasd and national guard with rifles with magazines in the magwell i'm not you know they had a round chamber doesn't matter does it no you're a second away from chambering around right exactly yeah um i mean the idf carries with an empty chamber and it hasn't stopped them killing a whole lot of people has it yeah the presence of lethal force was closer than I've seen before.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Look, I'm familiar with seeing Overwatch at these things, right?

Speaker 31 Someone with what you would colloquially refer to as a sniper on a rooftop but it's not overwatch if you're just in the back of a pickup truck with an m4 right like like an an unmagnified optic like you're not uh you're not overwatching you you just have lethal lethal force right there and i i saw that a number of times right from the national guard and the lasd they did the the whole lrad like go home this has been declared an unlawful assembly thing but then there wasn't that kind of

Speaker 31 scaled use of force that like you say is supposed to be there. And there wasn't really much in the way of, like,

Speaker 31 we're going to start shooting now.

Speaker 31 And, like, of course, that means that if you're an unhoused person, if you've arrived late, if you're, if you're a local person just trying to get home, it's very possible you can just walk past and get tear gassed.

Speaker 31 Like, at one point,

Speaker 31 they were opening up and, like, I had been looking for a place to use a bathroom for a while because fucking Southern California, right? Like, there are no public bathrooms. Yes.

Speaker 31 Which is, you know, increasingly every major city. Yeah.
That was an issue.

Speaker 31 People got, people got arrested by the feds for like peeing on federal property in portland yeah great when like there was really nowhere else to go yeah yeah exactly and like some some kindly local guy uh invited us into his building and asked that you know let us use the bathroom but uh yeah then we stepped out and suddenly we're like confronted by cops again like you know he i could have been someone who was there to go and have to get a slice of pizza yeah the force was like sporadic and unpredictable throughout the evening and then as were these convoys of vehicles that would just come hauling ass through downtown, right?

Speaker 31 Obviously, not, you know, stopping at red lights, etc. It was weird.

Speaker 31 Sometimes a green light would happen, so the cars would start going, like, and then this cop convoy would come, and some of them would turn right, and some of them would assume the cars would stop and go straight on.

Speaker 31 And so, you had this situation where the cops were nearly hitting each other, and it just like it seemed utterly chaotic.

Speaker 31 And I don't know what they were doing other than just driving around at high speed for fun. Once they did manage to kettle some groups of people, right? Like, they

Speaker 31 again, folks, maybe who haven't been at these events before will not be familiar with the way these things work, but like the police would move in from both sides and then suddenly you're like, oh shit, there's nowhere to go.

Speaker 31 And then I did see them put up in a school bus to take, presumably to detain those people and take them to process them. But yeah, the tactics were like, I mean, it's they're cops.

Speaker 31 It's what you expect. You know, we've both been doing this for a while.
You expect them to use those weapons in the way that can inflict the most damage and harm to people.

Speaker 31 And unfortunately, like that does seem to be happening again. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Well, in terms of where things are right now, you know, Gavin Newsom is trying to thread the needle, it looks like, between letting the LAPD do whatever they and he, to be fair, I don't think he has any issue with people getting fucked up with riot munitions, what to do, while also not ceding responsibility for security of his state to the federal government, which has been an interesting line for him to walk.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, his stance seems to be like the LAPD can fuck up these kids kids just fine. We don't need your help.
Yes, which, I mean, they literally can. Like, I will say

Speaker 31 that's not incorrect, right?

Speaker 31 I'm not talking at a moral level. I'm just saying, like, yes, the LAPD has sufficient force for the protests that have been, that have existed.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, the LAPD then, the first nights were caught off guard, I think. Right.
Right. And so was ICE.

Speaker 31 And there was a lot of debate about, because like, you know, LAPD not coming in initially to support ICE when they got surrounded.

Speaker 31 Like, and those are the kind of things you get when the authorities are taken off balance.

Speaker 31 But if the numbers don't keep increasing, you know, and they have to increase pretty exponentially as they move in, you know, federal agents and the National Guard and mobilize the whole police force in a city like LA,

Speaker 31 then the situation becomes basically impossible for protesters to regain the initiative.

Speaker 31 And I don't know if I'd say it's impossible right now, but unless there's some sort of like massive sea change in what's happening, that does seem kind of like where things are going to go.

Speaker 31 And to be clear here, we're talking about primarily Compton, Paramount, some protests, and then downtown Los Angeles, some protests.

Speaker 31 There's a handful of city blocks and one of the largest metro areas in the entire country. Yeah.

Speaker 31 This is not Los Angeles all collapsed.

Speaker 31 Yeah. It's not like the riots that occurred after Rodney King, right? Like

Speaker 31 not even a little bit. Yeah.
No. Yet, right? Like,

Speaker 31 I mean, people are pissed off, obviously. Like, like, and maybe

Speaker 31 you'll get that sort of thing you had in Portland, right?

Speaker 31 Where more people came as the protest continued and as more and more feds turned up, like, there were people who might not have showed up at first, just being like upset at the presence of feds in their city.

Speaker 31 I don't know. But yeah, it seems like right now that their move is to flood the city.
I mean, crazy volumes of cops shutting all the exits on the 110 today. Yeah.

Speaker 31 National Guard, like the National Guard folks were mostly around the federal building from what I saw, but like, yeah, just a huge volume of cops and no particular plan other than a vast number of police.

Speaker 31 And I guess, you know, massive detentions, massive use of riot munitions, massive use of violence to dissuade protest. But then I've seen, like, obviously it's interesting, right?

Speaker 31 Like, and I'm sure you've experienced this, Robert, like, you can be, like, nose to the grindstone in a conflict zone or at a protest and not have a clue what's happening and have to go on Twitter or Blue Sky to work out what the fuck's going on.

Speaker 31 Right. You can tell kind of what's happening in front of you.

Speaker 31 And even then, you sometimes see something or you're looking left and the thing happens on the right and you get three different stories about what happened. Yep, totally.

Speaker 31 And so like, you know, you know, we found out David Tuerto had been released when Mia sent a message saying that. Right.

Speaker 31 And then likewise, folks were finding out that there were protests in other areas of the country, which you know is always, I think, gives a little morale boost. And yeah, so like, there's a chance.

Speaker 31 I mean, I'm seeing more and more. I saw a big protest in New York tonight.

Speaker 31 They can't deploy the Marines everywhere. I mean, right? There are a lot of Marines, but not that many.
I know. It's

Speaker 31 in one sense, like, and I know that this is maybe a strange opinion or

Speaker 31 stance or what have you, but like, in a sense, it gives me hope to see these things.

Speaker 31 Like, at a protest or, you know, like a big action like that, like, I always feel kind of very cared for in a strange way because, like, the only thing that matters is taking care of each other, right?

Speaker 31 And trying not to get hurt. And, and, and, and for folks who are in the street to try and remain there, right?

Speaker 31 And, like, it's quite a uh, like, you have this kind of disaster community, right? The same thing that you sometimes find in conflict zones or after natural disasters.

Speaker 31 And, like, right, it's always beautiful to see that, right? Like, you know, I'm vegan and I could not find any fucking vegan food

Speaker 31 for a while. And like, people were bringing me snacks.
And I thought that was really sweet.

Speaker 31 And like, you know, I saw people taking care of strangers when they got tear gassed or taking care of strangers when they got shot or like just folks who have bought snacks and like wanted to give them to unhoused people who were there.

Speaker 31 Right.

Speaker 31 So all that stuff is just a reminder that like, you know, like actually, you know, if you were consuming this through the fucking New York Times, Times, right, you'd think that people were looting and burning the city.

Speaker 31 And like, I don't see anyone steal shit. I did see people take care of one another.
Yeah. And that's a beautiful thing.

Speaker 31 And, you know, maybe people need to be in the streets to find one another right now. Cause, you know, every

Speaker 31 year, people, it gets harder to go outside and easily have to stay on the internet. Right.
People get more atomized. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And like, it was cool to see like young Mexican folks, young Salvadorian folks, Guatemalan, you know, people of different extractions who are now Americans,

Speaker 31 in addition, obviously, to their ethnic identities and backgrounds, showing up. And then like young black folks showing up with them and being like, yeah, you know, like fuck the police.

Speaker 31 And like, it was cool to see maybe folks who are a little bit more liberal. Like I definitely had folks who were like, oh, we're not here for the riot.
We're just here for the peaceful protest.

Speaker 31 In so much as, you know, no one wants to get shot in the face with a 40 millimeter rate. No one, no one's there to.
No, absolutely not. And so it's cool to see those people making those connections.

Speaker 31 And we need to make those connections now, right? We need to talk to people and talk to each other. I didn't see people beefing with each other.
I didn't really see the like optics police, right?

Speaker 31 If you were again, if you were consuming this on the fucking blue sky, which can be intolerably lib sometimes, like seeing people being like, you know, because I personally disagree with the optics of this one person's decision, the whole protest is therefore flawed.

Speaker 31 Yeah, the whole protest is fucked. And And let's just let I steal their fucking children.
Like,

Speaker 31 yeah, people will let people be and

Speaker 31 deal with the consequences of their own actions instead of being condescending.

Speaker 31 No, and I mean, I'm looking at Twitter right now where half of the comments are about someone who drove through a crowd in LA and people either, this is what happens when America gets fed up, or what other option did he have?

Speaker 31 You know, you're getting a mix of that sort of thing. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Shit. Are people okay?

Speaker 31 I'm not aware of any like serious injuries or fatalities, certainly, but yeah. Yeah.
That was the other weird thing.

Speaker 31 Like vehicles throughout, I mean, it's LA, everyone's driving all the time, but there were vehicles like constantly just moving through. Yep.

Speaker 31 It's LA right so people coming out to do their donuts and stuff. But like, yeah, it is a risk.
Like if someone...

Speaker 31 We've shared a car bomb, Robert. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, we sure did. I've seen a few car bombs.
It always freaks me out when you're in a big crowd like that. And then you've got these cars around, like

Speaker 31 potential for vehicular violence. Yeah, it's not great.
Yeah, again, right? We have the quote-unquote public safety forces deployed in massive numbers and no one's stopping that.

Speaker 31 No, and also just a note to people, the only realistic way to stop cars in this situation is with a barrier made of other cars, right?

Speaker 31 You block off the route of march with vehicles. There's no other realistic tool at your disposal as somebody who's a part of a protest to stop a full-ass vehicle.

Speaker 31 We're going to talk a little bit more with a couple of updates from the ground and then close out. But first, here's our last bit of ads.

Speaker 31 Y'all look the same skin color as me. Come on, man.
Y'all, baby's gonna be taken away like my own.

Speaker 31 Like somebody's gonna be a kid. Nice and smoke, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Put your fucking head on the bill.

Speaker 31 So we're back, and James, while you were leaving, the mayor of Los Angeles declared a curfew in place from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Speaker 31 for the 110 to the west I-5 to the east.

Speaker 31 yeah, 110 to South I-5 and 110 to North. This is from the public safety alert texted out to people in Los Angeles.
So people are allowed to travel to and from work to seek or to give emergency care.

Speaker 31 EMS people are exempt. No one else is exempt as far as I'm aware.
But yeah, that's the situation.

Speaker 31 So part of why Mayor Karen Bass has issued a curfew is that it gives the police extra kind of freedom to take people into custody, right? Yeah. Oh, credentialed media are exempt.

Speaker 31 Yeah, that's what I was told. Yeah, people to and from work, credentialed media, emergency and medical personnel, law enforcement are the limited exemptions.

Speaker 31 So that's, that's what we've got going on right now. Yeah.
And if you are out there working as a journalist, like it's important to carry your press pass, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 31 That won't stop you from getting shot with impact munitions because they've done that to a lot of people. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 And like, you know, I had a large blue press badge on my plate carrier, like I always do. And like, yeah, it's not done to make you bulletproof.

Speaker 31 yeah but yeah there's a curfew tonight which like you say just gives them the means to to to use more coercive force or to charge people more harshly they'll continue doing their helicopter right

Speaker 31 they had probably four or five helicopters they they really love putting them out in la and especially now that they got the military Yeah, man, it had a real kind of blade runner vibe to be in this like dark city at night with these helicopters circling, spotlighting people from above and like little fires happening across the city, and then occasional clouds of like spicy air floating towards you.

Speaker 31 I have seen some speculation that they were using some kind of other chemical irritant instead of tear gas. I think that the most likely explanation is just they were using tear gas that was older.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it tastes different when it's older. The shit the feds use is often different from the shit state or local police use.
Like, you know, you get different sort of mixes, but I'm not aware.

Speaker 31 Like, it's, it's, I'm certain it's just tear gas, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 31 Um, I think it's just different, yeah, different variants and ages of tear gas, um, and sometimes those take on different appearances too.

Speaker 31 And they weren't really fogging the tear gas, not that I saw, they were just tossing, tossing out the grenades.

Speaker 31 Yeah, you didn't get that like wall of tear gas that you guys are familiar with in Portland. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 31 Yeah, but it took on like the protest aesthetic, like, didn't see as many people with half masks or hard hats or goggles or any of that stuff.

Speaker 31 So, like, yeah, And in one sense, people, it's, it's great to see people coming out and like engaging their right to protest. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And coming from where they are as they are showing up to show out for something. Leaving work or whatever.
Yeah. Yeah.
It makes me worried for them.

Speaker 31 Like it like, you know, I'm

Speaker 31 around the block a few times and I'm worried that people are going to get fucked up.

Speaker 31 So yeah, it's curfew tonight. It's curfew tonight.
There's still marine numbers are still at around 700. There's about 4,000 National Guard troops.

Speaker 31 So the number of military deployed significantly outnumbers demonstrators at this point. Mayor Karen Bass has stated that, or sorry, the Pentagon has stated that it's costing about $134 million

Speaker 31 this deployment.

Speaker 31 Jesus, man. Yeah,

Speaker 31 it's like, I'd say it's not a pointless escalation. The point of the escalation is that they want to keep using the military, right? Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 And to sort of establish a precedent that domestic unrest can be dealt with by the military, which

Speaker 31 to be clear, like by my reading, is completely in contradiction of the Constitution. Yeah.

Speaker 31 But a lot of things that are in contradiction of the Constitution happen, especially with policing, all the fucking time. Right.

Speaker 31 Like, yeah, like, it is important not to normalize this. Again, like, you don't have to be like

Speaker 31 a blue-head Antifa to be like, this is fucked up.

Speaker 31 And I think I definitely spoke to a few people, like, folks who have come out of church and stuff and and just like, yo, we heard they had sent the Marines here.

Speaker 31 So we just came on down because that's not okay. And that's good to see.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 And like, those are conversations that people who are invested in not living in a country where your First Amendment rights don't matter anymore because you can get shot by an 18-year-old Marine who hasn't had the time to really morally and ethically consider that decision.

Speaker 31 Yeah. Like it's important to have those talks with people now because like it is

Speaker 31 very concerning. Yeah.
You know, you and I have

Speaker 31 attended a few civil wars. Uh, I don't want to be like this country spinning towards civil wars.
You know, I think we have a long, long way from that.

Speaker 31 I mean, when the president stands in front of a bunch of enlisted men at Fort Bragg and talks about how they're using the military to restore order to an American city that's been invaded, there's no longer an argument that those comparisons are an escalation or exaggeration, right?

Speaker 31 Like, hyperbolic. Yeah, like we're in the shit right now, folks.
Yeah, man. Like, show me a thing that Assad wouldn't have said today.
Right, right, right.

Speaker 31 And what you don't have is an actual insurrection going on. What you don't have is anyone actually fighting the government.

Speaker 31 You have people who are like angry and yelling and some folks who throw through rocks. You do not have a militant uprising against federal power.
They're just kind of acting like it.

Speaker 31 Yeah, like if you have an insurrection in this country, this country has a shit ton of guns.

Speaker 31 You will know if there's an insurrection because people will be using them. Like, that's not happening.
Yeah. It's young people in the street waving flags and shouting.

Speaker 31 And, like, saying, fuck the police is a constitutionally protected right in this country. Like, yes, it is.
You should not get hurt for exercising your First Amendment rights. Right.

Speaker 31 Yeah, man. Like, I'm, I'm proud of all those people who showed up.
I'm proud of them for taking care of each other. Yeah.
And I hope that they, they stay there.

Speaker 31 And I hope that they, you know, as they stay there, they become more, more astute. Yeah.
They learn some stuff.

Speaker 31 I saw a lot of running 200 yards away from the cops in a very straight line, straight down a straight street. Yeah.
Like, which is not the move, right? Like,

Speaker 31 you want to be, I'm up, he sees me, I'm down. Yeah.
Serpentine, serpentine.

Speaker 31 You do the worm. That's how you get him.

Speaker 31 Yeah. There is some polling out, early polling.
This is from G. Elliott Morris, formerly of

Speaker 31 538, but conducted June 10th by YouGov of 4,309 adults.

Speaker 31 Do you approve or disapprove of deploying National Guard soldiers to the Los Angeles area to respond to protests over the federal government's immigration enforcement? 38%

Speaker 31 approve, 45% disapprove, and 19% are not sure. Do you approve or disapprove of deploying Marines to the Los Angeles area? 34% approve, 47% disapprove, 19% not sure.
So,

Speaker 31 you know, these aren't popular measures, although they're also not as unpopular as you would hope. Yeah,

Speaker 31 that's not great. I'd like to see more.
I mean, yeah, you got Tom Cotton doing his,

Speaker 31 I forget if it's Wars Future Journal, Washington Post, op-ed. Right.
Send in the troops for real this time. Oh, was that? I thought that was the Times.
That was the Times. I think I forget exactly.

Speaker 31 Yeah,

Speaker 31 they're somewhat indistinguishable these days, especially in their op-ed pages. You're right, Robert.
It was the Times. Nope, nope, that's a 2020 op-ed.
Oh, 2025 op-ed was in the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 31 Oh, he got a new one. Okay, that's it.
Yeah, he wrote 2020, Robert. He wrote Send in the Troops.
In 2025, he wrote Send in the Troops,

Speaker 31 for real.

Speaker 31 For real. Okay, well, he got it.
Yep. Yeah.
I mean, he got what he wanted.

Speaker 31 Well done. Ranger Tom, guy who lied about being an Army Ranger.
Yes, not a Ranger Tom. Yeah, yeah, not a Ranger Tom.
Yeah, I mean, you see this in the UK a lot.

Speaker 31 I'm very familiar with this kind of, oh, send in the powers. Yeah.
Maybe that's a good place for us to end. If you are in the U.S.

Speaker 31 military or the National Guard, if you or someone you love is in the military or the National Guard, now is a good time to read up about Bloody Sunday. Yeah.
Happened in Ireland.

Speaker 31 And now is a good time to look at what's currently happening, what has been happening to those soldiers. Because it took a long time for those people to stand trial.

Speaker 31 And it's not officers who are standing trial, right? It's soldiers. It's paratroopers in this case.
Because those are always going to be the fingers on the trigger, right? Yeah.

Speaker 31 And so, you know, no one knows which direction history is moving in, but like like

Speaker 31 things don't feel morally right.

Speaker 31 You know, there are things like the GI rights hotline, but I think people should be aware what happens when countries use their militaries to oppress protest and what has happened to some of the soldiers who have been ordered to do that.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Well, look up Bloody Sunday, folks. Maybe we'll cover that in the not-too-distant future.
Because, yeah,

Speaker 31 that's just going to get more relevant. Don't listen to U2 if you can avoid it.
But just look it up. Yeah, avoid U2.
Not the song Sunday

Speaker 31 or Bloody Sunday, but yeah, all right, everybody. Well, this has been, it could happen here.
We will be back tomorrow. Uh, we'll see if Gavin Newsom has been arrested yet.

Speaker 30 All right, thanks, James.

Speaker 31 Yeah, thanks, Robert. That's an episode.
Bye,

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Speaker 31 To live and die in LA, ayy, this is not a game, it is smoke bomb flash. That was the day the feds came

Speaker 31 That was the day the feds came

Speaker 31 That was the day the feds live and die in LA Why nothing'll be the same It's smoke bomb flash That was the day the feds came

Speaker 31 That was the day the feds came

Speaker 31 That was the day the feds live and die in LA I ain't a song we sang It's the gang banging traders We was ready when it came for us Oinky honkey piggy piggy immigration coward boy Happin' out the back of black vans out in Paramount Black bagging family kidnapping broad daylight Stare at us, daring us to fight back right.

Speaker 31 They try to make us choose sides. Black love, brown pride.
Won't play when it's time to ride for West Sides. B-sides, he tryna send Americans to foreign prisons.

Speaker 31 You don't think you'll try to put black bodies inside? Game time, homie, gon' meet us on Alameda. I ain't scared of Neil La Migra.

Speaker 31 We knew the trail, we've been here, gon' keep it peace, bruh. They gon' try to bait us and instigate us.
But wait, bruh, take it to they face, bruh. They masculine as paper thin.

Speaker 31 We work for the border, we just following orders. But fear overtakes them, badges of facade.
We exercise our rights, they said National Guard. And one thing's for certain, burn down the regime.

Speaker 31 When the president chooses to send the Marines, live and die in LA, ay, this is not a game, it is smoke bomb flash. That was the day the feds came.

Speaker 31 That was the day the feds came.

Speaker 31 That was the day the feds live and die in LA. Why nothing will be the same? It's smoke bomb flash.
That was the day the feds came.

Speaker 31 That was the day the feds came.

Speaker 31 That was the

Speaker 30 This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 30 Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong and James Stout. This episode, we are covering the week of June 4 to June 11th.

Speaker 30 Let's start, James, with an update on the protests happening in LA in response to mass ICE raids in the Los Angeles area and also around the country.

Speaker 31 Yeah. So I've been in LA.
I was up there covering it. I'm back home now.
It's on Wednesday. We did a whole episode about this that people can listen to.

Speaker 31 In terms of updates, I think things were a little bit smaller tonight. There were a large number of detentions made last night.
Tonight, you mean last night, Tuesday night? Tuesday night.

Speaker 30 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 31 To summarize, right, the first two nights saw the city caught off guard.

Speaker 30 Yeah. The weekend was pretty spicy.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it got pretty wild out there. A couple of cop cars got destroyed, I think.
Some Waymos made the ultimate sacrifice. R.I.P.

Speaker 30 Waymo.

Speaker 31 Yep. Oh, I saw them trucking the Waymos out, and there was not much Waymo left.
Like, it was

Speaker 31 the cremains of the Waymo passed me. Gone but not forgotten.
So by Monday morning, they had flooded Los Angeles with police. I saw police from LAPD, LASD.

Speaker 31 I saw police from FPS, DHS, National Guard, California Highway Patrol.

Speaker 31 It's like Pokemon for cops up there. And that resulted in them splitting up protesters, kettling and detaining people on Monday night.

Speaker 31 And they made extremely liberal use of impact munitions, chemical irritants, et cetera. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.
Thousands of

Speaker 31 impact munitions. You can find kissings all over DTLA if you just go walk around.
I saw a lot of like people had tagged up a lot of buildings in DTLA.

Speaker 31 But from what I've seen, seen i don't know we'll see right it's also the week so maybe maybe things will will get bigger again over the weekend yeah things can get less combative during the week as people are busy with work and keeping themselves like fed and

Speaker 31 and housed and then on the weekend things can sometimes open back up again yeah and also it's worth it's worth noting how these how these specific protests are flaring up which is that like These ones are flaring up when ICE like drags people out of a place.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 30 It is directly in response to ICE kidnapping their neighbors, right?

Speaker 31 And so, you know, the next time ICE does a bunch of kidnappings of people, there's a chance that it will pop off again because people are being like, holy shit, don't take my neighbor away.

Speaker 30 Yeah. And the LA protests are already happening in a sequence, right? We had stuff happening in San Diego.
We then had stuff in Minneapolis. We then had stuff in Chicago.

Speaker 30 We then had the really big flare of which was LA.

Speaker 30 And I think what's interesting right now is that instead of having just like nationwide riots like there was in 2020, this is more like a sequence that actually directly follows the actions of ICE.

Speaker 30 And in some ways, I think this can be harder to combat.

Speaker 30 If every city has the capacity to do what LA has done in response to the actions of ICE, that follow the actions of ICE, that could be harder to prepare for than just the federal government realizing that we have to do massive counterinsurgency everywhere all at the same time like what happened in 2020.

Speaker 30 If instead this is a rolling sequence of protests that happened directly in response to ICE actions, any city could be next.

Speaker 30 Instead of just trying to prepare for nationwide riots, they have to be this more like mobile fluid force.

Speaker 30 They have to respond to different outbursts that happen in different cities at different times.

Speaker 30 And I think the other advantage that this model has is that the actual protesters themselves can also iterate on tactics.

Speaker 30 Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every time, you can take what happened in a previous city like a week ago, two weeks ago, and iterate on that, iterate on what was unsuccessfully, what captured attention, and what was able to catch the cops off guard, minimizing mass arrests.

Speaker 31 Yeah. In terms of the state response, just in case people have missed it, right? 2,000 National Guard troops, 700 United States Marines.
The Marines Wittly came from 29 Palms.

Speaker 31 I know the Corps has like an urban warfare school, or at least had one there in 29 Palms. Obviously, Camp Pendleton is a bigger base.
I see might not be geographic.

Speaker 31 They're both huge and closer to LA, but they sent them from 29 Palms instead. I didn't see any Marines.
They're just supposed to be protecting federal assets.

Speaker 31 They're not supposed to be out there like straight up policing. Obviously, that's unconstitutional.
One could make a case that it's unconstitutional to be deploying them at all in this fashion.

Speaker 30 There's some on the streets now. National Guard is actually making arrests on the street.
Marines have not as of Wednesday, but some of the Marines have been deployed.

Speaker 30 There's upwards of 700 who are like in the process of being deployed to LA streets right now, out of 2,000 available troops, some of which are actually still receiving training on standard rules of force.

Speaker 30 So these people do not have necessarily like extensive training on police crowd control, but are currently brushing up on crowd control tactics.

Speaker 31 Yeah. What I saw from National Guard was like, it seemed to be by rank, although I'm not certain of that.
Guys with shields and sticks, right?

Speaker 31 Just straight up poles, as opposed to like truncheons with like a T shape or an L shape or whatever. And then probably one in every five or six had an M4 with a magazine.

Speaker 31 That's a gun, for people who aren't familiar. It's an AR-15.
And that's obviously live ammunition.

Speaker 31 So like they didn't seem to have any access access to like less lethals, or they didn't bring them if they did.

Speaker 31 But I don't know about the Marines, and obviously, we saw like police using less lethals, and then LASD also had some cops with M4s

Speaker 31 amongst their formations.

Speaker 30 And this is just about to like really expand outside of LA and California, amidst anti-ICE protests across Texas. Governor Greg Abbott just deployed the Texas National Guard.

Speaker 30 And on Tuesday night, I believe, MSNBC broke the story that ICE is about to send special response team, quote-unquote, tactical units to five Democrat-controlled areas, namely New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Northern Virginia.

Speaker 31 Yeah, SRT is like a SWAT team, if you're not familiar. Like, there was a DHS SRT that ended up responding to that South Park protest in San Diego that we mentioned last week or the week before.

Speaker 30 As of Wednesday, there's already been protests this week in over half U.S. states.
This will certainly continue throughout the weekend, at least for LA. On Tuesday night, the mayor announced an 8 p.m.

Speaker 30 curfew in downtown Los Angeles. There were mass arrests Tuesday night, hundreds of people.

Speaker 30 I think the other advantage that this kind of rolling sequence model that we've seen with like San Diego, Minneapolis, Chicago, LA, is that not only does it give people time to like iterate on tactics, it also gives people a break.

Speaker 30 If anyone who survived 2020, like you know how intense burnout can be from just doing that all the time. Yeah.

Speaker 30 And having built-in breaks where you can like recover physically and mentally while iterating on tactics. That could be interesting to see.

Speaker 31 I think also there's one thing we should note about this, which is that

Speaker 31 there's a very clear actual thing you're trying to do here, which is stop them from taking these people.

Speaker 31 And even if you fail to immediately take someone, like stop them from taking someone in the moment, every single like second they're having to do dealing with this shit is means that they're not doing it.

Speaker 31 Yeah. So you're, you're degrading their capacity.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 31 Time is like the most valuable asset here yeah and and like obviously again like the larger goals you want to like expel like you know like one of the most common things i'm hearing from people is just like ice out of the city right like we don't want them to be fucking doing these raids but every every time they're forced to like actually face resistance when they're doing a raid makes it much much harder for them to do it they have to start planning for there to be resistance to the rage which slows them down and yeah everything you could do to put fucking wrenches into the gears until the machine breaks is is good and there's a there's a very clear path from A to B to C in a way that there kind of aren't, like, it doesn't rely on politicians doing stuff.

Speaker 31 It just relies on us stopping them. So, yeah.
Yeah. Talking of politicians doing stuff, the city of Glendale did cancel its detention contract with ICE, right? So they won't be detaining people there.

Speaker 31 So like a little bit of progress there. And Gavin Newsom has said some shit about the deployment of the National Guard and California has filed a court case.

Speaker 31 Like Newsom has not done everything in his power to stop that. But yes, Gavin Newsome, what do you expect? I'll be back in LA if things continue there.
But

Speaker 31 it's

Speaker 31 certainly the biggest protest we've seen this time around in the Trump administration.

Speaker 30 All right, let's go on break and come back to discuss more news.

Speaker 31 We are back,

Speaker 31 and unlike people from 12 countries who will not be coming back to the United States for the foreseeable future because the Trump administration has announced a new travel ban.

Speaker 31 The form of the travel ban is basically anyone who applies for a visa or is in the process of applying for a visa currently, if they are from one of these 12 countries, is unable to obtain a visa to the United States, right?

Speaker 31 The 12 countries, seven have partial restrictions.

Speaker 31 And then the full ban is on Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

Speaker 31 And then Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela have like a higher barrier, right? And some visas are not available to them.

Speaker 30 Myanmar is an interesting inclusion there.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it is. They looked at two criteria, it seems, right? Because Trump made an executive order at the start of his presidency, like looking to identify countries for a travel ban.

Speaker 31 The two criteria they had were visa overstay percentages and the quote-unquote not having a competent central authority to cooperate with on vetting, right?

Speaker 31 So, like, you can't do a background check on someone if their country doesn't have that facility. It's a claim, right? I think they got Vyanmar on visa overstay percentages.

Speaker 31 It's worth noting, right, that they use percentages and not raw numbers for a reason. Because, yeah, a certain percentage of Burmese people may overstay their visa.
I think it's 27.1%.

Speaker 31 That amounts to 543 individuals. If we look at, for instance, France, these are 2023 numbers, about 0.6% of French people overstay their visa.
That amounts to 9,182 individuals, right?

Speaker 31 So, like, a percentage is great, but like a big percentage of a small thing is still a small thing. Yeah.

Speaker 31 This is how they're attempting to justify it, though, in terms of bulletproofing it through the courts. Obviously, they didn't have the best luck with their travel ban in the first administration.

Speaker 31 So, using this tactic is one that they're hoping will justify it. It will stick the landing through the courts.
I should add that they have some exemptions, right?

Speaker 31 Existing visa holders who are currently within the United States can remain in the United States, right?

Speaker 31 In practice, lots of these countries only get single-entry visas, so it might be hard for them to leave and come back.

Speaker 31 But it's sometimes I've heard it reported that all these people, like people from these countries can no longer come to the United States or be in the United States and that's not true.

Speaker 31 There are exemptions for people who are dual citizens. There are exemptions for adoptive children.
There are exemptions for ethnic and religious minorities in Iran.

Speaker 31 There are exemptions for sports teams because the United States.

Speaker 31 Well, the United States is holding the World Cup and the Olympics, right? Yeah. So like it would be

Speaker 31 something of a farcical spectacle if you know 19 countries were not represented. I mean, the Olympic Games is something of a farcical spectacle to begin with, one could argue.

Speaker 31 But yeah, they didn't want that, right? They didn't want that like international spectacle. So a professional athlete visa is hard to get at the best of times.

Speaker 31 So like that is a high bar, but those ones still seem to be available. And then there's also exemptions for SIV, right? Special immigrant visas.

Speaker 31 These are people who have worked closely with the United States. The vast bulk of them will be Afghan people,

Speaker 31 people who worked as interpreters or otherwise cooperated with the United States during the 20 years that the United States was at war in Afghanistan.

Speaker 31 Again, I've seen that misreported, including by people who really should know better. But, you know, I'm never not disappointed in a lot of people's immigration coverage.

Speaker 31 This will be challenged in court, right? But I think they have gone some way to trying to make this a bit more bulletproof than they did before.

Speaker 31 And it is concerning that they seem to have a better chance.

Speaker 31 Obviously, pretty concerning, especially for us, you know, with our extensive reporting on Burma or Myanmar, that those people can't come here and be safe. Yeah,

Speaker 31 that's a travel ban in a nutshell, I guess. Also, I think it's worth noting.
So, like, this is just an expanded version.

Speaker 31 Well, I guess there's like a little bit of differences, but it's basically an expanded version of the Muslim ban from his first term.

Speaker 31 Yeah, with some new countries, and I think maybe the removal of some countries from previously.

Speaker 31 Yeah, and like, it's worth noting that like in Trump one, like, that immediately caused the airport protests Which were like the first big protests of the administration that were extremely effective until people like went home

Speaker 31 and this time it's basically not been a news story because we're so far along that the protests have been about like ISIS dragging our neighbors away and Yeah, I just think that's fucking bad as shit and also the airport protests like were really effective.

Speaker 31 They were some of the more effective protests in those years. Yeah.
Yeah. I am yeah.
I did see a flyer for an airport protest, but I've seen no evidence of ones occurring. Yeah.

Speaker 31 I had heard that there was going to be one on Monday, but that it just didn't happen. So I don't know what's going on with that.
Yeah, but that was a thing that was pretty effective.

Speaker 31 And they also didn't beat the shirt out of everyone for most of it, which was nice. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Well, Mia, talking of beats, how about we drop some beats right now with this sick tariff song?

Speaker 30 Great work, James.

Speaker 31 Thank you. Thank you.
Sorry, don't like

Speaker 31 So Donald Trump has apparently, according to him, resolved the trade war with China. He's claiming the negotiations.
He won?

Speaker 31 He's claiming victory.

Speaker 30 Mission accomplished.

Speaker 31 The claim that he's making

Speaker 31 out of the London negotiations, and I want to point out that I have not heard anything from the Chinese side.

Speaker 31 It's possible there'll be stuff from the Chinese side by the time this episode comes out. It's possible this whole deal will have collapsed by the time this comes out.

Speaker 31 It seems like the deal is that US maintains tariffs at 55%, which is what they're at right now. China maintains 10% tariffs, and then China ensures US access to rare earth metals.
And then the US

Speaker 31 does.

Speaker 31 Trump was talking about the U.S. not actually doing a crackdown on like Chinese international students.
So who knows what the fuck is going to happen with any of that?

Speaker 31 That is the reporting that's coming out right now. I don't know.
Quite frankly, I am skeptical if this is going to hold.

Speaker 31 Again,

Speaker 31 I don't know if like

Speaker 31 in two days when this episode comes out, if any of this is going to be true, because again, we have heard nothing from the Chinese side. It has all been from Trump.
So who the fuck knows?

Speaker 31 But yeah,

Speaker 31 that is the late tariff news. This is a kind of short one.

Speaker 31 That's what we've got.

Speaker 30 That's exciting. That's exciting that we won.
Trade is back. I can go back to buying everything I own from Timu.
No problem.

Speaker 31 Yeah, I mean, I can give my usual disclaimer that that 50% tariff on China is like fucking ruinous to the global economy, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 31 I do genuinely hope that the Chinese international students aren't getting cracked out on because

Speaker 31 Jesus fucking Christ, those poor kids all of these policies are tied together in this sort of like unhinged like american nationalist project etc etc they're all connected they hate us all and yay really really fun time to be a chinese trans woman in the us woo

Speaker 30 great

Speaker 30 it's also fun to enjoy the COVID vaccine because we may not get it for much longer. I guess I'll do a brief update on an episode I did with Cave a few weeks ago.

Speaker 30 So RFK has now dismissed the entirety of the ACIP, the CDC's vaccine advisory committee. That has just been completely dissolved.
This happened on Tuesday.

Speaker 30 That was the big fear that Cave had is that if that panel gets dissolved, that that was kind of the last line of defense with like reasonable people being in charge of COVID vaccine recommendations at the CDC.

Speaker 30 And that is gone. And just a few minutes ago, RFK Jr.
announced the replacements. And I'd have not had enough time to look into all these guys because this was literally just 30 minutes ago.

Speaker 30 But at least half of them are at the very least what would be considered a COVID vaccine skeptic.

Speaker 31 Oh crazy.

Speaker 30 Right-wing libertarian types, people who have been dismissed from their academic positions. Basically, it's who you would expect RFK to

Speaker 30 submit to a vaccine advisory panel. The very least half are like cranks.

Speaker 30 I will try to look into the rest of these guys in the future. We should probably do a full follow-up episode eventually on the new panel.
So, not looking good on the COVID vaccine front.

Speaker 31 Yeah, we also have very bad news from the FCC, which instead of like, you know,

Speaker 31 I don't know. Like, I know crypto scams are supposed to be the SEC's thing, but I feel like the FCC also should have fucking things for crypto scams.
But

Speaker 31 instead of going after the fucking crypto scams, what they're doing is they're going to hold like meetings basically with what is, I'm assuming, is going to be a bunch of the most unhinged G-trans grifters and anti-trans like hacks, frauds, and violent bigots.

Speaker 30 Notably, not trans people. Yeah.
They will not be included per no per the statement.

Speaker 31 No trans people. No trans people.
No, no, no.

Speaker 31 No, they're looking into ways to do like FCC investigations for like deceptive marketing practices for any doctor and also parents for some reason, which how the fuck is you going after a parent for defective marketing?

Speaker 31 What the fuck are we doing here? But anyone who like gives a child any kind of trans health care

Speaker 31 is it specifically trans healthcare or are they trying to like specify like surgical procedures because I've seen some like mixed reporting on this it's unclear right now the wording that I saw was so ambiguous that I think it could be anything but I don't know and this is I think one of the other things it's not clear that they know right now right like it's all just really really up in the air what the fuck this is going to turn into or if this is even going to turn into anything we had that whole at the beginning of pride the fbi was like hey you can report like doctors doing like trans health care here two things yeah and some of these have not really turned into anything yet the anti-woke fbi soliciting tips for people providing trans health care yeah yeah so like i don't know we'll we'll put a pin in that one to see if some fucking horrible stuff happens out of the out of there but that's you know one of the next

Speaker 31 giant anti-trans things that they're doing as all of the anti-immigrant stuff happens as they fucking make vaccines illegal like it's

Speaker 30 so much of the trans stuff specifically is like just the chilling effect it's trying to scare people away from providing people with the health care that they need to live fulfilling lives and it's working like there are there are lots of clinics that have like fucking stopped and if you if you are one of the people at these clinics fuck you eat shit um well and i think that is where people can apply pressure to yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what i was gonna say yeah is like there there have been protests you're not gonna change the mind of the Trump administration on this topic at this point, but you can apply pressure to people who are feeling like

Speaker 30 they're too scared to actually provide healthcare. And they can be reminded that, no, it is their duty to provide people with health care.

Speaker 31 Yeah. Yeah.
And

Speaker 31 people have successfully gotten clinics to start to restart like trans healthcare for kids by just going out and protesting. But this is, this is also just like, if you're,

Speaker 31 I don't know, you're in like a blue city and you don't know immigrants and you are like, I want to do a protest. This is the thing you can do.

Speaker 31 You can find, there's one in Chicago right now that I'm blanking on the name of where there's a bunch of protests.

Speaker 31 Yeah, but like you can find the clinics that are refusing to do this and you can go fucking protest them and this can and will work.

Speaker 31 We've spoken on the show before to healthcare workers who are like very dedicated to keeping the provision of gender affirming care. So like.
If you want to listen to more, you can hear that.

Speaker 31 You can hear how folks are organizing to retake that. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And all of those people are fucking heroes, even if they probably won't be remembered as such for a long time, but they are and keep doing it and keep the fight up.

Speaker 30 Let's go and break and then return to finish up on an exciting piece of news.

Speaker 31 Hooray!

Speaker 30 Okay, we are back.

Speaker 30 So, as usual, a massive, massive news dropped right after we finished recording last week's executive disorder.

Speaker 30 And that is the Elon Musk Donald Trump breakup story got a lot more messy. So this is what we're going to close on, possibly one of our last stinky Musk segments.

Speaker 31 God, I fucking know.

Speaker 31 Jesus Christ. We'll never forget you, Elon.

Speaker 30 Mia, do you want to start us off here?

Speaker 31 Yeah, let's start this off with, okay, I have been seeing...

Speaker 31 This has kind of stopped now that Elon has kind of like run crying back to Trump, but like,

Speaker 31 there was a moment where a lot of the like, like Matt and Glasius, like a lot of the sort of like reasonable Democrats or whatever were trying to be like, we should try to recruit Musk into the coalition.

Speaker 30 That was a scary moment. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Yeah. I want to remind everyone, this is the guy who did two Nazi salutes at the inauguration.
Two, two of them. He did one and then he did a second one.

Speaker 31 People have forgotten that he also did the second Nazi salute. Like since this administration came into office, he has spent this time destroying the federal government.

Speaker 31 He has spent this time terrorizing like government employees, just shutting down fucking important government institutions enormous numbers of people are going to die because of the things that he's done like you the shutting down usaid and particularly like the vaccine programs the anti-hiv programs you know like he's just been doing all of this for this entire time right he has been just systematically looting and tearing apart anything in the us federal government that even can remotely do anything for a person from again everything from like hiv prevention to like destroying a bunch of the apparatus that like figures out what the weather is going to be and tells you when storms are coming.

Speaker 31 Yeah. He has been fucking doing that for me.

Speaker 30 Well, Mia, the weather is woke.

Speaker 30 You can't forget.

Speaker 31 The woke weather machines. Yeah.

Speaker 30 That's right. I just had a meeting with the Southeast Alliance where we're deciding the weather for the next few weeks.

Speaker 31 Oh my fucking God. Make it less hot here.
It's too fucking hot.

Speaker 31 Weather too hot.

Speaker 30 I know. Well, we have to raise the temperature, Mia.
It's all part of the

Speaker 30 large-scale political plan.

Speaker 31 That's right.

Speaker 30 You get it, James.

Speaker 31 Yeah, follow the plan. More heat, more riots.
I don't know. That's right.
So, okay, it's also remembering that these two were very, very close, sort of like during this election cycle, right?

Speaker 31 Trump was just straight up going first buddy.

Speaker 31 I mean, he's just like straight up in Philadelphia, like paying people to vote through these like raffles.

Speaker 30 Elon. Elon.

Speaker 31 Yeah. Elon was just like, yeah, straight up doing these, right? Trump just like did a Tesla ad.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 31 It was like, he just did a Tesla ad.

Speaker 30 First buddies gotta gotta have each other's backs, you know? Yeah,

Speaker 31 never say that again. So there had started to be a little bit of tension between them, like, as the tariff sort of mounted, because the tariffs are, you know, not good for Elon.

Speaker 31 And I think things kind of came to a head when Elon tried to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and just got his ass kicked harder than anyone I've ever seen get just absolutely thumped.

Speaker 30 And this is where the policy wonk sector of the right was starting to like side-eye Elon and question his his like

Speaker 30 invincibility, right?

Speaker 30 This guy that can come in and like save the Republican Party, can secure every future election. That's where that view of Elon started to really get called into question.

Speaker 30 Maybe this guy is kind of just a one-hit wonder.

Speaker 31 Yeah, and you can also look at a lot of the stuff that was sort of happening here in terms of like,

Speaker 31 he is staggeringly unpopular. Right.
Everyone fucking hates him.

Speaker 31 And like the Democratic Party did a really bad job of this, but like, just like the party's base and the Tesla protests were very effective and like negative,

Speaker 31 polarizing opinion of him negative. People really, really dislike him.
Like worldwide. Yeah.
Everyone hates it. He cost right-wing parties elections in countries that like

Speaker 31 staggering. Yeah.
Staggering. Like he, he, he may have accidentally saved Germany from fascism for like a decade.
Like, yes. It's very funny.

Speaker 30 You know, critical support to the to the fascist car maker who saves Germany from fascism.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Yeah. And then, so, okay, so we've been coming up to like the end of his appointment as like a special, what the fuck was the name of the term? Special government employee, yeah.

Speaker 31 Special government employee. Oh, it was special.
I was going to say that. And I was like, it can't be called special government employee.
We call it a sidge.

Speaker 31 Ski.

Speaker 31 Ski. Skay.
Well, James, you can't say that. No, no, you can't.
I've been cancelled.

Speaker 31 But there was always a question of like what exactly his role is going to be going forward once his time as a special government employee like

Speaker 31 ran out yeah but then he leaves with stephen miller's wife

Speaker 31 and

Speaker 31 so

Speaker 31 as as we've reported in previous episodes but the the final break came over the weekend over the budget big beautiful budget and and elon has been pissed off at this budget for like a while

Speaker 31 And over the weekend, he finally starts straight up doing like kill the budget posting and telling people to like call their senators to kill the budget instead of just saying it's bad.

Speaker 31 And this is, I think, actually an important thing to note here.

Speaker 30 Like actively campaigning against the budget bill and

Speaker 30 which is essentially Trump's like core policy at this point.

Speaker 30 It's like the way to, yeah, the way to push through a whole bunch of the stuff that he can't just do himself as president is just Trojan horsed through this budget bill.

Speaker 31 Yeah. Yeah.
And

Speaker 31 this gets to, I think, something that's like a kind of important split in the Republican Party right now about this budget, which is that like Musk is a is a budget deficit true believer, right?

Speaker 31 Like, yes, he and his ghouls are trying to destroy the federal government because like ideologically they don't think it should really exist except for like as a tool to hand them money, as a tool to like shoot people who they don't like.

Speaker 31 But he is part of this cadre of tech people. And this is very, very common in these tech circles.
And you see this in some finance circles of these people who believe that the U.S.

Speaker 31 is about to like enter like the super Great Depression because

Speaker 31 the amount of the GDP being spent on debt payments is too high.

Speaker 31 And so they think if they don't like stop this right now, and this is partially why they were trying to like crash the economy, because they thought that if you crashed the economy and you did all this tariff stuff or like whatever,

Speaker 31 it would decrease the cost of US borrowing. Now, that didn't happen, right?

Speaker 31 The interest rates of the bonds shot up because everyone was like, holy fuck, these like absolute maniacs aren't going to pay their debt.

Speaker 31 So, you know, none of this shit is working, but they are like true believers on this, right? And this is, again, this is very, very, very common in tech circles. It's like these people who like are

Speaker 31 really like, oh God, the U.S.

Speaker 30 is going to die unless we like yeah like unless we start just like destroying the the national debt and the whole the whole doge idea is built around like terminal tech brain yeah and it's it's it's trying to apply the logic of these like startups that are kind of scams but try trying to apply the logic of startups to an entire government and there was an interview in npr uh this week where they talked to a doge employee oh yeah yeah it was an ex-doge employee and npr asked about how much fraud and and like abuse they were actually able to find.

Speaker 30 And he said, quote, I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins.
I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.

Speaker 30 And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud, and abuse to me feels relatively non-existent.

Speaker 30 And the reason is, I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors, and have lots of people kind of sitting around and doing nothing.

Speaker 31 Unquote.

Speaker 30 So his idea that the government must be full of like fraud and abuse is because that's just how tech companies work. And he assumed that the government works the same as a tech company.

Speaker 30 And I think Elon views this the exact same way. That's why he was doing his like Twitter takeover stuff to the government.

Speaker 30 He believed that's how it actually functions and it doesn't. That's not really how the federal bureaucracy functions.
Like

Speaker 31 these people have just like eaten the fucking Kool-Aid, right? Like none of the Republicans actually believed that like the U.S. like economy functions like a pocketbook.

Speaker 31 Like none of them believe that because it's not true, right? Like you don't print your own money. So of course the U.S.
government doesn't function like a pocketbook.

Speaker 31 But like this is the generation of people where like the people who are just so absolutely pilled on the ideology have taken over.

Speaker 31 But on the other hand, there is Trump and Trump doesn't give a fuck about any of this, right? Like the faction that Trump here is representing is the faction of capitalists who just wants tax cuts.

Speaker 31 You don't give a fuck about like all of this weird tech brain stuff. Like they elected Trump with the mandate of handing them trillions of dollars in these form of the tax cuts.

Speaker 31 And that's all they care about.

Speaker 31 And we're getting a giant conflict between them because as much as Trump has just sort of been like lying about the budget numbers or whatever the fuck, if you're one of these actual budget lock people, you can just look at the budget and go, this is going to increase their debt by like $2 trillion or whatever the fuck.

Speaker 31 Right.

Speaker 31 And it's revealed a sort of pre-existing source of tension inside of the base between the sort of tech people and a lot of the rest of sectors of capital, which aren't as ideologically pilled.

Speaker 31 So let's get into all of the actual shit because it's very funny. So Business Insider put together a really good minute-by-minute timeline if you want to do that.

Speaker 31 I'm not going through this shit minute by minute.

Speaker 30 I'm not going to go through minute by minute. I am.
I am going to go through. tweet by tweeting

Speaker 31 because we have to talk about the tweets.

Speaker 30 We did the first time I've ever really wanted to say that.

Speaker 31 Oh, they're so good.

Speaker 30 Yeah. The first big tweet, and this was, you know, amongst Elon crashing out about the budget bill and talking about how he's going to cancel certain

Speaker 30 SpaceX projects. But the first big tweet from Elon was, time to drop the really big bomb at Real Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.
That is the real reason. They have not been made public.

Speaker 30 Have a nice day, Donald J. Trump.
Mark this post of the future. The truth will come out.
So this is, this is the really big one, as Elon says, the really big bomb.

Speaker 31 I actually think this, in the long run, could be one of the most important aspects of this entire fight, because the right is incredibly conspiracy-brained.

Speaker 31 They've all been like hyped up on this like Epstein pill shit. And like, specifically on like the Trump's going to release the Epstein files and show all the Democrats, right?

Speaker 31 But they've always had like this psychological block about talking about the fact that like Trump and Epstein are the most connected motherfuckers anyone's ever been. I'm going to read this.

Speaker 31 There's a very famous quote from a New York magazine article that's like Trump talking to a bunch of people at like a meeting. Quote, I've known Jeff for 15 years.

Speaker 31 Terrific guy, Trump booms from a speakerphone. He's a lot of fun to be with.

Speaker 31 It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do. And many of them are on the younger side.
No doubt about it. Jeffrey enjoys his social life.
So like he knew, right?

Speaker 31 He was friends with Epstein for ages. Yeah, so in 2002,

Speaker 31 like he's, he's on Epstein's fucking plane. Like he is like, everyone knows this, right? Like, everyone except everyone knows this, right?

Speaker 30 Everyone except for like the weirdo QAnon right

Speaker 30 understands this. And some of the QAnon people tried to justify this as being like, no, Trump was like, you know, a deep,

Speaker 30 a deep plant who got in close with Epstein so that we could eventually round up and arrest all the Democrat pedophiles, right? That's what they try to justify it.

Speaker 30 But now that that sort of like specific QAnon logic doesn't really exist as much on the right anymore,

Speaker 30 now people just like memory hole, especially the right. They just memory hole that like Trump and Epstein were best buddies.

Speaker 31 Yeah. And like, and this is the thing, it's been impossible to talk about on the right.
You just can't do it. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 31 And suddenly, Elon Musk, who is a guy who like is capable of shifting what right-wing discourse is, is suddenly like, yeah, this guy's a pedophile.

Speaker 31 I want to read this, this, this post that Trump made as a response to this, right?

Speaker 31 I missed this when this happens. I've only seen this in the business insider reporting.
So on Truth Social, Trump's response to this was to post it or to truth,

Speaker 31 thank you. The truth of David Schoen, who who tweeted this, quote, I was hired to lead Jeffrey Epstein's defense as his criminal lawyer nine days before he died.

Speaker 31 He sought my advice for months before that. I can authoritatively, unequivocally, and definitively say he has no information to hurt President Trump.
I specifically asked him

Speaker 31 this is one of the most unhinged posts I have ever seen. This, genuinely, this is, this is not a joke.

Speaker 31 If you, if you are a fucking poster and you are like, what can my contribution to like the future of democracy be?

Speaker 31 You need to push this shit into the unhinged, like, fucking, like, the, the depths of like fucking 8chan, right?

Speaker 31 Like, into, into like the fucking breeding layers of the most unhinged railing spaces in the world. You need to be going in and just injecting this shit straight into their fucking brains.

Speaker 31 You need to be like, like, just like, just hyping them up on the most unhinged conspiracies about Trump being like a fucking, like being a fucking Epstein guy, because

Speaker 31 this is completely unhinged.

Speaker 31 Like, what do you mean his defense lawyer, who was hired nine days before he died, is supposed to have specifically asked him about Trump and Trump's response to being called a pedophile is to go to this guy?

Speaker 31 Fucking inject that shit into right-wing discourse We know 4chan does this to leftist discourse all the time and injects like the worst discourses of all time fucking do it to them

Speaker 30 It is odd how this was really the first thing that breaks through this this block on the right you had you had Alex Jones like freaking out on Twitter being quote God help us all so did Kanye oh yay Kanye was freaking out cat turn was crashing out on the timeline it was really bizarre Trump's immediate response was saying quote I don't mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago.

Speaker 30 This is one of the greatest bills ever presented to Congress. And then goes on to talk about how great the bill is.

Speaker 30 It's wild. You had Ian Miles Chong

Speaker 30 tweeting about Elon versus the president. Who will win? My money is on Elon.
Trump should be impeached and J.D. Vance should replace him.
With Elon Musk boosting this claim, saying, Yes.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty pretty funny.

Speaker 30 Something that's extremely indicative of the current cultural moment that we are at is during this spat, when things really broke out on Twitter and Truth Social,

Speaker 30 during this spat, both the Vice President of the United States and the director of the FBI were on two separate podcasts and got to live react to this conflict.

Speaker 31 I know that. That's very funny.

Speaker 30 Unfortunately, I am going to play the clip. I will start with JD Vance reacting live on a podcast by someone named Theo Vaughan.

Speaker 31 Here's my basic reaction to all this stuff is, look, first of all,

Speaker 56 absolutely not. Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong with Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 31 Like, there's the guy is

Speaker 56 whatever the Democrats and the media says about him, that's totally BS. Here's my basic.
My basic read on it. First of all, I'm the vice president to President Trump.

Speaker 31 My loyalties are always going to be with the president.

Speaker 56 And I think that Elon, he's an incredible entrepreneur. He's actually done a lot.
I think Doge was really good. The sort of effort to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in our country was really good.

Speaker 56 And look, man, I'm always going to be loyal to the president. And I hope that eventually Elon kind of comes back into the fold.
Maybe that's not possible now because he's gone so nuclear.

Speaker 31 Well, it's feeling hard. I hope it is

Speaker 31 feeling to hurt. Why, though? Do you know why? Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 31 so

Speaker 56 look, I think number one, Elon's new to politics, right? So part of it is this guy got into politics and has suffered a lot for it.

Speaker 56 But I mean, and I, and I get the frustration there and I get the frustration that, I mean, look, Congress got the spending bill, but the main purpose of the bill is not actually spending or cutting spending, though it does cut a lot of spending.

Speaker 56 The main purpose of the bill is to prevent the biggest tax increase. But I understand, like, it's a good bill.
It's not a perfect bill.

Speaker 57 Like, the process in DC, if you're a business leader, you probably get frustrated with that process because it's more, you know, bureaucratic, it's more slow moving.

Speaker 56 So I think there's just some frustrations there.

Speaker 56 But I really, man, I think it's a huge mistake for him to go after the president like that.

Speaker 56 And I think that if he and the president are in some blood feud, most importantly, it's going to be bad for the country.

Speaker 57 But I think it's going to be, I don't think it's going to be good for Elon either.

Speaker 30 So that's JD Vance's reaction to this. He eventually got put onto like damage control.
We'll talk about that in a sec.

Speaker 30 What is more interesting to me is Cash Patel's reaction, because Patel's been taking fire from the right for being a little bit soft on the promise of releasing the full Epstein files, trying to downplay the extent of the files and say there's really nothing in there that's super notable.

Speaker 30 And this has gotten him in trouble because him and people like Dan Bongino have for years made a living out of talking about how the Epstein files is going to, you know, ruin the Democratic Party.

Speaker 30 They have all of this evidence, all this footage. And now that these guys are in power, they're simply not talking about this issue.
And this has got some of the QAnon right upset.

Speaker 30 And Cash Fatelle's reaction to this is

Speaker 30 frankly baffling.

Speaker 31 I'm not participating in any of that conversation. What is with Elon? Have a nice day, DJD.
So much digits phone away. They're going back and forth about different things.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Well, he said he was disappointed in Elon. Yeah, I told him to leave.
Jesus Christ, that's a crazy thing to say. How does he know? Does he know that Donald Trump is in the upsteam files?

Speaker 31 Does he have access to the upstream files? I don't know how he would, but I'm just staying out of the Trump-Elon thing. That's way outside.
What the fuck are they doing?

Speaker 31 I know my lane, and that ain't it.

Speaker 30 What do you mean this isn't your lane? You are the director of the FBI. You are in charge of the Epstein files.
This specifically is your lane.

Speaker 30 This one thing is actually your lane. It's unhinged.

Speaker 30 Oh, my God.

Speaker 31 His big thing now is he has to wear a hunting camera all the time, I guess. That says his new lane.

Speaker 30 So after the heat of this started to die down, you started to get more more of the right try to, I guess,

Speaker 30 soothe the tension.

Speaker 30 A lot of people

Speaker 30 trying to talk about coming together. You had right-wing commentators trying to frame this as two alpha males beefing, right?

Speaker 30 This is just how

Speaker 30 alpha males beef.

Speaker 30 We got to quote some of these because uh Jack Pasovic famously said, Some of y'all can't handle two high-agency males going at it, and it really shows this is direct communication, phallocentric, versus indirect communication, gynocentric.

Speaker 30 I understand you aren't used to it. Wonderful stuff from Pesobic as usual.

Speaker 30 Yeah, you also had our friends at the new norm posting videos about trying to solve this dispute through a dancing competition. Roll the clip.

Speaker 31 Can't we all just get along? We've got a country to say.

Speaker 30 Hey, I do find it odd that a lot of people's innate reaction after the heat died down was, even if Elon Musk is semi-credibly accusing the president of being a pedophile, can't we just all get along together?

Speaker 30 I don't know why we can't just get along.

Speaker 30 This is hurting the country.

Speaker 30 And Elon's remark about Trump being in the files is in and of itself just kind of baffling from Elon's perspective because he was bragging in tweets about how he is responsible for Trump being elected.

Speaker 30 And Trump was then having to respond to that by claiming that they would have won the election without Elon. But Elon was saying that without him, Trump would have lost the election.

Speaker 30 Right after he called him a pedophile, which is super interesting because it's essentially Musk saying, I'm fine with making sure a pedophile gets elected president, but I draw the line at a bad spending bill.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 30 That's really what is too much for him.

Speaker 30 The implication is that if he didn't get essentially shafted from the White House, he just would have kept this a secret and he's like okay with working with Trump otherwise, except for the bad bill and maybe he's maybe he's butthurt about Trump threatening to terminate his governmental subsidies and contracts.

Speaker 30 But like, come on, Elon, this is crazy.

Speaker 31 Yeah, yeah. Not the most well-considered.
It is fantastic that the richest man in the world is addicted to posting because we get some real, we get some real banging.

Speaker 30 Posters, posters, madness. It never fails.

Speaker 31 I got to say, though, Trump's posting response, terrible. This guy is washed.
There's nothing there. He's fucking gone mentally.

Speaker 31 Like, he could have fucking, like, even 2020, Trump just destroys him in one tweet. Like, none of this is, he's, there's nothing left there.
He's just a shell.

Speaker 30 Now, they have now been making attempts to fold the team back together.

Speaker 30 It was reported recently that actually on Friday night, which was the day after this spat on unfolded on Twitter, but a Friday night, J.D.

Speaker 30 Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Willis had a call with Elon to de-escalate the conflict. Eventually, Elon started deleting some of his more inflammatory tweets about the president.

Speaker 31 Coward.

Speaker 30 And has now posted, quote, I regret some of my posts about President Trump last week. They went too far.

Speaker 31 I said the things I wasn't supposed to say.

Speaker 30 So he got a stern talking to by JD Vance,

Speaker 30 who is kind of caught in between Trump and Musk here, but has stated that his loyalties will, will always lie with the president. So yeah, that is the current state of the Musk and Trump fallout.

Speaker 30 It will not be able to go back to how it was, but they might try to play nice again.

Speaker 30 I think that does it for us here at It Could Happen Here.

Speaker 30 We reported the news.

Speaker 31 We reported the news.

Speaker 31 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 58 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 58 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 58 You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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