It Could Happen Here Weekly 181

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Speaker 6 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 9 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 11 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 13 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 16 We got clear facts, maybe we can calm down a little.

Speaker 18 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 20 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 21 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 22 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 22 Coolzone Media.

Speaker 2 Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 2 So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

Speaker 2 If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 Good morning, podcast fans, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's me, James, today, and I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Garrison Davis.
Hi, Gary.

Speaker 2 Hello. Hey.

Speaker 3 So what I want to talk about today is a little piece I wrote.

Speaker 3 I wrote it on my Patreon, but I want to kind of discuss it a bit here, read it to you, and talk about it, about what we talk about when we talk about immigration.

Speaker 3 Sophie recently sent me an Associated Press piece on the Darian Gap, and the piece was reflecting on the loss of economic opportunity for the Emperor people who had previously sold, as you heard in my series, right, products, services, accommodation to migrants coming through the Garyan Gap.

Speaker 3 But if you read that whole piece, you'd never know they were Emperor because the word Emperor doesn't occur once in the piece, right? You'd never know that the Emperor people existed.

Speaker 3 They never appear in the story.

Speaker 3 Instead, the AP, which is currently going toe-to-toe with the Trump administration on whether it should call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America or not, and was ejected from the White House press pool at one point for refusing to call it the Gulf of America, used the phrase Comarca indigenous lands.

Speaker 3 in its reporting, which I don't know where this came from. It has kind of a strange capitalization.

Speaker 3 If you were just reading the piece, you might think that that was the name of the Comarca, like that it was a proper noun, but it's not.

Speaker 3 The Comarca is like, I guess, you could roughly equate that to an American state. It's like an administrative division of Panama.

Speaker 3 The name of the Comarca is Embra Unan, but that doesn't appear anywhere in the AP piece. And you could, to be clear, like, I understand that some reporters don't speak Spanish.

Speaker 3 I understand that some reporters, like, you know, they are not like particularly expert in a given region. Neither am I.
That was my first time in Panama.

Speaker 3 But, like, this is something you could find out on Google Maps, right? It's not unique to the AP,

Speaker 3 it happens all the time, right? And I want to talk about that today because it happens at the US's southern border, too.

Speaker 3 One of the reasons that I wanted to go to a Darien was because I felt like the Ember Ar story was not being told when people talked about the Darian Gap.

Speaker 3 When they're mentioned at all, it's kind of in passing or not as people who have agency right and even i think these stories about like uh the lack of income that they have after migrants leaving kind of strip them in agent of agency in the way that they're told when people talk about the darien gap in media they kind of use this heart of darkness construction obviously it's joseph conrad novel but like this idea that like it's where the wild things are i don't know like it it it it strikes me as very um almost orientalist yeah Orientalist is what I was going to say.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And it, like, it completely discounts that there are thousands of people who live there, who've raised their families there. Their children play fucking basketball there.
Right.

Speaker 3 They spend their whole life there and they bury their elders there. And they have done for thousands of years.
For them, it's their home, right? And I understand that the jungle could be scary.

Speaker 3 And I think anyone who's listened to my series will

Speaker 3 understand that like the jungle was scary for me sometimes.

Speaker 3 And it could be a very harsh environment but if you're someone who belongs there if you're comfortable there it can also be home and it can be beautiful and it could be bountiful and and i think the same thing is true of the mountains and deserts and rivers that make up the usa southern border the desert can kill people i'm well aware of that but

Speaker 3 for the people who call it home the desert is somewhere that contains their memories and their sacred spaces, their childhood recollections and the remains of their ancestors, right?

Speaker 3 And the omission of Indigenous perspectives is something that we saw again when Christine Noam decided to waive a number of laws in order to facilitate faster construction of the border wall.

Speaker 3 So I want to highlight again the AP coverage there. The AP, and again, they're far from unique in this, right? Lots of other outlets did this too.

Speaker 3 They seem to have only engaged with the DHS press release. as opposed to the actual proclamation by Noam, which you can find in the Federal Register, right?

Speaker 3 So the press release only focused on the environmental laws she was waiving.

Speaker 3 DHS said, and I quote, to cut through bureaucratic delays, DHS is waiving environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, that can stall vital products for months or even years.

Speaker 3 This waiver clears the path for the rapid deployment of physical barriers where they're needed most, reinforcing our commitment to national security and the rule of law.

Speaker 3 The rule of law thing kind of made me laugh as they were like, here we are waiving like a dozen or so laws uh but i'm not a big rule of law person so i guess like that's fine it seems that almost every outlet though like

Speaker 3 that that's what they read and that's what they ran with like that they're waiving these environmental laws and i think that can sometimes be this like uh we still see this all the time in the legacy press like when they talk about environmental laws there's this idea that it's like some kind of like people who want to protect the flowers and the plants and like that it's not that serious, you know, and that like these environmental laws are something that's not that are nice but not necessary.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And like some of these environmental laws, like specifically the ones that regulate water, will determine the future of places like California, like, and obviously places south of the border, right?

Speaker 3 The water doesn't know where the border is. And like.

Speaker 3 In the previous Trump administration, they waived some environmental laws, including ones about flood water, which that combined with the expedited way which they built the border wall, I guess, led to them not putting floodgates in part of the wall, which then led to the wall damming up with like dead trees and dead cacti, right, when it rained heavily, and then the wall becoming a barrier to water, and then the wall getting broken or washed away, right?

Speaker 3 Because it didn't have like sluice gates that they could open to let the water out. The AP went to someone called Earth Justice for comment.

Speaker 3 And to their credit, that person said, quote, waiving environmental, cultural preservation and good governance laws that protect clean air, clean water, safeguard precious cultural resources and preserve vibrant ecosystems and biodiversity will only cause further harm to our border communities and ecosystems.

Speaker 3 That person is the only person who mentioned the cultural damage that's being done here. And unless a reader themselves, the Federal Register isn't linked in any of these pieces, right? It really is.

Speaker 3 I try and link to it when we talk about something in executive disorder.

Speaker 3 But unless you found that yourself, you wouldn't know that along with waiving these environmental laws, and like I've said, those are important, they also waived something called the Native American Grace Protection and Repatriation Act, according to the Department of the Interior.

Speaker 3 I was kind of surprised this was still up on their website, actually. I thought this might have been purged.
So like a lot of maybe it just.

Speaker 24 Maybe it's just like skirted by.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. Like, well, I mean, no, apparently no one fucking talks about it.
So

Speaker 3 maybe they got away with it, you know, like it's always funny going on government websites now, being like, oh, it's gone. Like finding dead links to so much stuff.

Speaker 3 Even in stories I've written in like 2020, those links are dead now.

Speaker 3 NAGPRA requires any federally funded entity to return human remains, funerary possessions, objects of cultural patrimony and sacred objects to the deceased persons and their descendants by, and I'm quoting from a website now, consulting with lineal descendants, Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations on Native American human remains and other cultural items, protecting and planning for Native American human remains and other cultural items that may be removed from federal or tribal lands, identifying and reporting all Native American human remains and other cultural items in inventories and summaries of holdings or collections, and giving prior notice to repatriating or transferring human remains and other cultural items.

Speaker 3 So the waiver allows them not to do these things, right? Crucially,

Speaker 3 in the context of border wall construction, what it allows them to do is not to conduct an archaeological survey before they dig the border wall.

Speaker 3 And again, like, I don't know why this isn't something the legacy media isn't concerned about. It wasn't in 2020 either, right?

Speaker 3 When they started doing this, they were blasting areas where something called midden soil was found. Midden soil is soil that contains evidence of cremated human remains, right?

Speaker 3 I wrote a piece in 2020 for Sierra about this. And normally

Speaker 3 before these digs, there would be an archaeological survey done by and a tribal representative would be there to take part in that, right? That would take time and it would delay construction.

Speaker 3 Instead, right now, the construction will continue without considering the damage done to the cultural patrimony and ancestral remains of the Kumeyay people here in San Diego, whose homelands span both sides of the border and who were here long before the U.S.

Speaker 3 or Mexico was.

Speaker 2 Talking of,

Speaker 3 I can't think of a good fucking ad pivot.

Speaker 24 Yeah, there really is no good ad pivot for stuff like this.

Speaker 3 No, there's not. We're just going to do adverts now.

Speaker 2 And we are

Speaker 2 back.

Speaker 3 The Kimiya are not the only indigenous people whose homelands have been significantly and permanently damaged by the construction of border barriers, right?

Speaker 3 Further east, in the homelands of the Tornodam people, where I've spent a lot of time, wall construction has destroyed sacred saguaros. Saguaros, that's the big cactus.

Speaker 3 Like when you think of a cactus, right? Like the cactus

Speaker 2 die waves. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. With the two arms, you could put a little hat on the cactus if you wanted to, maybe give it like a little six shooter and it would look like it was a cowboy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's the, it's literally the cactus. It's in all the Western films that were filmed out at Old Tucson there.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 We used to ride our bikes from the Pasqual Yaki Rez to the place where they filmed all those Western films. That was our loop.
A very, very weird experience, that place.

Speaker 3 It's like a one day I will write my fucking five-part documentary about the myth of the old West, but

Speaker 3 you can find it there in Tucson.

Speaker 2 The

Speaker 3 Saguaros, people aren't aware, are afforded the highest respect as ancestors by Ottoman people.

Speaker 3 And they play an important role in ceremonial and culinary traditions that have been kept alive despite centuries of genocide and assimilationist policies from state and local government.

Speaker 3 Under the Biden administration, the Government Accountability Office wrote a report about damage done by border wall construction.

Speaker 3 Again, for now, this is on the internet and I will link it in the show notes.

Speaker 3 I don't know how long that will remain on the internet. It's a PDF, so like it's going to be out and about.
It can't be taken down, but maybe it won't be on government websites.

Speaker 3 They highlighted the case of Monument Hill, which was damaged by explosives in the previous Trump administration, despite being a sacred place for Latono Odham, and the site of ceremonies conducted by the heresaid Odham, who were their ancestors.

Speaker 3 Kitopakito Springs, which is a sacred site and oasis in the Sonoran desert, it's a really special place, was irreparably damaged in the last Trump administration, including the destruction of a burial site that the tribe had sought to protect.

Speaker 3 In some cases, the Biden administration made this worse. One of those was that on entering office, Biden said they were going to build not one more foot of border wall in 2021, right?

Speaker 3 He was full of shit. They built lots more border wall, but they did put a pause on some of the contracts, right?

Speaker 3 It sort of they finished some of them and they were like, oh, we can't go back on this federal funding, which has not been an issue for Donald Trump four years later.

Speaker 3 They were like, Congress approved it, so we have to, uh, we have to pay it, which was great.

Speaker 3 But the bits that they were able to cut included a program that had people taking care of, so they attempted to transplant the saguaros. They didn't just cut them down because they were sacred, right?

Speaker 3 And they're very old. They wanted to take them somewhere else.
And this was part of sort of the agreement that they came to.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, the Biden administration cut the funding for the people who were taking care of them in their new location. So nearly all of them died.

Speaker 3 They were being watered and stuff to get them settled into their new root structure. And

Speaker 3 yeah, because

Speaker 3 the Biden administration cut back funding, it stopped them from being watered. And so many of them died.
In areas where barriers were built, but drainage culverts were not finished.

Speaker 3 The culverts were never installed. So that was the flooding I was talking about earlier, right? Sometimes they just went ahead and built wall.

Speaker 3 When they build the wall, it comes in about 50-foot sections. And they truck those out there and like just put them on the ground flat and pull them up, right?

Speaker 3 And then they dig a foundation, they mix the sand, make concrete,

Speaker 3 and put the wall sections up.

Speaker 3 But then they, I guess it's my understanding that in the end of the last Trump administration, Trump made a claim in a debate about the number of miles of of wall that had been built.

Speaker 3 And that claim was largely inaccurate, but they sort of started trying to ex post facto justify it by claiming repairs were miles of wall, right?

Speaker 3 And in the final months of the Trump administration, maybe like from late summer to January, maybe certainly to November, they were really speed running wall construction.

Speaker 3 And part of that was putting sections up where there should have been culverts and just putting regular wall sections there and then attempting to come back later and do the culverts, which because there's a funding pause, they didn't do.

Speaker 3 So then we've seen a huge change in how the desert drains, right?

Speaker 3 Because it backs up at the, all the detritus, all the dead branches and stuff get caught in the wall and then the water gets sort of pushed along the wall until it finds a weak point to undermine it or push it over.

Speaker 3 Very little of this gets reported at all, right? Occasionally, there are media moments when everyone wants to report on the borders damage to indigenous communities.

Speaker 3 And we had one in 2020 when they started destroying saguados at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. But these appear to be,

Speaker 3 when they just pop up like this, it seems like it's without context or precedent, right?

Speaker 3 And when outlets ignore Indigenous people for 90% of their border reporting, it doesn't give the context that's necessary to explain these incidents which are outrageous in decades of policy, which has been outrageous.

Speaker 3 If If our listeners are not aware that the border is on native land, all of it, just like all of America, right?

Speaker 3 It can seem confusing for them, right?

Speaker 3 When they see something like Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and they think, well, that's not on a reservation, because a lot of outlets don't give that context, right?

Speaker 3 That obviously reservations do not contain all the spaces that are sacred to Indigenous people and that like a reservation is a legal, not a cultural construct.

Speaker 3 It can seem alien to them. And lots of these spaces that are being

Speaker 3 military, that will be militarized under this Roosevelt Reservation Declaration, right? The reservations are not militarized under that, but spaces that are sacred to people still will be.

Speaker 3 But because our reporting so often lacks that context, people don't understand it. The admission of tribal lands was again like missing in lots of pieces on the Roosevelt Reservation, right?

Speaker 3 Washington Post article on the Roosevelt Reservation, the one that broke the story, it doesn't contain the word tribal lands at at all, right?

Speaker 3 It doesn't mention the fact that these areas are not part of the militarization proclamation.

Speaker 3 The problem here isn't just the ongoing erasure of Indigenous people. It's a failure in basic journalistic practice, in my mind, right?

Speaker 3 We can't properly understand borders unless we acknowledge the people they impact.

Speaker 3 There's no way I could have experienced a Darien Gap in the way that I did if it wasn't for the Mbara people who literally let me live in their homes, right?

Speaker 3 Without the same generosity that they showed to me, the people crossing would die in much greater numbers. And it's precisely because

Speaker 3 migrants arrive in indigenous villages and not in like a government Panama that a system exists where they're ferried upriver on those Piraguas that I reported on, right?

Speaker 3 And it's precisely because they enter enter government custody at las blancas a place at the ap called a river port by the way which i mean it's one of the more miserable places that one can end up it's terrible and calling it a river port fundamentally undersells how appalling it is what happens to people people are stored there for months right and that is because they are entering the system of bureaucracy the system of the state the system of

Speaker 3 fees and identification papers and all these things.

Speaker 3 More importantly, I think we can't understand the relatively new and invasive nature of borders, especially borders with physical barriers, without acknowledging the much, much longer history of Indigenous people moving freely through these areas.

Speaker 3 Like I said, it's not just people, it's water and wildlife. And in all cases, the damage done will be unforeseen and likely irreparable.

Speaker 3 But if we only treat the border as a rhetorical thing, like something to discuss in Congress, not a physical place, then we miss what's really happening and we miss the people it really impacts.

Speaker 3 I don't want to pick solely on the AP.

Speaker 3 It's a tendency in the whole US, right, where the overwhelming media narrative erases the existence of indigenous people, unless it's some kind of novelty or trope through which they can be deployed.

Speaker 3 The Durant example was a particularly stark one to me because I spent a decent amount of time there and I obviously have a great deal of affection for the people who looked after me.

Speaker 3 But as more and more laws are waived, both in terms of border wall construction and human rights, more damage will be done.

Speaker 3 It's already the case that people who speak indigenous languages tend to have much worse outcomes in the U.S. immigration system, right? I've seen this firsthand.

Speaker 3 It could be very difficult when someone arrives and

Speaker 3 they speak an indigenous language from Mexico, from Peru, from these places where

Speaker 3 the people speak these indigenous languages, their first language.

Speaker 3 It's hard for them to, very hard for them to get legal representation, right?

Speaker 24 Even U.S.

Speaker 24 citizens, like that incident from just a few weeks ago where that 19-year-old who was born in the state of Georgia, but primarily spoke an indigenous language, was like put into ICE detention overnight.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like, which I think kind of these two narratives sort of play into each other, right?

Speaker 3 Like, because Indigenous people don't exist so much in so much coverage, it can be much easier for the state to make them disappear, right? Like, like that guy.

Speaker 24 Well, yeah, and literally being arrested. and charged with like entry as an unauthorized alien.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like absolutely.

Speaker 3 i mean and it's happened to indigenous people who are like indigenous to the united states right like yeah it and it will continue to i think i've heard some stuff about it happening on the navajo res relatively recently obviously i should say if that has happened to you or someone you know you can reach out to us at coolzone tips at proton.me

Speaker 3 and like

Speaker 3 i know that there are lots of big border reporters at big outlets who fucking hate me and i really don't care

Speaker 3 i just want to like any one one person coming into this country who needs a bottle of water is more important to me than all of their collective opinions, right?

Speaker 3 Like, my job is not to make them happy. My job is to tell the stories of the people who come into this country and often suffer greatly to do so.

Speaker 3 I care more about them than like my ability to be objective, which, you know, I don't think we should be objective in these situations.

Speaker 3 And like,

Speaker 3 I want to kind of end on this idea of like objectivity because, oh, no, objectivity i don't know i'm glad that the washington post is running a story about a venezuelan teacher who got deported today i'm glad that they're giving these people human faces now but it's hard to look at the reporters who wouldn't drive half an hour down a dirt road to come and see people in concentration camps when biden was president because i know they were worried about getting their rental car dirty or they don't speak spanish or the desert's cold at night like i don't know why people didn't come i suspect it's because their commitment to writing about about migrants is more a commitment to doing it when it makes money than it is to doing it because it's the right thing to do.

Speaker 3 And like, when we write these stories now about deportations being terrible, they seem to pop up without context, right?

Speaker 3 And the context of how these people came into this country and the amount that they were forced to suffer by choice by the Biden administration in 2023,

Speaker 3 it's completely absent from these stories, right? Like, the reason folks, some folks are choosing to leave is because what they've seen of the U.S.

Speaker 3 government, a week in an outdoor detention camp where the government didn't even bring them food or water, right?

Speaker 3 And then their passage through this system, which doesn't give them a pathway to permanent residency, which doesn't give them a pathway to citizenship. And then they see these deportations.

Speaker 3 Like from the migrant perspective, this is just a sort of steady escalation. Don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying that what's happening now is the same as what happened before. It's worse.

Speaker 3 It's considerably worse and it's abhorrent. But like, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't tell the truth about what happened before either.

Speaker 3 And it doesn't mean that we should ignore the physical border as well as the sort of rhetorical and internal and technical border, right? All these things that we're seeing now.

Speaker 3 And like the way that borders have worked in this country is that it's like a ratchet that only moves to the right. And the Republicans move it to the right and the Democrats never move it back.

Speaker 3 And until we hold them accountable for this, it will continue to get worse. Like the Democrats completely seeded the narrative on migration under the Biden administration.

Speaker 3 And that's part of why they lost, right? Rather than like making an argument that these people have a right to come here, that many of them are a massive benefit to our society.

Speaker 3 And it doesn't matter whether they are or not, they still deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

Speaker 3 And even if you're a big law of law and order person, like according to international and United States law, they didn't do that.

Speaker 3 They didn't treat them according to to international and United States law, nor did they make an argument that it's morally right to do so. And that's one of the reasons they lost, right?

Speaker 3 This is why I really think that we need to be conscious in our media consumption and be conscious as journalists of like why we do this, because I'm finding it really hard to see this outpouring of care from people who I know didn't care.

Speaker 3 when they were shivering little babies in the desert, from people who could have said something, could have done something, right? Like this could have stopped earlier.

Speaker 3 If there were big, major legacy media op-eds, if the pictures of shivering babies were like on the nine o'clock news, right?

Speaker 3 Coming into people's houses every night, this wouldn't have lasted for as long as it did. People wouldn't have suffered and people wouldn't have died.

Speaker 3 But because I guess Joe Biden was in office, it didn't matter. And I'm glad that people care now.
Don't get me wrong. But like, I want...

Speaker 3 especially listeners to think about holding those people accountable to caring when it's not profitable, caring when it's not convenient. And our listeners have, to be fair, right?

Speaker 3 Like we raised almost $50,000 for migrants in the desert and that was fantastic. But yeah, I still think we do immigration reporting wrong.

Speaker 3 I still think for most outlets, that's because they treat migrants as a rhetorical device, not as people in the same way that they are. And that upsets me.
And I wanted to write about it. So I have.

Speaker 3 I guess that's all I've got. It's not the best ending.

Speaker 2 If

Speaker 3 you are somebody who wants wants to get in touch, right, like I said, especially with regard to immigration activities on reservations or of Indigenous people, you can reach us at coolzonetips at proton.me.

Speaker 3 If there's other stuff that you want to share with us, you can do it there too. It is end-to-end encrypted only if you send from another Proton email address.

Speaker 2 That's all I got.

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Speaker 32 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

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Speaker 6 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 9 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 11 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 13 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 14 We got clear facts.

Speaker 17 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 19 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 20 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 21 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 22 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 2 Welcome to It Could Happened Here, a podcast about transgender. I am your host, Mia Wong.

Speaker 2 Now, we have spent a lot of time on this show covering a bunch of really bad stuff and also somebody some cool stuff. We've had some cool trans things on this show, too.

Speaker 2 We're going to have some more in like the coming weeks but it is a bleak time to be trans

Speaker 2 really anywhere in the world the united states is also pretty fucking bad right now but in in the words of lengths and hughes between the darkness and the dawn there rises a red star and one of the things that that has happened as this sort of like you know sort of the crisis of transphobia and the crisis of the genocide and the sort of multiple genocides the government's doing and as sort of transphobia as like an institutional state discourse has

Speaker 2 like solidified is that, I mean, honestly, multiple generations of transjournalists have really kind of like risen, risen to the forefront. And yeah,

Speaker 2 we've been seeing a bunch of extremely cool reporting and a bunch of very, very good work from a bunch of like more radical transjournalists. And that's a thing that kind of like.

Speaker 2 There's been so few of us for so long and suddenly there's several and it ripped and I'm really happy about it.

Speaker 2 And with me to talk about sort of, you know, what trans journalism is like in this moment, how it functions,

Speaker 2 and, you know, and how it can be sustained going forward and why it's sort of important is David Forbes, who is the editor of the Asheville Blade and also an independent journalist.

Speaker 2 Mira Lazine, who is a freelance journalist who recently launched the outlet Free Radical. And Matty Castigan, who's an independent journalist and the creator of Maddy Cast News.

Speaker 2 All of you, welcome to the show. Thank you.

Speaker 4 Happy to be on.

Speaker 2 Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm ecstatic to have all of you on to get to talk about this because I don't know.
I guess the place that I want to start is like,

Speaker 2 I remember this kind of like period in like 2024, 2023, 2024, where it was like,

Speaker 2 I mean, it still is really bleak for trans journalism in a lot of ways. Like, you know, I mean, just in trans media in general, like, I was just watching.

Speaker 2 like the space that had been opened a little bit in like the 2010s for there to be trans people in media just like closing, you know, and like I've been watching like pretty immediately around me, like I've been watching the number of like trans fams, especially like non-white trans fams, just like disappearing from media.

Speaker 2 And it was, you know, it was, it was like watching the stars disappear from the sky.

Speaker 2 And the thing about the stars disappearing from the sky is, you know, there's, you don't notice it unless you're looking at them, in which case the light is fucking gone forever.

Speaker 2 And it was this really, really bleak thing.

Speaker 2 But also, you know, as it's happening and as we've been sort of like resisting this, I've been getting to watch like the stars go back on in the sky and like watching new like people emerge and watching people who've been doing cool work for a really long time sort of like

Speaker 2 come out into the open and like get more sort of national recognition. And

Speaker 2 yeah, I don't know. I guess I guess that's the sort of place I wanted to start is just talking a little bit about like what it's like to be fucking doing journalism right now because Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 I'll go ahead and start. I've been a journalist for over 20 years, and for those who might be wondering, since you referred to trans femmes, I am a trans woman, I use she, they pronounce.

Speaker 2 I also like the name David. So, but

Speaker 2 I have seen it kind of wax and wane, I've seen it go up and down, and to some degree, what we're facing now, it is a much worse and escalating version, but it is also some of what I've seen trans journalists face.

Speaker 2 Yeah, period. I came out in publicly in 2016, I started my transition in 2015, And immediately my freelance career basically died overnight.

Speaker 2 And it wasn't like I was writing for right-wing outlets or something.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 honestly, the fact is, and this is, I think, unusual among transjournalism, because a lot of it admirably focuses on national, even international level stuff, because what we face is so vast.

Speaker 2 But if it had not been for the local support, because the Blade, a lot of the Blade subscribers are local, though we certainly welcome people to subscribe from wherever they are.

Speaker 2 You know, I would be homeless, and there's a good chance I wouldn't be talking to y'all right now.

Speaker 2 But at the same time, in this kind of what I kind of call the quiet purge, which I think has been escalating in recent years that you talked about about, you know, just we've got trans journalists who used to write for national magazines living out of their cars now.

Speaker 2 That is the reality we face.

Speaker 2 Our publications all working class trans people.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we've had journalists arrested twice

Speaker 2 for doing their jobs.

Speaker 2 two of our journalists were were taken to trial in 2023 on a minor trespassing charge which is almost unheard of in in the us as bad as the us often is i should mention also this was like trespassing for reporting on the cops doing in homeless encampment sleep like on christmas yeah yeah on christmas yeah yeah yeah like i just like unhinged police state shit like yeah

Speaker 4 Yeah, even in LA, they'll like, sometimes they'll actually accidentally quote unquote arrest journalists, but then they'll be like, Okay, we'll let you go because you're a journalist.

Speaker 2 They don't actually take you to trial. This is one of those kind of welcome to Asheville moments because I think people buy the marketing sometimes and think we're this super progressive city.

Speaker 2 And actually, it's an incredibly repressive, like tourism fife. And that's this kind of really to a point, though.

Speaker 2 Like, the city government, city council here is six Democrats and one kind of like Bernie Sanders type independent, um, though even more tepid. And the DA is a Democrat, and still,

Speaker 2 you know, they were hell-bent

Speaker 2 to persecute trans journalists.

Speaker 2 One of our journalists, Matilda Bliss, was openly mistreated and misgendered based on her gender during that.

Speaker 2 So to some degree, what's happening now is certainly a worsening, but it is also an extension of what's been going on for a very long time. So, okay, like it is getting worse.

Speaker 2 I don't know where we're going to be in a... two, three, even one year, but also like this is not a new fight.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I can speak to it a little bit too.

Speaker 4 I've been a journalist for, I guess, what was six months because it's a long story, but I kind of got into it more out of fear for myself.

Speaker 4 Sometimes people think I'm selfless and maybe I am a little bit, but a lot of it is really selfish and just feeling like I have to do stuff to protect myself and my friends, basically.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 4 even in that short period of time, I have faced a lot of

Speaker 4 bad stuff from honestly predominantly the left and liberals and sometimes even other queer people being a trans woman of color. And that wasn't really initially what I was afraid of.

Speaker 4 You know, I was afraid of like, I'm going to get death threats and Nazis up then like an adox be. And actually, none of that's happened.
I can't really explain why other than I just don't use Twitter.

Speaker 2 And I guess so they don't know I exist.

Speaker 4 But I have like one of the

Speaker 4 first national news story that I broke, or one of them, I guess, it was about like meta AI being like super racist. And I like kind of figured that out.
I like proved that it was racist.

Speaker 4 Basically, I just like used my brain to make it tell on itself and explain its prompt and all that. And it became this huge international news story.

Speaker 4 But it was like immediately co-opted by a Washington Post journalist who retweeted me and then retreated the conversation and posted it again.

Speaker 4 And then I had to go on like this weeks long like kind of campaign to try to just get basic credit for that and eventually she did credit me in the column to give her credit but that was not something that was forgiven and a lot of others that i said the thing to also didn't credit me and that's just been a recurring trend that uh

Speaker 4 yeah like i i'm kind of invisible even though i make a lot of important news. So that kind of sucks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's something that happens fucking constantly. I'm like, my, my like welcome to the, this is before I was out too.

Speaker 2 And this is also like, you know, part, part of what's going on here is like,

Speaker 2 one of the things you learn really quickly in media is the extent to which so much national media is just like

Speaker 2 what they do is steal stories from like people like who are you know from sort of like like more regional media or people they think they can get away with taking stuff from like if and this goes all the way up the chain right like if if you want to know what's going to be on rachel maddow show look at look at what's happening on behind the bastards whenever they cover someone on the right.

Speaker 2 And within about three weeks, you will get a Rachel Maddow episode that is five minutes a thing.

Speaker 2 But like, you know, but like, you know, it's obviously like it's significantly worse with like trans people because like, yeah, they can just fucking sell stories from us.

Speaker 2 And like, I remember, God, my, like, my fucking, like, the first, like, journalism, well, that's not true, but the first journalism-y stuff that I did with like who's on people was like, we,

Speaker 2 when, like, the Atlanta spa shooting, we tracked down there, there was like, there was a Facebook post that people were circulating reportedly from the shooter that was like like basically blaming like anti-China media stuff for it.

Speaker 2 And we tracked down that this person did not have a Facebook and that all of this was fake. But that person, that post had been circulating through the national news.

Speaker 2 And we were like, well, yeah, this is like fake. Right.
And then like every single news, like every single, like CNN, fucking Fox News, like every single major news outlet just like.

Speaker 2 took all of our work and like repackaged it and then never fucking mentioned that it was like Gary and I who did this because you know why would you credit the transgender anarchists when you could simply repackage the story yourself?

Speaker 2 And this is a problem that's like goes all the way up to like, this is part of the reason we're here right now, right?

Speaker 2 Like we're complaining about this on sort of like professional level because like it's annoying, but also like the reason we're fucking here right now is because the person who got to write about trans stuff was fucking Jesse Singhal, who is a cis man whose only qualification was the thing he previously wrote about was men who fuck other men who don't consider themselves gay.

Speaker 2 And because he was the person who got to write all of the like trans coverage, even though he's just like some fucking cis dipshit, right?

Speaker 2 Like he's now the guy who's like been being cited in fucking legal cases for ages and ages for why you should restrict trans healthcare.

Speaker 4 The Atlantic and its consequences on society.

Speaker 2 Disaster. Disaster.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Amira, do you want to talk a bit about your experience with it? Honestly, what you just described has been happening to me this week.

Speaker 2 So I've been in the industry for about three to four years now, consistently and consistently for a little bit longer. And

Speaker 2 initially, it was way easier for me to get gigs. Like within the first few months of me seriously starting, I got accepted pitches into Discover Magazine and places like that.

Speaker 2 And then like within like six months after that, it became a nightmare to get pitches accepted. Yeah.
And it just so happened I became more out as trans around that timeframe.

Speaker 2 Definitely not a coincidence at all. But more recently, this week, I launched my independent newsletter, The Free Radical.
Go subscribe.

Speaker 2 Go subscribe. It's legitimately great.
You will get reporting there that you won't fucking get from, well, okay.

Speaker 2 You will get reporting there that you won't get from anyone else until about three weeks later when all the national outlets pick it up and it will be better and you will have it first for the person who actually reported it.

Speaker 2 In every article I've written so far, I've taken a second to basically be like, okay, here's some anarchist shit you should read, y'all, because my audience is mostly like clibs.

Speaker 2 And I'm just like, here, here, here, read this, please. But

Speaker 2 my first story I broke this week was about a trans woman who was legally held in Guantanamo Bay.

Speaker 24 And

Speaker 2 that story got picked up by major media outlets pretty quick. Within the first like 12 hours, the news outlet them.
did a very good story that basically cited me every chance they got.

Speaker 2 Come to find out this is because a trans woman wrote that. She's awesome.
I just followed her the other day.

Speaker 2 But then Brazilian news outlet started picking up on this. Yeah, this was a Brazilian trans woman who got like sent to Guantanamo.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the first one

Speaker 2 to do this was the newspaper, forgive me if I am mispronouncing this, Fulha Deus South Paulo. I believe it's called.
I might be mispronouncing that. I apologize if I am.

Speaker 2 But they are one of the biggest newspapers in Brazil and definitely one of the oldest. And that story was all right.
You know, they credited me for breaking the story. Yeah,

Speaker 2 I was talking to the person who wrote that. She said, she's sweet.
And even did original recording. It's awesome.
And then right after that, like dozens of other outlets came in.

Speaker 2 None of them credited me.

Speaker 2 And they posted like social media stuff about the story. Not a single one of those credited me.

Speaker 2 And they're getting like thousands of likes and comments and shares. And yeah most egregious i think is

Speaker 2 i've seen a few of them credit the journalist with foha as breaking the story and i've even seen one cite them as breaking the story oh my god who's whose article mind you literally in a subheading says i broke the story yeah

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 I didn't check in on it today yet, but last night I was like up late just looking at all the news outlets that I was boosting.

Speaker 2 and it's like i'm glad the story's getting coverage don't get me wrong it's an important one it's just like yeah no it's great yeah almost none of them are seeing where they got the story from it's just like oh wow there's this bigger outlet covering i'm going to credit the bigger outlet so to explain why we're also sort of concerned about like the way this attribution stuff works right

Speaker 2 this is a incredibly material problem for us right and like i am very lucky in that like in terms of transjournalism i have like a stable job

Speaker 2 but the thing is right unless unless you fucking got really lucky and you got hired like as a cis person and then you have a bunch of very very supportive like co-workers and like your bosses are supportive you are like trying to cobble together like every cent that you can possibly pull out of a fucking couch cushion Because like, you know, I've said this on the show before, right?

Speaker 2 Like if you're a trans person in the U.S., even when, even before all the turf tariffs hit, right? Like, you, you were living in the 1936 Great Depression that falls of unemployment.

Speaker 2 And, you know, and so, and so that means that like it actually matters a lot when when other outlets do your studies and don't attribute it to you because like

Speaker 2 you have to find a way to fucking make money. And like almost all trans journalists are like the most hideously broke people you've ever heard of in your entire fucking life.

Speaker 2 Like, and this is also, you know, and this is, this is also part of the way that like class plays out in in the trans media you see is like,

Speaker 2 you know, the people with the biggest platforms tend to be trans people who were already doing okay, because those are the only people who can afford to fucking do this.

Speaker 2 And like, that's why most of you have heard of me, and most of you probably have not heard of David Amira, even though David and Mira do like, quite frankly, more important journalism than I do.

Speaker 2 And like, and in terms of, especially in terms of like, like, and like break, way more fucking stories than I do, because that's not kind of like not exactly like my thing right but that's because i was like you know like i i was already sort of like in a place that was financially secure and everyone else is so unbelievably broke all the time and it matters when stories get stolen because the only way that if you're a trans journalist and you're you know you're working at your own outlet because an outlet won't hire you because that's just the way that the

Speaker 2 media is structured the only way for you to get paid is by like people seeing your stories and that's part of why there's like just not that many trans journalists is because like the level of discrimination on top of the kind of like erasure of independent journalists that already happens makes it just like financially impossible to fucking do it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 It's it's not just uh liberal media or it's not just like the cis

Speaker 4 liberal media too. Sometimes like uh I had a similar thing with when I broke the story of Rain and some other uh sexual abuse nonprofits removing all of the trans people from their websites.

Speaker 4 That became a national news story, and the Washington Post picked it up also.

Speaker 4 And I think part of that was because I complained so much about the previous time where they almost didn't cite me, that maybe they were a little bit more cautious about me, is my theory.

Speaker 4 But anyway, after that initial news story that cited me, same thing happened where it's like everyone's like, oh, well, we can just cite the Washington Post now instead of this person no one knows.

Speaker 4 And the first website to do that was like a queer news outlet.

Speaker 4 And then I just kept watching as like, I think it was like three or four different queer or like feminist women focused news outlets did the same thing of not citing me and there was even like a really long piece from this other like outlet that was felt like it was going out of its way not to cite me because it was talking about this entire issue about non-profits censoring people and that was an entire conversation that was started specifically because of a news article i wrote but it specifically did not cite me even though they mentioned how one of the organizations that I reported on had reversed course, which is something that they emailed me and said it was because of me.

Speaker 4 So that's how, that's how deep this goes.

Speaker 4 They will like go out of their way to like carve you out of a story that exists because of you, even if they are ostensibly, you know, not just a liberal, like a New York Times outlet, but like a left-wing, like progressive-facing outlet that's trying to like market itself like that.

Speaker 4 They just they just want to exclude trans women from their own stories, even. It's kind of crazy.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The extent of it is actually telling in the local level, too.

Speaker 2 Here, the Blade did a number of reporting, and we also featured some really well-thought-out and pretty sharp opinion columns, which is one thing we kind of specialize in because I think they're really good for raising issues in the local level about how awful the tourism development authority is, which is this hotelier cartel that takes every dime of all the local hotel tax, every bit of it, and then uses it to market the place to more rich people and push crackdowns on pretty much everyone else.

Speaker 2 So we pushed this. It became a widespread public demand.
A lot of organizing happened around it.

Speaker 2 And there was ZipZilch Zero mentioned that like spurred by investigations and editorials in the Asheville Blade, even one of the, one of the people who wrote that editorial, who was a local resident and activist who dealt with some tourism stuff, was literally being quoted.

Speaker 2 the fact she'd written a piece for the blade and that you know was just not mentioned and it actually became kind of a running kind of grim joke because we're all working class trans people and

Speaker 2 half of us are trans femme. Yeah.
It's just the Asheville blade does not exist. And some of that was for liberals, but honestly, Asheville has a massive trans misogyny problem.

Speaker 2 We think we were the first meetouts to do like a quick guide to trans misogyny, which we did kind of like a slideshow about it in our Patreon and stuff because it was that extensive.

Speaker 2 But even the left in Asheville has some real problems with trans misogyny.

Speaker 2 So and it's applied everything, not just from trans issues, but even to bread and butter kind of local stuff, which we also do a lot of reporting on you know it's we can admit that trans leftists and anarchists are shaping the discussion in any way shape or form

Speaker 2 it's funny because like like even us like even like the podcast it could happen here which is like a pretty big national thing like there's no one else talks about us. It's fucking amazing.

Speaker 2 You could, you could just like see, you could like literally watch like every other podcast that's like a tenth of our size, there's like media coverage of, and there's nothing and they will never admit that we fucking did anything.

Speaker 2 It's awesome. It's so cool.
And I think there's like a convergence of actors here too, because like, you know, on the one hand, like in terms of sort of the way that hyper-visibility works, right?

Speaker 2 Hyper-visibility for trans femmes only works negatively. Like there's only the kind of like you get fucked by it.

Speaker 2 But then also on top of it, you get the reverse version of it where it's like, yeah, you know, your labor was stolen.

Speaker 2 And this is, you know, this is true both in movements. This is true of the way that sort of capitalist media functions.

Speaker 2 And then on top of that, we have the kind of like trifecta of like, we will never mention that you exist, which is

Speaker 2 trans.

Speaker 2 independent and radical at the same time.

Speaker 2 And like, this is the thing that happens to like every fucking trans fem like journalist, like friend of the show, Maya Arson, Crime W has had this happen to it like a billion fucking times.

Speaker 2 I want to talk a bit more about kind of just like the financials of how this plays out and how independent media is sort of being supported in this era. Because,

Speaker 2 you know, like it's also really true that like even the like nominally trans outlets, like a lot of it functions on labor exploitation. And

Speaker 2 yeah, let's let's talk a a bit about that. I have a lot of strong cakes.

Speaker 2 Seen some shit.

Speaker 2 Oh boy.

Speaker 2 I have so many opinions. So I mentioned I kind of more formally got a start three to four years ago.
My first article was published in like 2018 and it was just like a local thing when I was living in

Speaker 2 Scranton, Pennsylvania area, where nothing happens, but I found something to report on.

Speaker 2 The reason I got started,

Speaker 2 that would have been like early 2022, reason I got started then was because I was homeless and I needed a way to make money. And where I was living at the time was a complete job desert.

Speaker 2 I didn't have a car and there was nothing in walking distance to me.

Speaker 2 The only things that were were like

Speaker 2 minimum wage food service jobs that over half an hour walk. And my new, I'm disabled.
My body is in pain if I stand up too long. So

Speaker 2 those jobs did not last long because I physically couldn't.

Speaker 2 And so I tried to find something that I could do remotely more consistently. And I went all in into freelance writing and journalism.

Speaker 2 Really the money-making career.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I'm totally.
I'm just in this for the money. You know, I made such amazing profits that year, which is why I ended up homeless again.
And by the end of the year, I was living in a motel.

Speaker 2 God. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And a lot of the writing I was doing at that time was very generalist and I hadn't really found much of my niche yet. But as I began to zero in more on trans issues over time

Speaker 2 and just politics and stuff like that, because as an aside, I also tried to break into gaming journalism because I unfortunately am a gamer, regrettably. Many such cases.
Many such cases.

Speaker 2 And that industry is just dead. It was dying at that point.

Speaker 2 And then I was just like, if you want to get a job as a gaming journalist you're not gonna i tried we need more people to do it but it does not pay so i ended up going into politics journalism which pays like marginally better

Speaker 2 and by marginally better let me talk about some of my rates oh god yeah one outlet i've written for

Speaker 2 um pretty consistently go for a while To start, it paid me about a hundred bucks an article, flat rate. And this includes for highly researched in-depth reporting articles.
My God. Yeah.

Speaker 2 This is again like shit that's going to be stolen by a national outlet in two days. Like,

Speaker 2 and by you, a lot of these stories took weeks to make and fell for a hundred bucks. And so I eventually got, quote, upgraded to that outlet to doing 75 a piece, but four pieces in a month.

Speaker 2 And so that was great, you know, that 200, 200 a month for each individually reported piece. That really paid the bills.

Speaker 2 And eventually it changed into $150 a piece for in-depth reporting pieces that often took over a month's worth of work to get going.

Speaker 2 And I had to meet my deadline or else they would get really angry at me and

Speaker 2 they would be really dickish. And

Speaker 2 That was one of my better experiences. Certainly not the best.
I've had plenty of people who were wonderful, who I've written for, and who I've had great times with.

Speaker 2 But the through line of all of it, even the places that pay better, they're for one-off stories. They're for things that do not guarantee a source of income long term.

Speaker 2 Even the places that have paid me the best for individual stories, it's not enough.

Speaker 2 Not the least of which, because, you know, the cost of living is horrible right now. Terrorists are going show up.
And oh, God, what the fuck is happening? But also because none of it's consistent.

Speaker 2 The closest to consistent I had was

Speaker 2 overworking myself by writing like upwards of like 10 articles a week.

Speaker 2 Sometimes upwards of like five to seven in one day and all of them being reported in

Speaker 2 depth. And it's not sustainable doing that.
No.

Speaker 2 Oh.

Speaker 2 But that's just common.

Speaker 2 That is just normal. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And it's, and it's like the sort of bleak thing about it is your, your options are you have money already, you won the fucking lottery, basically, and like you got a staple position.

Speaker 2 You work at a rate that is like genuinely hideous

Speaker 2 or you have a second job. And sometimes it's a lot of these things combined.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think there's a tendency to talk about discrimination as something that's sort of like abstract or something that's even just kind of like

Speaker 2 point of hiring stuff, which is all true. And like, you know, it is like, yeah, like part of the problem with this is that it's impossible to get like fucking staff positions.

Speaker 2 And like, and like, I mean, I could say this is like, so I mean, I got hired like as a cis person, right?

Speaker 2 And like, like, they would have hired me if I was trans, but like, that's also just true for a lot of people, which is that, like, that's like the way that you can do it.

Speaker 2 So like there, there is the like front door discrimination, but then also the second aspect of it is that like the way that all of this stuff plays out structurally in the economy is that you get reduced sort of contract labor unless you try to go out go it by yourself

Speaker 2 and because of the incredible just material financial oppression of trans people this is another big part of the reason why there's just so few you know and like there's there's becoming more right and i'm i'm incredibly happy that like you know like i'm fucking talking with three trans journalists this rules and also the reason there's not more of us which is important because

Speaker 2 Like cis people trying to cover our stories is a fucking disaster. Like that's how we got here.

Speaker 2 But like, part of the reason why there's not more is just that, like, it's so difficult to survive doing this. And, yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, and that's also, I'm going to, I'm going to turn this into a minor plug, which is like, go subscribe to the Asheville Blade. Go subscribe to Free Radical.
Go subscribe to Manicast News.

Speaker 2 Because, like, literally the difference between like people being able to have. an apartment and pay their rent or like living in a car is like the amount of support that you get from this stuff.

Speaker 2 That's absolutely true. And I should note the, you know, the Blade's a co-op.
We've been one for

Speaker 2 half a decade now. And part of the reason for that was we'd seen how unfairly like income was treated

Speaker 2 just in the press in general. And also I'm an anarchist.
And while I love being an editor, I don't want to be a boss. I want to like work with other people.

Speaker 2 And it's made us a lot more effective. I would say we wouldn't exist if we hadn't become a co-op.

Speaker 2 But also, when we do hit a difficult financial spot, we operate in a shoestring budget, especially post-Taleen, as sadly a lot of folks have been driven out of Asheville by the refusal of various governments to do anything about rental aid, by the resumption of like very quick resumption of evictions and a lot of other horrible stuff.

Speaker 2 Like it's a struggle. We all are working class folks.
We all work out of their jobs and face trans, you know, the discrimination, trans misalgia, and transphobia. So it's, it's difficult.

Speaker 2 And even with being a co-op, we do the best we can. And we do, unlike other places, pay freelancers' fare rates.

Speaker 2 But sometimes it's legitimately difficult to divide up our tiny budget. And at some points, we say, look, we can't cover this right now.

Speaker 2 Or we have to say, okay, in some cases, I've done it before, certainly.

Speaker 2 I'm covering this, but I am going to literally have to split up payment for it over multiple months because we just don't have the money in there.

Speaker 2 But I feel it does need, it does need to get out there.

Speaker 2 And even if those decisions are made more fairly, it is still a real problem that we are dividing up a fairly small pool of resources. We do a lot with that, but it is a real limitation.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm kind of in a similar boat in terms of my publication, Maddie Cast News. So I'm in one of the categories you mentioned.

Speaker 4 Actually, I'm in two of them where I fund what I'm doing not from my work, but from my

Speaker 4 first job, my main job, I guess, which I got, I guess, pretending to be cis or maybe, you know, non-binary B-ZM or whatever, and then kind of jump scare them.

Speaker 4 But anyway, that job pays pretty well, thankfully. It's, you know, software engineering, one of the

Speaker 4 lottery professions for trans women. You get your healthcare, you get your money.
But I've been trying to go beyond just me and try to help other people as well.

Speaker 4 So recently we just applied for fiscal sponsorship with uh 501c3, which hopefully hopefully let us become a charity tax deductible and all that.

Speaker 4 And I've also been putting a bit of my own money and I've also been, you know, pretty much begging all of my readers to give us money because one of the biggest goals of my publication has it kind of started off more about like, you know, reporting on the news, of course.

Speaker 4 But now it's reporting on the news and also, you know, making sure the people who report on the news aren't homeless, actually. Maybe that's a bad thing.

Speaker 4 Everyone I know in my life knows people like all these journalists who report on this news, but a lot of them probably don't even know how much like they suck they struggle just like getting through their daily lives.

Speaker 4 So I'm really trying to hopefully create some structure for us to have at least one nonprofit that will fund trans journalists at like a living wage of at least $25 an hour, which I honestly don't think is a lot, especially like in a place like LA.

Speaker 4 But $25 an hour is probably more than you can get almost anywhere as a trans journalist. Also, I've heard a lot of jokes about, you know, we're passing around the same $20

Speaker 4 in the trans community. And it's a little bit more of that.

Speaker 4 But I'm also hoping to see if I can try to fundraise from other people and try to, you know, raise awareness for this issue because I don't have a lot of time myself to be writing articles these days because I do have a full-time job.

Speaker 4 But yeah, hoping to kind of make a dent on this issue and raise awareness.

Speaker 4 And it's really a win-win for all trans people that, you know, if we're paying people who need this money to survive, but they're also creating really important news coverage that literally is like life-changing for hundreds of thousands, millions of people at many times.

Speaker 4 And that's how I see it's an exceptionally important issue that is completely unaddressed.

Speaker 2 This is also part of the issue with the way that like trans

Speaker 2 issues are reported on by the media is that they're they're largely,

Speaker 2 you know, and it's not, it's not things like healthcare aren't important, right? But like just the raw class dynamic of all of this just does not get talked about, Right.

Speaker 2 The homelessness rates that I don't I don't actually fuck. I should have the homelessness rates off the top of my head.

Speaker 2 I think it's like three or four times at the very least more likely across the entire trans population to be homeless than cis people. And like you can just fucking see that.

Speaker 2 If you know trans people, it's like, yeah,

Speaker 2 fucking everyone's spent a bunch of time being homeless. And like,

Speaker 2 you know, that's just the conditions of this. And, you know, this is a thing that like, as you, the listener, like,

Speaker 2 it is possible for this. It doesn't have to fucking be like this.

Speaker 2 Like, it doesn't. You, you have the power in your hands to like to get people off the street and like with a roof above their head.
And you could do this by clicking the links in the description.

Speaker 2 From our co-op, thank you for repeatedly mentioning that aspect.

Speaker 2 I think also this does, this class dynamic does shape the type of trans coverage you see too, quite a bit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We did some reporting one time on the city of Asheville spending over a million dollars to the Salvation Army, which is basically a queer and transphobic cult.

Speaker 2 But that piece was reported very differently from if it had been reported by, say, a trans journalist who'd been very well off their entire lives, you know,

Speaker 2 because a lot of us people in our co-op have either been close to or been homeless before.

Speaker 2 And so we were able to bring in the experience of knowing that if you are a trans homeless person, the Salvation Army isn't letting you in in or is one of the worst possible shelters you can end up in.

Speaker 2 And that piece was written and read very differently because we were drawing from that, from that on-the-ground experience. Yeah, on that note,

Speaker 2 I've written so many stories that have been about just the poverty rates of trans people and what we've all gone through.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I used to be a daily contributor for LGBTQ Nation. They were one of the outlooks that I was trying to crank out as many articles as I could for.

Speaker 2 And the editors, lovely people there, no issues with them. Lovely folks.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 They just, they don't, they didn't have enough money to begin with to pay me enough. So you got to do.
But

Speaker 2 I remember working on a story sometime like the summer of last year

Speaker 2 for them where

Speaker 2 I was reading about some new report that came out. talking about just like poverty rates, job discrimination rates of trans people.
And one thing I've noticed is

Speaker 2 like david mentioned there is a huge disconnect between even if you have like wealthier trans people write about an issue versus those who are in poverty like yeah a lot of the sources i had for um a specific article i don't remember the headline because i i wrote like 500 articles for q nation last year but um

Speaker 2 A lot of the sources I used for that article and like other ones like it are like big nonprofits.

Speaker 2 And, you know, obviously your mileage may vary depending on what's non-profit, but most of the folk who like were writing these reports or who were doing the press releases and stuff like that, you could just kind of tell that they maybe did not have quite the same experiences as say trans people who have been homeless, trans people who have had to deprive themselves of medical care because they couldn't afford it, trans people who have had to go without food because not enough money.

Speaker 2 And it's almost like a lot of people who didn't have to go through this stuff like intellectualize it more. They see it as like these abstract numbers and

Speaker 2 they know it's bad, but they don't have that like individual connection.

Speaker 2 Like even many of the nonprofit folk, a lot of their friends, even their social circles are all going to be on average, you know, I can't say for every single person, obviously, like on average, more wealthy, more stable.

Speaker 2 They have family to back them up. They have plenty of options.

Speaker 2 And I don't know, rambling a bit, but there's just a disconnect, you know, whenever reaching out to folk who won the birth lottery a little bit. Yeah.

Speaker 4 One of the most

Speaker 4 the most expensive article that we did at Mighty Cast News earlier last month was about Maryland prisons and how they're basically torture chambers for trans women, as most prisons are, but it seems like they're especially bad in Maryland, you know, despite it being supposedly a safe trans state, you know, 70% Democrats.

Speaker 4 And that was kind of an example of just like how

Speaker 4 unprofitable, how impossible to not, not just unprofitable, because when you think unprofitable, it's like, oh, you're not making money. It's not about that.

Speaker 4 It's like, if you're losing like 80% of the money you put into these articles, because it takes so many, like I'm a very strong believer of paying people, you know, a living wage.

Speaker 4 So I was paying the journalist like well over $25 $25 an hour for

Speaker 4 dozens of hours of work, and that adds up really fast. And then court fee, like PACER fees, every all these other costs are adding up.
And it ends up being like around $1,000 for the single article.

Speaker 4 And it's a really important article that raised a lot of awareness. Everyone in Maryland, in the trans circle, they're talking about it.
But at the same time, it's basically a charity project, right?

Speaker 4 This is why I'm trying to become a non-profit, because there's simply no other way to be able to fund this stuff. There's no capitalist model for reporting on trans women in prison.

Speaker 4 It's not a, it's not something that people are, you know, like I definitely get, there's a lot of people who support us out of the goodness of their hearts. And that's really nice.

Speaker 4 But even that is not enough because that's just how it is. There's just not enough people who care about these issues, sadly, especially the more intersectional it is.

Speaker 4 You know, even a lot of people in the queer community aren't as worried necessarily about people in prisons. They're more worried about people not in prisons.

Speaker 4 And, you know, of course, everyone matters, but I think it's really important to focus on those most intersectional issues because when you really think about it, like prisons are basically, you know,

Speaker 4 where they do everything they want to do to trans women who aren't in prison. That's where they get to do all of it.
And no one's looking.

Speaker 4 No one's watching them. No one's holding them accountable.
But yeah, I think it's basically a complete failing of capitalism. Like it's...

Speaker 4 There's definitely be some outlets that, you know, maybe they could be doing better. But at the same time, a lot of the time, it's basically, you know, be really shitty to people or close down.

Speaker 4 And neither of those are great options. And personally, I would close down, but I can't tell other people what to do.

Speaker 4 And I think really it's a systemic issue that society doesn't care about us, that the cis people who really should be funding these things and trying to solve these issues just pretend like we don't exist and you know go out of their way to even erase our presence, even when we do, you know, create national news.

Speaker 2 You know, I think part of the difficulty of it, right? And this specifically the way the trans issues function about class and journalism are a microcosm.

Speaker 2 It's like the most intense version of the stuff that's happening to the entire journalism industry, right?

Speaker 2 Where, like, you know, part of what we're seeing is like, is just it's been the destruction of local news, right?

Speaker 2 And the product of this is that the only people who can be journalists are like a bunch of fucking rich dipshits.

Speaker 2 And, you know, like, yeah, you've all fucking read like New York Times columnist is like platforming a genocide denier today, right?

Speaker 2 Like that, and that's, that's sort of the, the, the product of this.

Speaker 2 And it means that, like, unless like literally, like, people like you, the fucking listener, and I guess this doesn't apply to you if you're, you know, like statistically, a good number of you are like, you are also transgender and you make like fucking $9 an hour, like

Speaker 2 running a forklift or something.

Speaker 2 Like, this is not, this is not on you like i know a bunch of you are gonna be like holy shit i should give money to these people it's like i okay but like this stuff is only possible if people are actually fucking willing to support it like until we can like fundamentally change the way that the entire political and economic system works in this country and in this world and until then it's like yeah like it's i this is a fucking problem for like us here too because you know like again like i got fucking lucky like i i am extremely dissimilar like i am the trans woman like one of the trans women who you will hear from the most.

Speaker 2 And I have like a stable job. I haven't been homeless and I haven't done sex work.
And this makes me completely unlike a huge portion of trans people, especially trans fems. Right.

Speaker 2 And yeah, it's like, yeah, it fucking colors the way I do this shit in ways that like I don't see because like I haven't had to like do this shit. And this is a real fucking problem.

Speaker 2 The only way that it can not be like this is if people are actually willing to support the people who understand

Speaker 2 these things because they fucking gone through it.

Speaker 2 And so your options are like all of our stuff gets reported on by Jesse Singhal and we all fucking die or we fund transjournalism and we fight them and we all live in a fucking better world.

Speaker 2 My backup option if trans journalism doesn't work, you mentioned sex work, is quite literally to write furry smut and hope that pays.

Speaker 2 The last year, the Asheville Blade marked our 10th anniversary. So I think that is worth mentioning too.
Like,

Speaker 2 I think sometimes things, and they truly are precarious. They truly are difficult.
In some ways, they're only getting more precarious and more difficult.

Speaker 2 But at the same time, despite our journalists being arrested, despite being kind of like targeted and ignored by a lot of liberals and even some leftists in town, we're still here.

Speaker 2 We're still doing journalism. We just put out a...
really powerful investigation about, you know, more mouth, yet more malfeasance in the police department. So, so, so yeah, like it can be done.

Speaker 2 It's not impossible. And as tight as things are, there is also a lot of resilience.
And we do get a lot of very genuine support. I do think that's worth emphasizing too.

Speaker 2 So like there is strength and there is some hope here. Yeah.
And, you know, and again, it's like, it's, it's not impossible.

Speaker 2 It just requires, it requires a bunch of fucking work from the trans people who are doing it. And then also it requires, you know, putting on my fucking MPR pledge drive voice.

Speaker 2 It requires viewers like you to, you know it requires people to care enough about it to support it and make it exist and yeah i think that's a that's a kind of good note to start sort of wrapping up do you have anything else uh that you want to make sure you get in yeah before we move to plugs

Speaker 4 i guess yeah for for me uh as as a as i'm also kind of in that spectrum of like being a little bit more privileged as far as trans women go financially.

Speaker 4 And my message to other people who make, especially if you're a cis person, you you make over $100,000, you're comfortable and you're feeling bad listening to this, you know, go give a trans person money.

Speaker 4 Go give Myra Elizine money. Go give David Forbes money.
Like we have to, we really need everyone to start pitching in, especially people who aren't trans.

Speaker 4 And we really need, like, it's, it's literally life-saving, the, the money.

Speaker 4 Like, and I think one thing to consider is, you know, $1,000 to someone who makes a lot of money is completely different from $1,000 to someone who is like a month away from being homeless.

Speaker 2 $20 functions like that. Like, yeah, $20 even.

Speaker 4 No, I know so many people, like, $1,000, like, they'll go, they'll spend $1,000 in a couple of weeks on restaurants.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 4 And then there's people, there's trans people with $1,000. It's like changed their life forever.

Speaker 2 The look on Mira's face, like, the look of horror.

Speaker 2 There's people who spend, and I don't even joke, $20,000 a year on sushi. Holy shit.
Having worked in the service industry. Yeah.
I feel bad when I spend like 20 bucks on Popeyes once a week.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 So if you spend $20,000 a year on sushi, please spend $19,000 a year this year and give $1,000 to a trans person. That's my advice for you.

Speaker 2 Double the income of a trans person today.

Speaker 2 This is also like... you know, part of what I was talking about with like the Great Depression.

Speaker 2 Like we don't live in the same economy that everyone else does like it is literally a different fucking world and the more fucked you are like down the fucking scale of like of like trans poverty the more it's like you literally like the the reality that like the people live in is just completely alien to you it's like what the fuck i want that kind of money

Speaker 2 Mira, David, yeah, do you have anything else that you want to say before we like wrap up? Please support trend journalists. Please, dear God, please.

Speaker 2 Everyone I know who is primarily a journalist for work is broke. We need the money.
Please, dear God.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I would, yeah, I'd add to that. But another thing is, look.
You should support trans journalists because trans people deserve to, you know, to be supported and to be able to make a living.

Speaker 2 Also, frankly, we're really good at this, like generally as a whole. Like we have a lot more perspective, I think, on how this hellscape social structure actually does and doesn't work

Speaker 2 and a lot more determination to actually tell the truth in general. And so,

Speaker 2 you know, dollars to the Asheville Blade, for example, or to, or to Mira, or to Madicast, like they go to journalism. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, they're not going to like some Baroque hierarchy of, you know, of gentry administrators or something or CEOs. Like it goes to journalism.

Speaker 2 It goes to actual interesting reporting and views and things that need to be said.

Speaker 2 So if people are even just looking, if some journalism is something they care about or think needs to be stronger, this is the way to do it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And like, like, this is also a directly political thing because like the work that y'all do, like I have literally watched it change the sort of political landscape.

Speaker 2 Like that's just, that's just like a thing that happens.

Speaker 2 You know, like, and I think we're all, we're all very cynical about sort of the power of like the truth to do anything because it requires people to act on it but you know if you don't know anything is happening it is not possible to act on something yeah so like you know you are simultaneously you are supporting like you are supporting trans people in like the most precarious position we've been in in fucking ages

Speaker 2 you are like supporting you're supporting journalism and you are not even poking a stick you are helping build a lance to like stab into the side of the people who are like destroying this world

Speaker 2 and yeah i i think that's important so if people want to support you where do they go where do they go go go go go

Speaker 2 yeah so if you want to support me uh go to thefree radical.org that that that is my newsletter um there's stuff to to subscribe and and and and give money you can do a free subscription you know if especially if you're broke please do a free subscription like we don't i don't need your 20 i'll give you my twenty dollars please

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 also, I have a Ko-Fi.

Speaker 2 If you only do like a one-time thing, it's Mirror Luzine. I'm the only one, only Mirror Luzine on there.

Speaker 2 And if you subscribe, you're supporting some of the only trans anarchist national news coverage.

Speaker 2 Basically, in every single article I write, I try to find a way to shoot word anarchist theory and what fucking and fucking like my first article. I was like, hey, go check out Crime Think.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 The one, what I published yesterday i just i i went on a whole like

Speaker 2 page long tangent where i'm like okay cool so this is what more liberal people are saying but here's go read lorenzo kumboa irvin go read cruerian anarchism go read go read this um and and yeah that's i i just want to shoehorn anarchist theory and get more people to be anarchists um yeah

Speaker 4 yeah so if you ever want to support Maddie Cast News.

Speaker 4 To be clear, I don't take any income from the website. I actually have

Speaker 4 plans to put lots of money into it. But all of your money will be going towards supporting other trans journalists.
So that's one way to, you know, contribute to the cause.

Speaker 4 So, or even if you just give me your email, I appreciate that too. But my website is maddiecast.com, and that's only 1D.
So M-A-D-Ycast.com. And Run Blue, Blue Sky, too, with the same website name.

Speaker 4 And yeah, thank you.

Speaker 2 People can find our co-ops work at ashfulblade.com. And there's a giant link to our Patreon there.

Speaker 2 For 15 bucks a month, you can get a lovely gentry tears mug, which we're particularly proud of. It's so cool.
It rules.

Speaker 2 Thank you for the endorsement. And at the end of each article, we have addition to our Patreon a link if folks just want to send us some one-time support.
We'll certainly put that to use as well.

Speaker 2 And if they would like to see some of my personal writings about trans survival, as well as some anarchist looks at various periods of history patreon.com slash david forbes if if that is if that is more their cup of tea statistically in our audience i know there are a bunch of you whose special interest either is or could be medieval peasant uprisings you are not going to find better writing on medieval peasant uprisings anywhere else

Speaker 2 yes there is a limit to the extent to which you can actually talk about the structural problems that are happening and you can't fucking talk about how to solve them and this is also partially why like i've called myself a journalist like Like I kind of jokingly refuse to call myself a journalist because like I fucking, I fucking refuse to be associated with like all of those goddamn Atlantic motherfuckers who use institutional jobs to endanger trans people.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, but also

Speaker 2 that's true. That's true.
Yeah. You know, because it's like, we're the ones actually fucking doing this shit.
But also, yeah, like this is...

Speaker 2 you know, to do my one, to do my one Karl Marx quote, it's like, you know, like philosophy has hitherto only sought to describe the world. The point is to change it.

Speaker 2 And that's a thing that we could, that, like, we, like, have the power to collectively do together.

Speaker 2 And that's something that, like, the New York Times does not want you to know that you can change things.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they, to borrow a term that David has recently gotten into my vocabulary a bunch, uh, the gentry really fucking do not like the idea of solutions.

Speaker 2 Their idea of a solution is go vote for Pete Budig.

Speaker 2 Go sign the ACLU's petition. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I want to read this fucking post that I saw that Kendra writes about the New York Times.

Speaker 2 I think a lot about the top New York Times editor who I told the historians were warning were in a similar period to the ramp up to the Holocaust.

Speaker 2 And maybe we could look back and see what MYT had done wrong to not repeat his mistakes. He shrugged.
New York Times didn't really cover the Holocaust. Oh my God.
What?

Speaker 2 So, don't support these people. Support the people who actually do this shit.
You know, like, go laugh.

Speaker 2 I'm going to make a kind of comparison, but it was like, at the time this shit was happening, there was a bunch of very good coverage of the Holocaust and of what was happening.

Speaker 2 But it was because it was all happening from fucking, like, because it was like largely Jewish radicals who were doing it. All that shit fucking got ignored.

Speaker 2 And shit that could have been fucking prevented wasn't.

Speaker 2 And we don't have to live in a world where that shit fucking happens. And we can make it not be like that.

Speaker 2 But like the structural, the structural, like, structural nature of, of the media is one of the ways that this

Speaker 2 happens and we don't have to let the new york times do this again no and that's a good reminder there is another way with journalism you know idol wells was able to detail the extent and horror of american segregation and lynching and also called for people to shoot the clan yeah this is the you know the modern idea that you have to be detached and everybody attached from pretty gentry perspective you know there's a world elsewhere there's other ways to do things

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Speaker 32 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

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Speaker 6 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 9 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 11 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 13 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 14 We got clear facts.

Speaker 17 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 18 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 20 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 21 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 22 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 52 Welcome to another episode of It Can Happen Here. I am your guest co-host, Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet.

Speaker 52 I'm joined by the lovely Molly, host of award-winning podcast on CoolZone, Weird Little Guys. Molly, how you doing?

Speaker 53 Great. Glad to be here, Bridget.

Speaker 52 Okay, so I wish we were here to talk about all the exciting stuff going on in your life, but I wanted to bring this topic to the It Could Happen Here audience because I live in the district.

Speaker 52 I know you're a Virginia gal, so you might know a little bit more about how it works in the district than your average person, but...

Speaker 52 I don't know that people really understand what is happening to residents of the District of Columbia like myself. So I live in DC.
I've lived here for most of my life.

Speaker 52 I have a lot of like hometown pride. This is not just where I happen to live.
It's like my city, my home.

Speaker 24 Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 53 And you don't have representation.

Speaker 52 It's it's true, right? It's something that infuriates me. And so, you know, the first thing to know about DC is that it's not a state.

Speaker 52 So that means that what happens federally has a huge impact on the day-to-day minutiae of the life of people like me who live in the district.

Speaker 52 If you don't live in the district, when it comes to decisions about about how your like local tax dollars are spent,

Speaker 52 that usually lies with like your state and local leaders. That's not really the case for me and the other like over half a million residents of the district.

Speaker 52 All of this is made worse by the fact that we are essentially disenfranchised, just like you said, right?

Speaker 52 All of this stuff is playing out in our home, like all of these big national conversations are happening in our own backyard, and we arguably have less electoral power and agency because we aren't a state.

Speaker 52 Fun fact, DC residents only got the right to vote in 1961 in presidential elections.

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 52 I know. Like,

Speaker 52 we have not been voting in presidential elections for very long when you think about it in the fullness of time.

Speaker 52 So when people are like, oh, you know, call your congressperson, call your elected official to oppose XYZ,

Speaker 52 we really have like nobody to call. Our congressional representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, cannot vote on bills that are being considered by the full House.

Speaker 52 And so we really just like don't have a say.

Speaker 52 Whenever those big campaigns are going on, I'm like, oh, it must be nice to have, even if that person ignores you, it must be nice to have someone you can call, wouldn't know.

Speaker 53 It always seems disrespectful to be like, oh, yeah, you guys, you guys have a representative, but it doesn't do anything.

Speaker 52 Exactly.

Speaker 53 It's just vibes.

Speaker 52 It's just vibes. So all of this matters for Trump's return to my hometown because as president, Trump has a lot more authority to dictate how things are run locally for DC residents like myself.

Speaker 52 You know, we all know that the Trump administration is hell-bent on making all of our lives worse.

Speaker 52 But imagine if Trump was also in charge of how your local police force in your city policed your city.

Speaker 2 Like, that would be horrible, right?

Speaker 53 That sounds like a nightmare.

Speaker 52 And that is, that threat is like literally the reality that we are faced with here in DC.

Speaker 52 So there's been some pretty big changes this time around in the Trump administration. During his first administration, I feel like Trump largely ignored DC.

Speaker 52 Like he would pick a fight every now and then, but he didn't really seem to meddle in how DC was run like locally.

Speaker 52 That does not mean that he was not like out in the district doing terrible things, which he very much was.

Speaker 52 You might recall in 2020 during the racial justice uprisings in the wake of George Floyd's death, Trump cleared protesters using chemical agents so that he could go out in front of St.

Speaker 52 John's church and like pose upside-down Bible.

Speaker 2 Upside-down Bible. Remember that?

Speaker 2 Distressing.

Speaker 52 It was distressing. I was there that day, and I'll say, like, it was like genuinely genuinely very excessive.

Speaker 52 I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, but in the aftermath of that event, internal reports made it clear that like it wasn't exactly clear what happened and under what authority.

Speaker 52 Like was it DC's local police force, Metropolitan PD? Was it federal park police? Like it really underscored the tensions of DC locally versus the federal government.

Speaker 53 And it doesn't help that there's half a dozen different police forces operating on any given block of DC.

Speaker 52 Oh my God, girl. Like you, you genuinely never know.
When you see flashing blue and red lights, you genuinely, it's like, you're like, this could be federal. Like this could be federal.

Speaker 52 You never know.

Speaker 53 Have I just committed a federal traffic violation?

Speaker 52 Exactly.

Speaker 52 And so the New York Times actually described that event as, quote, a burst of violence unlike any seen in the shadow of the White House in generations and possibly one of the defining moments of the Trump presidency.

Speaker 52 And so. I remember that as like a moment that played out nationally, but also it felt very local.

Speaker 52 And like, I think it underscored how we really felt the impacts of how militarized the city could locally get during Trump's first administration.

Speaker 52 So that was like something that really sticks out to me.

Speaker 53 I mean, I, I rarely visit D.C. because I'm afraid of traffic.
Like just the act of driving to, through Northern Virginia to get to DC is too frightening for me. So I try not to go.

Speaker 53 But right, I think people who don't live in the area don't think of DC as a place where people live. They don't think of it as anyone's home, right?

Speaker 53 It's like Congress lives there, the laws live there, but like a lot of people live there, people who have nothing to do with the federal government, mostly a lot of black people, honestly.

Speaker 52 I mean, DC used to be called chocolate city for a reason. These days were more like a latte city, but exactly.

Speaker 52 I can confirm that people don't think of the you know, over half a million DC residents who have nothing to do with the federal government sometimes, who have nothing to do with politics, who just like live here and is our home.

Speaker 52 Like I was born in DC. Like this is, I didn't just, you know, move here to work in politics.
Like my family can be traced back to our roots in the district through generations.

Speaker 52 And so I have a bee in my bonnet about this because I feel very unseen.

Speaker 52 And I think the way that the Trump administration is playing out, I feel like the reporting really can sometimes overlook the way that this is playing out in the lie, the life of your average, you know, DC resident who might have nothing to do with politics or, you know, the federal government.

Speaker 52 You're like seventh graders trying to get to middle school exactly that exactly that so during trump's first administration after the incident at st.

Speaker 52 john's church uh our mayor dc's mayor muriel bowser she's still the mayor she's still the mayor she's still the mayor she is

Speaker 52 old and strong

Speaker 52 she erected what became known as black lives matter plaza where she wrote black lives matter in like big yellow letters outside of the white house you remember this i've had some unpleasant experiences in that zone yes Yes.

Speaker 52 You and me both. This could be a separate conversation.
And so I will say when she did that, it was largely like a symbolic move.

Speaker 52 And a lot of DC activists thought the mayor was kind of co-opting a racial justice ethos that she didn't really embody in practice.

Speaker 52 But I do think that that really set the tone for the mayor's relationship with Trump during his first term. Like she was defiant.
She was someone who was going to stand up to him publicly.

Speaker 52 And something to know about DC's mayor, Muriel Bowser, is that she kind of of has two modes, defiant, like the version of herself that painted Black Lives Matter outside of the Trump White House, and then sort of diplomatic, right?

Speaker 52 Like somebody who like wants to find common ground, which I think is the version of her that we're seeing this time around that is very different than how she was the last time around.

Speaker 52 Like she started Trump's second term sort of. touting the goals they have in common.
And like she met with him even before he was in office.

Speaker 52 And so I have a lot of critiques about DC's mayor just like anybody would would have their political leader.

Speaker 52 But I do think it is important that folks understand that she is navigating something that literally no other elected official in the United States has to because of DC's lack of statehood.

Speaker 52 Like we, our city is uniquely threatened by Trump and she knows this and Trump knows this. And so she really has to like

Speaker 52 walk a tightrope greased in shit, if you will.

Speaker 52 She's like navigating this public relationship with an unstable lying fascist and has to do so in a way that's going to end up with like what's best for the city.

Speaker 52 So you can say whatever you want about Mayor Bowser, like I certainly do, but this is a complicated thing to navigate.

Speaker 52 I do not advocate for anybody complying in advance with a fascist, but in this situation, I do think it's fair to ask, like, well, would being defiant toward Trump make things worse for DC residents like myself?

Speaker 3 Would it result in martial law in the city?

Speaker 52 Exactly. Exactly.
So like, I don't like it, but I get it. I guess if there was like a mantra for my feelings on this, it's like, I don't like it at all, but I get it.

Speaker 53 It's a no-win situation.

Speaker 52 It is a no-win situation. And, you know, Trump spent,

Speaker 52 even when he was on the campaign trail before he was president, he talked this time around about how he was planning to take over the city. And because D.C.

Speaker 52 is not a state, like any president does have the authority to interfere with how D.C. is run.

Speaker 52 Any president can take over the police department and the powers of the mayor and the DC city council.

Speaker 52 Any president has the power to federalize D.C.'s like local police force, Metropolitan Police, deputize the National Guard and give law enforcement powers in D.C.

Speaker 52 and activate the military and federal law enforcement agencies such as the Park Police in D.C. So.

Speaker 53 Oh, I didn't even... So like the governor of any state has control of their National Guard, but D.C.
has its own National Guard, right?

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 53 And they don't have a governor.

Speaker 52 So those are the president's national guard?

Speaker 2 Correct.

Speaker 53 Oh, that's not great.

Speaker 52 So it's not great. It's not great.
And, you know, the prospect of, just like, let that sink in, the prospect of Trump having his own military and police force in the district, like,

Speaker 52 I cannot tell you how much this terrifies me. Like, I cannot stress to listeners how much of a shit hitting the fan moment this would be for the city.

Speaker 52 To give you a sense, like, I have a go bag and a like, get the fuck out plan for that scenario playing out.

Speaker 53 Virginia's so close.

Speaker 2 I know. I mean, yeah.

Speaker 52 Honestly, anybody in the DMV, if you're in Maryland, Virginia, you should all be thinking about this.

Speaker 52 So, Trump has continued to like pressure the mayor and threatening to like take over if she will not do the things that he says. Things like clean up the city.

Speaker 52 Trump notified Mayor Bowser that she has to clean up all the unsightly homeless encampments in the district, especially around federal buildings.

Speaker 52 If she's not capable of doing so, we will be forced to do it for her, he said. And so far, her strategy has really been one of like quiet appeasement.

Speaker 52 So that Black Lives Matter Plaza that she erected in defiance during his first term, that came down.

Speaker 53 Did it really?

Speaker 3 They painted over it?

Speaker 52 Yeah, I think they painted, they dismantled it. I think that they were like, oh, we're going to like take it up so that it can go someplace else.

Speaker 52 but we're removing it from this part of the city, if that makes sense.

Speaker 53 That's, I mean, that's a symbolic moment, right? Just like pouring the asphalt over the words Black Lives Matter.

Speaker 52 Yeah. And I do really think it, it underscores this moment that we're in right now where it does, I mean, I'm curious for your thoughts.

Speaker 52 It does sort of feel like a pendulum swing in some ways where all of these like largely symbolic gestures are now like being bulldozed over, oftentimes like voluntarily, like without even really being pressured into doing so.

Speaker 53 Right. I guess it's hard, right? Because like painting Black Lives Matter on the sidewalk did nothing for black people, right?

Speaker 53 like did that help you did that materially improve your life no it was purely symbolic but negating that symbolic gesture i think does a lot more harm than never having had it right because that is a that is a an imposition of of will over over what was again a symbol that did nothing and accomplished nothing and didn't actually help anyone or change any situation but taking the time out of your day to bulldoze that symbol sends a strong message.

Speaker 52 I feel the exact same way. And Republican Representative Andrew Clyde actually wants to go further.
He introduced a bill that would have amended the U.S. code to withhold certain funds from D.C.

Speaker 52 unless Black Lives Matter was taken off the street and that area was renamed, quote, Liberty Plaza, and for the district to remove all Black Lives Matter Plaza references from city websites and official documents.

Speaker 52 So they want to like memory hole it and be like, it never happened.

Speaker 53 That's such crybaby bullshit, too, for the like these free speech warriors, right?

Speaker 24 Like, oh, the facts don't care about your feelings.

Speaker 53 Free speech is the most important thing. Like the marketplace of ideas, like, I guess you can't compete in the marketplace of ideas, bucko.

Speaker 52 Exactly. Clyde said, quote, it's time for our nation to leave this failed agenda behind, starting with the removal of BLM Plaza from America's capital.
Trump is 100% right.

Speaker 52 We must clean up DC for the American people. I believe that removing BLM Plaza must be part of this critical effort.

Speaker 52 After all, BLM is a radical, defund the police organization, but we are not a defund the police nation.

Speaker 53 So I know this, you know, clean up the city rhetoric is sort of fascist in and of itself right that that's scary rhetoric regardless but pairing it with like back to back in the same breath like we have to clean up the city we have to get rid of blm plaza like are you saying being reminded that black people have civil liberties is dirty to you that that's what's making the city dirty is the black people i would argue that's exactly what he's saying but dc is like getting upset about black people it's like going to the beach and getting upset when there's sand right it's like we gotta have a whole conversation about dc's demographics but like we are we are a black city like that is what makes DC what it is.

Speaker 52 It's like why I continue to live here, right?

Speaker 52 And so like, I think that's exactly what he's saying is we don't want our nation's capital to be one that honors the, you know, agency of black people, black bodies, and black lives. Right.

Speaker 52 Like, I think that's like what he's saying.

Speaker 53 And move the White House to South Boston, I guess. I don't know what to say.

Speaker 52 So, you know, the mayor pretty quickly relented and BLM Plaza is no more. She basically said like, you know, we've got bigger fish to fry, like focusing on DC's autonomy and budget.

Speaker 52 And to be honest, like a lot of residents agreed with her that like, it probably was not worth the fight.

Speaker 52 That's kind of, that's kind of the theme here is that all of these little things that individually are probably not worth the fight, but then collectively you're like, well, who is sort of in charge of this city, you know?

Speaker 53 And if none of these little things are worth the fight, are you fighting?

Speaker 52 That's a great question. Are you fighting? If nothing is worth the fight, are you fighting?

Speaker 53 And I feel like that's kind of, I don't know, on a larger scale, sort of the National Democratic Party's line has always been, well, we got to keep our powder dry. We got to keep our powder dry.

Speaker 53 Keep them dry for fucking what, dog?

Speaker 52 Right.

Speaker 53 Like you're going to, you're going to end the war, you know, with a pile of bodies and a bunch of dry powder.

Speaker 52 Exactly.

Speaker 52 So the next demand that Trump made of Bowser was the need to clear homeless encampments near the White House, saying that if Bowser didn't do it, he would be forced to do it for her.

Speaker 52 So within hours of Trump's call to Bowser, DC City crews arrived at these encampments to tell residents they had to be out the next day. It's not great.

Speaker 52 Like to be clear, it is not like our mayor does not clear encampments in D.C.

Speaker 52 In fact, her administration said they have been planning to clear the encampment in question, but just doing so in like a more planned, rolled-out way.

Speaker 52 So it's not like she's like someone who is not, you know, down with clearing encampments.

Speaker 52 The Washington Post spoke to some of the people who were residents of those encampments when they were cleared.

Speaker 52 Shelley Byers is someone they spoke to who has been chronically homeless in DC for three years.

Speaker 52 She was living at an encampment that was cleared in 2023 before winding up at the one that Trump wanted cleared. And she said they were basically given no notice that they needed to vacate.

Speaker 52 She said, now we have only less than 24 hours to get out. As she threw her clothing out of her tent, I liked it here.

Speaker 52 They keep shoving us off from place to place, making it so we don't have anywhere to go.

Speaker 52 The Post also spoke to the president of Miriam's Kitchen, which is a big nonprofit here in DC that provides services for the homeless.

Speaker 52 And he said that it wasn't even clear, like he wasn't even sure if the city followed proper protocols with this hasty encampment clearing at Trump's direction.

Speaker 52 Encampment residents are meant to be given two weeks' notice, but people who were cleared said that they only learned about that action within 24 hours.

Speaker 2 And so I think that's part of the issue here.

Speaker 52 DC, like any city, has issues like crime and homelessness, but like getting people housed takes time.

Speaker 52 Like just wanting to quickly move people who might not have anywhere else to go because they look, as Trump said, unseemly or unsightly is not solving the problem.

Speaker 52 What you're actually doing is just traumatizing people who are already vulnerable and then forcing them to go elsewhere, exactly like that woman told the post.

Speaker 53 Right.

Speaker 53 Like even in the best case scenario, even the most organized clearing of an encampment is, I mean, it's violent and it's inhumane and it doesn't really serve a greater purpose other than, I don't know, so that people don't have to think about homelessness on their way to work.

Speaker 53 But there is a way to do it that is at least theoretically

Speaker 53 could result in something that is not monstrous. You know what I mean? Like, like I said, there's no good way to clear an encampment unless you're giving everyone an apartment.

Speaker 53 But right, like you're giving people two weeks' notice, lets social services get involved, lets them go, you know, tent to tent for those two weeks, talking to people about where they could go, giving them options, connecting them with services if that's what they choose.

Speaker 53 Like, but if you're just rolling up overnight and throwing people's shit away, you're not. You're not solving a problem.
You're not even trying to solve a problem.

Speaker 53 You're not even pretending that you're trying to solve a problem.

Speaker 52 But I think that's exactly how Trump thinks about this issue. It just like looks bad and unseemly to him.
So I don't care where they go. I don't care how you do it.

Speaker 52 Just, I don't want to be looking at them.

Speaker 53 Right. Cause for him, it's not, it's not about getting these people connected to services so that they might eventually find stable housing.

Speaker 53 It's about, I don't want to fucking see these people because they're gross.

Speaker 52 Exactly. And like, he is encroaching on how our city is run.
Right. And so, like, if that is the ethos that you have, I don't want to see these gross people.
I don't care where they go.

Speaker 52 This is not an ethos that responsibly is able to run a city. Like, like, that is really.
It's disruptive.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's absolutely disruptive.

Speaker 53 Because they'll go somewhere else. They'll go somewhere else.
And now they, now their lives have been uprooted.

Speaker 53 They don't have, maybe the documents got thrown away and it's going to be even harder for them to find stability.

Speaker 24 Like you have not addressed the problem.

Speaker 52 Exactly. And I think that's what, that's like the name of the game with the way that Trump has already been, you know, meddling in the way that DC runs its local affairs.

Speaker 52 This next example, I got to say, it really gets to me.

Speaker 52 So DC's Attorney General, Brian Schwab, recently dropped a lawsuit against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for their behavior during January 6th.

Speaker 52 So this suit was initially filed by the former D.C. Attorney General Carl A.
Racine.

Speaker 52 It initially marks the first effort by a government agency to hold the individuals and organizations civilly liable for violence at the Capitol on January 6th. But a federal judge in D.C.

Speaker 52 granted the district's request to dismiss that case. The suit was fashioned after a modern version of the 1871 law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.

Speaker 52 that was enacted after the Civil War to safeguard government officials carrying out their duties to protect civil rights.

Speaker 52 This was actually a similar challenge that prevailed against groups involved in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which Molly, I know you might know a thing or two about. Let's just see.

Speaker 53 I'm very familiar with Klan Act lawsuits.

Speaker 2 And they are effective.

Speaker 53 They're effective. It's one of the only things that we still have from Reconstruction that hasn't been taken away from us is this civil remedy for civil rights violations.

Speaker 2 And it works.

Speaker 52 It works, but like you have to carry it out. And basically the city decided that it wasn't worth it given all of the threats to DC's autonomy by the Trump administration.

Speaker 53 So it's extortion.

Speaker 52 I mean, yeah, like that's exactly what it feels like.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is extortion.

Speaker 53 They're being prevented. They're being prevented from seeking a viable civil remedy through the courts out of fear of retaliation.

Speaker 5 That seems very bad.

Speaker 52 It's like, I mean, I'm glad that you used the word extortion because it really does feel like...

Speaker 52 If you've seen one of my favorite movies, Goodfellas, it feels like what Henry Hill, the mobster, calls real greaseball shit, right? Like, ooh, great city you have here.

Speaker 52 It would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Speaker 2 Like, extortion. Right.

Speaker 53 God, but usually, I mean, sometimes you get something out of a protection racket. D.C.'s not even fucking getting anything out of this.

Speaker 52 I guess you could argue that they are like not raising the ire further of the Trump administration and that, like, that might lead to DC having more autonomy and like DC, you know, like Trump officials not meddling in D.C.'s affairs.

Speaker 53 I mean, I don't know if any of these people have read a book,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 53 appeasing of fascists has historically not resulted in you getting what you want.

Speaker 52 No, and I got to be honest, girl, this one fucking stung. Like, it sucks hearing people like the Proud Boys leader Enrique Terrio basically brag about having this case dropped.

Speaker 52 The Oath Keepers founder, Stuart Rhodes, his attorney said, We are very pleased to see the District of Columbia has come to the same conclusion that the American public and President Trump have.

Speaker 52 The narrative that January 6th was some sort of armed insurrection to overthrow the government was false from the very beginning.

Speaker 52 Enrique Terrio posted after the district requested to dismiss this lawsuit saying, another exoneration. If God is with us, who can be against us? Like, it just chaps my ass to hear this shit.

Speaker 53 Like, God didn't do this, baby.

Speaker 24 God didn't do this.

Speaker 52 You also have DC's Metro Police investigating the vandalization of Teslas as a hate crime.

Speaker 52 This, again, like, it really makes me wonder, like, as far as I know, Trump is not in charge of our Metropolitan Police Department.

Speaker 52 But stuff like this makes me wonder, we're like, is he kind of in charge?

Speaker 53 I mean, pressure is clearly being exerted.

Speaker 52 Basically, somebody wrote, quote, political hate speech on a Tesla, the statement from the Metropolitan Police Department said they were investigating these offenses as being motivated by hate or bias.

Speaker 52 To be clear, Mayor Bowser was like, I didn't tell them to do this. Like, she was like, I have nothing to do with the police department's decision making on this.
Like, that's them.

Speaker 53 Hate crime typically implicates a protected class, like race, gender, religion, national origin. What is the protected class of being a Tesla owner?

Speaker 53 Is being a big loser a protected class now?

Speaker 52 Unclear. And they wouldn't even say, like, what was the nature of what was written on this car that made it a potential hate crime? Like, we don't even know.

Speaker 53 Which is so funny because these guys never believed in hate crimes before.

Speaker 52 Unless it's against, like, Elon Musk and people who like him.

Speaker 52 That's the best I can figure.

Speaker 53 But I've heard full-throated arguments against the existence of the category of hate crime. And now suddenly they're very important.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Now they're very important.

Speaker 52 And I do think, I mean, like, when I heard about this, it really made me think about how different categories of crime and legislation around it is like very well-intended and well-meaning.

Speaker 52 And like, I understand who hate crime legislation is meant to protect.

Speaker 52 But then you also have the ways that it can be sort of like perverted to protect a protective class that is not a protected class, right? Like it's.

Speaker 53 I mean, it's the same as the language around terrorism, right? That like terrorism wasn't something that we were talking about or charging.

Speaker 53 It's not even very well defined in the law, to be honest, but it's something that became part of the conversation when America became very afraid of Muslims, became very afraid of Middle Eastern people, right?

Speaker 53 So terrorism had that implication for a very long time. And then there was this brief window in the last couple of years where they were using it against domestic white extremists.

Speaker 53 And now they're not doing that anymore. And they're just going to charge you with terrorism for looking sideways at a Tesla.

Speaker 52 Exactly.

Speaker 52 Here's how my co-host and friend, Michael Schaefer, who writes the Capital Cities column for Politico, put it, he says, now the White House is beating the drums about Tesla vandalism, creating another incentive for locals to play ball.

Speaker 52 The FBI director called Tesla vandalism domestic terrorism. The president suggested sending vandals to jail in El Salvador.

Speaker 52 If likening the run-of-the-mill political graffiti to criminal bigotry is what it takes to keep the feds from padlocking City Hall, the logic goes, maybe it's worth it. No, it's not.

Speaker 52 I would say it's not. No, no, it's not.

Speaker 53 Maybe they want to do extraordinary rendition to vandals, but maybe it's worth it.

Speaker 52 No, it's not worth it.

Speaker 52 It's not worth it.

Speaker 53 You're not going to, you're not holding back the tide of fascism if you allow fascism to happen.

Speaker 52 Unlike local governments in Cleveland or Boston, DC is really stuck between a rock and a hard place. And I mean, like, I understand

Speaker 52 why city officials are taking this like appeasement angle, but like,

Speaker 52 I guess, as you said, like, I don't know how you can make the argument that it's like worth it.

Speaker 52 Like, what are we getting if every single day it's going to be a new threat to DC's autonomy, a new threat to DC, a new EO from the Trump administration, what are we really getting by playing ball in this way?

Speaker 53 Right.

Speaker 53 And if you're saying you're saving your energy for the big fight, it's like, well, what do you think the big fight is going to be if it's not the slow erosion of the safety and civil liberties of everyone who lives here?

Speaker 53 Exactly. What is the big fight?

Speaker 52 Well, some might say the big fight is DC's tense budget showdown, which is ongoing.

Speaker 52 It's a little in the weedsy, so like I'm not going to get too, too into it, but I'll try to give you the quick and dirty version of what's going on.

Speaker 52 The district is overseen by Congress thanks to a provision in the Constitution.

Speaker 52 So this means that DC is occasionally treated like a federal agency rather than like a city or a local government under various laws.

Speaker 52 This used to mean that DC's budget was regularly delayed because of this.

Speaker 52 The city had to wait for Congress to approve DC's local budget alongside other federal agencies, which Congress is like almost never does on time.

Speaker 52 So pretty much everybody agreed like this was a problem.

Speaker 52 So in the early 2000s, they changed it so that if Congress was behind schedule, DC could just keep spending at its current budget levels without disruption until Congress is able to formally approve a new budget.

Speaker 52 But in March, that all changed because the language was omitted from a new funding bill that Congress passed in March that would basically force DC to omit $1 billion from its budget.

Speaker 52 Just to be clear, like if DC were to omit $1 billion from the budget, we basically could not function as a city.

Speaker 52 The things that you need to run a city, schools, garbage collection, all of that would be cut to the point of like not being viable.

Speaker 52 I'm not even sure what that would mean for the city to make that deep of a cut. And the worst part is nobody really knows why Congress did this.

Speaker 52 Like in my capacity as co-host for a local DC podcast, CityCast DC, I've spoken to a lot of people in DC government and reporters.

Speaker 52 And the best I can come up with is that Congress just really does not understand what they have done.

Speaker 52 A reporter that I spoke to said that there seemed to be confusion with lawmakers that we were talking about DC's local tax money and not federal money.

Speaker 52 And so this was happening in March during the height of like Doge

Speaker 52 efficiency. I'm putting efficiency in like heavy scare quotes.
It was at the height of that.

Speaker 52 And so the best I could think was that lawmakers thought like, oh, this will, we will be able to like say that, you know, making DC cut a billion dollars from the budget will be a big show of federal tax dollar savings.

Speaker 52 But we're not talking about federal money. We're talking about local tax money, not federal money.
It doesn't save anybody any federal money.

Speaker 52 And so I think that from what I've heard, it sounds like people like Mike Johnson just maybe like did not really have a good understanding of that.

Speaker 52 It is a little bit complicated, but like if you're a lawmaker, like, come on, dude.

Speaker 53 But again, because you have no representative who is really involved in this process, like there's nobody in that room going to bat for DC.

Speaker 53 There's nobody in that room whose constituency is DC, who understands what it means to run DC.

Speaker 52 Exactly. And what's funny is that like for all the talk about like how DC, how like we're not a defund the police nation, this bill would kind of defund D.C.
police. It would have to mean

Speaker 52 like it would mean like $67 million cut from the DC police budget, along with cutting funding for D.C.

Speaker 52 public schools and the Department of Human Services, which serves the city's poorest residents, right?

Speaker 2 So like it would defund everything, including the police.

Speaker 52 So it's like funny to be like, we're not down with defund the police, but we are down with this bill that kind of does it?

Speaker 53 Right. Like, who do you think is going to fill the potholes? Who's going to mow the grass? Like, nothing will get done.
The city will fall apart.

Speaker 52 Well, so our mayor has really been doing her diplomacy thing and appealing to exactly that, right?

Speaker 52 Like Trump has been really clear about all these goals he has for the district, like beautifying DC and cracking down on crime and homelessness.

Speaker 52 There is no way to do that if you are slashing the budgets of these departments that are meant to work on those things by tens of millions of dollars.

Speaker 53 Who's going going to prune the cherry trees?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, who's going to prune?

Speaker 52 Almost as if Trump doesn't really care about doing any of this stuff. He's just like talking big and doesn't give a shit about how it actually plays out.

Speaker 53 He doesn't know how anything works.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 52 I mean, that's really the bottom line for me is that when you have Trump really loudly talking about the ways that he is meddling in the way that DC is run, he's not someone who is good at efficiently governing.

Speaker 52 And so like, you know, say what you will about DC. We had a function, we we have a functioning local government, a functioning city, putting somebody like Trump in charge of how things get done.

Speaker 52 What happens to encampments? What happens to education? What happens to crime? Like, that's just a terrible, terrible move for the city.

Speaker 53 I mean, it's like, you know, at a shitty retail job, you get a new assistant store manager and they try to change the way the schedule gets made just so they can look like they're doing something, so they can feel like they're in charge.

Speaker 53 And it's like, yeah, dog, that's just not how things work at this store. Like, it won't function if the key holder doesn't open.

Speaker 52 I wish I could tell Trump that. Like, I'm taken back to my days of working retail at the mall where I, where you could just be like, actually, Greg, that's not how it works here at this Claire's.

Speaker 52 I used to work at Claire's.

Speaker 2 It just won't work like that.

Speaker 53 Like, I know you're very important and you're in charge here, but it's just like, it won't work.

Speaker 2 It won't work.

Speaker 52 So, yeah, I mean, as of today, there has not been a vote on DC's budget.

Speaker 52 Trump actually signaled that he is on board for a fix that would prevent this billion dollar cut and he urged the senate to vote for it he posted the house should take up the dc funding fix that the senate passed and get it done immediately all caps but everybody's on recess and so in the meantime like it's not clear what's going to happen and the city did announce that they're looking at making cuts and furloughing staffs uh because it's not clear what's going to happen so you know so it's not it's not that the city doesn't have the it's not like the city is broke like the city has the money they're just not allowed to budget it yes exactly that and for no reason

Speaker 52 it's a fake problem it's a fake problem.

Speaker 52 But again, I don't know that people like Mike Johnson understand that there are people who live here who, you know, just want to have their trash taken out, just want to be able to educate their kids, just want to be able to like live our lives in the city.

Speaker 52 And I think I said this on it could happen here before, but I have to feel like it's punitive, right? Like DC,

Speaker 52 nobody didn't vote for Trump like VC didn't vote for Trump. Like, you know, Nikki Haley won DC's Republican primary, not even Trump, right?

Speaker 52 So like we have made it very clear that we don't like him and we don't want him here.

Speaker 52 And I guess I just have to say the only thing that makes sense as to why Congress would do this is punitive, is to be like, fuck DC and the progressive, hippy-dippy, educated people who live there.

Speaker 52 Like, it just feels like a punitive attack on the district.

Speaker 53 But again, just like shooting themselves in the dick. Because, like, if the city falls apart, like, you still work here.
You still have to drive on the streets here.

Speaker 52 Well, I mean, if Trump gets his way and DC just becomes like a, instead of a city, like a military compound that is controlled by like his goons.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 53 Like a sort of a, like a Trump Vatican City where he's the king of this little tiny country.

Speaker 52 That is my ultimate biggest fear about what is on the horizon for DC. That is like the ultimate, ultimate like negative fear that I have.

Speaker 52 And I guess bottom line is like, this is why DC needs statehood. Like we are facing such unique threats from the Trump administration that no other place in the United States faces.

Speaker 52 You know, there are a million reasons for DC to become a state, but this just, I think that the way that Trump is acting toward our city, toward our mayor, toward our council, with regards to our budget, like it all just makes so much sense that our residents should not be at the behest of somebody like Trump to have our city run the way that we want it to be run.

Speaker 53 And yeah. It just doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense.

Speaker 53 The city should be able to make its own budget. There's no reason for it to function like this.

Speaker 52 There is no reason for it. So, from your lips to God's ears, I hope.

Speaker 53 Yeah. So, like, I guess what should people look for? Like, what's the next step in this process? Like, when's the next vote on this?

Speaker 52 So, when lawmakers are back in session, we should have some sense of what's going on with DC's budget. The thing I would end with is like, Give a shit about DC.

Speaker 52 Like, don't, don't be somebody who perpetuates the idea that the only thing happening in DC is like national politics and like where national conversations are happening because, you know, there are 600,000 people who live here and we want to be able to control our city and control our tax money.

Speaker 52 Like I pay taxes just like anybody else and it's ridiculous that I get less of a say than everybody else. So if you don't live in D.C.

Speaker 52 and you hear about Congress or the Senate voting on stuff that impacts D.C. residents, like you might hear about them voting on the D.C.
budget fix bill.

Speaker 52 you can call your representatives and advocate on our behalf and kind of be our voice because we don't really get one. Hopefully this all gives you a sense of what's at stake for us.

Speaker 52 So please give a shit about DC.

Speaker 53 Give a shit about DC. And hopefully you guys still have garbage services.

Speaker 2 We'll see.

Speaker 52 Molly, thank you for running through all of this with me. You're such a good co-host.

Speaker 53 Yeah, this was fun. Yeah, I listened to Bridget's podcast.
There are no girls on the internet. Listen to Weird Little Guys, a Webby award-winning podcast.

Speaker 52 Yes. So deserved.
Are you like keeping your wedding secret? Is that something I can talk about?

Speaker 53 Well, I did tell the listeners just because there's going to be some reruns coming up that I'm getting married soon. So I will be out of town for a little bit.

Speaker 2 But yeah, so I got a lot going on. I got my weird little guys.

Speaker 53 I got my weird little wedding.

Speaker 52 Well, congratulations. I was telling you off mic that, like, I love it when women who do work in the like extremism, right-wing space have happy, thriving personal lives.
So it brings me a lot of joy.

Speaker 52 Deeply, congratulations.

Speaker 53 Thank you. Yeah, I am experiencing a lot of joy.

Speaker 52 You deserve it.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

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Speaker 32 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentlemen's Gaming.

Speaker 39 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

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Speaker 50 Com, com. Global, global, global,

Speaker 6 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 8 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 11 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 13 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 14 We got clear facts.

Speaker 17 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 19 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 20 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 21 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 22 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast normally about it happening here being, you know, the real world where you live.

Speaker 2 But for the next two weeks after this, and for the week before this, and for this week, we're talking about it happening in a galaxy far, far away.

Speaker 2 That's right, this is the second in our four-part series reviewing and discussing Andor Season 2, which due to a series of incredibly unlikely events has become the most radical media to reach a wide audience in the United States in quite some time.

Speaker 2 I am here with Mia Wong and Garrison Davis. How are we all doing today? Hanging in there.
Hanging in there.

Speaker 2 As we always are.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just watched episodes seven through nine last night, which is really helping with the hanging in there. I have not seen that shit yet.

Speaker 24 Yeah, that's for next week, though. We have to say that for next week.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Yeah, well, we're not talking about them now, but we watched them this week, and I'm happy.

Speaker 24 I did watch them, and oh boy, but we still have a lot to talk about for episodes four to six.

Speaker 24 It does kind of set up what we see later on, but I think there's a lot of interesting stuff there with like building an underground resistance, a lot of spies and espionage mixed in with like the personal cost of rebellion and how it affects like your personal life, your relationships.

Speaker 24 So, there is a lot to discuss here, but oh boy, I am excited for next week.

Speaker 2 Yes, I I am very excited for next week. I'm very excited for this week, which we should talk about.
So kind of there's a few themes running through these three episodes.

Speaker 2 One of them is, yeah, the cost in terms of your personal life on being part of a rebellion.

Speaker 2 And yeah,

Speaker 2 I'm interested kind of what are some of the, I mean, there's one real standout moment in these episodes that I know we're all going to want to talk about, which is a speech given by Saul Guerrera.

Speaker 2 Saw, yeah.

Speaker 24 Played by forrest whitaker uh just just amazingly yeah the nitrous speech yeah the nitrous we'll get to it we'll get to that but yeah we should start with the first of these episodes yeah episode four ever been to gorman uh i guess once again if if you do not want to be giving disney plus your money you can be like hondo andaka

Speaker 24 and acquire the show that way remember the torrent combinations remember the variations gotta keep them all in your head yes yes all nine or eight uh variations let's do a quick recap of this episode, then we'll talk about some of these aspects.

Speaker 24 So, one year later, from the previous episodes, Cassian and Bix are on the planet Coruscant staying at a safe house in between running missions for Luthan.

Speaker 24 Bix is severely struggling with PTSD, while Cassian is stressed about having to avoid surveillance while hiding in the capital city.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and Bix is also, we find out, abusing space Xanax.

Speaker 24 Yeah, later on,

Speaker 24 we can see that she's

Speaker 24 using space drugs to help her cope with the massive amounts of trauma that she's been forced to deal with the past few years.

Speaker 24 Now, our favorite weasel, Cyril Karn, has been transferred to the planet Gourmet, where he's running the local Bureau of Standards in the capital city of Palmo.

Speaker 24 He refutes Imperial propaganda about Gourmet while on a FaceTime call with his Fox News addictive moment.

Speaker 2 He's talking about, like, yeah, the Imperial, uh, the Imperial News says the Gormans are super arrogant, just real assholes.

Speaker 24 You gotta stop watching Imperial News, man.

Speaker 24 But this may be a ploy from Cyril because Cyril knows he's being monitored and surveilled by members of the Gourmand Front, a small underground resistance group.

Speaker 24 While working as a double agent for his ISB girlfriend Debra, Syrtle gets invited to a town hall meeting where he's introduced to the leader of the Gorman Front, a local businessman and city councilor, and then Cyril is recruited into the resistance.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I want to say a little about the Gorman Front because they're very clearly French resistance in World War II coded.

Speaker 2 they developed a whole like language for them to speak which is basically like french with french phonics but different words but different words and so it sounds a little bit like french and german like got mashed together people who speak both have told me i don't know i i'm not a not a language guy but it sounds distinctive and they're very clearly like again their whole the whole industry of this planet is high quality textiles that come from like spider silk but also clearly the the the guy who's leading the resistance his business is kind of meant to evoke sort of like a classic like French vineyard.

Speaker 2 Like so he's like, he's not a poor man, right? Like no, he's like, he's like wealthy.

Speaker 24 He's like well off. Yes.
Yes. I mean, that's a big part about like Gorman is this is like a you know middle upper class like status planet.
Yeah.

Speaker 24 This is like a big part of like Luthan's interest in the planet is if he can bring a planet with that status into the rebellion, that could have a whole bunch of advantages.

Speaker 24 And that's kind of why he's at least like looking into them as like an option. and eventually kind of setting them up for like an accelerationist push.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because I actually think it's a slightly different even than that, but we'll talk about that when we get to episode nine. Yeah.
Sure.

Speaker 24 There's an ISB board meeting where they discuss a batch of new raids and arrests on rebel activity and how to deal with this influx of arrests that's making it hard to process and obtain useful information.

Speaker 24 Luthan's ISB spy informs them of the Empire's increased interest in Gorman and that the ISB is running covert operations on the planet.

Speaker 24 Meanwhile, Senator Monmothma unsuccessfully lobbies against the Emperor's resentencing directive, and at Saw Guerrera's hideout, Willem teaches Saw's partisans how to safely deploy a fuel pipeline diverter.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and specifically, Saw puts him with one of his guys who's kind of coded as being like a close to Saul, like this is somebody that he really trusts.

Speaker 2 And it's kind of implied fairly soon that like Saw doesn't want this guy going back to Luthen with information, right? He wants to keep Willem. Yeah, he has just like kidnapped this guy.
It's like.

Speaker 2 Well, he wants to kill him at first. That's the statement he makes to his guy is like, once you have these variations down, we're going to ice him.

Speaker 24 Saw doesn't really trust Luthan very much anymore.

Speaker 2 He never did.

Speaker 24 Luthan's slowly losing a lot of the trust that he's built up throughout the galaxy.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But like one of the things that's interesting here is that like we kind of see Saw's paranoia where there's a bunch of variations you need to know to get fuel out of any number of different things.

Speaker 2 And the guy's like, I have to memorize too many. If you just let us know which one we're trying to go after, but that would make it clear which fuel station they're going after.

Speaker 2 So Saw doesn't want to say shit initially.

Speaker 24 So this episode, we're introduced to the planet Gourmand like in person. It's basically like northern Italy mixed with French culture.
Yeah.

Speaker 24 The massive set they built is just gorgeous, like huge, huge town square for the capital city of Palmo.

Speaker 2 The amount of money they spent on this show.

Speaker 2 The protesters, I think, is really interesting because it's like...

Speaker 24 It's protesters at like the monument of the Tarkin massacre.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.
They're sort of fascinating because it's like the way that their banners are designed really, really remind me of like pictures you see from like 1917.

Speaker 2 It's like very, very similar to that. And also they have a thing that's a very common protest thing where it's like there's a, there's, you know, there's protests going on.

Speaker 2 So there's like just like 10 guys in the square all the time. Yes.
Kind of like chanting stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 24 Always making noise.

Speaker 2 They're kind of keeping a vigil because basically what happened is

Speaker 2 and this is another interesting Tony Gurui is kind of famously not a Star Wars fan like prior to working on this.

Speaker 2 And so there was a lot of like anxiety from big Star Star Wars nerds that like, oh, this isn't going to feel like Star Wars.

Speaker 2 But it clearly has a lot of folks who understand not just like the stuff that's come out, you know, since Disney started in the different books and comics, but like the legend stuff.

Speaker 2 Because in Legends, like a major spark of the whole rebellion was the Gorman Massacre, which is in Tarkin lands. And Tarkin's the old guy in the Death Star in A New Hope.
right?

Speaker 2 Like he's the guy who's Darth Vader's boss in the first movie. And he lands a craft on a crowd at Gorman.
And that's supposed to to have been one of the major sparks.

Speaker 2 And they've retconned it a little, but to the point where that still happened, but it's clearly the setup for a larger massacre that this season is building towards. Yeah.

Speaker 24 Man, Space Fox News, very good. We see the Ministry of Enlightenment's efforts to weaponize public opinion and how much it's working on

Speaker 24 someone like Cyril's mother, who then becomes convinced that the propaganda that she's being fed is stuff that she already believed, absolutely, right?

Speaker 24 Is stuff that she's retconned into her own memory of being like, no, like, I've, I've always never trusted the gore, yeah.

Speaker 24 Um, meanwhile, she's like sitting in front of her like TV like 24-7 watching this, like, the garbage get beamed into her brain.

Speaker 2 And I'm wondering, did y'all wonder for a second if Cyril was legitimately getting pilled by the Gorman resistant? Yeah, because it's, it's good, right?

Speaker 2 There's like that moment where you're like, well, fuck, is he, is our boy like starting to have a break already? And then you realize, like, no.

Speaker 24 That's, that's what we're getting, like, that's kind of what's being set up. It's like, how, will

Speaker 24 this experience for Cyril like change him as a person? And I think, yeah, the audience is meant to not fully know. And I think it's, it's definitely like possible,

Speaker 24 but, but Cyril might be more of a hard ass than what some people give him credit for. Yeah.
Because he is, he's very excited to get invited to this meeting.

Speaker 24 He purchases a spider from one of like the Gorman Front like recruiters that has information on how to, how to go to this like public town hall where he talks about, hey, you know, if maybe, maybe we can can start working together maybe i can start feeding information one point hilariously he gets he gets accused of being an imperial spy in like a joking manner yeah

Speaker 24 and denies it and then he gets on the phone with his iSp girlfriend is like i'm in

Speaker 2 this is this is this is one of the first times we see this the gorman front people

Speaker 2 these people have no idea what the fuck they're doing they are amateurs very green they are like very green yeah like their operational security is unbelievably dog shit they like wiretapped one guy and were like hey let me introduce you to the leader of our organization we have met you one time we have listened to one phone call you're in now

Speaker 2 I just I think they've probably listened to more than one but it's yeah they've definitely been watching him for a while

Speaker 2 him much they just were kind of like hey you're gonna like meet our leader now at the first meeting you've shown up to

Speaker 24 He met like the public facing aspect of it, I guess.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 you can see the Gorman, like they have some degree of sophistication in that they're tapping like him and they've been listening probably for quite a while and they sweep their shit every day for bugs so you you understand that like they have an idea of what they need to be doing but when it comes to all of the in-person stuff yeah that's where they're incompetent right where they they don't have the actual operational experience to know when someone feels off right like that's the stuff that they're missing like man to man on the ground is where the problems come in like you can tell they're thinking this stuff through but they just don't know what they're doing enough this is this is the thing you i mean this is the thing you genuinely run into like in the field a lot where there's people who like have read a lot of stuff about operational security, but haven't done anything.

Speaker 2 And so they don't understand there's varying levels of this, right? But you get this to do people where it's like they don't know what the important things are.

Speaker 2 So they do some of the stuff right that they've read, but they don't understand how to put all of it together to like do something securely.

Speaker 2 And so you'll get these things where like some of their stuff is like unbelievably secure to a point where it's useless.

Speaker 2 And then some of it is like very open yeah yeah they're just like hey have i don't know yeah they'll just bring people into stuff that instantly compromises everything that they're doing because they haven't like thought it through yeah i mean and this is something that that cassian talks about in the next episode which we will get to shortly yeah i mean so much of these episodes is built around like paranoia and like surveillance

Speaker 24 like cassian's talking about not wanting to go like on a walk in the park because the Empire just put up cameras. He's nervous about like where they go grocery shopping.
Like he's he's trying to like

Speaker 24 everything right, but it's like hurting his relationship with BIX. And it's just making their life very, very challenging on Coruscant as they're like stationed there in between missions.

Speaker 24 Like meanwhile, like Luthan is just trying to gain as much information on Gorman as possible. He has a line that I like, a smear campaign is an opening move, not an end game.
I need the end game.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Talking about like the limits of the Empire's Fox News. style propaganda is is only is only like a starting position.
Like this is obviously leading somewhere and I need to know where that is.

Speaker 24 And he's going to obtain that information slowly over the course of the next few episodes.

Speaker 24 And then I think the other thing I want to talk about before we go on break is Mon Mothma's lobbying against like the prison sentencing guidelines.

Speaker 24 She says, quote, sector boundaries, civil liberties, personal freedom, respect for local traditions. You've been voting with me on these issues for years.

Speaker 24 And the Gorman senator replies, this is security, Mon. You're confusing criminality and politics here.
Mon says, really? Are we finding criminals or are we making them?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 24 This is where you see senators parroting like fake crime stats about how there's been like, you know, this increased wave of people.

Speaker 2 But that's not true. Yeah.

Speaker 24 Because just because just because they're arresting more people, so that makes there be more crime.

Speaker 24 And like you see this in season one where Cassian's arrested at the beach planet for like no reason and then sentenced to the forever prison. Yeah.
Like, yeah, they are arresting more people.

Speaker 24 So if you just look at those stats by itself without any context on like how other policing is working, then yeah, it can look a certain way. And this is what Mon's trying to like push back on.

Speaker 24 And the other senators are just too like bought into the empire or too scared. Like the Gorman senator believes that voting against the emperor at this point would further endanger his planet.
Yeah.

Speaker 24 Even though this type of thing is actually going to end up biting him in the ass in the next few years.

Speaker 2 Yes. And yeah, he is like very much desperate to like, no, please, we can we can calm this down if we just don't piss the empire off enough.
No.

Speaker 2 The thing I think is actually is interesting about the the the crime statistics stuff is that this is actually a more sophisticated operation than what happened in real life where in real life all the actual crime statistics were like crime is falling but everyone just kept saying there was more crime totally yeah totally this is like arresting more people to jack the crime rates that is a more sophisticated thing than what we actually dealt with which was the media just lying our our own version of this our our not outer space version of like propaganda news media can just say something and you don't even need the stats to back it up.

Speaker 24 Yeah. Let's go and break and we'll come back to talk about episode five.
I have friends everywhere.

Speaker 2 Ah

Speaker 2 And we're back.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so yeah, let's start with the summary of this episode. All right.

Speaker 24 Luthan wants a first-person assessment of the Gorman front, but he's like too high profile to go himself, so he sends Cassian undercover as fashion designer Varian Sky.

Speaker 24 The ISB stages a performative raid of Cyril Karn's office to gain more cred with local rebels as Cyril begins to feed them select information.

Speaker 2 And he does such a good job of seeming pissed at it. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 24 He loves pretending to be pissed at the ISB.

Speaker 2 He has so much fun kicking his little trash can across the room.

Speaker 2 This is outrageous. Yeah.

Speaker 24 Very good stuff.

Speaker 24 And I do like, yeah, like the weaponization of like state repression as a tactic to actually increase state repression like long term doing this like performative show so that cyril like builds trust and like solidarity with the other rebels very good luthan visits bix at the safe house and grows concerned for her well-being as she uses space drugs to cope with trauma yeah cyril arrives back on coruscant to report to isp command uh has a one-hour meeting with his girlfriend where they turn off the lights.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 2 After arguing, because she's had him followed. After arguing.

Speaker 24 Yeah, he's a little bit pissed that she's having him followed. And then she orders him to turn off the lights and then they do something for an hour in their apartment.

Speaker 2 God only knows.

Speaker 2 I don't want to know. I don't want to know what they did up to.

Speaker 24 But at ISB Command, they plan how to carefully push the Gorman front into taking action against the Empire.

Speaker 24 Cassian makes contact on Gorman and is unimpressed with their operational security and warns against trusting an imperial source as the ISB could be feeding false intel.

Speaker 2 Some of the best moments in the episode so far, because it's, they don't know shit about Cassian, so they don't know who they're talking to.

Speaker 2 And when he's like, you guys shouldn't do fuck right now because you don't know shit about fuck. They're like, well, you're not a real revolutionary.
You don't get it.

Speaker 24 And like, honestly, I understand what

Speaker 24 what's being expressed there too.

Speaker 2 And like, we'll get to that in a sec.

Speaker 24 Like the Gorman Front is adamant that their source is vetted and reliable, even though they haven't really been vetted.

Speaker 24 The plan is that the resistance seeks to expose the construction of an imperial military base on Palmo, something that the Empire denies, though it seems most of the citizens actually already take this to be true.

Speaker 24 And/or questions the necessity of this plan, and relations sour with the group.

Speaker 24 Back on Coruscant, Klea learns through radio chatter that one of Luthen's listening devices may be discovered during an artifact reappraisal.

Speaker 24 Saw kills an imperial spy and his crew, forcibly recruits Willem, and while on mission installing a fuel diverter, Saw convinces Willem to huff the fuel fumes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we'll talk about that in a second.

Speaker 24 I want to talk a little bit about like Cassian on Gorman.

Speaker 2 Yes. And

Speaker 24 there's a lot of interesting stuff there. And like...

Speaker 24 specifically when the Gorman front leader like calls Cassian out for like not being a real like revolutionary, which I think is like kind of true. Like Cassian at this point is a thief and a soldier.

Speaker 24 He thinks about things purely from that like operationally like tactical point of view. He doesn't have like a larger like politics he's like focused on, right?

Speaker 24 Like Luthan is more of like a revolutionary, a very like manipulative one, but like he is focused on like this like larger political game.

Speaker 24 And this is something that at this point, Cassian's not fully like interested in. He's more interested in like on the ground like tactical preparedness.

Speaker 2 He is interested in what he can do and get away with, right? Exactly. As opposed to Luthan is interested in what does more damage to the empire.

Speaker 2 Now, what's interesting to me is that the Gorman front are actually in the middle. They think

Speaker 2 that they are willing to do whatever, but they don't understand what that is. And part of what you are seeing here is the Gorman front are adamant, we are ready for war.
We're already in a war.

Speaker 2 And they're not technically wrong about that because the Empire is planning to wipe them out. right? We know the Empire does not plan for there to be a Gorman in the future.

Speaker 2 So the stakes are where they're saying they are. But even though they're saying that, most of them don't truly believe or understand it.
And Cassian understands what war is.

Speaker 2 And what he is telling them is that you are, and he's right about this. You are not ready for what you think you're ready for.
Yeah. Totally.
Because what you're going to do is die. All of you.

Speaker 24 That's what makes all their interaction so interesting because there is that unspoken tension, which slowly gets like aired. Because like they're really assessing different things.

Speaker 24 Like what Cassian's assessing is different from what Luthan wants assessed. And that's different from what the Gourmand Front actually want to do.

Speaker 24 Like they're okay with the degree of casualties being had because they just want to have control over their planet again and put up any resistance, even if it ends up leading to hardship.

Speaker 2 But I think the other angle of that too, though, is that they don't know what they're doing. Right.
No.

Speaker 2 Their plan is genuinely really bad. Right.
Like the plan is

Speaker 2 they want to like steal an imperial weapons shipment and then reveal that the Empire is shipping weapons in.

Speaker 2 But if you do that, then you've just like, and Andrew points this out, like, okay, so if you do this, then you reveal that

Speaker 2 you hijacked the shipment. So they're just going to like raid you all.
And they're okay with that. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 24 But like, and they're like okay with that visibility at this point.

Speaker 2 Well, and there's this very standard, it's also this very common, and this is part of what Cassian recognizes, this common myopic thing that you get with people who, again, think they want a war that they don't truly understand the meaning of, where they're like,

Speaker 2 we need weapons. And when they think of weapons, they think of guns that they can hold.
And so that's what they're focused on getting. And that's what they think will let them fight the empire.

Speaker 2 When Cassidy understands there's no fighting the empire with what you can possibly get from a raid like this, all there is is suicide.

Speaker 2 And then there's the other level of what Luthan understands is, so the fuck what?

Speaker 24 Sometimes that needs to happen.

Speaker 2 What matters is that these people die in public and it pisses people off. Yeah.
Right. And that's, there's this, there's this escalation of like the Gormans think having guns means you can fight back.

Speaker 24 Or like guns, guns means that they'll be safer.

Speaker 2 Right. And they're wrong.
Cassian thinks staying alive for a future moment means that you can fight back. And he is wrong.

Speaker 2 Luthan understands that the only ammunition that really counts in this war is human life.

Speaker 24 And that sucks.

Speaker 2 And that sucks. That's why he's lost his mind and soul.

Speaker 24 Yes. And that's why people are starting to really like dislike working with him.
Yes, because he's even though he might not be like completely wrong here. Yeah.

Speaker 24 I like so much this episode is built around finding bugs. Yeah.
The ISB looks for bugs in Cyril's office. The ISB is planting bugs in Cyril's office.

Speaker 24 Bugs are hidden in the artifacts that Luthen's selling to high society. Everyone's listening.
Everyone's always, everyone's trying to collect more intel.

Speaker 2 And there's this

Speaker 2 issue the Empire and Luthen's organization are having with like, we're getting too much. You know, the Empire is like, we're arresting too many people.

Speaker 2 Like, number one, it's like cutting into our ability to get into into these organizations. And it also is just like, we're drowning.
And Luthan says the same thing.

Speaker 2 I'm always spacing on her name, but she's wonderful to

Speaker 2 his comments lady. Like, we're drowning.
We have too much shit.

Speaker 24 Yeah. Something I love is when Cyril's talking with the Gorman Front about the ISB raid of his office.

Speaker 24 The Gorman Front remarks, quote, we think the ISB is running a shadow government without the emperors involved.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes. Unquote.
And it's a real, you hear this when you read about histories of like czarist Russia.

Speaker 2 Like even a lot of people who take part in the 1917 revolution, right, right up till it started, their attitude was like, oh, if the czar knew what his advisors were doing in his name, he'd

Speaker 2 be on our side. And the same thing happened in the Third Reich.
If only Hitler knew was a common phrase. We're like, well, Hitler doesn't know that Gestapo is doing all these awful things, of course.

Speaker 24 And it's so sad because

Speaker 24 this is their like. local like resistance group who who still has that level of delusion because they come from like high society, right?

Speaker 24 They come from this like diplomatic background background where they can like solve things through like free trade.

Speaker 24 And they're like, sure, surely, surely the emperor doesn't actually know what's going on here.

Speaker 24 It must be like the CIA. It must be the FBI.
It's like the ISB is running. a shadow government.
They're the ones that are actually like ruining things. Yes.

Speaker 24 And you're like, no, your enemy is the entire empire. Yes, your enemy is the ISB, but it's also Cyril Karn and it's also Emperor Palpatine.

Speaker 2 Yes. And I love, that's part of what I love about that lattered interaction between them and Cassian and Cassian and Luthan is they're not really revolutionaries either.

Speaker 2 They are protesters, right? Totally. They still think that the overall empire, once it realizes how bad things are, will be on their side.
And Cassian thinks they can wait.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's Luthan who's like, no, no, no, there's one way out, right? You know, back going back to season one, there's one way out.

Speaker 24 Before we talk about the Saguera stuff at the end, I do want to point out how wonderful it was to see Cyril Karn in the ISB control room where he remarks that this is the greatest day of his life.

Speaker 24 Oh, God.

Speaker 2 It's just

Speaker 2 going Libby shit. It's like Libby finally getting to spy.

Speaker 2 And Pardagaz even makes that great, that great comment where he's directly talking about the Gourmet Front, and he's like, Yeah, there's a lot of people who think they understand shit better than they do because they're new to it.

Speaker 2 But he's also, he's clearly talking to Cyril like, you don't know what you're doing, but I'll use you fine.

Speaker 24 It's so good.

Speaker 24 Cyril gains cred amongst the Gorben Front when they find out that his background is that he lost his job because the ISP found out how badly he fucked up Ferex.

Speaker 2 And like, they're like, ah, I see.

Speaker 24 Cyril must have good reason to hate the Empire because of this.

Speaker 2 And you're like, no.

Speaker 2 He's like,

Speaker 24 he's desperately trying to become some ISP secret agent.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Like he just wants approval from like... the daddy state.

Speaker 2 And from his girlfriend, right?

Speaker 24 Who has taken over for his mom in and being like the primary source the person he's trying to impress the last thing i want to talk about in this episode is this episode displays like two different types of drug use yes we have we we have bix who's trying to get over the immense amount of up stuff that's happened to her yeah by taking space xanax if you will she's barred out every night holding a gun watching tv and yeah and it's like who amongst us

Speaker 2 it is disrupting her personal life it's also disrupting her like operational capacity. She has been sent out in the recent past and she can't be sent back out again.

Speaker 2 And the specific, we don't even see the mission that most recently fucked her up, but we're through her nightmares, we're led to infer she and Cassian captured an Imperial pilot and Cassian killed the guy because he'd seen her face.

Speaker 2 And she's, in addition to having been tortured in season one, fucked up because like, well, we didn't need to kill him. And Cassian's like, yeah, we did.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 he saw your face. That's it.

Speaker 24 The weight of resistance is really getting to Bix. Yeah.

Speaker 24 And like, like, Luthan comes over to, like, check on her and also, like, see if she's able to, like, work, see if she can, like, appraise some like weapons or something.

Speaker 24 Um, and he realizes, like, she is not, like, well enough to, to, to work at this point. Yeah.
And becomes, like, getting worried for her and like, like, tries to, like, plead with her.

Speaker 24 Like, you have to, you have to make sure that you, like, stay healthy. I don't know.
It's definitely, it's definitely hard to watch. I think this is definitely like this moment.

Speaker 24 It's like, I don't know. Bix has always had a lot of agency taken away from her.
Like we see this like in season one and we see this kind of now.

Speaker 24 And I definitely would like to would like to see her get put back in like the driver's seat of her own life at a certain point. But like

Speaker 24 living through like PTSD and living through like these types of like, you know, political movements does, does like destroy people.

Speaker 2 And like this does happen. Well, and just what torture does, right? Like

Speaker 2 torture breaks people. That's its purpose, you know?

Speaker 24 So we have Space Danix and then we have Saw Guerrera.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we fucking do. So let's, I want to talk a little bit about his background, some stuff that's not in the show.
In the show, you see him when

Speaker 2 he is already basically the hardest son of a bitch in the rebellion, right?

Speaker 2 He is the only leader of a rebel faction that Luthen treats as an equal, right? Where like Luthan is meeting with him. We see Luthan meeting with him directly.

Speaker 2 Luthan is not willing to sacrifice he and his men in like uh in order to maintain the cover of a spy, which he is willing to have.

Speaker 24 Yeah, because they're like serious militants.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they are serious. And they're, and every time we see them, there's more of them and they have more ships.
They're the first ones. They're the first rebels to use X-Wings.

Speaker 24 The first ones to have X-Wings. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And Saw's background, and you have, this is way, a bunch of the expanded stuff, but he started out as essentially a local rebel on this planet during the Clone Wars that was not aligned between either major faction, but basically the Jedi taking the role of space CIA armed.

Speaker 2 him and his sister to lead like a rebel group against the other power they were fighting in the Clone Wars.

Speaker 24 Occupation, like separatist forces.

Speaker 2 He was meant to be Mujahideen, coded, right? Initially, right? So he's like a space Mujahideen who's armed by the space CIA, who are the Jedi. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then when the Republic ends, he immediately starts fighting the Empire.

Speaker 2 And one of the kind of like moments that Forum saw is his sister dies in the process of this failed attempt to gain independence for their homeworld, this place called Andoran, right?

Speaker 2 You don't need to know any of that to perfectly get and enjoy his character in these shows.

Speaker 2 But the moment that we're about to talk about means more if you understand his backstory with his sister, right? Yeah.

Speaker 24 And he's been doing this ever since he was like a kid.

Speaker 2 Yes. And yeah, this has been his whole life, right? I think he's supposed to be like 46 when he dies in Rogue One.
Hard 46.

Speaker 2 If you look at him, you know, he looks clearly older, but also he looks like, well, yeah, he's been fighting his entire life. That ages.
He's like a teenager. And he has this.

Speaker 2 So the first thing that he does is he executes this guy who was set up as his friend when it becomes clear that that guy was a spy. And it's insinuated he thinks it's a spy for the Empire.

Speaker 2 That guy might have been a spy for Luthen or someone else. We don't actually know.
Sure. We know he was sending info to someone.

Speaker 24 He was transmitting.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Saw thinks that they were going to set up like an ambush at their next mission. Yeah.
And instead they evacuate their base.

Speaker 2 And Saw blasts him and basically says, hey, to the kid, you're mine now. And we're going to go steal this fucking fuel.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So the next time we see them, they've busted onto this Imperial fuel lot and they're fueling up their ships. And while the kid is like working out to set this thing up to allow them to take

Speaker 2 the Ribo, which is the

Speaker 2 starship fuel. While the kid is like doing this job that we've been told, if you don't do it perfectly, it kills you and everyone around you.

Speaker 2 Saw is monologuing and he's talking about his childhood where he was like, I was a child slave, you know, forced to labor in these rhito mines, right?

Speaker 2 And one day there was a gas leak and all everyone ran.

Speaker 2 And, you know, this stuff, it was so bad out there, the old people would die and you'd come back the next day and the jungle was so thick, they'd been eaten down to bones.

Speaker 2 And one day everybody has to flee because of this leak, but I don't run away because like I'm huffing this gas. I get high and I like realize for the first time I'm alive, you know? He has this like

Speaker 2 this moment.

Speaker 2 And then when the kid figures out how to get the fuel hooked up, Saw immediately leans in and starts huffing what is effectively gasoline and going and the kid's like, what the fuck the kid who's wearing a gas mask who's like wearing a PPE is like what are you doing and he's like she's my sister Rito she's my sister and she loves me I want to read it here I have I have the back of the monologue quote yeah you feel how badly she wants to explode yeah remember this moment you think I'm crazy yes I am revolution is not for the sane look at us unloved hunted cannon fodder we'll all be dead before the republic is back and yet here we are where are you boy?

Speaker 24 You're here. You're not with Luthen.
You're here. You're right here.
And you're ready to fight. We're the rido kid.
We're the fuel.

Speaker 24 We're the thing that explodes when there's too much friction in the air. Let it in, boy.
That's freedom calling. Let it in.
Let it run. Let it run wild.

Speaker 2 And he is just for one thing.

Speaker 24 The kid is choking on the fumes.

Speaker 2 Is nearly dying from the gas fumes that clearly saw is barely affected by anymore, right?

Speaker 2 It's again this thing I love that they do in terms of they're they're calling back to the older lore when he calls this his sister. But you don't need to know that his sister died to get this moment.

Speaker 2 It just makes it adds an extra layer of meaning if you're a nerd for the lore, which I appreciate a lot. And it also sets up in Rogue One when we see Saw near death,

Speaker 2 he's on oxygen. He's well, I think he's on O2 because he's destroyed his long suffering.
He's huffing this now.

Speaker 24 This is what he's huffing that has been like retconned.

Speaker 2 Is it confirmed? It wasn't oxygen.

Speaker 24 Okay. Yes.
Bo,

Speaker 24 the writer,

Speaker 24 called Tony Gilroy and said, hey, what if we have him huffing fumes? And they went for it.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, but I think that was to try to explain because Tony said he didn't know why Saul was on oxygen when he put it in Rogue One. And so they came to explain it.

Speaker 2 But I think he's on oxygen because I think it's been retcon to

Speaker 24 being that he's just huffing right now.

Speaker 2 Is he just huffing rhytho? I don't know. I saw it in an article.
Yeah. So either way.
We'll see. We'll see.
I could be wrong.

Speaker 24 I was wrong last week about one thing.

Speaker 24 I miscredited the quote about the Empire's grip tightening and systems falling through because the theory twinks British actor has an accent very similar to the one Carrie Fisher poorly tries to imitate in A New Hope where she says that line.

Speaker 24 So sorry, George. Sorry, George.
That was your line. Good line.
The theory twink just has some very similar ones. So I got confused.
Accountability.

Speaker 2 Wow. Mean to Carrie Fisher, Garrison.

Speaker 24 Everyone knows her accents bad in that that movie.

Speaker 2 We all know it.

Speaker 2 I fucking love this speech by Saw. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 24 This is the most Robert thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's perfect. It's perfect.
Everything about it makes me so happy. Bo Willeman continues to be like maybe the best monologuist writing for TV right now.
It's just such a raw scene. And

Speaker 2 it explains both like why Saw is still around, because he's the most paranoid, crazy son of a bitch there is, and because he, unlike everyone else, and unlike Gormans, unlike even Cassian, he's the only guy who understands what Luthan understands, which is that, like,

Speaker 2 we're not here to see the other side of this. No.
We're here to catch on fire, you know? Like, that's, that's the whole thing.

Speaker 24 And hopefully that fire will grow.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 24 And yeah, if that means we get burned up in the process, that is, that's how it'd be.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 24 If the fire will burn very brightly. Yes.
All right. Let's go and break and then come back to discuss the final episode in this arc.

Speaker 2 Okay, we are back.

Speaker 24 Andor season two, episode six. What a festive evening.

Speaker 24 Luthan sends Monmothma's cousin Val to re-establish relations with the Gorman Front after Cassian's icy reception. Cassian and Bix reunite on Coruscant.

Speaker 24 But then Cassian shows up at Luthan's shop to confront him about checking in on Bix at the safe house while Andor was on mission in a possibly like OPSEC, irresponsible.

Speaker 2 Huge OPSEC fuck up. Huge OSEC fuck up.
Cassian Andor's face is known.

Speaker 24 Yeah,

Speaker 24 not good. This is like Cassian's emotions getting the better of him here.

Speaker 24 Senator Monmothma and her husband Perrin attend a party of the Empire's elite where she debates Krenik on Imperial cruelty and the mindset of a rebel underdog.

Speaker 24 Meanwhile, Klea uses their undercover ISB agent to help remove a listening device. hidden in the prized collection of artifacts.

Speaker 24 Vel reunites with Sinta as they help to lead the Gourmand Front's first attack, stealing imperial weapons on a cargo transport. At first, things go according to plan.

Speaker 24 Cyril watches from a distance and reports to ISB headquarters.

Speaker 2 We should note ahead of this that during the meeting where they had about this, one point that they had made is none of you have guns. None of you carry guns on this.

Speaker 2 Me and her are the only people with blasters. You don't need them.
You're not competent to use them.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 24 So near the end of this operation, a civilian confronts the rebels about what they're doing.

Speaker 24 And in the struggle, Sinta is accidentally shot and killed by one of the members of the Gorman Front, a guy named Sam with two M's. I love Star Wars.

Speaker 24 This episode ends with Bix and Cassian going on a mission to kill the Imperial interrogation expert, Dr. Gorst, which they succeed and then walk away heroically from the explosion, similar to...

Speaker 2 Kill him by torturing him the way he tortured her. Yeah, and then they blow him off.

Speaker 24 Then they blow up the building and they play the music cue from the very first arc. Yeah.
the very first season

Speaker 24 where Cassian is walking away with that fast drumbeat. So this episode has so much about relationships complicating political activity, right? We have Andor and Bix.

Speaker 24 We have the lesbians, Val and Senta.

Speaker 2 They killed my lesbian.

Speaker 24 They did kill your lesbian.

Speaker 2 We'll talk about that in a second.

Speaker 2 We'll talk about that in a second.

Speaker 24 They also have Cyril and Debra. We have

Speaker 24 a lot of how relationships and politics function,

Speaker 24 where there's friction, when things can go well, when things can go bad. Let's talk, I guess, a little bit about

Speaker 24 this party where, where,

Speaker 24 where Luthan talks with Credic very, very briefly. And at the end, I mean,

Speaker 24 this is a very effective scene where they like build tension with Klea trying to remove this bug while Credic's like in the room seeing these other artifacts and It's like debating Mon.

Speaker 24 But when Luthan and Klea leave, they jokingly remark,

Speaker 2 man, we should have killed Credic when we were up there. And then they laugh.
And you're like, yeah, no, you guys should have. That's not a joke.

Speaker 2 You really should have killed Credic.

Speaker 2 You really should have killed Credic. They would have fucked things up.

Speaker 24 But then the Death Star may not have been completed. And this whole thing would have gone differently.
Although, you know,

Speaker 24 in a way, the Death Star operation does lead to the fall of the Empire in like a paradoxical way.

Speaker 2 To be fair,

Speaker 2 they don't know that Death Star exists now. They know some business seeing it.
There's no way that it's not. But

Speaker 24 he's like a super high up guy.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 24 And man, yeah, that is tough. That's, that's a tough scene.

Speaker 2 It's a tough. What's also interesting is that it's a tough scene in light of the rest of the lore.
It's a really nice, because they've been fighting, bickering for this whole cycle of episodes.

Speaker 2 And like, you're, things are breaking down. And this is a moment where like they get back on the same page.
And you're like. Tension eases.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, because part of it, because like part of what's going on here is like Luthan is losing it. Right.
And this is the thing because like he's, he's juggling too many threads at once.

Speaker 2 And like, yeah, you fuck, everyone's fucking seen this. Like, yeah, your friend is juggling 15 projects at once.
They're losing their goddamn minds. And then like the

Speaker 2 girl in your group who's on top of it has to just slap them and be like, lock the fuck in. Yeah.

Speaker 24 No, Claya is a scary monster. She is on it.

Speaker 2 Well, it's made really clear in these cycles. She is not his subordinate.
Oh, no. They are.
They are handling very different parts of the operation, but she is not working under him.

Speaker 2 No, and she is like the one who like is the reason any of this shit works. Absolutely.

Speaker 24 And it's like, that's the thing you see very often there's a line in season one where things are looking bad for them and he specifically asks her is your go bag ready and he doesn't check his own so he I think he understands if one of us has to get out it should be you she has to survive yeah totally yeah and I think that is that is where things are are gonna are gonna be moving yeah yeah I mean when when Cassian's coming back from Gourmet like Luthan picks him up and and they start like arguing over like is the Gorman front like a real thing to like spend effort and like time on like they're kind of all like green.

Speaker 24 They don't really have good opsc. They're not, they're just not like ready yet.
Yeah. And, and, and Luthan pushes back and says to Cassian, like, you're thinking small.
You're thinking like a thief.

Speaker 24 And then Cassian rebuts, like, no, I'm thinking like a soldier.

Speaker 2 And Luthan's like, no, you have to think like a soldier.

Speaker 24 You, you have to think like a leader. You have to actually, and like, from Luthen's point of view, a leader is like a very like manipulative role.

Speaker 24 And like, like, you, you have to start using these guys as pawns for this like larger game because the empire is bigger than just Gorman. The empire is bigger than us.

Speaker 24 us we we have to think bigger you can't just you can't just think like a you know a small illegalist who's gonna steal your food and and not pay for parking and and just like get by while still doing crime but like you know try to like outsmart the empire it's like no like we are we are we are beyond that we ain't robbing banks anymore yeah yeah exactly right like we are beyond the illegalist like point of view we have to start thinking like much more much more like strategically and with like the bigger picture in mind because like we are we are slowly getting closer to the battle of yavin here yeah and i i find i find their little argument there really really interesting and and then uh their secondary meetup uh where where cassian's mad about luthen checking in on bix

Speaker 24 and i think like i can understand both their point of view here is this i i think this is still a big up from cassian but it's like it makes sense but like yeah the the relationship's getting like the better of him on like a strategic standpoint like at at this at this plot point and luthen still trusts them though like luthan still gives them the assignment assignment to kill Dr.

Speaker 24 Gorse.

Speaker 24 So like Luthen still is able to work with these people and he still actually, like oddly enough, like prioritizes empathy and like says like like empathy, like you can, you cannot have a, you cannot have a revolution without empathy.

Speaker 24 That's what this is built on. And

Speaker 24 even though he's a bit of a hard ass sometimes,

Speaker 24 he still does like trust them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but he's like, he also is deliberately fucking with them. Like one of these things.
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 24 He's very manipulative.

Speaker 2 He's being unbelievably manipulative.

Speaker 2 Like one of the things here is like he deliberately gives Bix, tells bix about this assignment that he was going to give her and then doesn't specifically to see if she would tell and or about it and test how andor would react to that which is like don't do that that's unhinged like that's like not and this is like also part of like you know the thing the thing you have to like balance here right is like you know you have to be able to balance like getting people to do things that need to be done with like not being a fucking asshole and alienating everyone.

Speaker 2 And this is like a,

Speaker 2 and especially when you yourself, because like Luthid is also falling apart.

Speaker 24 He's not going to change. He's not, he's never going to change.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 No, he's not changing. But that's like, that's the thing, though.
That's not his job. Yeah.
Right. His job was to make the later stages of this where people act differently inevitable.
Totally.

Speaker 2 And he understands that you need something that horrifies people to do that. Right.
Like, and that's, that's all he's trying to set up.

Speaker 24 Luthan is absolutely like immoral, very manipulative. I am, I am still, I'm still teaming up.

Speaker 2 100%.

Speaker 24 Even though he like sucks as a dude. Like I would hate to work with him.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, it's like, but like, I still gotta be team Luthan in the end. Yeah, well,

Speaker 2 I would just say, like, like, if the thing is, like, if you try to act like this in, like, an actual organizing space, this isn't gonna work. You're just gonna, but he's not.

Speaker 2 Luthan's not, he's not that. He's not in the organizing space.
He's not doing that. Right.
That's, that's what I'm saying, though. You're right, right.
Like, like, yeah, like.

Speaker 2 This works because of the exact specific thing that he's doing, which is he is the guy who was coordinating a bunch of networks.

Speaker 2 But the thing is, in order for networks to hold together and work, people have to have relationships with each other. And if you behave like this in that situation, it will fuck out everything.

Speaker 2 And this is like the conflict that's happening, like even inside of his own limited network, is that like he's he is like fucking with everyone. And we'll get to that with the lesson.

Speaker 2 And you see, you see how you see the different levels at which networks work here. Like the Gorman front works because they're all friends and neighbors who care about each other, right?

Speaker 2 And that's why they are real tactile solidarity. And they're able to stick together, even though they're not, they don't have perfect competence.

Speaker 2 We see Saw's group where someone made the comment that, like, well, he's basically a fascist.

Speaker 2 And because of like the hold he has on his group, which is not what I saw at all. I saw as soon as he shoots that spy,

Speaker 2 he has to prove.

Speaker 24 But he's not a fascist.

Speaker 2 He has to prove to the rest of his group that guy was a spy and needed to die. And once he does, they're like, all right, well, back to the job, right? I mean, yeah, no.

Speaker 2 But, and he gets, he has to get fucked, you know, he he gets fucked up as part of like the,

Speaker 2 just the necessity of, it's, it's literally the only thing he has in between acts of terrifying violence. But that's how that group bands together.

Speaker 2 And then we see, you know, these smaller cells of experts, right? Um, who they have their connections with each other and they have their little moments of vengeance. And that's what keeps them going.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And the only thing that keeps Luthan going is the pure logic of the calculus of what he's put together.
That's all he's got. Yeah.

Speaker 24 Information collecting boyfriend, always collecting information. Yeah.
All right, let's talk about the space lesbians who are running the French resistance.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 24 I liked a lot of what they did with them in this episode. I liked how they were like reuniting.

Speaker 24 I liked the way they talked about the on-again, off-again style of their relationship based on having to live in this rebellion like life. Like they can't always see each other.

Speaker 24 They're always being moved around by Luthen. But they both both specifically took this assignment, like hoping and like, and I think like knowing that it would mean that they could see each other.
So

Speaker 24 I liked the development that we had with them as people who are in the same spaces, but do not have the luxury of actually having a life together at this point in time.

Speaker 24 They advise the little resistance group. They're much more friendly than

Speaker 24 Cassian is.

Speaker 2 They do come in and are like, all right, you motherfuckers, like you people are amateurs. You have to listen to every single thing that they're doing.
Oh, yeah, yeah. no guns yeah it's like

Speaker 24 no like i guess they have more of a willingness to put up with the amateurs than cassian does a little bit i think i think is is kind of what's going on there and you know they're they're hoping that after this mission's over maybe they'll be able to spend more time together and then cinta does get killed and i i've seen a lot of criticism of this i i've seen people invoking like a like a like a barrier gaze type

Speaker 24 and i don't think that's my personal outlook on what's going on on here. I think a lot of people die throughout this show.
We had Brasso die. And this sort of thing, like just to happen.

Speaker 2 It happens. That's the point.
Yes, she's really good. She's really good.
She's incredibly skilled.

Speaker 24 She feels so purposeless. And like, welcome to war.

Speaker 2 I think that is the problem, right?

Speaker 24 Part of the point. And like the upset, like a reaction that you have, I think is like, that's, that's showing, I think, the strength of, the strength of this.

Speaker 24 Like, it sucks to see a lesbian get killed, but I think we're seeing so many relationships get, like, fall apart. We're seeing a lot of people get killed.

Speaker 2 Rasso didn't die for any better reason, right? This is just how war works.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, I think, I think the reason, and this is an interesting part of this, I talked a bit about this last episode, but it's like, this is the most, like, this is by far the most gay Star Wars we've ever had, right?

Speaker 2 And it's the most, like, I'm trying to think of the number of other shows. It's the only time they didn't lean away from it or insinuate it.
Yeah. No, like, well, they just kissed this episode.

Speaker 2 And it's like,

Speaker 2 I'm legitimately, like, I'm like racking my brain. I'm trying to think of like the number of like major major TV shows I have ever seen in my life where a non-white lesbian gets to kiss someone.

Speaker 2 It's like not that high. And I think that's why people like, because like, yeah, like this is, this is, this is an increase.

Speaker 2 This is the best representation of my culture, which is like the leftist lesbians. Yeah.
We don't get to see each other. It hurts I've ever seen.
And then it's like, yeah, and she fucking dies. It's

Speaker 24 like, I think like.

Speaker 24 We were able to watch these characters develop over the course of like a few arcs, right?

Speaker 24 Like we saw these in the Aldani heist where they were like basically the only two people to survive besides Cassie. Like everyone else on that heist died, right? Yeah.

Speaker 24 So the lesbians made it out of that.

Speaker 24 They struggled to maintain the relationship in the interim as things happened. They had this emotional reunion here.

Speaker 24 I think, you know, you could make an argument that maybe it would be better to kill Val, but we've had more development with Val because of being related to Mon.

Speaker 24 So like, yeah, it is, it is, it is, it is tough with like the disposability, but that is, that is, that, that is a part of, of fighting in an environment like this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's not that they're disposable. It's that combat is random.
Like, and fuck-ups are random.

Speaker 2 Like, this, this exact thing, somebody screws up and shoots when they're not supposed to, and the bullet doesn't stop happens all the goddamn time. And like, it's part of what fucks people up.

Speaker 2 If you talk to people about their who have war experiences, one of the things that'll fuck someone up the most is watching someone they know and care about get turned into pink mist.

Speaker 2 And it's usually a situation where somebody hits or steps on or whatever an IED or takes a rocket at a bad time.

Speaker 2 And there's this person that you knew and you care about and they're three-dimensional to you and you probably plan to keep knowing them after the and then they're just fucking missed and it just it shatters people's minds.

Speaker 2 And that's what happens.

Speaker 24 Like and then like yeah, Val's little like speech to to Sam afterwards being like, like you are, you now have to live your entire life knowing that you took this person away and like every action you take for for the rest of your life is gonna be like it's gonna be all in all an attempt to like make up for this like every every every every imperial you kill will just be one for cinta yeah because like sinta was like a professional this is like the life that she led like you will never be able to understand how important she was you'll never be able to understand like how good she was at this and you're like a fucking like french kid yeah like you don't know what you're doing and now you have to spend your entire life making up for it and it was a very hard speech but i think val did a really good job with that and like understanding like the political necessity of like you can't let this be like in vain either.

Speaker 24 Like, you have to like push

Speaker 24 him, making making his life like worthwhile now. Yeah, and I mean, yeah, it's it was rough.

Speaker 24 I mean, I would love, I would love more, more like gay characters living happy lives in Star Wars, but we rarely see anyone living a happy life in Star Wars.

Speaker 2 This is not about happy lives.

Speaker 24 I also, that's not what we're seeing.

Speaker 2 I love the thing that doesn't get a huge amount of attention in these episodes, but is interesting to me is the guy that he was, he pulled that Matt, or whatever his name was, uh, Sama, Samama, the guy that Samama

Speaker 2 pulled his gun to try to stop is just this random Gorman dude who's like, hey, no, I'm not going to like leave. This is like my city.
What are you doing here? What's going on?

Speaker 2 As soon as he realizes, he carries her body. Like he goes with them, you know? And we, it's kind of unclear.

Speaker 2 Is he like some sort of spark, or is he literally a Gorman who at the whole time was looking for a way to get involved? And once he realized what was happening, he's like, yeah, these are my people.

Speaker 2 I'm with this.

Speaker 2 Was that the guy from the meeting or was it a different the one from the he wasn't there?

Speaker 2 He was at the meeting. Yeah.
Okay. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 24 Yeah, so I guess he just wasn't in the inner circle, but like he hops on, you know, yeah, but no, I do understand like the racial disposability and like the barrier gaze like aspect that can be read into this.

Speaker 24 So it's a tough thing to to thread here.

Speaker 24 And I think if you view this in context of all of the people that we have seen like get killed, like the entire Aldani crew, like Brasso, basically, you know, the droid from season one gets like abandoned on that planet.

Speaker 24 I think like it does, it does make sense, I think, in that larger context.

Speaker 24 I think there's a way that not everyone like has to die to lead to Rogue One, like besides Cassian.

Speaker 2 No, not everyone.

Speaker 24 But someone like Sinta. And like, frankly, like someone like Sinta, the type of militant she is, they do have a short lifespan.
Like that is, that is part of the specific thing Sinta is doing.

Speaker 24 you burn fast and you burn bright and sometimes you will die in a way that's like really purposeless and that fucking sucks And that happens in war. That happens in like activist spaces.

Speaker 24 Like that happens, that happens in the United States with people here.

Speaker 24 And often they are like non-white gay people.

Speaker 2 Like that's what happened in Atlanta.

Speaker 24 So like these, these things happen.

Speaker 2 The number of people who committed suicide too after 2020, you know? Like,

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 24 Do we have anything else we want to say, Mia? Do you have anything you want to close out on as the resident non-white lesbian on the podcast?

Speaker 2 They killed my lesbian. I'm so sad.

Speaker 2 There aren't.

Speaker 2 When is the next time I'm getting a non-white lesbian in Star Wars?

Speaker 2 I am going to be raising a black flag over Shenzhen by the next time we get another one of these fucking characters from this series.

Speaker 24 You know,

Speaker 24 we had a non-white lesbian

Speaker 24 in the acolyte who also died.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And

Speaker 24 I do not see people talking about the barrier gay stuff with the acolyte as well.

Speaker 2 Well, nobody, because nobody's did, unfortunately.

Speaker 24 Because it wasn't bad. And I think it's also worth it.
I think it's also worth remembering. Like, like, this is this is a show starring like a non-white leading role.
Like, like, Cassian is not white.

Speaker 24 Yeah. So I think the racial politics are a little bit more complex.
I think what some people are discussing.

Speaker 2 But yeah. All right.

Speaker 2 Well, these episodes have been amazing. Everybody get into inhalants

Speaker 2 and steal fuel from the military. That's the message of Andor.

Speaker 2 Run wild.

Speaker 2 Don't do that. That's a joke, legally.

Speaker 24 Okay.

Speaker 25 Meet Lisa, a mom of two who loves the holidays, but not the endless to-do list.

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Speaker 6 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 9 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 11 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 12 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 14 We got clear facts.

Speaker 17 Maybe we could calm down a little

Speaker 21 nbc news brings you clear reporting let's meet at the facts let's move forward from there nbc news reporting for america

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Speaker 32 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 39 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

Speaker 45 Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 49 Head over to globalgaming league.com.

Speaker 50 Com, com.

Speaker 50 Global, global, global, global, global, global, global. Global, global, global, global,

Speaker 6 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 9 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 11 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 13 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 14 We got clear facts.

Speaker 17 Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 19 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 20 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 21 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 22 NBC News, reporting for america

Speaker 24 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 james stout and robert evans that's right this episode we're covering the week of april 30th to may 7th yes when you think of ed you think about rigid cylindrical things nope flying at high speed towards Titan.

Speaker 2 Sorry, that's a bad way to introduce the fact that there is now a war going on between India and Pakistan. Jesus Christ.
I don't know. What else are we supposed to do?

Speaker 2 How are we supposed to go into this? Pakistan and India are shooting. Yeah.
Let's. Okay.
Okay. I am going to attempt to do a very, very, very, very brief.

Speaker 2 Please, God, like, do not let this be the extent of your knowledge about this conflict, but

Speaker 2 okay, here is one paragraph about this. So when India gained and Pakistan eventually gained independence from the UK and the British Empire, there was the partition.

Speaker 2 This is a process in which millions died and India and Pakistan were split into two states. Millions die as a result of the disruption to infrastructure and as a result of mass killings.
Yeah, and

Speaker 2 people fleeing like back and forth between the two places. There's been disputed territory for fucking ever.
One of the most contentious parts of this has always been Kashmir.

Speaker 2 There's a whole complicated thing here. But so Kashmir was sort of split into.
There's an almost entirely Muslim territory that ends up under the control of India.

Speaker 2 And India has waged a brutal military occupation of Kashmir since they got it, basically. It ramps up and down in terms of how

Speaker 2 bad it is, but it's never good.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And this has been a constant source of tension between India and Pakistan, where, you know, Pakistan has played its card of like, we are like the defenders of Muslims in India.

Speaker 2 And there's been a series of wars. Also, but this, this is one of the few times where you can say there are genocides on both sides.

Speaker 2 And it's true because like one of the wars that they fought was because of the genocide that Pakistan did in what became Bangladesh. So like there are no heroes in this story.

Speaker 2 There is only, I mean, I guess like, you know, there are people resisting repression from both states. They're good people, but neither of the states have clean hands.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but the states suck shit, right? Like, you know, let's be clear about that. Kashmir is one of the most militarized places in the world.

Speaker 2 It got much, much worse after 2019 when India withdrew the autonomous status that Kashmir had had. This sparked a bunch of protests.
They were horribly repressed.

Speaker 2 There's been staggering numbers of people have died over the past 30 years there. Like a lot of Kashmir's access to the outside world has been cut off.
It's been difficult to get people like in to it.

Speaker 2 And obviously, you know, the thing about occupations is that there's been a very, very long-running series of sort of insurgencies and militant groups in Kashmir of various kinds.

Speaker 2 Pakistan has funded some of these groups as a way to sort of like poke a stick at India. And in late April, a group killed 20 odd

Speaker 3 26, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 20, 26. 26.
I don't know. 26.
Yeah, I think that's the final number. Like Hindu tourists in Kashmir.

Speaker 2 It's worth noting there's no actual evidence that Pakistan is behind this, but... No, but that's India's claim.
Yeah, that's India's claim.

Speaker 2 And this has caused things to get really, really bad in Kashmir itself, which is the part of this I think has gotten lost in a lot of the discussion here, which is like,

Speaker 2 if you read statements from like...

Speaker 2 I mean, like, A, there's just been like an incredible intensification of repression.

Speaker 2 And B, if you read statements from Indian officials, they are just straight up talking about quote, like Indian style final solutions for Kashmir. It's completely unhinged.

Speaker 2 The Indian state has gone into this, I mean, like, you know, it's Modi, right? Modi is running probably the world's most effective fascist government.

Speaker 2 And his thing has always, like a huge part of it has always been specifically about like wanting to repress Muslims. And this, you know, has has kicked the Islamophobia into an absolute fever pitch.

Speaker 2 And the product of this is that they have started doing strikes inside of Pakistan. I'm going to pass it over to Robert and talk about like what those have looked like and what this conflict has been.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, and it's important you know that during this terrorist attack, one of the big things that is alleged is that husbands were executed in front of their wives.

Speaker 2 That is going to be relevant for the name of the operation that India is in the process of carrying out right now.

Speaker 2 Prior to in the immediate wake of that attack, everyone knew some shit was going to go down on the border.

Speaker 2 India was going to do something, in part because India said they were going to do something, right?

Speaker 2 JD Vance, the peacemaker, as we call him, I don't believe anyone else has ever been called that in the history of government or popular media. So yeah, that seems like a good nickname for him.

Speaker 2 Went to India like a day or two before this all happened to calm things down.

Speaker 3 This is after making a visit to the Pope.

Speaker 2 Or to tell Modi, do whatever. Like we don't know actually what he said.
Some people are like, Vance must have given him the go-ahead.

Speaker 2 I think it's just as likely Vance was like, hey, we don't really want a war right now. Can you calm shit down? And Modi didn't listen.
Or that Vance just didn't even have anything meaningful to say.

Speaker 2 We actually don't know at the moment. But last night, India started carrying out what they are calling Operation Sindur.
S-I-N-D-O-O-R is how it is generally anglicized. The name of the operation.

Speaker 2 comes from, again, I mentioned a little earlier that during that terrorist attack in Kashmir, Hindu men were killed in front of their wives.

Speaker 2 Sindur is a word that refers to this kind of colored dye that I believe it's like a bridal thing that like women put in, I think it's in their hair, but

Speaker 2 it's a reference to something that is part of like a traditional Hindu wedding and something that the bride does.

Speaker 2 And so it was specifically named this in order to make it very clear, this is vengeance for that attack, right? Like that's why it was named what it was. Okay.
Does that all make sense? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Sorry, I've got it here. Sindoor is the Hindi word for vermilion, which is the red pigment Hindu women apply to their forehead.
Right.

Speaker 2 So like that, and so it's, it's a reference also to the fact that these terrorists are said to have like shot their victims in the forehead, right?

Speaker 2 So, there's there's a lot going on there, basically, yeah,

Speaker 2 but that's what's relevant. So, when it comes to this, what's happening, first off, perfectly reasonable to call what's happening war.

Speaker 2 India has launched cross-border strikes, they appear to have launched both cruise missiles and airstrikes using modern jets, right? Pakistan has responded with modern military air defenses.

Speaker 2 What we can safely say right now is that this is the first full 21st century peer-on-peer military action. And I know, as came up in the meeting, people are going to say, well, Ukraine, not entirely.

Speaker 2 Ukraine and Russia, there is a degree to which that is true because Ukraine is armed by states that are peer or more than peer to Russia in terms of military technology.

Speaker 2 But Ukraine does not have an industrial base that is in any way comparable to Russia's.

Speaker 2 They are not capable of manufacturing the weaponry that they need to compete with Russia on the battlefield on their own. That's why international aid has been so critical.

Speaker 2 Pakistan and India are both effectively peers in that they both do purchase weaponry a lot from other countries, but they also have domestic arms industries and they have potent domestic militaries that are armed to a comparable standard, right?

Speaker 2 And so there's a few things happening here. I do not want to lose count of the fact that people are dying.
Obviously, civilians died in that attack in Kashmir.

Speaker 2 At the moment, it looks like the death toll from the initial Indian strikes is somewhere around 40. Pakistan is claiming the vast majority of those are civilians.

Speaker 2 India is claiming that they only hit infrastructure associated with the terrorist group that they believe carried out the attacks in Kashmir that they claim is being supported by Pakistan.

Speaker 2 There is substantial evidence that the majority of the dead are civilians. People have claimed that like large chunks of their families were wiped out in these strikes.

Speaker 2 I don't see any reason to doubt that, knowing how airstrikes work. A good number of the dead, though, have also occurred as a result of cross-border artillery fire.

Speaker 2 And it's unclear to me if India and Pakistan have had a full-on artillery duel across the border, or if this is Pakistan's artillery firing back in response to the airstrikes. That part is unclear.

Speaker 2 There are also videos where you can hear small arms fire, so machine guns and the like. And reports that that is coming from Pakistan's side too.

Speaker 2 It's possible there is a cross-border direct arm engagement. It's possible no one died as a result of the small arms fire, given the distances that this is occurring at, right?

Speaker 2 That the only deaths have been due to field artillery and due to missile strikes, right? That seems likely at this point.

Speaker 2 It's possible the death toll is much higher than 40, but that's somewhere around there, is what's been confirmed right now. Now, we have talked about the deaths.

Speaker 2 Obviously, the biggest concern is the loss in human life here. I am going to talk about what this means on a military level, because that is relevant both.

Speaker 2 how this conflict is going to proceed and how future conflicts are going to proceed, because we have not seen a peer-on-peer fight like this before in this century right so one of the more important things as to how this has proceeded is that a number of the jets that india launched across the border are what are called rafalls r-a-f-a-l-e this is a french fighter jet it is broadly considered to be equivalent to an f-18 super hornet now i say that if you go online and you listen to people who are nerds about fighter jets, they will pull a knife on you for claiming that, right?

Speaker 2 There are major differences between the two airframes.

Speaker 2 One of them is that the Rafal is a larger plane, which means it's theoretically capable, not theoretically, it is capable of a significantly higher payload.

Speaker 2 However, there's a couple of problems that come with that. One is that the Super Hornet...
Not only is it a small aircraft, but it is built for carrier duty, which means its wings fold, yada.

Speaker 2 You could fit more of them on a carrier. They take off and land more easily from a carrier.
A Rafal can take off and land from a carrier, but it has to have a different loadout, right?

Speaker 2 The other issue, a Super Hornet can stay supersonic with its full payload for longer periods of time.

Speaker 2 That means that it can be breaking the sound barrier consistently, not just using its afterburner for like a quick burst of speed.

Speaker 2 That matters because the faster you're going, the harder you are to shoot down. The primary air-to-ground package it has is what's called a hammer, and that's an acronym, H-A-M-M-E-R.

Speaker 2 I don't know what it stands for off the top of my head, but they are between 250 and 1,000 pounds each, right? These are their air-to-ground munitions. That they are equipped with standard.

Speaker 2 It's possible India has a separate loadout for them. I don't actually know.
This is their standard armament. Now, they can only have their full complement if they're not going supersonic.

Speaker 2 So they cannot go supersonic for a comparable period of time to a super hornet if they have a full complement.

Speaker 2 From a military technology standpoint, the biggest news from the initial stage of the strike is that at least one of these rafalls has been destroyed.

Speaker 2 There's decent evidence that potentially another two. If India lost three of these jets, they have 36.
That is a meaningful degradation of their entire Air Force capability to strike, right?

Speaker 2 Losing these jets. And they cannot be replaced on any kind of timeframe that is comparable to how quickly they're being shot down.

Speaker 2 Pakistan is claiming significantly more that they've Pakistan's claim is that they've downed three Rafals, one MiG-29, one Su-30MKI, and at least one Israeli-made Heron drone.

Speaker 2 People generally say Pakistan is probably exaggerating. However, French authorities have confirmed at least one rafal, and there's two more that possibilities that are being looked into.

Speaker 2 It's possible three planes were downed, but only one was a rafal. We don't really know yet, right? But even one is a meaningful loss.
And the fact that it was downed says a couple of things.

Speaker 2 One thing is that there's a decent chance, what I suspect we might hear. especially if three of these went down, is that India sent these things off with a full strike package.

Speaker 2 So they were not able to go as fast as they normally can, and thus were not able to evade Pakistan's anti-air defenses, right? That may be what happened.

Speaker 2 The other thing that we're seeing here is that Pakistan is equipped. They buy the best part, and Pakistan has a lot of S-300s and S-400s, I believe, which are like what we've seen in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 Those have had a very mixed operational history in terms of their capability to take out modern aircraft. Pakistan also has a lot of PL-15 radar-guided anti-air missiles.

Speaker 2 These are Chinese anti-aircraft missiles. They have never been used in combat before.

Speaker 2 If you're a nerd for like modern military technology, one of the things people have been talking about in that field for a long time is like, how are these going to function?

Speaker 2 And we just know that they've been used because wreckage from them has been found and photographed.

Speaker 2 And people who are experts in these missiles online have confirmed this is from this weapons package. It is very likely.
that the Rafael that was downed was downed by this missile.

Speaker 2 And if more than one was downed, that they were all downed by these missiles.

Speaker 2 So that tells us a lot about the comparable capabilities of both this modern modern Western fighter that the French are selling and of this Chinese anti-aircraft missile, right?

Speaker 2 And so that's really relevant if we're looking at both how this conflict is going to proceed, because I don't want to be coming at from this bloodless like, oh, I'm just interested in the military strategy part.

Speaker 2 This is relevant because if India has lost three of these advanced fighters that they cannot replace on any kind of comparable timeframe in the first few hours of strikes, that suggests one of two potential future outcomes.

Speaker 2 Number one, the tempo of use of advanced aircraft in this war is going to change considerably as it drags into the next stages, right? Because they simply can't maintain that tempo.

Speaker 2 They can't continue to take those sort of risks.

Speaker 2 And that either means moving on to a lot more ground engagements between infantry, between tanks, between artillery, like direct face-to-face shit, or a potential for escalating things to the next level.

Speaker 2 And the only next level higher than where we're at is nuclear, right? I don't think that is the likeliest outcome.

Speaker 2 I do not think a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India is the likeliest thing at this point.

Speaker 2 However, the rate at which India is attritting air assets means that they're going to have to make a choice in the not too distant future, right?

Speaker 2 Although, it's also worth noting, we don't know entirely the degree to which Pakistan's anti-air defenses have been attritted by this, right?

Speaker 2 There's a lot of open, there's a lot of unknown unknowns and known unknowns here, right?

Speaker 2 As our good friend Rumsfeld would say, I will say the other issue here: if there is a nuclear exchange, it's going to be the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of the century.

Speaker 2 That doesn't mean it's going to be a nuclear war across the entire world. And that shouldn't be your first concern.

Speaker 2 Your first concern should be that that would still mean millions of deaths in India and Pakistan, potentially, at least hundreds of thousands, right?

Speaker 2 The concern is not they start so everyone else does. It's they start and thus the worst humanitarian disaster since World War II occurs.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, some of the most densely populated cities on earth are in this region. Like a strike in any major city there would be devastating.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a strike in Islamabad would be the worst thing that's happened, possibly since the Holocaust, in terms of like human death toll due to human actions.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's pretty bad. I know India claimed that they were launching a, quote, non-escalatory strike, inso much as that means shit.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 They also claimed that the PL-15 didn't have its intercept ahead, which I guess the French intelligence refuted.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And this is all, there's a lot that's unknown about kind of how these weapons have performed still.

Speaker 2 But these are from a, in terms of both how how this conflict is going to proceed and how future conflicts will proceed, these are things you should be looking at.

Speaker 2 Because these weapons platforms, this is important in terms of what war is going to continue to look like. Yeah, I think it's also worth noting a couple of things.

Speaker 2 One is that this is by far the largest

Speaker 2 clash that these countries have had in a long time. But also, there have been like periodic cross-border skirmishes around casualties for a while now, right?

Speaker 2 Like there was a pretty big flare-up in 2020 that kind of lasted to 2021.

Speaker 2 And so there is a chance that this doesn't turn into a full-scale war and that you get something more like what happened sort of recently with Israel and Iran, where they like bomb each other a few times and then everyone sort of packs up their bags and goes home and continues to like poke each other with militant groups instead of it being like tanks.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think that is like orders of magnitude more likely than like nukes flying. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Just to sort of like, yeah, like the chance at which these people start shooting nukes at each other is not very high. Like, yes.

Speaker 2 Just like in the history of nuclear weapons, too, you have to understand that like, like, some of the most unhinged people who have ever lived, like Curtis LeMay, like the U.S.

Speaker 2 and the Soviets never did it. Like Mao, Mao and the Soviets never did it.
Like apartheid South Africa had nuclear weapons and never used them.

Speaker 2 Some of the worst people who have ever lived have had access to nukes and never fired them. The odds that you're going to die in nuclear fire are very, very, very, very, very very low.
It's not good.

Speaker 2 No. Everything that's happening here is very bad, but like you do not need to be like living in existential terror of like fire raining from the sky.
That's not like a reasonable reaction to this.

Speaker 2 And I've been seeing a lot of that. So.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 it's far from the likeliest outcome. And your primary concern should be to people who are living there right now.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right. You know, it's worth noting that the 1999, the cargo war, that was not an insignificant death toll, right? Like you're talking probably

Speaker 2 like certainly more than a thousand, I think, a thousand to a couple of thousand people.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 that would not be, that's not certainly not out of the question without it escalating in that way.

Speaker 2 I think the primary concern that you always have and why I bring up weapons systems is that countries think in terms of stuff like this a lot. This is a big part of why we get World War I, right?

Speaker 2 You have these nations that are arming and they're always concerned with how do my weapons compare to my neighbors?

Speaker 2 If we go to war now, I feel pretty good about where I'm at. And if I wait another two years, maybe they'll be in a better position.

Speaker 2 And thinking like that is part of the planning that's going on in these states and the planning about when do we escalate and how do we escalate, right?

Speaker 2 Do we move to a point where we've got masses of infantry shooting at each other? Well, maybe if we can't risk the continued attrition of our advanced air assets, we do that.

Speaker 2 Or maybe we make another decision. That's why it's relevant to know about this stuff.

Speaker 2 Not because you want to nerd out over who's got the coolest missile and who's got the coolest planes, but because that is very much how states think, right?

Speaker 2 Anyway, before we go to ads, to tie this back to the executive dysfunction, because that is what this is about, not

Speaker 2 the current wars podcast. In the immediate wake of all of this, President Trump was asked about, hey,

Speaker 2 how about these two nuclear-armed states going to war? What do you think about that?

Speaker 2 And he gave a, you know, just a traditionally eloquent, you know, Donald Trump response. It's a shame.
We just heard about it.

Speaker 2 I guess people knew something was was going to happen based on a little bit of the past. They've been fighting for a long time.
I just hope it ends quickly.

Speaker 2 Me too, buddy.

Speaker 2 Great.

Speaker 2 I guess they've been fighting for a long time.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Anyway, let's go to ads.

Speaker 24 Alright, we are back. I'm gonna talk now about some other horrifying geopolitical news.

Speaker 24 Hey, this is Garrison from Friday, May 9th. I have a correction to make.

Speaker 24 On the original copy of this episode, I made an error in saying Greta Thunberg was aboard a humanitarian aid ship off the coast of Italy that was airstriked by Israel.

Speaker 24 The ship was indeed attacked, but she was not on that ship. I watched a video of her discussing the attack, and it sounded first person, and then we recorded shortly thereafter.

Speaker 24 But now it's clear she was not on the ship, but instead planned to board later that day on the way to Gaza as a part of the humanitarian aid organization, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.

Speaker 24 More than a dozen other aid workers were aboard the vessel when it was hit. And this relates to the larger humanitarian aid crisis in Gaza.
Now, back to the episode.

Speaker 24 The past two months, Israel has forcibly cut off all food, water, machines, supplies, and other humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Speaker 24 Starving the Palestinian people as Netanyahu continues to reject ceasefire deals. Reports from the UN say that Gaza will run out of food in days.
Yep.

Speaker 2 I mean, it looks like a starvation genocide. I don't know how else to phrase this.
There's really nothing else.

Speaker 2 This isn't the time to mince words.

Speaker 2 Like, every piece of evidence suggests this is a starvation genocide being carried out, that they're trying to starve this population to death or until they all leave, which is the same.

Speaker 2 Genocide does not necessarily mean you kill everyone, it is the forced killing and/or displacement of a population. Yeah.

Speaker 24 Israel says that the Palestinians still have food for a few months, but the UN and other aid organizations say that is not true.

Speaker 24 Now, last Sunday night, Israel's security cabinet approved a plan to re-occupy and hold the Gaza Strip if a new ceasefire deal isn't reached by May 15th, while Netanyahu and Israeli officials continue to undermine negotiations for a permanent ceasefire.

Speaker 24 This plan is called Gideon's Chariots.

Speaker 2 Jesus fucking Christ.

Speaker 24 The plan is for the IDF to invade with four to five armored infantry divisions, mobilizing uproots of 70,000 reservists, which would gradually occupy and secure basically the entire Gaza Strip.

Speaker 24 According to Israel's finance minister, this IDF occupation would be permanent, not even pulling back with the release of any remaining hostages.

Speaker 24 Though other Israeli officials disagree on this and say this would be a temporary occupation. Pretty hard to take their word on that.

Speaker 24 All remaining buildings would be destroyed, flattening the entirety of the strip, just like Rafah and the northern side.

Speaker 24 Amir Avivi, the founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum think tank and a former deputy commander of the Israeli forces, say, quote, this is the only way to eradicate Hamas, militarily and governmentally, is to take over Gaza and to conquer the area and destroy them.

Speaker 24 There's some added complications with like legally occupying Gaza under the Geneva Convention.

Speaker 24 A formal occupation would require Israel to have the capacity to operate as an official government authority in this region.

Speaker 24 Now, there's no indication that Israel will like follow the Geneva Convention as they haven't.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's Israel. They never have given a shit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't see why we'd expect that.

Speaker 24 But if they do occupy, they would be more liable for the well-being of the Palestinians that would be inside the territory. And the IDF does have a plan for this.

Speaker 24 They are planning to forcibly relocate around 2 million Palestinians to a single quote-unquote humanitarian area, which is positioned in the rubble of Rafah, where secure quote-unquote compounds are being constructed to distribute food and supplies to Palestinians who are screened and approved as not being members of Hamas.

Speaker 24 This area will be managed by private U.S. companies and a quote-unquote new international foundation, which works with Israel and the United States.

Speaker 24 Established aid organizations in the UN announced that they would not be participating in running these quote-unquote compounds, calling this a tactic to give the Israeli military even more power over how aid is distributed, saying in a statement, quote, It contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic, as a part of a military strategy.

Speaker 24 It is dangerous, driving civilians into militarized zones to collect rations, threatening lives, including those of humanitarian workers, while further entrenching forced displacement.

Speaker 2 Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 24 An Israeli official said the only alternative to being moved to this quote-unquote humanitarian area would be to leave Gaza, quote-unquote, voluntarily.

Speaker 24 to other countries, citing Trump's plan to resettle displaced Palestinians. Robert, James, Mia, do you want to comment on this?

Speaker 3 It's not much to say.

Speaker 3 They're just saying the thing that they've been going for for a while now, which is the removal of all Palestinian people from the Gaza Strip, either in body bags or to live somewhere else, I guess.

Speaker 2 It's just straight up a genocide. Like they are describing a genocide.
Yeah. There's no doubting it.
Like, I don't even know, like, what is it? What is there to say?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Like, at this point, I almost think other than obviously documenting what's happening is important, the only important thing to try to talk about is like, how can this be stopped?

Speaker 2 And or how can a degree of like, what does justice look like at some point down the line? What should be done?

Speaker 2 You know, like, these are questions to ask, but like, to just like, I don't know what to keep saying other than like, yep, they're trying to wipe out Gaza. Like,

Speaker 24 well, and specifically the use of these like, quote unquote, compounds, you're like rounding up and keeping people inside one secure area.

Speaker 3 Concentrating them in camps.

Speaker 24 Like, come on, guys. You're just setting up camps for Palestinians on the south side of the strip.

Speaker 24 And like, that's all that this is as they reoccupy and hold the entirety to quote-unquote eliminate Hamas.

Speaker 24 So this Monday, Trump's going to start a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. This is while the U.S.

Speaker 24 government has taken a backfoot on Gaza negotiations while still backing up Netanyahu and any actions taken by the Israeli military.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 24 So we will know more about what Israel is actually going to do immediately in the region in like a week's time.

Speaker 24 Though it looks like they are going to be going forward with this May 15th reoccupation plan.

Speaker 2 Cool. Well,

Speaker 3 yeah, so more good news from me, immigration update.

Speaker 3 The New York Times today on the this is Wednesday the 7th is reporting that the Trump administration is as soon as today I checked this before recording, the plane hadn't taken off, planning to ship people to migrants to Libya.

Speaker 3 The nationalities of people being renditioned there are not clear, but my guess would be that these are third-party nationals that the U.S.

Speaker 3 can't deport to their home countries, like they previously deported these people to Panama and to El Salvador. If you're not familiar with migrant detention in Libya, conditions are horrific.

Speaker 3 Like among the worst things that can happen to people.

Speaker 3 The situation in Libya is currently the country is divided between the Tripoli government, which is recognized by the UN and which the US has formal government-to-government relationships with, and Haftar's government based in Benghazi, which the Trump regime has associated with before.

Speaker 3 We have covered conditions in Libyan migrant detention camps before, which I'll chuck in the show notes.

Speaker 3 And we also talked about the dangers faced by people leaving Libya towards the EU in a different episode, which I'll also list.

Speaker 3 But to recap, reports document starvation, rape, murder, slavery, and organ harvesting occurring in Libya. Mass graves, including one last year that was found with 65 bodies in it, are not uncommon.

Speaker 3 To quote from David Yambio, David Yambio is someone who

Speaker 3 was sold and then forced to fight in a militia in Libya. And I think, I believe he escaped and he is now in, I think he's in Italy, but he's relatively outspoken on this stuff.

Speaker 3 The slave trade is alive and thriving in Libya. It thrives in the silence of nations, in the shadows of complicit systems, and in the unchecked racism that dehumanizes black lives.

Speaker 3 In other immigration news, the government's attempt to just to delay Rumesa Ozturk's return to Vermont was rejected by the Second Circuit.

Speaker 3 So that means that she will have to be returned to she was arrested in Massachusetts, if you remember, for writing an op-ed.

Speaker 24 At Tufts University, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, moved across state borders to Vermont and from there sent to Louisiana.

Speaker 3 So the habeas case was transferred to Vermont and the Second Circuit has ruled that the government cannot delay bringing her back there anymore.

Speaker 3 Another flight containing 81 migrants left Panama yesterday at the United States' expense.

Speaker 3 This is a continuation of a plan that the Biden administration installed in summer last year and the Trump administration has continued, whereby the U.S. funds deportations from Panama.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, Tokyo Weekend in Japan is reporting that the United States is asking people to show five years of social media history in order to obtain a student visa.

Speaker 3 Just to like put that in perspective for people, so you have to, even if those accounts are deleted or no longer used, you have to declare them all on your form.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 3 If you're applying for a student visa and you're at the younger end of a traditional aged undergraduate, you could have to list every social media account you've had since you were 12

Speaker 3 on this form. And the U.S.
has required disclosure for a while, but like it hasn't been a practical thing.

Speaker 3 I haven't really ever heard from anyone of anybody's visa being denied or asylum being denied based on social media posting. But this is now something that they are asking people to disclose.

Speaker 24 Well, and requiring, not like requiring, yeah. Not asking.

Speaker 24 It is going to be like an enforced requirement in a way that before it really hasn't been.

Speaker 24 The term that the law firm used in this piece is like, in the past, this has been mostly quote-unquote negligible.

Speaker 24 And now this is something that the Department of State is really being adamant about.

Speaker 3 Yeah, which will massively delay the time to process visa applications on top of everything else.

Speaker 24 People in Japan have compared this to policies similar to that of China's Cultural Revolution.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, I have been to other countries, to be clear, where they open up your social media and look at it when you're entering, but this is not a thing that anyone has ever associated with the United States.

Speaker 3 Finally, I guess, the Freedom of the Press Foundation got some documents released under the Federal Freedom of Information Act that outlined that the intelligence community did not believe that the Maduro regime was controlling Cutende Aragua, which was one of the claims that the Trump administration has made in its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 So it's just kind of, I think most people who pay any attention to the situation weren't really buying that, but it's showing that this was documented by the U.S. intelligence community as well.

Speaker 3 So yeah, anything to add? The Libya stuff is bleak. Like,

Speaker 3 it hasn't got much coverage in the US. We have covered it before, but the European Union is already complicit in the terrible treatment of migrants in Libya.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 3 for ages, it has happened for ages. Like the so-called Libyan Coast Guard are bringing people back to Libya and are like literally selling them from shelters to human traffickers.

Speaker 3 I mean, we've more or less kind of lined up behind some of the worst places on earth, like in terms of migrant detention, right? With Sekkot and this. Yeah.

Speaker 24 More and more families are figuring out that like their family members have been sent to Sakkat, like people who have not been named in official documentation.

Speaker 24 They've been able to search through these propaganda videos and identify more people. So they're launching court cases to have them returned.

Speaker 24 People who very clearly have had no gang affiliation. Not that that should even matter when you're sending people to the forever prison.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I saw one guy who had a Donald Duck tattoo and that was,

Speaker 3 I guess, a decisive claim there, right? There's a form that ICE agents fill out and

Speaker 3 there's a number of points they have to amass. I believe it's three points.
And one of the things that can allow you to amass three points is like, I think two points come from a tattoo,

Speaker 3 which they decide to be gang affiliated.

Speaker 2 No, and again, like it, they seem to just be saying tattoos, period, right? Like anything is Trindagua, right? Yeah, right.

Speaker 24 People who have like soccer tattoos, people who have I love my mom and dad tattoos. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 There's an autism awareness tattoo.

Speaker 3 Yeah, some guy had an autism awareness. Yes.
Yeah. That one like haunts me because I

Speaker 3 have met young neurodivergent people and their families who are bringing them to the US to get better, what they thought was a better standard of care, right?

Speaker 3 To allow their children to progress and have a beautiful life yeah man that one like um

Speaker 3 like i honestly really struggle with that i uh i've spent lots and lots and lots of time with venezuelan migrants uh and like i they're my friends and that particular one like people whose children have any need for medical care right are overrepresented in the migrant population because they just can't access it there and so they they upend their whole lives and carry their children across the continent to give them a chance at a better life.

Speaker 3 And like that, that one is particularly hard for me to win.

Speaker 3 I did just want to mention on the topic of asylum, I have heard from so many migrants stuck in Mexico who are having a god-awful time to include robbery, kidnapping, sexual violence,

Speaker 3 all of the things that we know can happen to migrants along the migrant trail because they have no pathway to get to the U.S. They're now just stuck there, right?

Speaker 3 Mexico continues to take migrants and move them back back south if it catches them near the United States border, even

Speaker 3 if some of them move up as far as Mexico City, right? Because they have access to services there and then again sent back south to places where migrants have routinely been murdered.

Speaker 3 So I know we're focusing a lot on migrants being kicked out of the U.S., deported, renditioned.

Speaker 3 The conditions for migrants who aspired to come to the United States, who took great risks to be Americans and are stuck in Mexico are also dire.

Speaker 24 All right, let's go and break and then come back for a few more updates before we close out.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 We're back. And wait a second.
Is that

Speaker 2 the tariff song? Tyree don't like it.

Speaker 2 Rocking Caspar, rocking Casper. Tyre don't Lagging like

Speaker 2 Rocking Casper, Rocket Caspa.

Speaker 2 All right, guys, I actually don't know. Do we have anything to say about tariffs this week? Yeah, we actually do have some tariffs.
So we're going to be talking about Fridays. All right, good.

Speaker 2 I'm just, we got to get all of our use out of that song because, again,

Speaker 2 we really had to suspend the whole team's health care to pay for it. It was monstrously expensive.

Speaker 2 The full cut of that song is 17 and a half hours. We actually brought in the remaining members of Fleetwood Mac as as well as several Rolling Stones.
It was just disastrous.

Speaker 3 So far, attempts to resurrect Joe Strummer have failed that we have spent millions.

Speaker 2 We only use the clip with our friend the narcissist cookbook. But yeah, there is a 26-minute drum solo with the guy from Rush.
Getty Lee, he's still alive, right? Was it Getty Lee? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 He's still alive. The joke works.
The joke works.

Speaker 24 Not cheap.

Speaker 2 Not cheap.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. It's much like the direwolf thing.

Speaker 3 We've put Joe Strummer's DNA into another coffee man, and we're waiting to see where we've released him into the wild, and we're going to see how he develops.

Speaker 2 So far, he just has a lot of blood clots. But we're going to have to go.

Speaker 24 We have Nehemfielder on the case, though. He's training him up.

Speaker 2 We'll get him on soon. All right.
Media.

Speaker 2 Good, bad? What do you think? Yes. Everything was bad.
Okay. So, all right,

Speaker 2 let's actually do this shit.

Speaker 2 So, one of the things that we've been talking about a lot on this show is the De Minimis exemption, which was this exemption that formerly allowed you, was particularly used used in trade with China, where you could, like, if you were sending a package that was under like $700, you didn't have to, like, it didn't have to like go through customs in the way that you would normally would have to do it.

Speaker 2 That shit's gone. That ended on Friday of last week.
This has already skyrocketed the cost of doing imports of shit from China because huge amounts of stuff being shipped from China was.

Speaker 2 you know, like reliant on shipping it in packages that were exactly $699.

Speaker 2 And, you know, this has like, like, Temu's entire business model has changed basically overnight. We're like, they're no longer shipping stuff in from China.

Speaker 2 They're only selling stuff from like American distributors. This is going to have catastrophic effects on so many supply chains you've never even thought of in the weeks to come.

Speaker 2 Because again, there are so many different like tiny screws and shit.

Speaker 2 Like just like really, really small items that you used to be able to get from China for like fucking $5 for like 100 of them that now

Speaker 2 have like unbelievable tariff rates on on them and have to go through a really, really convoluted customs process.

Speaker 2 There have already been sort of massive supply chain disruptions in a large number of industries. It's going to continue to get worse.

Speaker 2 Sophie was talking about metal imports hitting the construction industry because there's, you know, there's tariffs on a bunch of different kinds of metal, as we've covered on the show.

Speaker 2 Aluminum, God knows what's going to happen to diet coat.

Speaker 3 We'll put it in lead, like God intended.

Speaker 24 Maybe that'll finally change Trump's outlook is when his diet code stops.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Trump and Musk both become inoperable.

Speaker 2 You know, Garrison, we will know when that's hit when the missiles are in the air. Like, oh, shit, he ran out.

Speaker 24 Federal occupation of the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, you know, and this is also like, this is going to have a profound impact on the Chinese economy.

Speaker 2 Again, we're still in sort of the waiting room until sort of midsummer when all of the rest of the tariffs that were supposed to go into effect go back into effect and literally everything collapses.

Speaker 2 You're probably three to five weeks out from really starting to see it hit hard in like the stuff you buy on a day-to-day basis, right?

Speaker 2 People who are doing stuff like remodeling houses or building houses are starting to notice now. Yeah.
I think people,

Speaker 2 car, car repair businesses and whatnot, people have to order parts. That is starting to hit.

Speaker 2 But your grocery store, that's really going to be most noticeable somewhere between three and five weeks from now. Maybe sooner, probably not much longer.

Speaker 2 Well, and other things are about to get significantly worse. So this has been talked about for a long time.
The buzz right now is that they're happening soon.

Speaker 2 I don't know exactly what that means, but there has been for a long, long time, Trump has been doing, talking about doing tariffs on pharma. So congratulations.

Speaker 2 Get excited for all of your medication costing a lot more money. He also put into place a 100% tariff on foreign movies.

Speaker 24 Well, we'll see. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But then he walked that back. He had a conversation with John Voigt and announced

Speaker 2 100% tariff on all movies. Yeah.
Not night in the U.S. No one knows what what that means.

Speaker 2 How do you do a tariff on a movie? What are we talking about?

Speaker 2 It's literally, it's literally just like he's doing tariffs in a way that like there's that, but that guy from the wolf of Wall Street is like what guy walks out of the room and goes short everything he's ever touched.

Speaker 2 Like it's like that thing. Yeah.
Like he's going to be tariffing like fucking ocean currents in two months.

Speaker 2 The responses to it have been have been so funny because Gavin Newsome, arch dip shit of the Democratic Party, was immediately like, we love the idea of working with our president to keep film jobs in California, you know.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, Trump immediately was like, well, maybe we won't do that. I think because there's still at the very head of the studio system, some scary old mob type dudes, right?

Speaker 2 And I think a few of them also Tom Cruise is terrifying. Tom Cruise.
Tom Cruise like sat down. Listen, Donald.

Speaker 2 You know, no one's heard from David Miscovich's wife in a long ass time, and they don't have to hear from you either. Like, you don't want to fuck with me.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Either that or Trump believes he actually is the Mission Impossible guy.

Speaker 24 And you could convince them.

Speaker 2 You could convince him.

Speaker 2 Somebody convinced him. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Somebody convinced him De Niros is. Didn't he reopen Alcatraz after the Alcatraz film aired on the little.

Speaker 2 Yes, but it was the Clint Eastwood one and not the much better Alcatraz film, The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage. A banger ages perfectly.
Watch it. Everyone watch it tonight.

Speaker 2 Fuck reading any more news. Okay, there's more news, though, unfortunately.
Yeah. Well, okay, there's one funny thing.

Speaker 2 And there's the, like, the actual news here is part of what's going on here is just everything is just chaos.

Speaker 2 And this is something that, like, I mean, I've had this conversation with like a bunch of people who work in shipping over the last couple of weeks is that, like, it's just chaos, right?

Speaker 2 Like, everything is changing all the fucking time.

Speaker 2 And this means that every time one of these things changes, a bunch of like the import codes and shit, like stuff just changes on the level of like the customs people.

Speaker 2 And like, just like literally the process of importing this stuff changes. And it's just a complete fucking disaster.
People are getting laid off constantly too.

Speaker 2 So like every single part of the government that's supposed to be doing this suddenly has less people. It's an absolute rolling catastrophe.
It will continue to get worse.

Speaker 2 There's also good evidence that like they know that it's going to get worse. I'm going to read this quote from USA Today.
Quote, this is from Trump.

Speaker 2 I don't think a beautiful baby that's 11 years old needs to have 30 dollars, Trump told meet the press host Kirsten Welker.

Speaker 2 I think they can have three or four dolls because what you're doing with China is just unbelievable. We have a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars for China.

Speaker 2 I'm just saying, they don't need to have 30 dollars. They can have only

Speaker 2 250 pencils. They can have five.
Five pencils, everyone.

Speaker 2 Five pencils and three dolls this Christmas.

Speaker 24 Imagine if Joe Biden announced, like, all right, we're going to have to cut down on Christmas gifts this year. We can't do it.

Speaker 24 The Fox News would be like freaking the fuck out. We're like, Joe Biden's taking away your kids' Christmas and the pencils.
And yeah, who cares?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I mean, like, like the Ashley Sunstein's thing here is like, yeah, no, like, these people understand that you're going to suffer. They don't give a shit.
They want you to suffer.

Speaker 24 That's the whole point of their political project.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, you know, yeah, owning the libs.

Speaker 24 Anyway, is that all for tariff talk, Bia?

Speaker 24 Yeah,

Speaker 2 that's all we got on. That's all we got on the tariffs.

Speaker 24 I am excited for Trump to meet Ethan Hunt on his last mission.

Speaker 24 There's still hope. All right.
I have a few more updates before we close out here. One on the federal judge back and forth of last week.
U.S.

Speaker 24 District Judge blocked the Trump admins' efforts via executive order to require what they deem as proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Speaker 24 The judge stated that this case was about separation of powers and undue presidential interference in how states and Congress run and regulate elections.

Speaker 24 Writing, quote, our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states, not the president, with the authority to regulate federal elections.

Speaker 24 No statutory delegation of authority to the executive executive branch permits the president to short-circuit Congress's deliberative process by executive order. Yeah.

Speaker 24 So we'll see how that develops for now. I'll also be doing an update on the SAVE Act as it as it makes its way through Congress as well for those interested.

Speaker 24 Another kind of voting suppression bill that's getting pushed through. This Tuesday, the Supreme Court upheld the trans-military ban, at least for now.

Speaker 24 It'll still process through appeals, but the Trump administration is now allowed to enforce the ban, which they previously couldn't because a lower court put the enforcement on hold.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I think the actual scariest part about that is

Speaker 2 if you read the language of what the court was talking about, they've been describing it as like someone who thinks that they are a woman when they're actually a man, like isn't someone who can perform at like the standards of like honor and whatever that like a soldier needs.

Speaker 2 And this is, I think, a ramp up to the really, really dangerous thing that is coming, which is their attempt to just straight up brand being trans as fraud.

Speaker 24 I mean, this is the Trump admins argument, correct? This is what they were writing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 This is the statement, I guess, that the DOD is claiming that expressing a, quote, false gender identity divergent from an individual sex can't satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.

Speaker 3 And they specifically talk about a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life.

Speaker 3 And they then go ahead to claim that being trans inherently contradicts that.

Speaker 24 That's the Trump admins argument, which is going to be like used to undermine transgender rights in the future, possibly threatening Title IX.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 3 yeah, it's very concerning.

Speaker 24 So the fact that they were able to,

Speaker 24 at least at this point, win this case in the Supreme Court, extremely worrying.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I will just say that if this impacts you, someone you care about, someone you know,

Speaker 3 you can reach out to us.

Speaker 3 Obviously, there's very little we can do about it, but we are here to listen and to report the news. And you can do that at coolzone tips at proton.me.

Speaker 3 It's only an encrypted email end-to-end if it comes from an encrypted email address to our encrypted email address.

Speaker 24 We are reading all of those. We may not respond to all of them, but we are taking note of them.

Speaker 2 And we'll report on stuff in the future.

Speaker 24 The last thing I do want to add is like a raid that happened last week in California.

Speaker 24 Homeland Security Investigations, ICE, and Secret Service raided a house in Southern California, looking for a man who months ago posted flyers around Los Angeles last January, warning about ICE agents in the area with names, photos, and phone numbers, reading in Spanish, quote, careful with these faces, unquote.

Speaker 24 The feds served a criminal search warrant on the home of this guy's parents, even though he moved to New York last March.

Speaker 24 At least 15 armored vehicles pulled up to this upscale neighborhood with full militarized federal SWAT. They seized routers and hard drives.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's not great.

Speaker 24 Acting ICE Director Todd Loynes was on the scene for this operation.

Speaker 24 He told Fox News that he took it personally that someone would put a target on his agents in an effort to interfere with them and put them at risk, saying the person will be held accountable.

Speaker 24 What they're using here is probably likely U.S. Code 119, protection of individuals performing certain duties.

Speaker 24 Whoever knowingly makes restricted personal information about a covered person or a member of the immediate family of that covered person publicly available with the intent to threaten, intimidate, or incite the commission of a crime of violence against that covered person or a member of the immediate family.

Speaker 24 So,

Speaker 24 this is likely what they're using, arguing that posting a photo on a flyer with the person's name and phone number is enough to threaten, intimidate, or facilitate the commission of a crime.

Speaker 3 Yeah. What constitutes covered persons under this?

Speaker 3 that's a good question james uh that's a screenshot right so you can't click that that is a screenshot um and probably a question for a lawyer but they are they are arguing that that the ice agents like fall under this this purview yes the term covered person means a an individual designated in section 114 b a grand juror petty juror witness or other officer of the court an informant or witness in a federal criminal investigation or prosecution, state or local officer or employee whose restricted personal information is made publicly available because of the participation in or assistance provided to a federal criminal investigation.

Speaker 3 So it's part C.

Speaker 24 Yeah, so that's what they're going to argue. The people's addresses weren't posted here.
It was just their names and photos.

Speaker 24 But ICE and HSI are being very protective of the faces of agents doing immigration raids and student crackdowns right now.

Speaker 24 They're really nervous about agents possibly being targeted. So any attempt to identify these is being treated as like a threat.

Speaker 24 A Homeland Security spokesperson told Fox News:

Speaker 24 These pathetic activists are putting targets on the backs of our law enforcement as they shield MS-13, Trendilagua, and other vicious gangs that traffic women and children, kidnap for ransom, and poison Americans with lethal drugs.

Speaker 24 These individuals will be held accountable for obstructing the law and justice. This shouldn't be controversial.

Speaker 2 Unquote.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, five people died after a panga carrying migrants migrants capsized off Del Mar, which is in North County San Diego. The search is ongoing.
I believe another five are still missing.

Speaker 3 One of those is a 10-year-old girl from India. And Christine Noam has said she wants the DOJ to pursue death penalty charges against the smugglers who bought these people over.

Speaker 3 These boats have been a thing for a while,

Speaker 3 but this is not the first of these tragedies. And it's obviously like we shouldn't lose focus of the fact that someone's little child died, which is horrific.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Uh, tough news week, uh, as usual, I guess.

Speaker 2 Tough news week.

Speaker 2 The only way to feel better is by fighting.

Speaker 24 But we did report the news.

Speaker 2 We did. We reported the news.

Speaker 2 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 56 It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 56 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 56 You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 5 Thanks for listening.

Speaker 25 The holidays with family and kids?

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