It Could Happen Here Weekly 186

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

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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.

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 and the free.

Damn, that's a rough transition, actually.

Thank you for

joining us so soon after you got back.

So there's a lot to talk about, right?

Like I feel as if in like

legacy media, when there is less discussion of Palestine recently, maybe just because I'm seeing so much domestic US coverage like 24-7, right?

We're in another like Trump news cycle.

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 and what's especially expected was happening in the West Bank.

So 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.

I noticed a rapid deterioration just between those two time periods.

So, I mean, it was bad last year when we went.

That was 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 Antifata.

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.

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,

we couldn't even get to 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.

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.

This time, they couldn't even take us there.

So we went to other camps instead.

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.

And I went down to Yaffa and to Tel Aviv and interviewed some longtime kind of liberal journalists from Haaretz.

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

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.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's pretty bleak.

Like,

I mean,

I guess the process of manufacturing consent has been

pretty successful and pretty complete in that sense.

And like just the dehumanization of Palestinian people has been pretty successful, at least there.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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 NACBA in 1948.

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

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.

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.

But to the extent that

it is almost entirely staffed by Palestinians,

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

Now, a lot of the higher leadership at UNRWA is still kind of your same

international diplomats.

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

do tend to

obviously be quite sympathetic to the conditions which the Palestinian staff are working under.

So my documentary is

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.

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

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.

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.

But the assumption was after a few years, there would have been a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There has not been.

And here we are 76, 77 years later, and we're still at that point.

So UNRWA still exists.

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.

The Israelis, the Palestinians, the staff themselves.

The only thing they disagree on is when and under what conditions, why?

Yeah.

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 refugees in Libya, right?

It's called My Fourth Time We Drowned.

It's an excellent book.

If people people haven't read it, they should read it.

Very good audio book as well.

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

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.

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 and they pull up 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?

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

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.

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?

Like

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

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

higher than in the Palestinian Authority.

The PA is largely seen as a contractor, subcontractor for Israel.

Right.

And UNRWA is seen, you know, as flawed.

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.

And, you know, inefficiencies that are going to come with any multinational institution, NGO.

Yeah, of course.

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

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.

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.

And many of them speak English incredibly well.

I mean, like,

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

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.

And that's very inconvenient for Israel because when you educate a lot of refugees who can then learn English and turn 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.

Right.

And this is one of the things that has distinguished the genocide in Gaza in terms of how it's been perceived in the U.S., at least, right?

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

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

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.

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

You know, people would have been in the streets for that.

But that communication wasn't that.

And yeah, it is extremely inconvenient if your project is an ethnostate, right,

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.

Dead.

No, it is tribute to the work that UNRWA has done.

You know what, I guess we should do.

I guess we should take an advertising break right now.

So let's do that.

We'll come back.

All right, we are back.

Let's talk about the alternative to UNRWA.

Alternative is a wrong word.

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.

This is the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, for people who aren't familiar.

Synthetic UNRWA, UNRWA alternative.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is the

Zin of UNRWA, you know.

Yeah.

Okay, so what, what's going on with the Gaza?

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

at all.

Like people are fucking dying in droves.

Yeah.

My 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.

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.

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.

So it's the UNRWA people are quite confused because they've had to de-conflict with with the Israelis for this entire time and recently as a result of this law it's actually become illegal under Israeli law for the Israelis to like coordinate with UNRWA 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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

Like it only exists as such as a result of the Nakba because it's where they put all of the displaced people who weren't in Jordan.

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.

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

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

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

So it's WFP infrastructure, trucks, you know, vehicles, everything like that.

that goes in first.

And then UNHCR, UNICEF, all this thing, they're piggybacking and coordinating with WFP.

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.

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 all of these different private NGOs.

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 value.

They wanted this to be a real solution.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

And just this morning, 27 Palestinians were killed at a GHF distribution after gunfire was opened up on them.

Yeah.

We're recording on the 3rd of June.

So that was when this second massacre occurred.

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?

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

But people who were prepared to go along with that, either because they could 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 that this is run, it's not worth it, right?

Right.

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

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.

The GHF is like, nope, you starving population will need to make the journey to this distribution point and this distribution point only, which, you know, has the political effect of depopulating these areas that, you know, Israel is operating in,

which, of course, has also met criticism.

There are some videos going around showing Palestinians celebrating

the relief efforts of the GHF.

I think some of them have been verified by Reuters.

Israeli media is making hay of that.

People praising Trump in Gaza,

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.

It means that the people who needed food got food.

Yeah.

I mean, and that's the political complexity of the situation is that the people of Gaza have just been abandoned by everyone, right?

I mean,

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

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.

So, I mean,

I'm glad that like some of them are getting food.

That is an improvement off of none of them getting food, but everyone in the aid world is starting to go on record saying.

The main problem is Israel preventing aid from going into the Gaza Strip.

And 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.

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.

We need to allow 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.

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.

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't do.

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.

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.

But yeah, the solution is more aid.

Not like, oh, unfortunately, the aid has been stolen.

So now then children must starve yeah that only works if you're prepared to accept the outcome in which little children die of starvation which the israelis are like they are they are perfectly i mean yeah this new was it university of penny pennsylvania poll came about saying 84 of israelis are in favor of the idf just simply either killing or displacing everyone in the gaza strip 84

Yeah, it's wild to see like

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

Because

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.

Some people have 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.

Fucking throwing Molotov cocktails at people in Boulder is not making anything better for anyone.

It's just making everything danger, more dangerous for everyone.

And it's fucking stupid.

And I would extend that to gunning down

Israeli couples outside the Jewish Museum in D.C.

I don't think that's necessarily the best way to help people in Gaza.

No, like, yeah, standing outside the event for Jewish people and fucking shooting random people is not.

Again, it doesn't make anyone safer.

It makes all of us less safe.

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 like, that is a problem, right?

That 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.

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?

And the situation in Palestine to be careful was very different then.

But like, it wasn't something people had heard of here 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.

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, I mean, the Nakbo was pretty fucked too.

But as the world looks on, right, like the genocide continues and people continue dying.

And seemingly, the acceptance of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation by states of the world is really troubling, right?

Like we're concentrating this starving population in a small area.

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

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 stopping aid entering the Gaza.

Like, this could end,

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.

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.

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.

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

Yeah.

The US-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 seeing this very obvious genocide genocide is being live streamed to our phones.

The powers that be are too invested to let it stop.

They're into the hill.

We've already seen the degree to which the United States is compromised in

its media and government storytelling 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.

Yeah.

They're seeing the unmistakable reality of this genocide.

And, 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.

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.

But I didn't speak on my behalf.

I was speaking on behalf of the United States government.

Right.

Yeah.

The old, the old Nuremberg defense.

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

not actually an excuse for participating in war crimes and like shouldn't be an excuse for apologizing or excusing them either.

Right.

I know that you guys have talked about and that 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.

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.

How often are we going to hear that in the next few years?

I guess.

It's so predictable, right?

Like every time this happens, right?

Like, and this isn't the first time the United Nations has basically allowed a genocide to happen right under its nose.

No.

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

feel better

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.

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

Like

you can say something's a 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.

Yeah.

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 not a big

international institutions enjoyer.

Like, I'm deeply skeptical of the United Nations in almost every one of its aspects.

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

I think a huge part of that is, again, it is staffed by the local population who are from these areas and they have duty and a commitment to care to their people yeah but in general no i mean i don't understand what the point of the u.

is if you don't give it the u.s military 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 u.

you would need the world police like you would need to just use the united states to like hunt down these people yeah and utilize its 800 military bases in every country to enforce these rules.

And we don't only

we allow these things to happen.

But yeah, I know big international institution to enjoy it either.

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.

Like I would be, 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?

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

I'm glad that they're there.

Oh, I'm glad that they were there at that time, I guess.

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, which is unsurprising, right?

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

I think that's a really difficult question to answer because we have tried so many options.

Yeah.

I mean, truly,

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

This is just what Israel wants.

And I think the humanitarian world is slowly swallowing that very difficult pill.

And I don't,

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.

Like, certainly it's not coming from the US, 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.

And it has, it has a house, a correlate with,

I think, yeah, Congresswoman Jayapal and a few others who are trying to kind of push that through.

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.

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

Yeah.

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.

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?

Like I talk to people who have very different politics to my own.

Yeah.

It's a nice way of saying that.

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, like, what the fuck is wrong?

You know, like, like, I think it's an area where

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.

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

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.

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

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

Isn't that a good thing?

Yeah.

Like, yeah, like,

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.

We do not have an organization 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?

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.

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

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

like there's nothing you can do.

Are there things that like

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?

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 protective presence operations in the West Bank.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Right.

Like we've we've interviewed people who have been shot doing that.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Young woman was killed doing that.

Yeah.

Aisha Naragi.

She was she was shot feet away from my friend who was just in the West Bank and he just got banned from the entire territory for 99 years.

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

But I can still go to the country.

Like

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 my palace, this is my solidarity with Palestine in an instant?

Yeah.

Whether it's joining a flotilla that might get airstrikes

or, you know, 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?

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

And he was hitting me up the entire like 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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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

I remember,

you know, just recently, I saw people from the Korean Nationalities Defense Force, right?

So, one of the revolutionary organizations in Myanmar making a statement about solidarity to the people of Palestine and to their children, and

that they too have experienced their children being killed.

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

And even in their own time of war,

the front in Korean state is hot right now, that they are still thinking of the people of Palestine.

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.

you like find a 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 uh like to share with people before we finish up here yeah I just think I would,

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?

The real trick of the imperial thought machine is that the pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it.

To quote Theory Twink Karasnimek.

But don't lose hope, right?

Because

the world does care about Palestine more than it ever has.

And they feel that.

The people there feel our love.

They feel our solidarity.

And that is not valueless, right?

Like,

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.

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 entire week talking about what we can do to alleviate to some small degree the suffering that your people are going through.

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.

Often, like, refugees will say to me,

asylum texts will say to me in the last six months now, I guess, that I think Americans don't care about them anymore.

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

And

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,

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.

And also, I mean, like, pressure people, you know, continue to make people embarrassed for

believing in genocide.

Call your congressmen congressmen and remind them that they are shills and cowards.

I think a lot about, you know, you mentioned like 19, you mentioned World War II earlier.

I mean, if we had had TikTok in the age of Dachau and Treblinka and Auschwitz, I think about like,

the American government knew about the final solution.

We knew that the boxcars were going to these

extermination camps and we refused to bomb them.

We focused on military targets.

If we've been able to live stream, you know, some from inside Auschwitz, and we, 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.

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.

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

That's what brought down South African apartheid.

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 fuck 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...

fucking stopped doing its apartheid right like uh that i was going to say there was global economic boycott it wasn't quite global israel was not boycotting apartheid South Africa.

But yeah,

that stuff does make a difference.

Charles, when's your documentary coming out?

Where can people find it?

What can they view it on?

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?

It has some relevance.

It's time-sensitive.

But you can follow it on Instagram.

It's just at the war on UNRWA, U-N-R-W-A.

Yeah.

And my personal account also posts a lot about it.

That's Charles McBride with a Y.

Yeah.

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.

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.

And like, take heart, you know, don't despair.

Yeah, yeah.

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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.

Not just LA, but largely L.A.

right now, which over the course of the last couple of days, while we were off for the weekend, has broken out into 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.

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.

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 Comitadas, although it's kind of unclear to me the extent to which they're in theater at this point.

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

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.

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 the day before.

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.

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.

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?

This like about 1 p.m.

Pacific time when we're recording this.

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.

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.

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, which is a specific provision within Title 10 of the U.S.

Code on Armed Services.

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.

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

500 people, yeah.

Had we're an open rebellion because they had yelled at a bunch of ICE officers for a while.

That was the situation.

Yeah, well, and also, but it's worth noting, too, 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.

You can only do it if the governor is working with you.

And the governor, like, Newsom is being a real piece of shit about this for, again, like, the president.

The LAPD's been.

Yeah, the LAPD.

Yeah, 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?

This is like, they've just stolen a state National Guard.

And Newsom's response has been, because he fucking hates protesters so much, has been like, oh, this is bad.

Am I going to like do anything about the fact that,

again, every single law about how how the National Guard is supposed to be used has just been torn the fuck up?

No,

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.

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.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And the activation of the U.S.

Marines is based on like Hegseth posted a tweet 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.

Marines into this situation.

Absolutely not.

It's all super, like, for one thing, the, 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.

Right.

They, 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,

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?

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 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 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 behind deploying them.

And they don't know, they're not, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's been a bunch of protests popping up at different places.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Like, that's just pure military dictatorship stuff.

If Trump is just able to, like,

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.

It is

real bad.

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

So the cops arrested the president of California SEIU, which is the service workers union in California, very, very large union, not a super bilitant one.

No, and David Huerta isn't who you'd call like a particularly militant leftist.

No,

he's just like a kind of like a Democratic Party labor guy.

And they just like arrested him outside of one of the initial protests where he was.

Injured him quite badly, too.

Yeah, yeah, like beat the shit out of him.

And then he's still being held

in a federal detention building.

They're charging him with federal felony conspiracy to impede an officer.

And again,

this is the head of like one of the largest unions in California.

No, and they're they're justifying it in part based on the charging documents because they saw him texting on his phone 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

in a federal detention building.

So, I mean, there's obviously been like unions are pissed about it 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 off its ass and like show up to it's this we don't know exactly what's going to happen the reporting that i've seen so far has suggested that there is actually a kind of heartening degree of of cross-union support for like holy the feds like just grabbing the president of a union is in fact bad

we're gonna 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.

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.

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

Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Like, yeah, it's police state shit now.

Do I believe that they actually have the ability to?

No, they don't, actually.

But yeah.

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

Yes.

Like,

I don't know, like, both for COVID, but like, also, Jesus fucking Christ, like they're flying predator throats over these protests.

Like wear masks.

Good lord.

Do you know what else wants you to buy masks?

Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast, perhaps.

And we're back.

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

there were 2,000 arrests from ICE on Tuesday.

They'd 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.

People have been being held in just horrifying conditions.

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.

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.

There's no cots.

They're sleeping on the ground.

Sickness is spreading.

There's not enough food or water.

Conditions are fucking horrifying.

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.

government, which means they cannot be deported.

But ICE has just fucking kidnapped them anyways.

There's videos you can see from the protesters outside the buildings.

And there's something I remember from Occupy ICE 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 people know that they're inside.

It's fucking horrifying.

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 we get into the point where like it's kind of difficult to see what's going on.

ICE claims that they were just staging a bunch of people.

The Department of Homeland Security said to the BBC that there was no raid on this Home Depot planned 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.

But regardless, there's, you know, like their protests started off, and then, like, the cops just started tear gassing the people who were protesting.

Yep.

This massive rage at a Home Depot.

Now, there was another kind of noteworthy event is when ICE showed up in force.

They got, there were kind of two different actions.

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.

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

And again, this is the kind of thing that makes it a lot more difficult.

I mean, that just appears

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

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

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 respond to them.

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.

So

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

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.

Yeah.

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?

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 tree.

It's like,

it's not clear to me that that's going to happen, that this is going to be like a...

lot of early comparisons to 2020, and it's not clear to me that that's going to happen.

One thing to note is that kind of at the top so far, we've had 46,000 people out in the street in LA.

Yeah, it's not 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.

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,

but not not mass demonstrations yet in other cities 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

like scattered things that we talked about this on uh executive disorder but there was a

there was a very big confrontation in minneapolis uh last week there's another one in chicago where they like attacked a bunch of Chicago aldermen, which was a time 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.

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,

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

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.

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 like 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, they're doing this in like other places, I think it could

start to escalate.

But right now, it's still very much unclear.

Yeah, 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.

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

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, and there's 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,

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

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

the state National Guard, bring out life troops, right?

That's what will happen everywhere.

That's going to become the new norm.

Or people will continue escalating.

And yeah, like in that case, the situation is like, do people escalate to deploying more force?

Do they have that real option, right?

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?

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

be looking at to see right like that's that's kind of where there's a couple of different places it can go from here 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.

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

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?

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

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.

economy, right?

Yeah.

Like, and there's, there's no real way to lock down the unrest.

Um, and you start getting National Guard refusing to respond to deployment orders, as well as active duty soldiers, like refusing to respond, right?

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.

I think maybe a likelier possibility is not that we hit that 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, you know, demonstrations responding in other cities.

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

But I don't know.

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, right?

I am still expecting that we're going to get a really large escalating series of protests this summer.

It's June,

you can tell how out of it I am.

It is June 9th as we're recording this, right?

It is going to be a long, hot summer, right?

Regardless of whether this is the one or whether it peters out here.

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

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.

Yeah.

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.

Ah, and we're back.

I should probably note very quickly that like, obviously, one thing that happens when like this goes down is that you get people posting on the internet their thoughts about this uh 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 support through 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 care that much if people are wrong on the internet.

Yeah, I mean, he he did have a a straight-up poster meltdown where he was like yelling about someone's like breakup to say that 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

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 and the DHS account posted a picture of like spy kids of a kid with like a little like computer tracker thing on his eye.

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.

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

Like,

where the federal government is like targeting themselves based on posts that make people angry.

Yeah.

And well, specifically posts on Twitter too.

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

If you are on Twitter,

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

Like, Jesus fucking Christ is a horrifying level of repression.

The sort of mirror to this is the stuff we've been seeing on the ground, right?

There's a video going around of a, like a pretty right-wing, like Australian journalist who's just like talking about the protests.

And like maybe 20 feet, her back turned to a police riot line.

Somewhere like 15.

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.

No chance that he was aiming at someone else.

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.

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

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,

like, appeared to be targeting a protester.

It's like, no, they weren't.

No, man.

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-political.

Everyone can see.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so they have to just lie about it and be like, oh, it's colony crushers like no with your own eyes you can see that the headline is lying this is not questionable 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 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 like this kind of shit just continues to happen like the press has learned nothing yeah from 2020 they're still doing all the stupid snography shit there's actually been shit the cops have done in this protest that I've never actually seen before, which is a new one.

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.

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.

That's also, and I think it's actually, is this worth understanding?

Is that like, that is the point of police horses?

Like, the reason they have them is so they can trample people with them.

Yeah, 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.

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

Yeah.

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.

And 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 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 that yeah this this munition has never been used like that no no

that's and that's the general truth of riot munitions and actually i don't know if this guy was shot with a with a 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 this guy very nearly died in portland a few years back from that only his bike helmet saved him yeah yeah 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

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 at places they wanted to set up roadblocks to stop police cars going through and stop ICE cars going through.

And then they would light them on fire.

And

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

it's a self-driving flaming barricade.

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 you getting footage from WIMO, right?

Yep, yep, yep.

So they were like, well, these are surveillance machines.

And yeah, if you if they show up, you light one on fire and there's this flaming barricade.

Yeah.

Yep.

And then and then people figured out that you could just like, oh, we could just bring these to places like this.

This is a self-deploying flaming barricade.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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 have this tendency to think of of riots as these like really spontaneous things that nobody's like thinking about a lot.

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.

Like there's there's a surveillance angle.

There's also the angle that these things are trying to fucking kill you all the time.

And so, and this is like, you know, this is a very common like like 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.

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

Yeah.

So I don't know.

I guess we should end this with assuming things do kind of get bigger or assuming things get bigger later.

Yeah.

And you're watching this and either you head out soon and wind up, you know, being at a protest or that happens later.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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,

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?

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

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.

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.

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 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 pistols.

That's what helmet ballistic helmets are for.

And those are great for police riot rounds.

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

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

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 bump helmet.

These are different things.

A bump helmet is higher rated than like a standard bike helmet.

A motorcycle helmet is also pretty robust.

A bumper, a 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.

But all of those, any kind of helmet is better than your bare skull when police are shooting into a craft.

So wear something, even if it's a $10 fucking bicycle helmet, if that's all you can get,

wear wear that.

Don't go into a situation like this without a helmet.

Bring something like a fucking camelback or whatever that you 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.

Only use water to wash out tear gas.

Only water.

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.

You can do this.

You don't need to make cheese in your eyes.

Only you, only you can prevent people.

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

It don't work.

And if somebody starts talking about, well, no, you know, actually, it's just like if you eat something spicy and no comes.

No, no, no, no, no.

None of that's right.

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.

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.

Only water.

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.

Look, melt the ice into water.

Only use the water on your ice.

I use clean water.

Ideally, from something like, anyway, whatever.

When it comes to mace, 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?

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.

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?

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

There's a better thing for this, 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 next would be something like 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.

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.

You generally want to 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.

Pseudocon wipes are the best thing to use with mace.

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

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.

Don't be like, my 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.

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.

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.

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.

You simply don't go on the bridge.

Yeah.

Okay.

And that's the episode for today, everybody.

Use water.

Don't get kenneled on bridges.

Yeah.

Good luck, everyone.

Good luck.

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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast.

It's me, James, today, and I am lucky to be joined again by Mick.

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.

A lot of bad stuff happens.

And if you someone who prefers not to hear about like violence or sexual violence or incarceration,

it's probably some other stuff I'm overlooking.

This might not be the episode for you.

And that's fine.

But Mick, how are you doing?

Hi, James.

I'm good.

I'm good.

That was an uplifting intro, wasn't it?

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.

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

It's horrible.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

And you have a whole industry, a whole part of their economy that is predicated on enslaving migrants, like selling people, 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.

It's very hard to pinpoint exactly like where does the government end and where does this human trafficking business begin.

Right.

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.

Yeah, like which was which.

Exactly.

It was under Breznev, I think.

But

don't quote me on that.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah, so give us a load on Libya.

First of all, maybe I guess if people have been not listening, why are we talking about Libya?

Well, on May 8th, it was reported that the Trump administration was considering deporting migrants to this North African country, which is a new low.

Yeah.

Like the bar is buried and these motherfuckers just grabbed a shovel.

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.

And to illustrate that, I'm going to briefly quote from this 2022 Amnesty International article.

Men, women, and children returned to Libya.

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

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

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

continues to facilitate further abuses and 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.

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.

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

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 screen or whatever, and someone else had a SIM card.

And

that way they could get a message out.

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.

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, yeah, as you said, Libya is a 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 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

you're fucking with this the uh the

European Union is absolutely complicit in this and like they ain't coming to save you we'll get to that howard the eu is complicit in both funding and in actions.

Yeah.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Well, I could guess many things, Reggie.

There's some stories about Gaddafi and Berlusconi, but

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.

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.

So

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

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.

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 haven't

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.

That's fair.

That's also something that plays in here.

And that I think, like, if you read a lot of human rights reports, you come across it.

But there's also like a distinct form of racism for sub-Saharan or like Eastern African people.

Definitely, yeah.

That's also going to play into this.

It's just a smorgasbord of bad stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, for people who 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?

Like Africa is 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.

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

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

the parts of Africa that are beneath the Sahara Desert and in the, which you could find by looking at the map.

But yeah, like just because this is in Africa, like racist shit is absolutely going down.

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.

Yeah.

But at least it's a global thing because racist is a social construct and it's not like an inherent thing that

you'll hear this a lot.

You know, I've worked in Hispaniola a lot, right?

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.

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.

That is a nature of race, right?

It's a social construct that we mobilize to create a power dynamic.

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

Yeah.

You could talk for hours about it, but that's not why we're here.

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 yeah so even that's that that step that's encoded in european law we're trying to like circumvent by just making sure that they don't cross the mediterranean right so Sometime later, when the civil war began during the Arab Spring, Libyan dissidents got rid of the sex best that was Muammar Gaddafi.

So the world became a slightly better place after that.

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

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

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.

The other faction is led by U.S.

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

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

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 the smuggling.

Sam, 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.

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

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.

He was captured in Turin after a soccer match.

The ICC requested he be arrested, but a Turin-based tribunal declined to

approve it, after which Al-Masri was released back into Libya.

Jesus.

So

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

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.

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, like,

I don't even know what to say about that.

Yeah.

I mean, this is the nature of what you're talking about in the extent, right?

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.

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 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.

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.

When they were going out to protest at first, they'd 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.

And like, they just thought this is the international law, it's the world law, so someone's going to do it.

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,

they've come to realize that, like, 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.

We can talk very high and mighty 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.

It's okay to become cynical after that realization.

Yeah.

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.

Qaddafi 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

Many Libyan authorities often have direct links to militias or organized crime groups that engage in these practices.

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.

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.

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

more empower these people.

Yes, it's even, I think, when we talked last year about this, I think Rose from Migrate mentioned it, 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.

What do you even say to that?

Yeah, I think it's genuinely unfavourable for a lot of people.

In 2025, people are absolutely being captured and sold into slavery.

Like that is occurring.

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 one that I'm thinking of right now, after six years, I think that person was able to buy himself away from the authorities.

Then his boat was captured within 30 minutes

after

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.

And I think he was rescued by a volunteer or human rights organization who are also patrolling the sea north of Libya.

Yeah, we've interviewed some of them.

Talking of patrolling the seas, maybe

this is an adverb for a boat.

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

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.

And this is in a way not really surprising.

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

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

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.

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.

Yeah, I like that.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Yeah, so still, there's very much a process of trying to not show what is being done there.

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

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

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

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.

And that could be someone who has just

seized it by arms from whoever controlled it last, right?

Exactly.

There is sometimes facilities are abandoned and they can become official.

There's also been reports of the government raiding like unofficial centers.

but then recapturing those people and put them in official centers.

Great.

That'll make it better.

It would be funny if it wasn't so fucking horrible.

Yeah, yeah.

And then it's bleak.

The DCM closed down five centers that had a history of human rights violations.

This act, however, had little effect on halting abuses.

Reports of beatings and torture continued, as some official centers closed by the DCIM quickly became unofficial sites, reopened and operated by militias.

For example, the Buisa official detention center in Zawiya 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.

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

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

I found an amazing article by Nadia Al-Dayon, Aaron Anfinson, and Graham Anfinson in the, and James, that this is real, the Journal of Human Trafficking,

which is an actual academic journal that exists.

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

Because

again, would would be funny if it wasn't so fucking legal

yeah uh 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 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

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

These academics distinguish between three types of centers.

Official, meaning they are run by the state, insofar as that means anything, of course.

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

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

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 categories are exempt from all the violence being done to people.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Jesus.

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.

Yeah, absolutely.

That is also something that happens and most likely underreported on.

Yeah, I think it's something you'd really struggle.

Like 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.

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

Yeah, exactly.

There's like, there's nothing to say, like, this is the

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,

how can I support this person, right?

Who do you direct that person to?

Like, exactly.

Anybody Anybody who has been trafficked and forced into sex work.

Like, and I've spoken to migrants 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.

Like, it's not none of what's happened to them is their choice, but it's very difficult for them to talk about it.

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.

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

Like, I think that's that's just a problem in general, not just in Libya.

Yeah.

It's arguably much worse in Libya, but

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

in a better world would be happening.

Yeah.

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.

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

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.

Impregnations by detention center officials also occurred.

Jesus Christ.

So, yeah.

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

Yeah.

Afni, which is a pseudonym,

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.

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.

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

Her daughter died when she was seven months old.

God.

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.

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

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.

You don't have to know every detail of this to care about people.

Like it's okay not to read it.

Yeah.

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 on a systemic level.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

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.

Fuck.

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.

Yeah,

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.

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

People understand that the,

you know, I mentioned this in my Darien Gap episode, but very young children are subject to sexual violence, which also sometimes results in their death.

Yeah.

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 that they feel they can secure a safe future for their children.

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.

Yeah, it is.

Like I,

you know, like I attend wars for work sometimes.

And

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

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 imagine imagine how one can be that courageous, that dedicated to one's child.

And we, we talked in our podcast recently about Primrose, who came with her daughter.

Like, that's someone I'm still like,

just in awe of.

You know, like you don't see that kind of courage and dedication and

just like

ability to

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

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 I'm just speechless.

Yeah, there's not much to say.

You know who else should be speechless?

Is it the

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.

all right we're back we've we've had a glass of water and uh

we're gonna keep doing the podcast anyway

yes rehydrates a bit yeah yeah so in terms of like

explicit accounts

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.

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,

last year.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

possibly undertaking the journey again.

Yeah, right.

Because yeah, I know you've stressed this a few times, but a number number one does not mean that it's just a single person.

It can be the same person who tries to cross multiple times.

Yeah, right.

People will repeat crossings.

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.

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?

Like that's not a thing that in the 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.

I'm very familiar with death at the border, but the scale of this is unfathomable.

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.

That's a small village.

Yeah, absolutely.

On a yearly basis.

It's a decent-sized city if you take

that 32,000 number.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like a mid-sized music festival of people who didn't need to die.

Yes.

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

Again, air quotes, around 21,000 migrants caught during a crossing attempt.

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.

Yeah.

There was at some point a video making around and it was this African woman on a boat filmed with like a mobile phone 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.

That is one of those statements that I'll immediately believe.

Yeah.

Yeah.

People have self-immolated in those detention centers.

Like,

such is their

misery and their desire for the world to see them, I guess.

Like, I can understand why someone would just rather stop being.

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.

Again, these are approximations.

More exact numbers, we'll never know.

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

It's not one of my strong suits.

I want to be upfront with that.

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

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

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.

The latter has seen an absolute massive increase in their budget

from around 250 billion in 2016 to over 840 billion in 2023.

god yeah that's a vast increase yes and what's relatively recently been happening is that rather than have their own vessels in in the the sea they are using air reconnaissance in the form of drones or other airborne vehicles to spot spot boats for dinghies with migrants and then they give that information to the Libyan Coast Guard.

I've heard this.

They can pick them up.

And this is 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.

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

Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It saw an

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

That agreement is a continuation of the Treaty on Friendship.

partnership and cooperation that was signed by Libya and Italy back in 28,

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

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.

Those are the main purposes of those agreements, which is to prevent people from passing the prestigious gates of Fortress Europe because politically we'd rather add them to the mortar with which those walls are built.

Jesus.

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.

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

with like fighting in the capital of Tripoli happened like two weeks ago.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I can imagine some people

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.

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.

I think that the point is to hurt these people as much as possible in the moment.

And then there isn't really much of a long-term thought process beyond that.

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

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

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 it's easy for people to get this kind of smug social democracy kind of like, oh, look at the Americans.

They're so fucked up.

I'm saying things aren't fucked up here.

They are.

But the EU is doing some fucked up shit to migrants.

And like

people in Europe should be in the streets about that too.

Definitely.

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.

There's people who try to cross through Morocco to Spain,

who also encounter, again, not as bad as the things we just talked about, but by no means good.

Yeah, stuff that shouldn't be happening.

I don't even want to use words like good or bad because

they tend to lose all meaning.

Yeah.

Like less bad doesn't necessarily mean good.

Yeah, it absolutely doesn't.

It means less worse.

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.

Or like that we should accept any of it.

No, no.

People should be fucking mad about all of this.

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

Like that's definitely an attitude that's not uncommon among Europeans.

But then again, we very often fail to look into our own our own backyards.

Yeah.

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 victor orban yeah massive example uh maloney in italy is another one yeah but also in in my own country of the netherlands they tried to bypass parliament in order to make a an emergency law to make sure that migrants wouldn't enter the netherlands and as we speak they're threatening to uh stop the the government formation if no stricter measures against migrants are being taken.

Yeah.

So it's these little seeds of like autocracy that are almost more worrying because it's these little steps that happen.

And before you know it, things are getting worse quick.

Yeah.

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 anti-migrant sentiment, right?

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

And,

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.

Yeah, that's exactly a good way of putting it.

Yeah, unfortunately, it's being used as a manual by certain European governments.

Yeah.

So.

Thank you for sharing that traumatic piece of reporting with us.

That's rough.

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.

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

Yeah.

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

Great.

Yeah, that's all I got to.

Thank you very much.

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That was a big one.

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.

And right now, Los Angeles is where we're focused on.

Yeah, 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 four to six thousand people on Sunday.

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.

That'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.

But at that point, the SEIU were having a rally.

Yeah, 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.

And from there, like, I basically sort of started walking around downtown LA, I guess.

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

cops, feds, troops, or some combination of the three, right?

Pretty often around the federal building.

It's weird.

The front entrance, like where the entrance was, you had like a initial presence of like the front line with National Guard with maybe

it looked like it was maybe like NCOs or something who had loaded service weapons and then

other

soldiers had shields in it and like old school wooden baton sticks, right?

Just a long, long ass stick, basically.

Around the other side, you had la PD at the front and National Guard behind them

and then across the street from that you had California Highway Patrol uh and their riot squad and then in another location I think it was at City Hall you had LA sheriffs so like literally every agency that can claim any jurisdiction right there was also DHS RPF FPS like literally literally every every federal and local agency that could send cops sent cops 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 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 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

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.

They closed all the freeway entrances and exits, which like I took the,

I took the train up trying to be a mass transit enjoyer, and it made it a fucking nightmare to get anywhere.

Right.

Yeah, that makes sense.

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.

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.

Yeah, like, and unfortunately, like, you know, not much we can suggest.

And then on top of that, because it's Southern California or, you know, the United States, really, people who 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.

I remember, like, we were up by LAPDHQ at one point and

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 and I was like, oh, should I wake this guy?

You know, I don't want him to get a nasty surprise and wake up to a wall of robocops.

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 a mix of pepper balls and yeah, 40 millimeter.

Yep.

Yeah, grenades and rubber rounds some foam yeah some foam I found some Safariland 37 millimeter foam casings on the ground oh nice yeah and uh

yeah mostly what it was you know LAPD have those green 40 millimeter launchers with the EOTEX on top and that was what it yeah looks down the barrel of a few times and uh 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.

Occasionally, people would throw a firework or set off a firework.

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.

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 kind of LRAD, an awful assembly announcement at some point.

And

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.

And then they push people back past these various buildings, which had cops like stationed in place, like on the parapet of the building or in the courtyard outside, who would then also fire at them.

So the protest never really got a chance to centralize.

People didn't really get a chance to centralize in one place.

And,

you know, like 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

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.

I still don't get the sense, and this is what it sounds like from what you've said, that most of what is is being done effectively is not the National Guard, and certainly not the Marines, it's the federal and local police.

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 the same thing, right?

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.

Like, I don't know if LA will back down, to be clear.

Like, LA is a city of what, like, four million people.

And 18, 19 million in the greater Los Angeles metro area.

Yeah, like, it's,

I had no red, like, I had these, I had good conversations with a lot of people who are out there protesting.

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.

Right, of course.

And then it was very young people.

And like, a number of them approached.

I was, for a time, I was with Charles McBride and like some other

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.

Thank you for staying here after we got fucking tear gassed.

Like people should understand that what's happening.

Like unprompted, people would come and say thank you, which was nice, you know?

And like, we didn't really face 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, there are 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.

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.

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?

And like you said, the police response is an overwhelming use of violence.

Right.

Indiscriminately.

Shooting at people from what?

What's the, what's the furthest distance you were seeing them fire at people from?

I mean, I probably saw them taking 100 meter shots, I'm guessing.

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 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 three-corner open quad mall things.

Yeah.

So they're basically in a U-shaped container, right, with only one way in and one way out.

And

there's glass stores around it.

Like, you know, there's all the shopping bits people go shopping.

And there's pillars in the middle.

And the cops are just unloading from a distance of maybe 100 meters from LAPDHQ, I think, into these people who are effectively like in a like fish in a barrel, right?

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.

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 they clearly shot reloaded shot reloaded and

i was filming from the other side but you could see these projectiles whacking out like reinforced glass in in the front of these businesses at head height not breaking the glass and falling on the ground punching a hole straight through to you know they're coming with serious force even at that distance.

And those people weren't presenting a threat to anyone, right?

Like, they had retreated into that building after the cops shot their first volley and the cops just kept shooting at them.

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.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to 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.

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.

One of them is that there's supposed to be like a bladder of escalation before which they start utilizing force at range.

And the other is that there's certain ways they're supposed to use these munitions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah.

I don't know if maybe there's a different rounds they're using, but like, yeah, 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 just hear like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

Yeah.

As a bunch of them are loaded.

And like raising the 40 millimeter launcher to the shoulder and pointing it to someone two feet away.

Like, like, I saw a lot of that.

Yeah.

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?

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 i did see businesses getting their windows punched out by things that the police were shooting at people like yeah which i'm sure will wind up getting blamed on protesters yeah yeah exactly right 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 yep like it's just remarkable I mean, I did see LASD and National Guard with rifles, with magazines in the Magwell.

They had a round chamber, doesn't matter, does it?

No, you're a second away from chambering around, right?

Exactly, yeah.

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.

Yeah.

Like, I'm familiar with seeing Overwatch at these things, right?

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,

like an unmagnified optic like you're not uh you're not overwatching shit you just have lethal lethal force right there and i i saw that a number of times right from the national guard and then lasd they did the the whole l rad like go home this has been declared an unlawful assembly thing but then there wasn't that kind of scaled use of force that like you say is supposed to be there and there wasn't really much in the way of like

we're going to start shooting now.

And like, of course, that means that if you're an unhoused person, if you've arrived late, if you're a local person just trying to get home, it's very possible you can just walk past and get tear gassed.

Like at one point,

they were opening up and like I had been looking for a place to use the bathroom for a while because fucking Southern California, right?

Like there are no public bathrooms.

Yes.

Which is, you know, increasingly every major city.

Yeah.

That was an issue.

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 invited us into his building and asked that, you know, let us use the bathroom.

But

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 and just going out 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?

Obviously not, you know, stopping at red lights, et cetera.

It was weird.

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.

And so you had the situation where the cops were nearly hitting each other.

And it just like it seemed utterly chaotic.

And I don't know what they were doing other than just driving around at high speed for fun.

Once they did manage to cattle some groups of people, right?

Like they, uh,

again, it 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 were like, like, oh shit, there's nowhere to go.

And then I did see them put up in a school bus to take the, presumably to detain those people and take them to process them.

But yeah, the tactics were like, I mean, it's they're cops.

It's what you expect.

You know, we've both been doing this for a while.

You expect them to use those weapons in a way that can inflict the most damage and harm to people.

And unfortunately, like that does seem to be happening again.

Yeah.

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 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 yeah i mean his stance seems to be like the lapd can up these kids just fine we don't need your help Yes, which, I mean, they literally can.

Like, I will say,

that's not incorrect, right?

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.

Yeah.

I mean, the LAPD on the first nights were caught off guard, I think.

Right.

Right.

And so was ICE.

And there was a lot of debate about, because like, you know, LAPD not coming in initially to support ICE when they got surrounded.

Like, and that's, those are the kind of things you get when the authorities are taken off balance.

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,

then the situation becomes basically impossible for protesters to regain the initiative.

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.

And to be clear here, we're talking about primarily Compton, Paramount, some protests, and then downtown Los Angeles, some protests.

There's a handful of city blocks and one of the largest metro areas in the entire country.

Yeah.

This is not Los Angeles all collapsed, you know?

Yeah, it's not like the riots that occurred after Rodney King, right?

Right, right.

Not even a little bit.

Yeah.

No.

Yet, right?

Like,

I mean, people are pissed off, obviously, like, like, and maybe that, you know, you'll get that sort of thing you had in Portland, right?

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

Right.

You can tell kind of what's happening in front of you.

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.

And so, like, you know, you know, we found out David Twerzo had been released when Mia sent a message saying that.

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.

Yeah.

So, like, there's a chance.

I mean, I'm seeing more and more.

I saw a big protest in New York tonight.

They can't deploy the Marines everywhere.

I mean, right.

There are a lot of Marines, but not that many.

I know.

It's

in one sense, like, and I know that this is maybe a strange opinion or

stance or what have you.

But, like, in a sense, it gives me hope to see these things.

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?

And trying, trying not to get hurt and

for folks who are in the street to try and remain there, right?

And like, it's quite a, like, you have this kind of disaster community, right?

The same thing that you sometimes find in conflict zones or after natural disasters.

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

for a while.

And like, people were bringing me snacks.

And I thought that was really sweet and and like

you know I saw people taking care of strangers when they got tear gassed or taking care of strangers when they get shot or like just folks who have bought snacks and like wanted to give them to unhoused people who were there right 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 right you'd think that people were looting and burning the city and like I didn't see anyone steal shit I did see people take care of one another yeah and that's a beautiful thing.

And, you know, maybe people need to be in the streets to find one another right now.

Cause, you know, every

year, people, it gets harder to go outside and easier to stay on the internet.

Right.

People get more atomized.

Yeah.

And, like, it was cool to see like.

young Mexican folks, young Salvadoran folks, Guatemalan, you know, people of different extractions who are now Americans,

in addition, obviously, to their, I think, 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.

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.

In so much as, you know, no one wants to get shot in the face with a 40 millimeter rate.

No one's there to.

No, absolutely not.

And so it's cool to see those people making those connections.

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 optics police, right?

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.

Yeah, the whole protest is fucked.

And let's just let I steal their fucking children.

Like,

yeah, people will let people be and

deal with the consequences of their own actions instead of being condescending.

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?

You know, you're getting a mix of that sort of thing.

Yeah,

shit.

Are people okay?

Like, is

I'm not aware of any like serious injuries or fatalities, certainly, but yeah.

Yeah.

That was the other weird thing.

Like vehicles throughout, I mean, it's LA, everyone's driving all the time, but there were vehicles, like, constantly just moving through.

Yep.

And obviously, it's LA, right?

So people coming out to do their donuts and stuff.

But like, yeah, it is a risk.

Like, if someone...

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

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 no one's stopping that no and you know 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 is you you 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 we're going to talk a little bit more uh with a couple of updates from the ground and then close out but first here's our last bit of ads

Y'all with the same skin color as me.

Come on, man.

Y'all families could have been taken away like my own.

Like somebody gonna need to get taken.

Nice and smoke, huh?

Yeah, here it is.

Put your fucking hand on the pillow.

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.

for the 110 to the west I-5 to the east.

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 So people are allowed to travel to and from work to seek or to give emergency care.

EMS people are exempt.

No one else is exempt as far as I'm aware.

But yeah, that's the situation.

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.

Yeah, that's what I was told.

Yeah, people to and from work, credentialed media, emergency and medical personnel, law enforcement are the limited limited exemptions.

So 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.

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.

And like, you know, I had a large blue press badge on my plate carrier, like I always do.

And like, it's...

Yeah, it's not, it doesn't make you bulletproof.

No.

Yeah, there's a curfew tonight, which, like you say, just gives them the means to use more coercive force or to charge people more harshly.

They'll continue doing their helicopter shit, right?

They had probably four or five helicopters.

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.

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.

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.

Like, it's, it's, I'm certain it's just tear gas, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Um, I think it's just different, yeah, different variants and ages of tear gas.

Um, and sometimes those take on different appearances too.

And they weren't really really fogging the tear gas, not that I saw, they were just tossing out the grenades.

You didn't get that like wall of tear gas that you guys are familiar with in Portland.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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.

So, like, yeah, and in one sense, people, it's great to see people coming out and like engaging their right to protest.

Yeah.

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.

You know, I'm

been around the block a few times and I'm worried that people are going to get fucked up.

So yeah, it's curfew tonight.

It's curfew tonight.

There's still the marine numbers are still at around 700.

There's about 4,000 National Guard troops.

So the number of military deployed significantly outnumbers demonstrators at this point.

Mayor Karen Bass has stated that, or the the, or sorry, the Pentagon has stated that it's costing about $134 million

this deployment.

So Jesus, man.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's like, I'd say it's, it's not a pointless escalation.

The point of the escalation is that they want to keep using the military, right?

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

And to sort of establish a precedent that domestic unrest can be dealt with by the military, which it, to be clear, like by my reading is completely in contradiction of the Constitution.

Yeah, but a lot of things that that are in contradiction of the Constitution happen, especially with policing, all the fucking time.

Right.

Like, yeah, like, it is important not to normalize this.

Again, like, you don't have to be like a blue-head Antifa to be like, this is fucked up.

And I think.

I definitely spoke to a few people, like, folks who have come out of church and stuff and just like, yeah, we heard they had sent the Marines here.

So we just came on down because that's not okay.

And that's good to see.

Yeah.

And like, if 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.

Yeah.

Like it's important to have those talks with people now because

it is

very concerning.

Yeah.

You know, you and I have attended a few civil wars.

I don't want to be like this country spinning towards civil war because, you know, I think we have a long, long way from that.

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?

Like, yeah, 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.

And what you don't have is an actual insurrection going on.

What you don't have is anyone actually fighting the government.

You have people who are like angry and yelling and some folks who threw rocks.

You do not have a militant uprising against federal power.

They're just kind of acting like it.

Yeah.

Like if you have an insurrection in this country, this country has a shit ton of guns.

You won't know if there's an insurrection because people will be using them.

Like that's not happening.

It's young people in the street waving flags and shouting.

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?

Yeah, man.

Like, 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 stay there.

And I hope that they, you know, as they stay there, they become more, more astute.

Yeah.

They learn some stuff.

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, you want to, you want to be, you want to be, I'm up, he sees me, I'm down.

Yeah.

Serpentine, serpentine.

You do the worm.

That's how that's how you get him.

Yeah.

There is some polling out, early polling.

This is from G.

Elliott Morris, formerly of

538, but conducted June 10th by YouGov of 4,309 adults.

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% of approve, 45% disapprove, and 19% are not sure.

do you approve or disapprove of send deploying marines to the los angeles area 34 approve 47 disapprove 19 not sure so man you know these aren't popular measures although they're also not as unpopular as you would hope yeah that's uh that's not great i'd like to see more i mean yeah you got tom cotton doing his is uh i forget it was wall street journal washington post op-ed right send in the troops for real this time oh was that i thought that was the times was it the times i think i i i forget exactly Yeah,

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.

Oh, he got a new one.

Okay, that's it.

Yeah, he wrote in 2020, Robert, he wrote Send in the Troops.

In 2025, he wrote Send in the Troops,

for real.

For real.

Okay, well, he got it.

Yep.

Yeah.

I mean, he got what he wanted.

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.

I'm very familiar with this code of, oh, send in the powers.

Yeah.

Maybe that's a good place for us to end.

If you are in the U.S.

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.

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.

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.

And so, you know, no one knows which direction history is moving in, but like things don't feel morally right.

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 protests and what has happened to some of the soldiers who have been ordered to do that.

Yeah.

Well, look up Bloody Sunday, folks.

Maybe we'll cover that in the not-too-distant future because, yeah,

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

or Bloody Sunday.

But yeah.

All right, everybody.

Well, this has been, it could happen here.

We will be back tomorrow.

We'll see if Gavin Newsom has been arrested yet.

All right.

Thanks, James.

Yeah, thanks, bro.

That's an episode.

Bye.

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To live and die in LA, ayy, this is not a game.

It is smoke on flash.

That was the day the feds came.

That was the day the feds came.

That was the day the feds came.

Live and die in LA.

Why nothing will be the same?

It's smoke on flash.

That was the day the feds came.

That was the day the feds came.

That was the day the feds came.

Can live and die in LA.

I ain't a song we sang.

It's the gang banging traders.

We was ready when it came to us.

Winky, winky, piggy, piggy, immigration coward boy.

Speaking out the back of black vans out in Paramount.

Black bagging family kidnapping broad daylight.

Stare at us, daring us to fight back right.

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.

You don't think he'll try to put black bodies inside?

Game time, homie, gon' meet us on Alameda.

I ain't scared of Neer La Migra.

We knew the trail, we been here, gon' keep it peace, bruh.

They gon' try to bait us and instigate us.

But wait, bruh, take it to their face, bruh.

They mask it in this paper.

Then we work for the border, we just follow with orders.

But fear overtakes them, badges of facade.

We exercise our rights, they send national guard.

And one thing's for certain, burn down the regime.

When the president chooses to send the Marines.

LA.

Hey, this is not a game, it is smoke bomb flash.

That was the day the feds came.

That was the day the feds came.

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.

That was the day the feds came.

That was the day the feds came.

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.

Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong and James Stout.

This episode, we are covering the week of June 4 to June 11th.

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.

Yeah, so I've been in L.A.

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.

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.

Okay.

Yeah.

To summarize, right?

The first two nights saw the city caught off guard.

Yeah.

The weekend was pretty spicy.

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.

Waymo.

Yep.

Oh, I saw them trucking the Waymos out, and there was not much Waymo left.

Like, it was 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, I saw police from FPS, DHS,

National Guard, California Highway Patrol.

It's like Pokemon for cops up there.

And that resulted in them splitting up protesters, kettling and detaining people on Monday night.

Yeah.

And they made extremely liberal use of impact munitions, chemical irritants, et cetera.

Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.

Thousands of

impact munitions.

You can find casings 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, but from what I've seen, I don't know, we'll see, right?

It's also the week.

So maybe things will get bigger again over the weekend.

Yeah, things can get less combative during the week because people are busy with work and keeping themselves like fed and

housed.

And then on the weekend, things can sometimes open back up again.

Yeah.

And also, it's worth noting how these specific protests are flaring up, which is that

these ones are flaring up when ICE drags people out of a place.

Yeah.

It is directly in response to ICE kidnapping their neighbors, right?

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.

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.

We then had the really big flare, which was LA.

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.

And in some ways, I think this can be harder to combat.

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.

If instead this is a rolling sequence of protests that happened directly in response to ICE actions, any city could be next.

Instead of just trying to prepare for nationwide riots, they have to be this more like mobile fluid force.

They have to respond to different outbursts that happen in different cities at different times.

And I think the other advantage that this model has is that the actual protesters themselves can also iterate on tactics.

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 done successfully, what captured attention, and what was able to catch the cops off guard, minimizing mass arrests.

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 came from 29 Palms.

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 my NB geography.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So these people do not have necessarily like extensive training on police crowd control, but are currently brushing up on crowd control tactics.

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?

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.

That's a gun for people who aren't familiar.

It's an AR-15, and that's obviously live ammunition.

So, like, they didn't seem to have any access to like less lethals, or they didn't bring them if they did.

Um, but I don't know about the Marines, and obviously, we saw like police using less lethals, and then LASD also had

cops with M4s

amongst their formations.

And this is just about to really expand outside of LA and California amidst anti-ICE protests across Texas.

Governor Greg Abbott just deployed the Texas National Guard.

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.

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.

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.

curfew in downtown Los Angeles.

There were mass arrests Tuesday night, hundreds of people.

I think the other advantage this kind of rolling sequence model that we've seen for 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.

If anyone who survived 2020, like you know how intense burnout can be from just doing that all the time.

Yeah.

And having built-in breaks where you can like recover physically and mentally while iterating on tactics, that could be interesting to see.

I think also there's one thing we should notice about this, which is that like there's a very clear actual thing you're trying to do here which is stop them from taking these people 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 yeah so you're you're degrading their capacity yeah exactly time is like the most valuable yeah asset here yeah and and like obviously again like the larger goals we 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 good.

And 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.

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.

So 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.

Like Newsom has not done everything in his power to stop that.

But it's Gavin Newsome.

What do you expect?

I'll be back in LA if things continue there.

But

it's

certainly the biggest protest we've seen this time around in the Trump administration.

All right, let's go on break and come back to discuss more news.

We are back,

and uh, 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.

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?

The 12 countries, seven have partial restrictions, and then the full ban is on Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

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.

Myanmar is an interesting inclusion there.

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.

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?

So, like, you can't do a background check on someone in their country who doesn't have that facility.

It's a claim, right?

I think they got Myanmar on visa overstay percentages.

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%.

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?

So, like, a percentage is great, but like a big percentage of a small thing is still a small thing.

Yeah.

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.

So, using this tactic

is one that they're hoping will justify it.

We'll stick the landing through the courts.

I should add that they have some exemptions, right?

Existing visa holders who are currently within the United States can remain in the United States, right?

In practice, lots of these countries only get single-entry visas, so it might be hard for them to leave and come back.

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.

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.

There are exemptions for sports teams because the United States.

Well, the United States is holding the World Cup and the Olympics, right?

So like it would be

something of a farcical spectacle if

19 countries were not represented.

I mean, the Olympic Games is something of a farcical spectacle to begin with, one could argue.

But yeah, they didn't want that, right?

They didn't want that international spectacle.

So, a professional athlete visa is hard to get at the best of times.

So, 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.

These are people who have worked closely with the United States.

The vast bulk of them will be Afghan people,

people who worked as interpreters or otherwise cooperated with the United States during the 20 years the United States was at war in Afghanistan.

Again, I've seen that misreported, including by people who really should know know better.

But, you know, I'm never not disappointed in a lot of people's immigration coverage.

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.

And it is concerning that they seem to have a better chance.

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,

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 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 yeah with some new countries and i think maybe the removal of some countries from previously 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

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.

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, I had heard that there was going to be one on Monday, but that it just like didn't happen.

So I don't know what's going on with that.

Yeah, but that was a thing that was pretty effective.

And they also didn't beat the shirt out of everyone for most of it, which was nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Mia, talking of beats, how about we drop some beats right now with this sick tariff song?

Great work, James.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Rocket Caspar, rocket Caspar.

So, Donald Trump has apparently, according to him, resolved the trade war with China.

He's claiming the negotiations.

He won?

He's claiming victory.

Mission accomplished.

The claim that he's making

out of the London negotiations, and I want to point out that I have not heard anything from the Chinese side.

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 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

does

well Trump was talking about the US not actually doing a crackdown on like Chinese international students So who knows what the fuck is going to happen with any of that?

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.

Again, like, I don't know if

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?

But yeah,

that is the late of tariff news.

This is a kind of short one.

That's what we've got.

that's exciting that's exciting that we won trade is back i can go back to to buying everything i own from timu no problem yeah i mean i i can give my usual disclaimer that 50 tariff on china is like fucking ruinous the global economy etc etc i i do genuinely hope that like the chinese international students aren't getting cracked out on because

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 whoo

it's great

it's also fun to enjoy the covet 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 so rfk has now dismissed the entirety of the acip the cdc's vaccine advisory committee that has just been completely dissolved uh this happened on Tuesday.

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.

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.

But at least half of them are at the very least, what would be considered COVID vaccine skeptic.

Oh, great.

Right-wing libertarian types, people who have been dismissed from their academic positions.

Basically, it's who you would expect RFK to

submit to a vaccine advisory panel.

At the very least, half are like cranks.

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.

Yeah, we also have very bad news from the FCC, which instead of like, you know,

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 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.

Notably, not trans people.

Yeah, yeah.

They will not be be included

per the statement.

No trans people.

No trans people.

No, no, no.

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?

What the fuck are we doing here?

But anyone who like gives a child any kind of trans health care?

I mean, 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 here.

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 healthcare tier two things.

Yeah.

And some of these have not really turned into anything yet.

The anti-woke FBI soliciting tips for people providing trans healthcare.

Yeah, yeah.

So like, I don't know,

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

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...

So much of the Trent 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 it's like 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 they're too 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 yeah yeah and and people have successfully gotten clinics to start to restart like trans healthcare for kids by just going out and protesting but this is a this is also just like if you're

i don't know you're in like a blued city and you don't know immigrants and you are like i want to do a protest this is the thing you can do you can find there's one in chicago right now that i'm blanking on the name of where there's there's a bunch of protests 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.

And 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.

Yeah.

You can hear how folks are organizing to retake that.

Yeah.

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.

Let's go and break and then return to finish up on an exciting piece of news.

Hooray.

Okay, we are back.

So, as usual, a massive, massive news dropped right after we finished recording last week's executive disorder.

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.

God, I fucking know.

Jesus Christ.

We'll never forget you, Elon.

Mia, do you want to start us off here?

Yeah, let's start this off with, okay, I have been seeing

this has kind of stopped now that Elon has kind of like run crying back to Trump, but like, we'll see.

There was a moment where a lot of the like, like Madden Glacius, 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.

That was a scary moment, yeah.

Yeah.

I want to remind 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.

People have forgotten that he also did the second Nazi salute.

Like census administration came into office.

He has spent this time destroying the federal government.

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 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 shit for this entire time, right?

He has been just systematically looting and tearing apart anything in the U.S.

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.

He has been fucking doing that for like Mia.

The weather is woke.

You can't forget.

The woke weather machines.

Yeah.

That's right.

I just had a meeting with the Southeast Alliance where we're deciding the weather for the next few weeks.

Oh, my fucking God.

Make it less hot here.

It's too fucking hot.

Weather too hot.

I know.

Well, we have to raise the temperature, Mia.

It's all part of the plan.

Large-scale political plan.

That's right.

You get it, James.

Yeah, follow the plan.

More heat, more riots.

I don't know.

That's right.

Okay.

It's also worth remembering that these two were very, very close, sort of like during this election cycle, right?

Trump was just straight up going first buddy.

He's just like straight up in Philadelphia, like paying people to vote through these like raffles.

Elon.

Elon.

Yeah.

Elon was just like, yeah, straight up doing these, right?

Trump just like did a Tesla ad.

Yeah, yeah.

It was like, he just did a Tesla ad.

First buddies gotta gotta have each other's backs, you know?

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 not good for Elon.

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.

And this is where the policy wonk sector of the right was starting to side-eye Elon and question his

invincibility, right?

This guy that can come in and save the Republican Party, can secure every future election.

That's where that view of Elon started to really get called into question.

Maybe this guy is kind of just a one-hit wonder.

Yeah, and you can also look at a lot of the stuff that was sort of happening here in terms of like,

he is staggeringly unpopular, right?

Everyone fucking hates him.

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, like polarizing opinion of him, negative.

People really, really dislike him.

Like worldwide.

Yeah.

everyone hates it she she cost right-wing parties elections in countries that like yeah he's never been to staggering yeah staggering like she he she may have accidentally saved Germany from fascism for like a decade like yes it's very funny you know critical support to the to the fascist car maker who saves Germany from fascism yeah but yeah and then so okay so we we've 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, special government employee.

Oh, it was special.

I was going to say that.

Then I was like, it can't be called special government employee.

We call it a sig.

Ski.

Ski.

Skay.

Well, James, you can't say that.

No, no, you can't.

I've been cancelled.

But there was always a question of like what exactly his role was going to be going forward once his time as a special government employee

ran out.

Yeah.

But then he leaves with Stephen Miller's wife.

So,

as we've reported in previous episodes, but the final break came over the weekend over the budget.

Big, beautiful budget.

And Elon has been pissed off at this budget for like a while.

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.

And this is, I think, actually an important thing to note here.

Like actively campaigning against the budget bill.

And

which is essentially Trump's like core policy at this point.

It's like the way to, 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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

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?

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 but he is part of this cadre of tech people.

And this is very, very common in these tech circles.

You see this in some finance circles of these people who believe that the US is about to like enter like the super Great Depression because the amount of the GDP being spent on debt payments is too high.

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,

it would decrease the cost of US borrowing.

Now, that didn't happen, right?

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.

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

really like, oh, God, the U.S.

is going to die unless we like.

Yeah.

Like, unless we start just destroying the national debt.

And the whole Doge idea is built around like terminal tech brain.

Yeah.

And

it's trying to apply the logic of these like startups that are kind of scams, but

trying to apply the logic of startups to an entire government.

And there was an interview in NPR this week where they talked to a Doge employee.

Oh, yeah.

He was an ex-Doge employee.

And NPR asked about how much fraud and like abuse they were actually able to find.

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.

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.

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.

Unquote.

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.

And I think Elon views this the exact same way.

That's why he was doing his like Twitter takeover stuff to the government.

He believed that's how it actually functions.

And it doesn't.

That's not really how the federal bureaucracy functions.

Like

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.

Like none of them believe that because it's not true, right?

Like you don't print your own money.

So of course the US government doesn't find something like a pocketbook.

But like, this is the generation of people where like the people who are just so absolutely pilled on the ideology have taken over.

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.

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 formative tax cuts, and that's all they care about.

And we're getting a giant conflict between them because as much 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 awk people, you can just look at the budget and go, this is going to increase the debt by like $2 trillion or whatever the fuck.

Right.

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.

So let's get into all of the actual shit because it's funny.

So Business Insider put together a really good minute-by-minute timeline if you want to do that.

I'm not going through this shit minute by minute.

I'm not going to go through minute by minute.

I am going to go through tweet by tweeting.

Because we have to talk about the tweets.

We do the first time I've ever really wanted to say that.

Oh, they're so good.

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

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.

Have a nice day, Donald J.

Trump.

Marcus posts of the future.

The truth will come out.

So this is the really big one, as Elon says, the really big bomb.

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.

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?

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, 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.

Terrific guy, Trump booms from a speakerphone he's a lot of fun to be with

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 he was friends with epstein for ages yeah some 2002 uh 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 everyone except for like the weirdo q anon right yeah understands this and some of the qnon people try to justify this as being like, no, Trump was like, you know, a deep,

a deep plant who got in close with, with Epstein so that we could eventually round up and arrest all the Democrat pedophiles, right?

That's what they try to justify it.

But now that that sort of like specific QAnon logic doesn't really exist as much on the right anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now people just like memory hole, especially the right.

They just memory hole that like Trump and Epstein were best buddies.

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.

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.

I want to read this, this, this post that Trump made as a response to this, right?

I miss 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

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.

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.

Yeah, that sounds legit.

This is one of the most unhinged posts I have ever seen.

This, genuinely, this is this is not a joke.

If you if you are a fucking poster and you are like, what can my contribution to like the future of democracy be?

You need to push this shit into the unhinged, like, fucking, like, the, the depths of like fucking 8-chan, right?

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.

You, you need to be like...

Like just like just just hyping them up on the most unhinged conspiracies about Trump being like a fucking like being a fucking Epstein guy because

this is completely unhinged 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 the and Trump's response to being called a pedophile is to go to this guy 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.

It is odd how this was really the first thing that breaks through this block on the right.

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 turret 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.

This is one of the greatest bills ever presented to Congress.

And then goes on to talk about how great the bill is.

It's wild.

You had Ian Miles Chong

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.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

It's pretty funny.

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,

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.

I know that.

That's very funny.

Unfortunately, I am going to play the clip.

I will start with JD Vance reacting live on a podcast by someone named Theo Vaughan.

Here's my basic reaction to all this stuff is look, First of all,

absolutely not.

Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong with Jeffrey Epstein.

Like, there's the guy is

whatever the Democrats and the media says about him, that's totally BS.

Here's

my basic read on it.

First of all, I'm the vice president to President Trump.

My loyalties are always going to be with the president.

And I think that Elon, he's an incredible entrepreneur.

He's actually done a, I think Doge was really good.

This sort of effort to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in our country was really good.

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.

Well, it's feeling hurt.

I hope it is.

He's feeling to hurt.

Why, though?

Do you know why?

Yeah, I mean, so, 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.

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.

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.

Like, the process in D.C., 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.

So I think there's just some frustrations there.

But I really, man, I think it's a huge mistake for him to go after the president like that.

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.

But I think it's going to be, I don't think it's going to be good for Elon either.

So that's J.D.

Vance's reaction to this.

He eventually got put onto like damage control.

We'll talk about that in a sec.

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.

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.

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.

And Cash Fatelle's reaction to this is

frankly baffling.

I'm not participating in any of that conversation

with Elon.

Have a nice day, DJD.

So much digits falling away.

They're going back and forth about different things.

Yeah.

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 Epstein files?

Does he have access to the Epstein files?

I don't know how he would, but I'm just staying out of the Trump-Elon thing.

That's way outside of my lane.

What the fuck are they doing?

I know my lane, and that ain't it.

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.

This one thing is actually your lane.

It's unhinged.

Oh my god.

His big thing now is he has to wear a hunting camera all the time, I guess.

That's his new lane.

So, after the heat of this started to die down, you started to get more of the right to try to, I guess,

soothe the tension.

A lot of people

trying to talk about coming together.

You had right-wing commentators trying to frame this as two alpha males beefing, right?

This is just how

alpha males beef.

We got to quote some of these because Jack Posevic 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.

I understand you aren't used to it.

Wonderful stuff from Poseovic as usual.

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.

Can't we all just get along?

We've got a country to say.

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?

I don't know why we can't just get along.

This is hurting the country.

And Elon's like 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.

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.

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.

Yeah,

yeah,

that's that's really what is too much for him.

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.

but like come on Elon this is crazy yeah yeah not the most well considered it is fantastic that the richest man in the world uh is addicted to posting because we get some real we get some real bang posters posters madness it never never fails i i gotta say though trump's posting response terrible this guy is washed there's nothing there he's gone mentally 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 shell now they have now been making attempts to fold the team back together.

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.

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.

Coward.

And has now posted, quote, I regret some of my posts about about President Trump last week.

They went too far.

I said the thing that I wasn't supposed to say.

So he got a stern talking to by JD Vance,

who is kind of caught in between Trump and Musk here, but has stated that his loyalties will always lie with the president.

So yeah, that is the current state of the Musk and Trump fallout.

It will not be able to go back to how it was, but they might try to play nice again.

i think that does it for us here at it could happen here

we reported the news

we reported the news

hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Thanks for listening.

This is Danielle Fischl from Pod Meets World.

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