It Could Happen Here Weekly 198

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That's sofas.com offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply this is matt rogers from lost culture resistance with matt rogers and bowen yang hey so what if you could boost the wi-fi to one of your devices when you need it most because xfinity wi-fi can and what if your wi-fi could fix itself before there's even really a problem xfinity does that too what if your wifi had parental instincts xfinity wi-fi is part nanny part ninja protecting your kids while they're online and finally what if your wifi was like the smartest Wi-Fi?

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

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

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

Garrison takes a puff of their clove cigarette as slow jazz plays in the background.

These sites ain't what they used to be.

I've been digging into liberal conspiracy.

Theories, that is.

They're all the rage where the sky is blue and the book is face.

These lebs think old Donnie Jay's close call in Pennsylvania was a false flag.

That the South African musk stole the election.

And that the Park Service has gone rogue, waging an insurgent information warfare against this corrupt administration.

Sending out coded messages on social media.

It's called Blue An' On Doll, and it's been making me blue.

This is it could happen here.

I'm Garrison Davis.

I'm joined by Mia Wong for our Blue On On episode.

Finally.

I never thought, I never thought I would be nostalgic for the days where I was arguing with ISIS on Twitter, but increasingly, increasingly, I am looking back at that as the golden age of the internet.

We're merely dealing with this.

No, it's only gotten more stupid.

And it's only going to get more stupid from here.

Oh, yeah, no, this is the least stupid it's going to be for at least 50 years.

And this is the thing that I realized while doing my research for this blue non episode is that usually conspiracy research is kind of fun.

I have a good time looking into conspiracy theories.

I like going to conspiracy conventions.

I get joy out of this.

Almost no joy looking into liberal conspiracy theories.

Really boring and kind of sad.

So

that's the intro for this episode.

Garrison, can I interest you in some of the bespoke bespoke shit none of none of the none of this 2024 election stolen can i can i interest you in some 2004

iowa vote total stealing oh yeah absolutely

we'll get to that

we'll get to that in our last section because yeah there has been liberal election denial in the past not at the same i think scale it exists at now but yes it certainly has existed before and you know for a while conspiracy theories were like a bipartisan or at least like a bi-directional, political pastime.

Like, old conspiracy magazines were not as partisan as conspiracy theories seem today.

Think of like, you know, JFK.

Everyone gets to have fun with JFK.

Except for me, I don't have any fun with that.

And conspiracy culture used to like cross over between hippie environmentalism, anti-Semitism, anti-corporatism, anti-authoritarianism.

All these things exist both on the far right and the far left.

There was a lot of meshing between different polarities of conspiracy theory.

And I think politics on the fringe are slightly more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.

And if you spend any amount of time in like, you know, the communist left, you'll see that they have their fair share of conspiracy theories.

Or even just a conspiratorial way of understanding the world.

They all think that we work for the CIA.

Yeah, stuff about the CIA and NATO, all kinds of stuff.

And though, like, anti-vaccine and 9-11 trutherism were initially more liberal-aligned conspiracy theories, in the Obama years, conspiracy culture coalesced around the growing far right.

Look at people like Glenn Beck and the slide of Alex Jones into the fascist right.

Case in point, Obama birtherism, and all this stuff leads to Donald Trump and QAnon.

As of late, liberals have had a conception that, as the more rational of the two political alignments, they were almost naturally immune to conspiratorial thinking.

Meanwhile, attacks on consensus reality, fractured information streams, and any larger collective sense of what's real and what isn't started to slip away from everyone.

Kirsten, yeah, your camera is flashing.

They're trying to silence me.

They're trying to silence.

I'm getting too close to the truth.

It legitimately looked like a fucking like you're being taken off the air in a cyberpunk thing.

Look, your fucking pirate radio is being taken down my my cat started to unplug my camera

really funny shit although my cat is named theodore katzynski and kaczynski was a cia operative who got mk ultra so you never know

the right wing's trailblazing of political unreality allowed space for liberals to dip their toes into the conspiratorial mindset again but maybe without even realizing that's what they were doing Exaggerations of Russia Gate was one of the first Trump-era liberal experiments with conspiracy theories.

The idea that Russia not only engaged in hacking on a social media disinformation campaign to influence the 2016 election, but that Donald Trump himself colluded with Russia to get himself elected and might even be a Russian asset.

And even though those allegations were investigated and not concretely proven, the conspiratorial churn continued, emboldened by the media environment that the right has created.

As QAnon accelerated during the second half of Trump's first term, so did the decline of American consensus reality, culminating in the Stop the Steal movement and January 6th, which were explosive manifestations of internet conspiracism which erupted in the physical world.

A severe fracturing of reality took place.

Any conception of a shared political reality seemed so far gone.

And the effects of this loss aren't just contained to Republicans, but this also enables liberals and people on the left by opening up space for small reality tunnels to form, regardless of political ideology.

The siloing of information channels makes it almost impossible to actually form a consensus reality.

As the United States has embraced its political keyfabe, as everything gets more absurd, what loses is political mundanity.

Liberals and the left were almost destined to become more conspiratorial in this current moment.

And you can even look at how Newsom is like copying Trump's posting strategies, and even how people like me memefy and replicate Trump phrases, many such cases.

We were all going to be pulled into this at a certain point because it's just more interesting.

I'm going to quote from one of Mia's favorite books, The CCRU.

Quote, Oh, God, no.

Conspiracy fictions are spun out of an all-encompassing narrative that can't possibly be falsified, because they want you to believe in their non-existence.

To attempt to refute such narratives is to be drawn into a tedious double game.

One either has to embrace an arbitrary and outrageous cosmic plot in which everything is being run by Jews, masons, the Illuminati, the CIA, Microsoft, or Satan, or, alternatively, advocate submission to the most mundane construction of quotidian reality, dismissing the hyperstitional chaos that operates behind the screens.

This is why atheism is usually so boring.

Both conspiracy and common sense, the normal reality script, depend on the dialectical side of the double game.

On reflective twins, belief and unbelief.

But disbelief is merely the negative complement of belief.

Belief is so much stronger because disbelief is so much more boring.

It only exists in comparison to belief in something.

I think this is why everyone has this urge to get more conspiratorial.

Like Americans specifically, our whole country is based on conspiracy theory.

Like the Masons are such a core part of our national identity.

I fucking went down that tunnel.

I went down the, like, if you asked me to start talking about politics in late 1970s, early 1980s, Italy, I could start talking about how Italy was run by a rogue Masonic launch.

So that actually is true.

If you Google Propaganda Due,

you will find out this was this was actually this was on the front page of the New York Times.

It was, to be fair to the Masons, this was a rogue Masonic launch.

They had been expelled from the Masons for being assholes.

But this is true.

All conspiracies are true, but only about 1970s Italy.

But it's more interesting, right?

Like,

it's so much more interesting.

Yeah, it is more interesting.

And it makes it really hard to disprove conspiracy theories when the act of disproving it makes it feel like you're submitting to some all-controlling authority.

And people, people feel like they're losing.

And that idea of submission is why people get so pulled into conspiracy theories because they think that believing in conspiracy theories is itself almost a form of resistance against, you know, quote-unquote them.

Yeah, which is, which, which is very funny because the actual operation of conspiracy is precisely the other way around.

Like, conspiracies have been encouraged by governments forever.

Like, the protocols of the elders of Zion were like an op by the fucking czars.

Like,

this is this, like, this, this, this, this was, this was literally a Russian police operation, right?

But all of these people now believe that they're like, oh, I'm like the anti-systemic person because I fell for this like anti-Semitic police operation.

But it's a, yeah, it's a really powerful force.

The U.S.

government has intentionally stoked UFO conspiracy theories for 80 years.

Yeah, because it covers up the thing, you know, if you want to go conspiratorial about it, because it covers up the thing they're actually doing, which is like mundane but horrifying weapons testing shit.

Like.

Now, the CCRU proposes that quote-unquote unbelief might be the way out of this cycle by building a plane of potentiality where the annihilation of judgment converges with real cosmic indeterminacy.

I myself try to embrace an unbelief viewpoint for a lot of things, but I think that only gets you so far and might also encourage some of these same problems in a larger scale.

Because America has now gotten to the point of unbelief, especially in regards to QAnon.

We've outgrown the need for QAnon because everything is QAnon now.

Politics are about determining who is and isn't a pedophile.

Immigrants are trafficking children.

Donald Trump is on the Epstein list, which both doesn't exist and was invented by Democrats.

Historical events are staged.

Every election was now stolen by the side who won.

DHS is posting coded messages on the internet.

The FBI and police are faking crime statistics.

Everything Trump does is a distraction from whatever the previous thing Trump did, which itself was a distraction from whatever the previous thing Trump did.

So on and so forth.

This is just what American politics are now.

And while Trump's numerous connections to Epstein are long documented, and he appears in Epstein FBI investigation files, discussions around it can feel very the storm is coming.

The pedo-elite are always just about to be arrested and removed from office.

I'd like to see old Donnie Jay wiggle his way out of this jam.

The logic of QAnon has perforated almost every aspect of American politics.

On Blue Sky, there is this conspiratorial mantra gaining traction among liberals, Quote: He wasn't shot, he didn't win, he's on the list.

Don't like that.

Oh no,

that's what they believe.

Do you know what isn't a conspiracy theory, Mia?

That advertisement is designed to drive consumer demand, to replenish capitalism by replacing your desire.

That's not a conspiracy theory, that's just the good old truth.

Listen to these ads.

Alright, we're back.

As QAnon itself became an uber conspiracy theory over time, linking together a large collection of historical and contemporary conspiracy theories into one overarching story, Bluanon does not just refer to a single conspiracy theory, but rather is a label that can be applied to a general assortment of theories or conspiratorial thinking held by contemporary liberals and Democratic voters.

I myself used a version of this term all the way back in January of 2021 for a since-removed YouTube video due to threats of violence in which I used the word blue QAnon to describe Portland liberals who believed that Russia was staging Antifa protests to make liberals look bad after Biden's election victory.

And some of the banners used in this video apparently had threats to the president of the United States.

So YouTube took down the video, unfortunately, even though the video was just outlining liberal conspiracy theories about this protest, thinking that, you know, Russia probably made this banner.

The censorship regime continues apace.

Around this time, 2021, the term Blue Anon was mostly used to refer to Trump-Russia conspiracy theories.

But there were a whole bunch of other liberal conspiracy theories in this era, like how pallets of bricks were being mysteriously dropped off at protests.

And though I will say, this conspiracy theory was used by both people on the right, as well as some centrist liberals.

Yeah, and I think this is actually, you know, you were talking about how there is this like QAnon, like this sort of moment of break with consensus reality.

And I think the 2020 uprising was one of the most, the single most important events in this entire process.

Massively so.

Yeah, because the 2020 uprising was a systemic challenge to both the liberal and the Republican establishment, right?

Because if its central premise is true that the United States is a structurally racist state, right, that is based on the oppression of black people,

then you can't continue to maintain the state.

And also simultaneously, the thing that was incredibly threatening was that people were actually willing to go out and fight the police over this.

And on the right, this obviously causes massive reality fraction because they have to grapple with the fact that like most of the country was fine with burning a police station down.

Or were they?

Right, yeah.

This is like, oh no, there was this was this was that this whole thing was actually like a plan by like Antifa Democrats and like Pritzker's billionaire or like the Jewish billionaire Soros Jewish billionaires.

It was actually the Boogaloo Boys who planned the whole thing and burned down the third precinct.

Yeah, and this is this is a very, very common.

This became the liberal main line on the burning of the third precinct was that it was a false flag by like the boogaloo boys.

People don't remember the boogalo boys.

Far-right Boogaloo boys.

Yeah, it was like they're like this very, very weird race war fascist.

Trying to encourage a new civil war.

Yeah, we're weird, fascist group.

But like that became the liberal main line because they had to find a way to explain the fact that the people who were, you know, like a lot of people who are normally supposed to be their base decided instead of doing their sort of just like vote for the president and like vote for the Democratic president and like non-violently and passively do nothing, people

went and fought the police for for most of a year.

And this caused this massive fracturing where people had to believe that instead of there just being construction sites and people taking bricks from construction sites, as people have been doing for literally since the first brick was made, people have been taking them and throwing them at enemy authorities, right?

Like Stonewall was a false play.

Yeah, right, because the actual power of that uprising was so dangerous to the fundamental liberal conceptions of

reality and the world.

And that like the marginalized and oppressed people who they sort of claim to represent would take it into their own hands the idea that, yeah, the state is structurally racist and so it has to be resisted.

That caused people to just have to create these like just pure reality tunnels of like, oh no, actually any attempt to fight the police is a false flag that the police want to do.

Or the burning of the third precinct was actually like the fascists attempting to provoke people and that the state actually wants you to fight it.

Because if you fight the state, then the state wins.

And like, this is one of the er reality tunnels that creates this sort of conspiratorial mindset where like you know the boogloo boys at the third reasoning that's not just a thing from like you know online posters that became the main line of the democratic party because they also had to contain the uprising and from there and once once that's the accepted narrative of like the democrats then this pure reality tunnel conspiracy is now just baked in to the very core of liberalism as it attempts to recuperate and defeat the energies that were unleashed by 2020.

And that's how we're here, because that's a large part of it.

Flash forwarding a few years, during the first half of 2024, especially in and around Biden's disastrous debate performance, the blue-nong term began being used to refer to a collection of theories that a secret cabal of deep state elites, the news media, high-ranking Democrats and Republicans were targeting Biden to sabotage his presidency to make him lose the election.

There is no such thing as getting old.

There is simply being sabotaged by cue cards and camera lighting positions.

Now, the Blue Anon term here is sort of a misnomer, because at this point, Russia Gate and QAnon had very little in common.

One viewed Trump as the Messiah, the other viewed him as basically, you know, an antichrist slash Russian asset.

In the wake of the Trump assassination, Philip Bump pinned a Washington Post article declaring, quote, QAnon and Bluenon rhyme, the similarities end there.

And I have sympathies for this viewpoint, especially in the wake of like January 6th, right?

Bluenon doesn't have satanic wayfare child trafficking,

but maybe it doesn't need to.

In conspiracy theories, it's not just about the substance of the beliefs held, but the function and methodology of the beliefs.

And in the past year, BluAnon's function and methodology have started to parallel QAnon's more and more.

Which leads us to the event that really opened up operating space for the mainstreaming of liberal conspiracy theories, the attempted assassination of one Donald Trump.

Americans are particularly susceptible to assassination conspiracy theories.

It has kind of been woven into our national identity.

Now, of course, Republicans, including elected representatives, develop their own fair share of theories about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, but that's another episode.

Here's a viral Facebook video.

Remember Facebook?

No.

It's not that bad.

Take a look at what happened, though.

Fake ass shit, man.

Stage fake ass shit, bro.

Ain't no bullets flying and nothing, you know what I'm saying?

If you you know anything about a shootout, seen a shootout, you'll see bullets flying, stuff getting pilled off.

Man, ain't nothing going on, nothing getting hit, nothing getting piled off.

He definitely didn't get hit.

He faked it off.

The whole thing is fake, staged, and rigged, bro.

This is how they play y'all.

They gonna make y'all vote for him now off the dump.

You feel me?

Oh, y'all.

Oh, he, oh, he's been shot at.

Y'all all gonna want to vote for him.

Y'all, some fucking clowns, bro.

The word staged spiked in use by almost 4,000%

on Twitter, according to the misinformation tracker NewsGuard, appearing 300,000 times the day of and after the shooting.

The term inside job also rose on social media, up by over 3,000%.

With bots and inauthentic accounts adding to this chaos, an Israeli disinfo tech firm Cybra found that 45% of accounts using hashtags like fake assassination and staged shooting were inauthentic.

Within a day, a post on X questioning the authenticity of the event gained over 50,000 likes.

Quote, great camera angle, great quality, no secret service agent in front of his head covering the wound, conveniently placed US flag.

Unquote.

Another got nearly 50,000 likes, asking users to, quote, raise your hand and repost if you think this was staged.

There was a flood of posts, earning thousands of likes and millions of alleged views, which questioned why Trump was able to, or allowed, to stand above the crowd after being shot, yelling fight, fight, fight, risking getting shot again.

And while it, you know, could have been possible that there was a second shooter, Trump was only able to stand back up after it was confirmed that Crooks was killed.

You can hear it in the video, shoot her down, shoot her down.

Secret Service was already aware of Crooks' position prior to the shooting and had not located any other possible shooters.

But reality does not matter here.

I'm going to play a short clip from a YouTube video, which was uploaded just a month ago with over 85,000 views, explaining why someone feels it really easy to believe in this conspiracy now.

Ladies and gentlemen.

I normally don't go down conspiracy holes.

I don't.

But we know MAGA does.

MAGA has gone down so many conspiracy holes and brought it to science that we've got people not giving their kids vaccine.

We've seen measles rising in Texas.

We had people not wanting to get to COVID.

We had quarterbacks telling people to take ivermectin.

We had people saying take fucking horse tranquilizers to get rid of COVID.

And so now I think I've earned the opportunity to go down a rabbit hole.

This video was someone who was right there at the Trump rally and they're contending that this whole thing is made up, which a lot of us felt like it was anyway, because we do know that Trump, he's not afraid to fool around in, shall we say,

reality or entertainment TV.

We know he's not afraid to do that.

And I'll show you an example of that in a minute.

What example do you think he's going to show?

It's a WWE thing.

It is the WWE thing.

I remember there was so much WWE like tying shit with this.

We'll get to that in a sec, but I find this explanation of why this person feels almost allowed to believe a conspiracy theory is now super interesting.

It is specifically because the right has been so willing to embrace conspiracism that now it feels like it's fair game for liberals to do it as well.

And this guy is just

almost acknowledging this fact.

He's kind of like working his way to my entire thesis here,

maybe without realizing it.

Also, this guy sponsored by an AI company just to make this absolutely perfect.

Great stuff.

Great stuff happening

in the sphere of our political discourse.

We love to see it.

But yes, based on the blood smeared across Trump's face after he went on the ground, people postulated that Trump was hiding a razor blade in his sleeve, WWE style, to purposefully cut his face to make it look like he was shot.

Yeah, Donald Trump bladed himself.

What are we doing here?

so should we believe that faking

getting shot is beyond them why would we believe that when this is still trump that once was trained by the wwe

Wasn't those some convincing ass right hands he just gave Vince McMahon?

No, those were the least convincing right hands I've ever seen.

And I have watched Paul Colgan throw up.

Good enough for me.

You know what?

I think we've solved this whole assassination thing right here.

Like, this stuff doesn't even warrant debunking.

Debunking is useless, right?

Yeah.

All of these conspiracy theories rest on the fact that rally attendees were hospitalized with gunshot wounds and two people died as a sacrifice to sell this event.

And that the Biden-era Secret Service helped facilitate this whole operation.

I watched YouTube videos explaining that even if bullets were fired and people at the rally were hit and killed, though just not Trump, the actual footage of the shooting is actually AI because the number of targets hit don't match the number of shots heard in the video and people in the crowd suddenly disappear once shots are fired.

As in people get down low on the ground to avoid getting hit.

As for the number of shots hit versus shots fired, these videos seem to not realize that bullets travel through objects, like say Donald Trump's ear.

That being the point of a bullet.

Also, this was actually Trump loyalist police firing into the crowd as a part of this stage operation, not Thomas Crooks.

After the shooting, a political advisor to Democratic donor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman named Dimitri Melhorn sent an email proposing that the shooting may have been, quote, encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash unquote the next day Melhorn regretted and apologized for sending the email and think about it while one person was lined up perfectly to get the now historic photo think of how many other professional photographers at the rally weren't so lucky there's not just one photographer at the event there's lots and yeah one person got a really compelling shot it's a campaign event there's paid photographers there this is this is what a campaign event is oh my god there is there was a flag that was staged because it was a campaign event.

I'm going insane.

According to a poll from Morning Consult, roughly one in five voters said that they found it credible that the shooting was staged and not intended to kill Trump, including one-third of, at the time, Biden supporters, 33% of Biden's supporters, and 12% of those who backed Trump, which is really funny to me.

That's actually really funny.

Thomas.

It was an insane job.

Good job, guys.

Good job.

The mega Trump assassination truthers.

The majority of voters, though, 62%, said that the unsubstantiated notion is not credible.

A statement I've seen from both the conspiratorial left and the right is that we know all about, say, Luigi Mangioni, or this latest school shooter, but still know nothing about the Trump assassination.

And this just isn't true.

We actually know a lot about Thomas Crookes now.

Just because you haven't read about it doesn't mean that we don't know.

I'll link to a recent New York Times article looking into his online footprint.

We know a lot about this guy.

Yep.

But based on the conception that this failed assassination attempt would, in the end, help Trump get elected, some people chose to just reject the event entirely.

And yeah, it was surreal, a warped manifestation of millions of people's dream.

And when things happen that challenge expectations or are just plain weird, some people reject that reality and substitute their own alternate realities, which make more sense to them.

If a near-miss event like this would help Trump, then it must be Trump's doing.

Do you know what Trump has no control over?

It's so not true that he doesn't have control of his products and services.

We have the reporting on this is increasingly.

The tariffs aren't real, Via.

I won't believe the tariffs until I see them with my own two eyes.

I'm going to walk you to the port of LA.

We're going to go look at the tariffs together.

My inside source.

Here's some ads.

All right, we're back.

You can't talk about liberal conspiracy theories without the most blatant example of some libs taking a page right out of the mega playbook, 2024 election denial.

Another instance of Trump and QAnon trailblazing something that used to be on the political fringe and normalizing it as acceptable political discourse.

Early on, after Trump was declared the projected winner, liberals questioned why there were seemingly 20 million missing Democratic votes from the expected 2024 totals, pointing to the higher numbers in 2020, seemingly forgetting that vote totals were still being counted.

And in the end, there were only 3 million fewer votes this election, which is extremely reasonable for an election.

According to NewsGuard, by Wednesday morning after the election, Trump cheated was trending on Twitter with nearly 100,000 mentions since midnight.

I'll read a few of these viral tweets.

Quote, I hold a master's degree in political science.

I don't yet understand these results, and I don't pretend to.

I'm not into conspiracy, but I'd like to know, did millions across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan really split their vote?

Did millions of Democratic voters really stay home?

And the answer is: yes.

Yes.

Yes, they did.

That is what happened.

You figured it out.

People did split their vote.

And yeah, lots of people were not compelled to vote for Harris and stayed home.

Congratulations.

You stumbled across the reality.

Another person remarked, quote, I hold a master's.

Again, I love all these people prefacing this by saying that they have degrees.

And I want to say two things about the degree thing.

One, 80% of the time when someone starts doing one of these things, you can go back and find different degrees they've have.

Two, I have been around

people.

who get master's degrees in in political science.

We are not talking about the cream of the intellectual crop here.

Like, this is a discipline that is like economics for people who like are even worse at the chain rule than economists.

Like, what are we doing here?

Quote: I hold a master's in political science with a minor in statistics, and I can't make sense of this.

Human nature had to completely upend itself for this to happen.

Swing states voting straight blue down the ballot, except for the top?

Nah, that's not what people do.

And yet, it is what happened.

Average political science analysis.

This is hinged for them.

So very quickly, liberals demanded recounts and court challenges, begging that Kamala Harris take this to court, with misinformation spreading that she was planning said court challenges.

Others alleged that Elon Musk hacked voting machines.

According to a report from the University of Washington, over a five-day period, there were hundreds of thousands of tweets and retweets about how Elon Musk, working with Trump and sometimes with Putin, used Starlink satellites to steal the election, perhaps by intercepting then changing vote totals through the internet, despite most voting machines not being connected to the internet.

No, and and the actual thing that he did was like going to places and saying, I'll give you a million dollars if you vote for this election.

One of you will win.

Like, that's like the actual thing that he did, which is so blatantly obvious.

And like basic, like ground game targeting and swing states.

Like

they mobilized a shit ton of money.

Quote, I'm hearing today that Elon's software Starship is the software that handled all the swing state ballots.

If indeed this is true, this is clearly a conflict of interest and another reason why swing states need investigations.

Well, good news.

This isn't indeed true.

You made this up.

This is fake.

It's not just Twitter, though.

On Meta's Twitter alternative, Threads, there was a hotbed of election denial, with posts like this spreading on the platform and beyond to places like Reddit.

Quote, Trump cheats at everything in life.

Putin interfered in the past three elections.

Musk and Trump talked to Putin a lot.

Musk's Starlink uploaded votes in swing states.

Swing state voters went dem down ballot, but Trump at the top?

Unlikely.

Starlink satellites exploding, destroying evidence.

Unquote.

This is referencing a conspiracy theory from the time that based on an event on November 10th, where a Starlink satellite re-entered orbit and blew up, as Elon Musk's technology is known to do,

this was itself proof that he was blowing up his satellites on purpose to conceal evidence that Starlink was used to alter election results.

SpaceX regularly retires satellites, which then slowly fall to Earth and blow up.

This is ordinary practice.

This particular satellite, which exploded on November 10th, was decommissioned back in August.

This has nothing to do with the election.

Yeah.

Still, there were viral tweets calling for a quote-unquote forensic investigation.

And accounts like your Anon News, an account pretending to be affiliated with the hacker group Anonymous, which is a real vector point of left-wing conspiratorial thinking.

I'm going to put a note here that says that the history and relationship of your Anon News is very complicated.

This is not our definitive statement on it.

Please don't get mad at us.

It's a fucking mess.

It's a fucking mess.

That's what I'm going to say about it.

That guy sucks shit.

They've been spreading a lot of election misinformation news, especially in November.

Quote, some strange statements from Trump and Elon have fueled doubts about election integrity.

You can just change one line of code, Elon stated, about the code on electronic voting machines.

I don't need more votes.

I already have votes, Trump stated repeatedly.

So why not take a look?

Unquote.

This alleged quote from Elon cannot be sourced at all.

The full version of it is, quote, if you want to steal an election, all you have to do is change one line of code, unquote.

I have tried so hard.

to find the original source for this quote.

I cannot.

It is just liberals saying Elon said this.

It may have been something something he said.

I cannot find it.

Even if it is something he said, there's not evidence that he stole the election

at all.

He does this.

There's a whole conspiracy on the left that thinks that Elon Musk was behind the coup in Bolivia, which was like something that was accepted by Evo back when he was in the NIS, like in Bolivia, because it was like politically convenient for everyone involved to believe that like Elon Musk did this coup in Bolivia over like lithium prices when the actual reality was it was done by a bunch of Bolivian agro barons.

But people just believe this shit.

And Elon will just play into it.

Because I don't, he probably didn't say that.

But like, even if he did, like, he did say the shit about he did the coup in Bolivia, but like, he didn't.

He objectively didn't.

LOL.

L-O-L-X-D.

Like, I, I,

okay, I'm not, I'm, I'm not, I'm not going to get into the price history of lithium here and how there was a fucking market glut at that point, which is the exact opposite thing you would want there to be if you were trying to steal lithium.

Like, it's nonsense.

So people just believe this shit because it fits, it fits their version of reality.

And the right is really happy to sort of play into this because they just play around with conspiracies.

And this line from Trump is just breaking about having a lot of projected votes already.

That's all it is.

Yeah, the day before Inauguration Day, people alleged that Trump may have accidentally admitted to stealing the election in one of his speeches.

Oh my fucking God.

Let's take a look.

Trump just told on himself.

He just credited Elon Musk's knowledge of how voting machines work for his victory in Pennsylvania.

He said this during his victory rally in Washington, D.C., the night before the alleged inauguration.

Let's listen to the audio.

And then he journeyed to Pennsylvania where he spent like a month and a half campaigning for me in Pennsylvania.

And he's a popular guy, and he was very effective.

And he knows those computers better than anybody, all those computers, those vote counting computers.

And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.

So it was pretty good.

It was pretty good.

So thank you to Elon.

That is from a very popular TikToker.

This particular video has 20,000 likes.

I can't even find how many views it has, but there's hundreds of comments talking about how the election was stolen.

The same video was spread by people like Friend of the Pod, Brooklyn Dad Defiant.

Oh, literally.

God, fucking.

Okay.

I need to spend five seconds.

No, we don't have time.

He's literally paid by the Democratic Party.

This is not used to be yeah, he used to be literally paid by the Democratic Party.

He was a fucking oil guy.

Fuck, God damn it.

Sorry, okay.

He said, quote, is that a fucking confession?

No.

23,000 likes.

And no.

This line from Trump gets referenced a lot in liberal stolen election theories.

Trump is not saying he won because Elon knows vote counting computers.

Those two statements can be separate statements that are just right next to each other.

Or it could be easily interpreted as saying that Elon Musk's computer knowledge helped prevent fraud, ensuring that if Dems tried to steal the election again, Elon would have caught them, as 2020 Republican election denial focused heavily on voting machines.

In terms of numbers on how many Democrats don't think the election was legitimate, we do have some statistics.

In 2020, 88% of Democrats thought the election was legitimate and accurate.

In 2024, it was only 63%,

with 9% saying it was the result of illegal voting or election rigging, and 29% saying they don't know if it was legitimate or accurate.

Of course, the Republicans found this election was extremely legitimate as compared to the last one, in which a majority of Republicans thought it was the result of illegal voting or election rigging.

But still, 29% of Democrats in 2024 not knowing if the election is accurate?

Pretty, pretty damaging.

And obviously, a lack of trust in election systems is an extremely damaging thing to the functioning of democracy.

The reason why I decided to finally do this episode after pulling little research bits over the course of the past year

is a tweet from August 20th.

Quote: Two whistleblowers have now confirmed that the NSA conducted an election audit and Harris was the winner.

Don't fucking ignore this.

146,000 likes, almost 30,000 retweets, 5.5 million quote-unquote views.

This went super viral.

One of the biggest instances I've seen in recent election denial.

This viral tweet links to a substack with over 51,000 subscribers and 3 million views.

The focus of the blog is showing how Kamala Harris really won the 2024 election.

The recent posts cover how a former CIA operative has confirmed that based on an NSA audit of the 2024 election, Kamala actually won.

This was a quote, covert, compartmentalized, forensic audit, unquote.

It's literally just stopped the steal.

They did the same thing.

It was completed in December 2024, and based on the findings, the NSA and CIA recommended a hand recount, but the recount was unable to take place before the January 6th election certification.

And since then, the findings of the audit, proving a Kamala victory, have been covered up by Tulsi Gabbard and the Trump administration.

This blog claims the election was stolen by hijacking voting machines and, quote, illegally copied software, decades of vulnerabilities, and the installation of a back door through a last-minute change order right before the election, unquote.

Now, there's a few problems with this theory, the first of which being that the NSA doesn't audit elections.

No!

What?

This substacker also operates a still-growing TikTok account.

To prevent being suppressed for misinformation, the user talks in coded phrases, calling elections baking contests.

State election results are either red cakes or blue cakes.

Votes are ingredients.

In her most popular video, with about 75,000 views, she claims that Trump isn't giving Red Swing states FEMA aid because he knows that these states actually voted for Kamala Harris, and so Trump is punishing them by withholding aid.

This is her second most popular video with 50,000 views, talking about North Carolina and how Elon Musk and Peter Thiel worked together to alter election results.

Hey, y'all, quick update on the baking contest in North Kackalaki, and the cake is, in fact, who.

We were able to identify about 197,000 ingredients that were swapped out by the space baker.

So he and his friend whose name rhymes with seal have been up to some interesting things when it comes to these baking contests.

So the surveillance seal and the space baker doing some doing some interesting baking.

So we need you to let your media friends know and

let all the people know.

We're going to do an email campaign next week because that seems to be how we get this done.

We do have avenues to undo this unholy mess and just hold on to your hope.

Run over to my friends at the backwards ATE and, of course, the common coalition.

Check out the report.

We have more to report on all of the baking contests that we're working on.

We're still digging, we got more to go, and

blue skies ahead, y'all.

There's something specifically, uniquely horrifying about the way that, like,

just the sort of TikTok language of

suicide or whatever, like that people say, like that kind of shit.

This stuff just makes me really sad.

No, it's

so

like, I can't have fun with this anymore.

God damn it.

The same thing when I was watching some of the Trump assassination videos, when I realized this is just from people who are unwell, and I can't even have fun with this.

And that is also the case with a lot of QAnon stuff.

You should be really careful about how much joy you take in the suffering of people people and people displaying their suffering on the internet by engaging in this stuff.

But yeah, this stuff's just really sad.

Like in other videos, she's pleading with her followers to contact their state governors to convince them to change all the voting machines because they've been compromised.

And I'll play one more video before we close the episode.

It says over 32,000 views.

She talks about Trump using tariffs as leverage to get countries to sign deals with Elon Musk's Starlink satellites, which will then be used to control elections worldwide.

And the only way to stop this is to impeach Trump and put Kamala in the White House since she is the rightful winner of the 2024 election.

They take from their constituents now to address the space cadet.

And how?

Look at what he launched last year in record time, 10 months, this low-orbit DTC constellation, and look at what they're doing with the countries around the world.

To get your tariffs removed, you have to sign a contract with the space cadet.

Hello, this is not about

any kind of like, you know,

internet in the rural areas, blah, blah, blah.

Nothing about this is to be nice.

No, it is to control future contests.

The U.S.

was not the endgame.

It was the litmus test.

So we can get out of this.

We have constitutional avenues to get out of this situation, but we need Congress to act.

And Congress won't act until the American people know what happened.

And they're not going to know what happened until our influencers and our media handle the situation.

So, oh, Rachel Maddow, please, Lawrence,

Midas Touch.

For heaven's sake, Midas Touch, you guys, four million people, you could be blasting this out and letting the American people know what happened.

Do your jobs, please, so we can get the rightful people in the house that they belong in.

The big white one.

I think

one of the things things that makes me so insane about these is that, like,

if you're actually, I guess, Garrison, you weren't around for this, but like, I've legitimately have lived through two attempts to steal an election, right?

Like, there was 2000,

which the Republicans just stole.

And then, yeah, Donald Trump did try to steal the election in 2020, but he did it by having people try to form mobs outside of polling places.

And then, like, his supporters did january 6th that's a real

thing

but the the thing about these conspiracies is it's like they they devour reality they they they consume it and strip it for for its constituent parts which is why you see so many like you know you used to see so many conspiracies that would you know if you look at their giant conspiracy charts they're talking about like the structure of the world bank and the imf and like that's that's where the builder book group stuff comes out of right they love charts the builder book Group stuff is them taking the real structure of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank

and then devouring that structure and spitting back out conspiracy.

And that's what these things do.

They take real things that happen in the world and just devour them and turn them into just nothing.

And it makes it harder to act because like, yeah, we do live in a world where the Republican Party has like attempted to or successfully did steal two elections, but not this one.

And if this is your mode of resistance, of hashtag resistance against Trump, that's useless.

It's completely useless.

It's not actually managing any of the effects of Trump

on people, like ICE, like attacks on queer people.

It's this fully contained non, non-form of fighting.

Yeah, and like you see, you see this, you see this too on the left with CIA stuff, where it's like everyone is convinced that like the person they're arguing with on Twitter, like is the CIA and that the way that you combat CIA influence is by like spreading, I don't know, post-in pro-Assad shit.

And it's like, that's not actually substantively combating the influence of the CIA.

It just feels like it is.

And that structure of feeling is so powerful that it prevents you from doing actual action.

There's been this new conspiracy theory getting traction on Blue Sky a lot that the masked people engaged in immigration enforcement, ICE,

aren't actually ICE ICE agents.

They're secretly, quote, J6ers, bounty hunters, or thugs, oath keepers, proud boys.

It's a big assumption to even say they're federal agents.

They're not identified.

We have no idea who they are.

Could be proud boys or oath keepers or 3%ers, unquote.

This is trying to push the blame away from the U.S.

government, who is engaging in this action, ICE, onto these non-state actors, which people in their mind think are easier targets.

And it's just a complete misunderstanding of power.

It's a misunderstanding of the current political situation.

And it gives you no,

no ability to actually stop the bad things ICE are doing.

But I've seen this theory gain a lot of traction online.

And in the same way that QAnon is a product of the cognitive dissonance of Trump supporters having to grapple with the fact that Trump, like their God king, is in power and their lives still suck,

this specific one is a product of the cognitive dissonance of like, the fact that these people all supported ICE when Biden was the, when Biden was the run running it, when like Biden fucking did his executive order to shut the border down, right?

Like when Biden Biden was like doing concentration camps in the desert, they were all pro-ICE.

And then they suddenly have to deal with the world where ICE is doing an ethnic cleansing.

And they can't process that.

And so the way that they attempt to cope with it is being like, well, that's actually not the real ICE.

That's like J6

Proud Boys.

It's a Groiper occupied government.

They're sending out coded messages on Twitter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's the same thing me and you did the episode about a few weeks ago in our dog whistle politics and the hunt for coded Nazi messaging episode.

But yeah, and though some Democratic voters are engaging in election denial, I think one key difference from 2020 Republican election denial is that liberal election officials have, as of yet, not been willing to participate in this rhetoric openly or pursue these baseless fraud accusations.

This is still one difference, but I think it's a ticking clock.

I think it's only a matter of time, especially once we see the midterms, that people running running for office, that Democrats might start embracing

some kind of wing-nutty stuff, the same way Marjorie Taylor Greene trojan horsed wing-nutty politics into Congress.

And now we see a whole bunch of other representatives being able to engage in conspiratorial thought on the right.

There's going to be a few instances of this, I think, in the next midterm election for Democrats.

It's something to keep an eye out for, because I think it's only a matter of time.

Like what I mentioned in that CCRU quote, mundane reality is going to lose because this stuff is just more interesting.

People are going to try to buy it and it requires constant pushback.

That does it for part one, but there's going to be another episode tomorrow where I talk with Jack of the Alt Watcher Blue Sky account to discuss the latest evolution of BlueAnon and possibly the most QAnon-y extension of BlueAnon we've seen yet.

The Alt National Park Service and their coded messages being sent out on Blue Sky and Facebook.

So stay tuned for that tomorrow.

And remember, you are not immune to propaganda.

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I sit down with reporters and the people who know this place best to connect the dots on why these stories matter to all of us.

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17

2 19 227

general public please disregard as this podcast is fighting battles on multiple fronts.

This podcast is it could happen here and I'm Garrison Davis.

Last episode, I talked with Mia Wong about the trajectory of liberal conspiracy theories, specifically throughout the last 10 years.

From Russia Gate to Trump's staged assassination and 2024 election denial, this resurgence of liberal conspiracism has been dubbed Blue Anon.

If you want more background on that, go listen to our previous episode.

But this episode is about a new evolution of Blue Anon and possibly the most QAnon-y iteration we've seen yet.

The Alt National Park Service, a social media engagement farming account that gained traction on Blue Sky and Facebook last February and March amidst cuts to the Park Service from the Trump administration.

This account gained followers by posing as a group of anti-Trump dissidents from within the Park Service.

And soon enough, it inspired a collection of other alt government accounts like Alt CDC, Alt NIH, Alt Yellowstone, and Alt NOAA.

The original Alt National Park Service account basically never talks about the Park Service itself, but during the first few months of Trump's second term, the account started going viral by posting sequences of random numbers as ostensibly coded messages to other hashtag resistance fighters.

though the account has since experimented with, altered, and refined their engagement strategies.

To hear more about that and how Alt National Park Service fits into this trend of liberal conspiracy theories, I talked with someone who has spent the past few months documenting and writing about this account.

The person who runs the Alt Watcher account on Blue Sky and writes about their research on the blog Dispatches from the Online Void.

So here's that interview.

My name's Jack.

I'm the user behind the account Alt Watcher on Blue Sky, and I've been following the Alt National Park Service for about six months, just documenting what they do and how they steal from journalists and how they're driving a lot of people insane, including me.

What is the Alt National Park Service?

Or first, what does the Alt National Park Service claim to be?

Yeah, that's an important difference.

The ALT National Park Service claims to be a loose affiliation of anonymous former parks employees that are either still employed by the Park Service and kind of working behind the scenes or who were fired or laid off by the Trump administration and are now part of a nationwide coalition to resist the government.

That's what they claim to be.

What they really are is just a Facebook shitposting account.

We're not sure if it's one person behind it or if it's a group.

It's remarkably hard to find out anything about the person who is behind the account, who they are, where they are, and how they started this.

But what they do most of the time is repost the work of journalists, directly plagiarize from news outlets, and post these vaguely conspiratorial things online to try to whip up engagement from their followers.

I first became aware of this back in probably March of 2025,

specifically.

when on Blue Sky, they just started posting a lot of numbers.

Yes.

I was aware that this account was created in the aftermath of some like, some like Doge-related cuts to the Park Service or like anti-DEI, anti-woke stuff.

And then this account popped up, claiming to be, you know, like resistance from inside to people who watch politics like seriously for their jobs was very clear that this was not a legitimate organization.

And then they just started posting numbers, sequences of numbers, along with other cryptic messages.

And this immediately starts hitting the QAnon bells.

Back in July of 2024, there was a Washington Post article about the Trump assassination conspiracy theories.

But specifically, it was

an opinion piece critical of terming liberal conspiracy theories as quote-unquote Blue Anon.

They said, quote, the main similarity of QAnon and Bluanon is that they rhyme.

And for a while, I kind of understood this criticism and agree with parts of it because there was, there was structural differences between some of how, you know, liberals or like, quote unquote, the left engage in conspiratorial thinking and like the function of QAnon.

The numbers thing started to really mess with that.

analysis because then you started to see the actual like methodology and like the ideological function of of QAnon start to get replicated in what is most likely just like engagement farming, but for the people who are following this account and engaging with it, and like it becomes like an important part of like their life and their perception of like hashtag resistance.

And I think that's where BlueAnon actually proved itself as a term was in March of 25.

I guess let's talk about the numbers.

You know what?

I would love, I would love to talk about the numbers.

The numbers are also what stood out to me.

And that is why I ended up making my account and diving into all this.

During the pandemic, I got obsessed with QAnon, you know, as just what is

a lot of people did.

A lot of people did.

You know, look, pandemic did a lot of crazy things to us.

Some people learned to knit.

Some people got good at baking.

I got really into learning about QAnon.

And I am a huge fan of the QAA podcast.

I listen to that constantly.

And as soon as I saw Alt NPS post one of the numbers, I realized I'm reading this in their cue voice.

Yeah.

Their voice modulated voice that sounds like this, whenever they would post.

And I started reading all the numbers post that way.

And just like you said, something clicked.

And I went, oh, this is, oh, I see what they're doing here.

Yeah.

And they've posted numbers many times.

I've got my giant spreadsheet pulled up here and I think they've posted something like 30 numbers.

It's been a while since they've done it but the thing that really gave the game away for me was during one of these numbers posts they posted some random number and then replied to themselves and said for discussion what do you think these numbers mean and i said oh i see what's happening here you know kind of giving away the game there a little exactly yeah this is not a group of government insiders communicating with you know their their coalition this is the user behind a facebook account realizing realizing in real time that they've stumbled on like a gold mine for engagement.

Yeah.

Oh, we can just do this and people will do the work for us.

And we're just going to say that out loud.

And throughout like March and April, their account just like rocketed in popularity.

Yes.

I've not actually looked on their Facebook account besides like the post that you've shared.

I've only seen them on Blue Sky.

What is the difference of their presence on Facebook versus like Blue Sky?

Blue Sky, I think they're at something like 900K on Facebook.

The last time I checked, it was about 4.3 million.

Jeez.

Yeah, they are a massive presence on Facebook.

And they've been monetizing their posts recently.

There have been sponsored content on Facebook leading to their page.

This is where I think one of the differences from like how QAnon functioned and Alt National Park Service, because you know, Q was not monetizing posts on the chance.

I I would have loved to see him try.

That would have been really funny.

I do not see like this account existing as

a sort of operation to influence the political trajectory of the United States the same way that the QAnon account at least evolved in that capacity, even if it started off as like a shit posting thing.

Exactly.

It certainly evolved with more of a malicious intent.

The people behind Q posting.

Yeah, I think that's a big difference between them is that this is straightforwardly an engagement farm.

Yeah.

using some of those tactics, especially like early on, but for a very simple reason, and that's that's making money on the internet, like everybody is trying to do, right?

It's just like internet hustle culture stuff with no grappling with like the consequences that has for like the psyche of people who engage with your content.

Exactly.

And the psyche of people who engage with this content is really what keeps me coming back to this project.

Because that is the real harm I see here.

Like online grifters are a dime a dozen.

You know, people who sell stuff online, it's everywhere.

It's inescapable.

What's unique about Alt NPS is that they are trying to make money on convincing people that this is real.

You know, they're not just selling hashtag resist shirts or whatever.

They're trying to get money out of people by convincing them that they really are part of a a shadow resistance against

Trump and that you can buy their shirts or you can straightforwardly just send them money for things like their Alt Junior Ranger program that they've said they're starting.

And if you send them a dollar, you're helping fund that program, and it's totally real.

And the fact that they didn't mention it for seven straight months after initially announcing it is something you definitely shouldn't worry about.

Do you know what else you definitely shouldn't worry about?

This short ad break.

So they have faced pushback for their numbers posting, but they have found a way to justify it publicly.

Do you want to talk about like how they've framed the posting of just like four numbers, two numbers, and like the sort of like defense of the account that it plays?

Yeah, that was

this maybe says something about me, but that was maybe the post that made me the angriest of anything they've done.

Because

I have a deep-seated reaction to feeling like someone who thinks I'm stupid.

And all I could think is, do you think I'm an idiot?

When I saw their reaction to this, because it was, we are often criticized for the numbers we post online.

We can't tell you everything.

Sorry.

And then they went on this big

half explanation about stingrays and cell site simulators.

Cell site simulators?

Yeah.

But they didn't explain.

what those actually do.

They did not explicitly claim they were being surveilled by one.

and they didn't explain why the existence of stingrays and cell site simulators means that they should do all this on Facebook instead.

Posting numbers does not bypass the security concerns posed by the presence of a cell site simulator.

No.

Because you're still posting publicly on the internet.

That doesn't matter at all.

Yeah.

You're pulling something out of your ass that sounds technical.

That's going to trick your average boomer and maybe, you know, three out of five Gen X people who are scrolling Facebook slash Blue Sky.

And like, that's, that's all they need to do.

But for, for anyone who knows what a cell site simulator is or how like internet communications works, it's very, very clear that this is just like completely bullshit.

It's completely bullshit.

Because you're right, that this is all they need to do.

They just need to deflect.

And I think that's what stood out to me about this post in particular is that it showed me that the person or people behind all time PS have a genuine level of PR skill.

You know, they have a certain level of what I think is a real skill at deflection, public relations, and being able to spin what they're saying.

You know, that's a genuine skill.

It's a shame that it's being applied to this instead of, I mean, anything else, but that is a skill that they have that they're able to deploy in defense of their conspiratorial posting.

The other thing that they post in relation to the numbers, is there a one-time four-word catchphrase general public can disregard?

Do you want to talk about the context of those posts?

Yes, those were replies that they would make to the numbers posts, usually to the numbers posts, but occasionally to just some other cryptic thing they would post.

They would post their number, say 44, and then they would reply to themselves saying, general public can disregard.

Or they'd say, please disregard if you are a member of the general public.

And there were a lot of people online who saw that and thought, oh, that must mean it's a code.

It has to be real.

They're engaged in some sort of like secret agent spy work and this is really important.

Yeah, yeah.

And I would see a lot of people push back on any criticism that the account would get for this by saying things like, it's code for a reason.

You know, guys, they're speaking in code.

Don't try to crack the code.

It's not for us.

You know, this is for the coalition.

And whenever anybody would say, I don't think this is real or like any of the things we've talked about about why this doesn't make sense, they would instantly be accused of being a right-wing infiltrator or a troll or a MAGA spy or something like that.

You know, there can be no actual criticism of the account.

There can only be infiltration.

Yeah, and that does have more like cue overlap, I suppose.

Absolutely.

I don't know.

It's odd because like throughout, throughout writing about all this like blue-in-on stuff, as much as this stuff is a legitimate legitimate problem, like which it is, it's just a symptom of a larger political problem in America.

And the people engaged with it, if anything, are kind of victims as well as like perpetrators.

And like, this was the same thing with like QAnon, where like your average person engaged with it, as bad as it is, and some of the stuff that they might like say or do, I also just feel bad for the people involved.

And it's the same thing with this, as annoying as this kind of like lib slop can be.

The people who

have to believe in something like this in order to like keep going, that is kind of like a tragedy in a way.

And this is obviously serving some important psychological function for them.

Yeah, I totally agree.

And I think that's

that

sadness, I think, is what.

keeps me wanting to engage with this.

You know, when I look at this and I see Alt NPS trying to get people to buy their t-shirts or just farm engagement, that's not remarkable to me.

That's normal.

Yeah.

That happens on the internet all the time.

What keeps me coming back to wanting to fight this and wanting to document all this is the people I see in the replies.

Yeah.

The people who say that Alt NPS brings them so much hope.

It's what's keeping them from falling into despair.

And it's not that I want to take that away from them.

It's that I don't like that their need for that is being used.

Yeah, this is like a predatory mode of trying to capitalize on that.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

The account is trying to capitalize on people's need for hope.

Yeah.

You know, they need to believe that there is someone fighting for them because in a lot of ways, it doesn't feel like anyone is.

You know, it feels like our politicians are ineffectual.

Our institutions are crumbling.

We need someone to be there.

We need, ironically, we need patriots to be in control.

Yeah.

We need to trust the plan.

There is an appeal to that.

And I do understand that.

I understand that these people are looking for a light in the darkness.

And I really can't pretend that I'm not doing the same thing

through my writing on this.

I need something to cling to.

And I can't blame anybody for feeling that way too.

I mean, that's why I feel like your project, though, comes from a much like better and like healthier place because you are looking at this like decline in nationwide American sanity and trying to do something about it, even if that's just a documentation and then writing about it and trying to explain to people and like help

people understand where the psyche of the country is.

And I think part of what makes me so interested in your project is that like it reminds me a little bit of people who started studying QAnon, you know, back in like 2017, 2018.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Back when it's just this little, little cute small thing.

And then you fast forward years later, they realize they've actually done some extremely important like work documenting a phenomenon that is shaping the trajectory of our country.

And I don't know if alt national park service is going to evolve in this same way.

But I think the slow embrace of this sort of conspiratorial thinking among decently sized chunks of the Democratic base, I think is very notable.

And work like what you're doing, I think, actually has a really important place in trying to map where our country might might be headed and yeah in a few years it might somehow it might turn out to be super important when the libs finally do their own j6 so

yeah i mean i to be honest i would be very happy if this whole thing petered out sure you know i would be very happy if one day the account just stops posting and there there is no years long continuation with this like there was with something like QAnon.

But I do think AltNPS is a part of a a broader ecosystem of this Blue Anon world.

And

I do agree with what you said earlier, that Blue Anon is a phrase that I think does get overused.

That there are some things that are just normal people, you know, expressing their political opinions that kind of gets derided as, oh, Blue Anon, but it really is just people being normal or people being extremely online.

But Alt NPS is a part of a bigger world of this sort of vaguely left-wing conspiracism.

You know, I'm seeing a lot of crossover between people who post in reply to Alt-NPS and people who have this sort of mantra about Trump, that he wasn't shot, he didn't win, he's on the list.

And you see that exact phrase, you know, posted over and over and over again.

It's in pictures, it's in memes, it's in people's posts.

And I think Alt-NPS is a part of that.

I think they're emblematic of that.

Yeah.

That you are not immune to conspiratorial thinking.

We are not better than that.

No, and they're facilitating, I think, that mindset.

I think liberals became so susceptible to it because they had this conception that they're immune to it, that conspiracy thinking is something that only exists on the political right.

Yes, that's for other people.

And this is part of what I'm going to write about it, like in general, but like the way that consensus reality was like.

Sheered down so heavily during during the first Trump administration and like parts of the Biden administration by people on the right that like weakened this notion we have of consensus reality that then liberals kind of got blindsided by when events happened that were hard to understand or felt so surreal or like bombastic that it allowed a split that was already there to grow into a pretty wide opening where you now believe that major historical events are fake and staged, that an election is stolen.

And you're like, what, what does this remind you of?

Like,

what are the things you're saying remind you of?

Isn't this part of why you're against the Trump movement in the first place?

Yeah.

And I think, God help you if you ever try and point that out.

Yeah.

You know, to a lot of the people in these replies.

It's just like, hey, guys, doesn't a lot of this smell a lot like you and

doesn't this sound a lot like the way people talked about the 2020 election?

You know, doesn't this smell the same way?

And that is when people in, especially in Alt NPS's replies, will go nuclear.

You know, there are, I've seen some incredible dog piles in response to people bringing this up, even if it's, if it's anodyne, you know, even if it is just, hey guys, just a reminder, I think this is something that we should, you know, maybe I'll take with a grain of salt.

People go nuts.

You know, they need to believe it needs to be real and it needs to be unquestioned, and that there can be no good faith questioning of this idea.

Do you know what else is an unquestioned truth that we have to go on one more ad break before we return to conclude our discussion on the Alt National Park Service?

Service.

It's easy to see how they've reached a certain like ceiling on how much they can just numbers post and have that be a reliable method of engagement that they've started to like experiment with with different types of posting to see what makes people stick, what can help with engagement over a long period of time instead of just like rocketing to like virality first but then having a stable audience and now they're basically a news aggregator account but deceptively framing where they are getting their their news from yeah they are a news aggregator account with massive caveats yeah yes well i mean i think most news aggregator accounts are actually bad yeah i'd agree something we saw in 2020 was how unreliable news aggregator accounts were and how much of a harm that they caused and i i i see i see the the current version of Alt National Park Service as kind of an extension of that, taken to a slightly higher level, I suppose.

I'm obsessed with this.

You know, I've said that a few times, but I've documented what I think is most of the times that they have posted a news article without attribution and either just described something where they could have or should have posted a link to an actual article, or

more often, just copy pasting sections of an article and reposting it as though they wrote it.

You know, those are the ones that really get me.

Those are the aspects of their news aggregation where you say, this is just plagiarism.

You know, this is just you stealing verbatim from an article and acting as though you wrote it because you want your audience to think that you are a government insider with all this inside information and that information like that is coming first to you, not to the New York Times, not to CNN.

Even though you're just posting sections of the New York Times and CNN.

Yeah.

I mean, they took the first, I think, three paragraphs of an article from Wired and did it word for word.

Didn't link to Wired, didn't say where it came from, and implied that the information was being sent to the Rangers of the Alt National Park Service instead of to journalists at Wired.

This happens constantly.

And every time I think, well, they've been posting more links lately.

They've been linking directly to actual sources of information.

Every time I start thinking that, they do it again.

you know they steal another thing again or they've started posting to um court watcher or directly to government documents in what I'm thinking is an attempt to dodge accusations like the one I make.

Somebody in my comments described it as the don't cite Wikipedia, cite Wikipedia's reference page problem.

They're reading an article from NPR, and rather than just saying, hey, we've heard this in NPR, they're going to NPR's citation of.

the Department of Justice and linking directly to that instead to make it look like they're diligently watching government court records and and posting them for our benefit the moment they come out instead of just we saw this in the Washington Post.

And they've been engaging this for like a few months now with this sort of behavior.

Oh, yeah.

They've been doing that since January, February.

Yeah.

They've also started claiming for a while and then they stopped that one of their sources that they would list at the end of their posts was an unnamed official in whatever.

relevant government agency they were talking about.

Our sources include this newspaper, this website, and an unnamed Department of Justice official, an unnamed Department of Education official.

They suddenly stopped doing that as soon as they started.

There was about a week or two where that was behind about every post.

Anything else you want to add about either the existence of these like alt accounts or like any other aspect of this world you want to mention before we, before we close up?

Yeah, I do have two quick ones.

And the first is that among the alt accounts that you see online, the alt national park service is overwhelmingly the most malicious and the most harmful.

You know, there are maybe a couple others that get a little wild, that are maybe a little conspiratorial.

I think Alt NOAA has been kind of in the spotlight for that lately.

But a lot of them, like Alt CDC,

the Alt Forest Service, all these random little alt government agency accounts are pretty harmless.

They really are just posting links to news articles or giving updates on their relevant agency.

Alt Forest Service mostly talks about the Forest Service.

Alt CDC mostly talks about the CDC.

Alt NPS basically never talks about the National Park Service.

I think I can count on one hand the times that they have said anything about the parks.

There was a point when, I think it was in the big, beautiful budget bill, where there were these massive cuts being proposed to the National Park Service.

And they talked about the bill as a whole and didn't mention anything about the cuts to the Park Service.

Well, you never know who's who's watching the communication channels.

You got to be careful.

There's cell site simulators out there.

There's cell site simulators out there.

And then the second thing is that I'm always very careful in my writing and in my posts to emphasize that the people who follow this account are not the problem.

The account itself is.

You know, I always want to make sure to have a lot of empathy for people who follow this account because I understand why they do.

I understand the hope they're looking for.

And I never want to do what I see some people do in the replies to Alt NPS's posts, which is dunking on their followers.

You know, how do you rubes believe this?

Do you idiots still think this is real?

I never want to do that because that doesn't help anyone.

What that does is make them dig in.

It makes them double down.

So I always want to make sure to treat the followers of these accounts with respect, you know, treat them with empathy.

talk to them like a person.

And that's how I've managed to get a few people to get out.

I've managed to have people tell me that it was through my writing and other people's work on this topic that they were able to get out.

They were able to disengage from this world of fake spies and code numbers.

And I think that matters.

I think that that helps with every little bit we do.

And it starts by just being nice to people, just being kind to people who are looking for hope in the world we live in.

Where can people find your work both on social media and then also your writing?

You can find me on Blue Sky at altwatcher.bsky.social.

And I am unfortunately still on Substack at my name.

It's jjoycelynch.substack.com.

You can also look for Dispatches from the Online Void is the name of the blog.

There should absolutely be more people reading your Dispatches from the Online Void.

This is some very, very solid work just straightly documenting the phenomenon that we've been talking about this episode and specifically the Alt National Park Service.

well i really appreciate it yeah it's fantastic very like non-editorialized just showing you what's happening extremely well put together well thanks thanks there's nice you to say thanks again to jack for talking with me about alt national park service i strongly recommend people seek out his research both on dispatches from the online void and blue sky Before I close this episode, I want to remind everybody that you too are not immune to propaganda.

This past weekend, the internet has been a buzz with rumors and speculation that Trump died over the weekend or was actively dying, and there's been attempts to cover it up, when in fact he just went on a brief Labor Day weekend holiday.

People were sharing AI-altered images to make Trump look more sickly and were speculating about road closures around Walter Reed Medical Center, sharing a map with roads blocked off.

But, in fact, there were no irregular road closures, and this map of supposed closures that was spreading online just showed old security gates.

People concocted elaborate theories that Putin poisoned Trump during their last meeting, and that when the quote-unquote president was supposed to give an announcement on Tuesday afternoon, it would be Trump resigning for health reasons, or Vance would come out and announce Trump died and he is now the president.

And sure enough, come Tuesday afternoon, Trump appeared perfectly normal for a press conference.

Even in the lead up to the press conference, I saw people continuing these conspiracy theories with sometimes a tad of irony, but as the press conference got delayed an hour, there was more and more speculation about Trump's declining health.

And yeah, he is an old man, but he's not going to drop dead this weekend.

This isn't true.

This is a copium strategy.

And the way people have been talking about it is very similar to the liberal conspiracy theories that I've been reading about these past few weeks.

And as fun as it can be to speculate about a president's health, as many people did, last time we had a geriatric president, when was that?

Oh, last year.

But as much of fun as it is, things can quickly spiral out of your conspiratorial control, even when your participation is from the safety of ironic detachment.

I'll talk a little bit more about Trump's imminent death theories on this week's episode of Executive Disorder, but until then, just remember: you are not immune to propaganda.

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Hi, I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

In every episode of The Bay, we ask deeper questions, cut through the noise, and keep you connected to the community that you and I love.

Find new episodes of KQED's The Bay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names.

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Welcome to It Could Happens Here, a podcast where my longtime home city of Chicago is preparing for a federal occupation.

I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me to talk about what the fuck is going on about a thing that at the end of last year, as bad as we thought this was going to be, was basically unimaginable.

With me talk about this is Raven, who's a journalist from the independent outlet Unraveled in Chicago, which does a lot of really, really excellent work on the ground, reporting on social movements in the city, reporting on the government,

does a bunch of incredible work, done some really good stuff on ShotSpotter.

Yeah, Raven, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you for such a beautiful intro.

Yeah, thanks for thanks for doing this.

I don't know.

Like, I'm a really big fan of Unraveled.

I think most of the newspapers in Chicago are just like just weird right-wing rags and getting actual good news out of the city is kind of difficult because it's like

yeah we we have we have a good number now like digital indie outlets in the city but once you get outside of counties especially you know the chicago metro area is huge and like yeah it's all like pink slime garbage like everything's been bought out they don't have like real reporters anymore so it can be a huge challenge to cover things like just in the collar counties, which is

coincidentally also where a lot of this ICE activity might be happening in the next

45 days, 30 days, however long it lasts.

Yeah.

So let's, I guess from the jump, before we get into sort of the kind of long arc of ICE and the feds in.

in Chicago over the last year, let's talk about Trump's thing to send in the National Guard and the stuff the people in the city are really concerned about.

Yeah, well, you know, there's kind of two things happening simultaneously, right?

Trump is threatening the National Guard, which has been a thing, like threatening the National Guard in Chicago has been a thing with him for like a while.

And it can be very difficult to tease out like what, what level of it is propaganda and what level of it is like really happening, right?

But the other more important part here is we do know now, like conclusively, that DHS is planning a large operation in like Los Los Angeles style.

So everything that's been happening around LA for the last few months is moving to Chicago.

This is what the chief of border patrol has said.

You know, he just put out like a social media video that was saying they're trading palm trees for skyscrapers and bringing a few hundred guys with DHS Ice Border Patrol to Chicago.

So it's pretty wild.

I don't think I've ever seen border patrol in numbers on the ground here in the Great Lakes.

We've always known it's like a thing that could conceivably happen because we're technically like a border city.

But, you know, to be staring it in the face now, knowing like it's real, like it's actually happening, it's obviously feels like a real emergency for our communities.

Yeah.

And I think that's the interesting thing, like talking to you and then talking to other people on the ground is that like

The National Guard deployment is what's getting all of the press.

Right.

And people really aren't that worried about it.

It's worth pointing out.

So we're recording this on the morning of like Wednesday, September 3rd.

Yeah.

So it's possible that stuff has changed by the time this episode goes out like tonight, because the situation is shifting really rapidly.

Right, right.

But, you know, there's this whole fight over whether the Texas National Guard is being deployed here on a federal deployment.

But people don't really seem to be worried about the National Guard.

And I think kind of for good reason, they didn't really, I mean, they did some protest stuff, I guess, but like they mostly kind of are there to make it look like there's troops in the street, right?

While ICE and DHS does like the most horrific shit, right?

That's been sort of the understanding of what's happened in Los Angeles.

And then in DC, it's gone a little bit differently just because they have so many feds already.

So they've been able to do a lot of traffic stops in these little Fed tactical teams.

So you'll have like some FBI guys, some DEA guys, maybe like an HSI guy.

I just read in WAPO the other day, they've crashed like six cars in DC.

I mean, like, it's really dangerous the kinds of stops these guys are executing.

They're jump outs, right?

It's not like officer-friendly, like pulling you over license and registration, please.

You know, it's like really violent.

And they're in unmarked cars and they're like trying to surprise people.

So that is, you know, also what we're expecting to see alongside like the ICE operations

is these Fed teams crawling through the city.

You know, I don't know when they're going to be doing what, where, but like I said, the Chicagoland area, you know, the suburbs, everything around, it's very big.

Yeah.

You know, there's every indication this isn't going to be centralized just to like downtown Chicago.

Yeah.

And like, I think this is something that's kind of hard to understand if you're not from Chicago, but like, Even just the city proper is massive.

Yeah.

Right.

Like it takes like, I mean, I haven't driven it it in a long time, but like I think, I think if you're trying to go from like the top of like the north side to like the bottom of the south side, that's like hour and a half, two hour drive.

Right.

It's massive.

Right.

And this naval station where they're basing operations isn't even in the city.

It's two hours north in a different county.

Yeah.

So there are a lot of questions right now.

I don't have the answers.

Nobody, nobody's going to know until it starts, but there are a lot of questions now of just kind of like, how far into the city are they even going to go?

You know, it's

obviously um you know what we've seen out in los angeles with these like larger like workplace raids like car washes and like home depot and stuff it's really difficult to imagine them executing something like that in the city i'm not going to say they couldn't try but they would obviously need a lot of backup from border patrol yeah to try something like that even even in the suburbs which is what we saw in la you know that's who showed up those first few days when they were like tear gassing the out of everybody and it was just like crazy you know that was border patrol yeah

so what are what our eyes are on is something like that and to your point about the the national guard and the press you know it's part of the issue is like the politicians the electeds like they can't say no to the feds they can't say no to ice like ice is coming dhs is coming no matter what they do The guard is a little more of like a political football for them.

And Pritzker can push back.

And there's like, you know, the arguments about sending one state's troops into another.

And so there's there's more legal option you know all this stuff right but the fbi yeah already has a field office here ice already has field offices here you know like there's there's just i think also a just a disconnect there because of like the way the news reporting works is like well we're reporting on what the public officials are saying governor pritzker did say pretty clearly actually like well dhs is is coming you know ice is going to do these operations and we don't approve of it but we can't stop it Yeah.

And I think before we get more into that, I want to pivot to talk about what the presence of ICE has been in Chicago already.

And I want to kind of like roll the clock back to

right before,

kind of like, I think like literally the weekend before the big confrontations in LA started, there was a pretty big raid at a check-in.

And a bunch of stuff happened with that.

I was wondering if you could talk about that a bit.

It was around the time when things popped off in LA.

I i don't remember precisely but around then yeah yeah i think it was like right before yeah you know they have these stuck-in sites where people have to go and some of them are on like electronic monitoring and some not and they they check in with ice and so it was like an ambush right like people showed up and then they were like oh we're actually like kidnapping you yeah and it it was very very ugly, of course, you know, like agents ripping people away from their families and friends.

And we had some local electeds like like trying to get in the way of the van and chicago police of course showed up and and then there was this whole back and forth over whether the police really assisted ice or not and i mean they were there and they did crowd control yeah they definitely did like

like you know it's it's very interesting what's happening with cpd and ice right now because like At the end of the day, cops are lazy above all else too, right?

You know, and so there's this kind of tension of like, well, we support what ICE is doing.

And ideologically, like, of course, the cops are aligned with ICE, but they also like don't want to get out of their car, you know?

So, so it's kind of any excuse they have not to do something, they will take.

So, it's not that we've seen them assisting with like enforcement removal operations, but of course, if there's a protest, they're going to show up and

police that.

And then, also, like, data sharing is a huge issue there.

I mean, like with fusion centers and with like block license plate data visas, you know, everything, there's just the information is so porous between local cops and the feds that it's just kind of absurd on its face to even think that they're like not sharing information.

Some of these cops are on task forces and they have like group chats together, you know, with DA and FBI agents, right?

So it's all, it's all connected.

It's all porous.

They're already working with the feds.

You know, it's just, they can't visibly be seen assisting with

immigration enforcement.

But yeah, that was a really traumatizing day for community.

Like an organizer here who was well known

was taken and she was a grandmother.

So she had family here too.

So it was brutal.

And then around that time that that was happening, also I started escalating arrests at the immigration court downtown.

Yeah.

which went on for a while and ultimately was stopped by protesters continuing to show up and just have a presence there.

You know, these guys are terrified of being doxxed, terrified.

I mean, they just,

they really don't want to be filmed.

And it's been a very different situation here in our courthouse versus New York's because I've seen so much photography out of the New York Immigration Court.

For whatever reason, they allow photos there, but they don't inside of ours.

But, you know, protesters started showing up there.

I mean, we had been there documenting what was going on.

Slowly people started trickling in, showing up and protesting.

And eventually people started then taking it to like actually walking the driveway that they were using a private parking garage belonging to the building and so they were like going underground and then like waiting and then using the freight elevator it was like this whole operation yeah

but ultimately the building put their foot down and banned them you know they got a lot of complaints from tenants people didn't like that the protests were going on sure but people also were like in the building people were like we want ice using our cradle yeah they'll put that

yeah yeah use the power of niddyism against them deploy every weapon exactly exactly

exactly it was it's kind of like a you know diversity of tactics thing there where it's like the people who own property in this building aren't like super aligned with the like people trying to block ice bands but but at that moment they joined forces yeah and you know so so that that was happening and like while all of this is happening of course ice is still doing more dispersed yeah traffic stops arresting people at their homes it's it's been happening it's happening all over out in elgin out in waukegan which is up by the base of operations you know where they're setting up all of these operations for what's coming this week waukegan north chicago and that area of lake county there are a ton of immigrants and they're not surrounded by necessarily like super progressive super friendly

people.

Some can be.

I mean, the politics of the North Shore, it's very like purple.

Like it's weird.

It's like you can have super progressive people, but then also, like, it can be out in the boonies somewhere.

You'll see like Trump signs.

So it's not as sympathetic as being in downtown Chicago for sure.

Yeah.

And so there's a lot of concern from people up around the base about what's going to happen in those communities because there's much less coverage to much less eyes on them.

Yep.

I want to talk more about sort of what enforcement has been looking like in outlying areas and what it's going to look like.

like.

But first, we need to go to ads.

And we are back.

So I want to, I kind of, I want to follow the train that you've been on about the stuff in the center of the city versus the stuff in the outlying areas and across Chicagoland in general, which is also just massive, unbelievably large geographic area.

It has unbelievably large numbers of people, and also the concentrations get way smaller really quickly.

And I think, I don't know, it seems like the resistance inside of the city proper had been pretty effective in a lot of ways, just in the sense of like shutting down the courthouse raids for the most part.

But what have things looked like up near like Waukegan and like, yeah, in the sort of outlying areas in terms of like resistance and in terms of cooperation?

Yeah, I mean, I've seen videos out of those places, you know, really harrowing scenes like traffic stops where they're separating

people from their families, showing up at people's homes.

Usually what's happening is we're not hearing about it until after the facts.

And in the city, there are like rapid response groups going by different neighborhoods.

But I think in general, sometimes it just doesn't feel very rapid because it's people are vetting, they're verifying, there's a lot of false alarms, you know, there's a lot going on.

So,

that's what I've seen that's happened out in the burbs.

You know, it's

kind of like I said, kind of a black hole for news out there, too.

It's not always easy to get information.

You know, we we also had a case of like an ICE agent detaining a woman with her child at like a well, it it wasn't an agent it was a contractor um contractor working for ice detaining an arrestee out at an hotel by o'hare airport

that's something that that people are concerned about in a more general sense too right now because we actually literally just this morning were looking at a letter from the mayor of broadview illinois which is where our processing center is

outlining how they're going to be operational seven days a week for the next 45 days which to me implies like thousands of arrests potentially happening.

And that facility is not set up.

It's not a long-term detention center.

Overnight detention is banned in Illinois.

So people have been kept there longer than they technically are allowed to, even with like, without some huge surge happening.

So it kind of thinking about what's potentially coming and then using that center, it kind of follows that.

Yeah, there could be more contractors keeping people in hotels like dispersed around.

Like there's just not enough space at that facility to keep up with that.

And so, because there are also backups in the like ICE logistics chain, because like people have to be, they can't be kept here long term.

So they have to go to Gary Airport to fly out somewhere or detention center in Indiana or Wisconsin or Michigan.

So I guess there's a couple of things, kinds of sort of resistance stuff I want to ask about.

I remember like, God, back in like 2018, I remember there was a bunch of efforts to like block deportation flights out of the airport.

Has that been still going?

No, I mean,

there was a protest at Gary Airport very early on in the year, actually.

It was like right after Trump was inaugurated, I think.

I know a photographer who was arrested, some protesters.

It was really random.

It was like...

Towards the end of the protest, Gary police just decided to like grab and arrest a few people.

And since then, I have not heard of any more protests or

or attempts at intervention at Gary Airport.

I mean, obviously, it's not Chicago, it's in Gary.

So, you know, there's a smaller community there.

People would have to travel to Gary.

I don't know if deportation, if any deportation flights are leaving from O'Hare.

I don't believe so, but don't quote me on that.

I'm not sure.

Yeah.

And it's also like, I feel like O'Hare is kind of a soft target for that in the sense of like, I mean, it's annoying to get there, but like, there is just a rail line that runs directly into O'Hare and you can flood it with a bunch of people pretty easily like what happened at like the beginning of Trump one right we haven't seen anything like that yet yeah yeah but it's also like I

wonder if they're still thinking about that in terms of like the flight logistics in terms of like running stuff primarily through Gary

oh I yeah that might be why yeah I the other thing I'm wondering about is like

Okay, so I guess it looks like right now with the information we have that they're planning to run their operations out of that military base

but everything that i've seen has been talking about like the national guard operating out of that base but do we know where the feds are supposed to be operating out of the feds are operating out of the base the national guard oh in child will will potentially operate operate out of the base if they come but we don't have a lot of details on like a national guard deployment and the the other thing to keep in mind is like the national guard are all younger people typically it's a lot of young people, and they have like families and things.

So that, that kind of information, like a deployment, right, of like platoon or several platoons, whatever the word is of National Guard, it's not going to stay secret for very long, right?

Like, because we would know.

So I have not seen anything yet as of 12.30 noon on Wednesday indicating that the National Guard specifically has rolled into that base.

That could change at any point.

You know, I don't know what's happened in the last hours.

that I haven't checked the news.

But what we do know is that the DHS operation, customs and border protection, the feds that are coming, they are setting up a base of operations at that naval station.

And the Navy said that they denied them lodging.

and that they have to stay elsewhere, like hotel-wise.

I don't know how that will work because that's like several hundred people.

I guess they're going to have to disperse a lot around the suburbs in order to do that.

And I don't know the reason for the denial for the lodging.

It could simply be they literally don't have space.

You know, people are actually like training there, like military and navy and stuff.

It's not like it's just empty.

So they might not have had capacity for that, but supposedly they're going to be doing office space there.

I think the letter also mentioned they can do laundry there, you know, like stuff like that.

But, but yeah, I mean, that's, that's like something that, of course, people have eyes on because if you can locate a hotel hotel where people are staying you know there that's like a pressure point yeah and i i think i think that's an interesting point that that comes back to something you were saying earlier which is like it really looks like this is a lot of this is going to be targeted on the places close to the base just because

like if they're really like two hours out from the city it's like pretty difficult to do raids further right into the city just on a logistical level and just like right I don't know, just in terms of like dealing with Chicago traffic.

I don't want to exclude it as a possibility.

Yeah, it's definitely possible, but it's like, I just think when we look at inner city or urban policing, there are certain tactics that like local police use that we see the feds also using, right?

Like these unmarked cars, more covert operations, trying to move really quickly and get in and out because they know that it's such a denser area.

And if rapid response shows up, people start showing up, then

it can get unsafe, you know, for them as cops.

And so we just, we do know that those tactics work.

We know that this is how they've been doing operations so far.

With more DHS agents and more customs and border protection backup, could they try for something?

bigger in the city.

I mean, yes, like we don't want to rule that out, trust me.

Like it definitely could happen, but I think given the numbers that they are trying to reach at this point, what we have to prepare for is it being really dispersed and just kind of everywhere, you know, like, and like that traffic, like you mentioned, you know, it's um, yeah, it's like, obviously, if they're driving at like three in the morning or something, they're not gonna face as much traffic up 9094, but like, yeah, there's also the like covertness of it too.

Like, you can't just drive a bunch of military vehicles down the highway for an hour and a half and not be sighted or spotted, right?

Like, so then you'd be giving, like you're giving people more opportunities to potentially intervene.

So I don't know.

I mean, I think like we'll see them in the city for sure.

We'll see them in the burbs for sure.

Whether or not we're going to see like teams of like border patrol, you know, in like full riot kit marching through like Pilsen.

That I don't know.

I think it's something that probably they want to do.

I'm sure those dudes would be amped as fuck to like, you know, be in downtown Chicago, like harassing people, you know, beating up people.

But from an operational security standpoint, like for them, it is like so dangerous.

Yeah.

So I just, I don't know.

So, so speaking, speaking of dangers, we're going to go to these ads and then we're going to come back and talk about,

oh, God.

Is rumors the

right word to describe something that the governor is saying about the targeting of the Mexican Independence Day parade.

Maybe not rumor.

Maybe

just statement.

Yeah,

we'll figure out the verbiage when we return.

Yeah.

We are back.

So one of the things that Governor Pritzker has said is that Stephen Miller,

I'm going to read this quote.

This is in NBC.

I'm going to read this quote just that Pritzker said at a conference.

We have reason to believe that Stephen Miller chose the month of September to come to Chicago because of celebrations around Mexican Independence Day that happened here every year.

And yeah, you know, he further said, it breaks my heart to report that we have been told ICE will try and disrupt community picnics and peaceful parades, he said.

Let's be clear, the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anyone living here.

So yeah, I guess I want to start by talking a little bit about these parades themselves because they are an absolutely massive event in Chicago.

There's like a big one in Pilsen, but also like, I just all over the city, there's just a bunch of people driving around with Mexican flags, rocks.

This is just people celebrating.

It's really cool.

Yeah, it turns into more of like a

widespread like car caravan thing.

Yep.

So there will be like a lot.

Yeah.

Like they'll jam a picture of drive, you know, and like, here's the thing.

I know traffic jams are annoying to like anybody

but when it's in celebration of something you know yeah it rocks it rocks take a train that day it's great

i mean i i understand the arguments for like well ambulances need to get through things like that but i i think there's a a lot of power in people taking the streets and like you know the cars are just the easiest way to get mass amounts of people around.

And then there's a lot of like, there's a street culture here around like street takeovers too and and this happens outside of like mexican independence day where like some some

people will take over an intersection and do donuts and set off fireworks and like yeah um yell at the cops and and whatever right it's fun it's cool it's it's good as hell we like it

that happens in cities and i think um when it comes to living in a city it's like yeah you you're trading certain things for other things and and and stuff like that happens and so with mexican independence day it's like we we we can have like sustained nights where that is just going on and on like the loop will be jammed up like everywhere will be jammed up and of course there's like the public safety people who like whine about it and and you know yeah this is also like a big like

like

white people of the city get really fucking pissed about this like every year for it's like ah da da da da look at the mexicans love like they get just like like the and like like the most racist shit you've ever heard in your entire life and then then there's the people sort of below that who will couch it and like, oh, public safety, da, da, da, da, da, da.

And I'm going to be really fucking mean to these people, which is like, if you're pissed off at a bunch of people like basically doing their own parade, you are not fit to live in a city.

Like, get the fuck out of here.

Like, fuck off.

Go back to the suburbs, you dip shits.

You're fucking losers.

You're not fit for urban life.

Like, eat my dick.

The shit rules.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, yeah, the, the reaction to it is like so, so over the top.

And it's the kind of thing where, like, when, when Trump is like talking about the National Guard and responding to crime in Chicago or disorder, you know, that's the kind of thing I could see him like ordering them in to respond to, you know, especially if there's like, there's like a shooting or something that happens towards the tail end of one of these celebrations, which again, you know, it's like that, that's a risk anytime large amounts of people gather anywhere, interpersonal violence breaking out, right?

Like, again, is a thing that happens.

And the direct cause of it is never like people partying.

The direct cause of it is usually like somebody's got a beef with somebody or somebody drank too much and lost impulse control, you know, whatever the reason might be.

Yeah.

So I think that is like, I think that's what Pritzker is alluding to.

It's kind of like the car caravan and stuff.

When he says like Stephen Miller is bringing ice to interrupt family picnics, like I I don't, I don't know where he's getting that information.

Like, I, I don't know that that is like specifically going to happen.

You know, I think given what we've seen out in LA, unless I've missed anything, it doesn't seem like they've attacked any like festivals or like like public gatherings like that, like in a direct way.

You know, I think like logistically, it's just maybe not as easy to necessarily like grab people with questionable immigration status at that kind of stuff.

And if you go to like a place where you know, like the car wash or wherever they have intel that it's like undocumented people are working here, it makes more sense.

So, so I don't want to rule out that something like that could happen, but I think

I think there's a whether it happens or not, it's like part of it is also the intention is to be have this chilling effect, like to make people afraid to celebrate or come out to cause that terror.

You know, it's kind of like we had a situation a couple months ago where some feds who claimed they were with like a financial crimes task force.

It wasn't even ICE, but I don't know what they were doing.

And they were meeting up in a, at a boathouse parking lot in Humboldt Park, like a week before all these cultural celebrations in the area.

And people got really freaked out because it was just like, what the fuck are you guys doing?

And they like went into the museum and were like questioning workers and asking you to the bathroom.

And I mean, just being assholes, it sounds like.

And then they left.

And then there were like all these questions swirling about about like, well, what was this?

Like, were they seeking intel before these fests?

And, you know, people made sure to like, we wanted, we wanted to still have these fests, but we want people to show up in even bigger numbers, like power and numbers.

Everybody show up.

And that's what happened.

And, you know, they didn't attack the fests.

And, you know, that was a really weird situation because it wasn't ICE and we didn't know what was going on.

But I think ultimately, like, yeah, giving in and like staying home and refusing to show up obviously just plays right into their hands.

And I wanted to kind of pivot a little bit from this into the way that Pritzker has sort of been framing this, where he's talking about how if anyone throws a sandwich at the guard, this is going to be used as like the excuse to do a crackdown.

And like, I think

they're going to do the crackdown anyways.

Like, I don't think that's like.

I mean, this is the central kind of point of conflict, I think, in like a lot of movement space discussions right now, too, especially among kind of like older liberals and like the younger generation.

And part of it is like, yeah, there's this insistence that, well, he's looking for a reason to send in the National Guard, so don't give him one.

But it's like Border Patrol is the reason.

You know, like they're going to show up.

And I don't know how it's going to go down, if it's going to be in Waukegan, if it's going to be in Chicago, whatever is going to happen.

But if somebody throws a water bottle at those DHS agents, that's enough of a reason, you know, for them to say there's, there's unrest.

Like, and who, who triggered that?

The cops.

Yeah.

And like, it's CPD.

Like, I, I have, I have watched CPD do this shit to people where nothing happened.

Right.

Like it was just people standing there and, you know.

Right.

Our attorney general said the same thing in a statement last night.

Like, make sure you protest peacefully within the law.

The Cook County board president, Tony Prakwinkle, said the same thing this morning.

Profwinkle's still around.

No.

I mean, how?

All the like, you know, Illinois Democratic

big dog people, like, they're all

saying the same thing.

I mean, like, honestly, Mayor Johnson kind of was a little more fiery in his rhetoric, but he's still only going to go so far.

You know, like, they're politicians.

They can't.

They're not going to come out and say, like, oh, let's physically resist ICE.

I think we all wish.

Yeah.

But it is like dang, it is a very dangerous way to, to frame resistance, like to say,

well,

don't provoke him.

You know, it's kind of like living with an abuser or a bully and then blaming somebody for fighting back.

Yeah.

And I think there's also, there's really, it creates really dangerous dynamics on the ground.

I mean, like, I still remember like.

One of the things I'm sort of haunted by from this during 2020 was

in Atlanta where someone, like, the person who burned the Wendy's down.

Yeah.

There was like a whole, there was like a whole thing where people were like, this is a federal infiltrator and they turned them over to the feds, which doesn't make any sense, by the way.

Like if your logic is this person is a fed and we turn them over to the feds, nonsensical, but like this is, this is the thing you see a lot in these kinds of protests where like people will just like hand people over to the feds.

And then it turned out that she was the girlfriend of a fucking guy the police had shot.

Yeah.

And that shit just like happens.

Yeah.

And I don't know.

And like, that's like, that's like the consequence of this, of this kind kind of stuff is like these people, the peace police people feel like they are empowered to hand people over to the actual police.

And I just want to sort of like take a second to talk to like directly to people who are listening to this who agree with this stuff, which is, okay, if you are facing a fascist regime, right?

Regardless of whether you agree with what someone is doing or not, do you think it's a good idea to hand them over to

the legal executors of that regime?

Like,

would you hand someone over to the SS because they resisted the SS in a way you didn't approve of?

No, what are we doing here?

Right?

I don't know.

I think this ties back to something from we were talking about the beginning of the week of like the extent to which people have become convinced that like the ICE agents are all like proud boys or something because they can't imagine the institutions that they had supported for so long

suddenly being fascist.

And it's like, no, actually,

like these organizations have always bent this way and they're they're organs of the state which means they're going to be subverted to enforcing the regime of fascism right and and you know i think i think a lot of people who kind of and i'm not talking about the politicians but like regular people who kind of share in this sentiment of like they're scared they don't want to provoke or like make things worse you know um i think their their hearts are in the right place like they're coming from a place of like well we just don't want people to get arrested we want people to be safe like i think by and large, that's the motivation.

But yeah, it's just kind of like a very shallow understanding of like how resistance actually looks and works in real life.

There's also just like a worry for a lot of people that like, well, that kind of stuff might endanger others who want to show up with kids or families.

And I think there just needs to be like a separation in space.

Obviously, not every protest or every resistance is for everyone.

But at the end of the day, like some of these discussions kind of just fall to the wayside once things get to a certain point, because like, yeah, yeah, if border patrol rolls through your town, you're, you're not going to be able to control how everyone responds to that.

Yeah.

Like that, that's a point at which you can see a more spontaneous

response.

And so like this sort of like top-down movement organizer level like control of like the protest and how it's going to kind of falls apart anyway because by that point like no one's in control of any yeah it's a it's a it's a bunch it's a bunch of people running out of their houses being like fuck fuck the fucking like the immigration authorities right right you know and I don't know that's the thing that gives me hope in this situation is that like

I'm going to retreat to the metaphysical level for a second where like one of the things, I don't know, almost spiritually that I believe in is cities, that cities are more than sort of the sum of their parts.

Yeah, and obviously, like they're broken down into all of these things and, you know, but like

there's something there, right?

And Chicago is something that I believe in.

And I believe in the people there.

And I believe in their capacity to resist this and to drive these people out because they can be driven out.

And, you know, with enough organization and enough spontaneity and enough cost imposed on their logistical operations, they can be ran out of a city.

Yeah.

I think the power of a city, it's not something that's clear until it's manifested.

And you never know when it's going to manifest.

But when it does, if you look at the entire federal deployment, and even if they're bringing the National Guard, like we're talking about less than 3,000 people,

there are millions.

of people in this city.

This is a fucking flea in an ocean.

And the flea flea is relying on the waves staying calm so it doesn't get drowned.

And this is the thing that can happen.

These people can be ran out of cities.

They can be, they can be chased out.

Their operations can be made impossible.

They can be rendered impotent and they can be made to retreat.

And, you know, this is something I'll say is this like the experience of watching these people break and run, because they will break and run.

They can and they will.

And you can do it is the most amazing feeling in the entire world.

Because, you know, however powerful they look, they are beatable and they know it.

And that's why they operate with this sort of, you know, these like fear shock tactics, because

they know that if you're not afraid of them, they can be defeated.

There have always been more of us than there are of them.

Yeah.

Like that's always been true.

And they do rule by fear.

And

Chicago will fight back.

And there's so much much knowledge and history here of our urban black and brown communities resisting the police.

Even to this day, I see on TikTok every night videos of crowds hassling the cops or pushing them out of their hood.

I mean, like, this is

happening right now.

There are communities who do this work right now.

The challenge, of course, remains building solidarity across the borders of the neighborhoods.

Yeah, but I don't think this is an insurmountable thing.

No.

I have never been in a place where more people fly the flag of their fucking city

than Chicago.

Like, it's unreal.

We're basically a small nation state at this point.

So this is going to get really weird really fast.

Yeah, and it's like, I don't know, like the U.S.'s record of military occupations is not good, and we can hand them another L.

Yeah, so Raven, is there anything else else that you want to say?

And also, where can people find your work?

Nothing else to say.

Our work is we've mostly been posting on Blue Sky, honestly, which I know is like kind of cringe, but we just, we do a lot of live reporting.

It's the only functional way to do it.

Yeah, it's really good, by the way.

This is like, yeah, it's a kind of coverage that I think is becoming more and more important as things go on.

And it's really the only way right now to get good on the ground coverage of people of how these actions are actually unfolding and it rocks.

I've, I mean,

we've, we've been there together at events, at protests before, and like, I could, I could, I could personally vouch for the coverage being good.

And yeah, yeah.

And it's also like, I mean, we have lots of people on this show, but like.

It really matters when the people who are covering a social movement are people who actually are in them and understand how they work and like have been in these places.

And And so, yeah, I think it's, I think it's really, really important work.

And I think people should go support y'all because it's, it's great.

And it's going to be more and more necessary as the occupation unfolds.

As the occupation unfolds.

What a, what a bleak, what a, what a terrible world.

But another world is possible.

That's the most important

part

to remember.

Yeah.

And the only way to do it is by building it.

And you can do that right now.

I also do think a lot about too, how like the first,

well, not the first police uprising, but like kind of the opening of this like era of what's going on was the George Floyd uprising, which did happen in Great Lakes, in the New West, in Minneapolis.

Yeah.

Like, I think there is, there's something about this.

region specifically.

We're generally not like the first to pop off just because we don't have as many people as New York or Los Angeles.

But there's such a rich history of like resistance to the police here.

I mean, you have Ferguson and Missouri, which is like kind of Midwest, kind of south, but like these communities have such a strong history of knowing what it's like to live as like some downtowns too.

And some of them still are with these like majority white police departments.

So it's.

It'll be something to watch how things unfold here specifically.

Yeah.

And the uprising in Chicago was like one of the most intense anywhere in the country.

Like, they ran the cops out of the center of the city, like, they lost control for days of like the giant shopping district in the middle of the city that is like the thing that like the Chicago business glitzy self-image is like based off of.

They just lost it fully because people ran them out.

And, you know,

we did it to them once, we could do it again.

Yeah.

Well, and I think public public opinion against ICE is much worse than like CPD.

I mean, like, not that public opinion against CPD is great, but obviously, things with ICE are reaching like a fever pitch right now.

Yeah, people hate them.

Yeah.

So, you know, you're not, I don't know that there's ever been an occupying army that people didn't hate, but like, it's just not going to go well for you when the locals hate you.

Like, it's just not going to go well.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, the history, as

before,

the history of American occupations is littered with defeats.

Fucking hand them another one.

Amen.

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Live in the Bay Area long enough, and you know that this region is made up of many communities, each with its own people, stories, and local realities.

I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

I sit down with reporters and the people who know this place best to connect the dots on why these stories matter to all of us.

Listen to The Bay, new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names.

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Use as directed.

No inappropriate joke, Robert, to start this episode.

Wow.

I feel so clean.

You know,

I guess you could say I have some executive dysfunction today.

This is it could happen here, executive disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis.

Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, Robert Evans, and possibly Sophie Lichterman, our producer.

This episode, we are covering the week of August 28th to September 3rd.

Happy fake Labor Day to everybody.

And some breaking news from this past weekend.

Trump maybe died.

Yeah, let's check in on that, Garrison, as our official is the president alive correspondent.

Let me do a quick Google search here.

Oh, no, no, he's still around.

Did everyone get tricked again?

He's still okay.

The conspiracy theories this week were really fun.

And then there was that thing that video that went viral that of like them like opening a white house window and throwing out a couple black trash bags that was really funny that was really funny i was like there's way worse things going on in the world i don't have time to care about this but we never got information about that that was just some weird not yet not yet sophie sensational i don't think we know what it was i mean it could just be that's them fucking cleaning shit but yeah i wouldn't be surprised if they were destroying evidence i wasn't aware those windows could open i thought they were like bulletproof bulletproof and

weren't supposed to open.

I'm sure they're both bulletproof, but have to be possible to open so that the Secret Service has more paths of egress in the event that some crazy disaster were to befall the White House.

Okay.

Well, you need to watch the documentary White House Down, Sophie.

This spells all of that out.

So Trump went a few days without a major public appearance.

The man is just trying to take some time off.

Though he was seen golfing between Saturday and Monday, but there's nothing on Trump's public schedule for three days during Labor Day weekend, where he essentially took a brief golfing holiday.

And this fueled speculation that he was in a rapid health decline, spawning a whole bunch of conspiracy theories about him being in the hospital, Vance imminently taking over.

And some comments from J.D.

Vance during a USA Today interview released last Thursday fueled some of this speculation over the weekend.

Vance said, quote, I feel very confident the President of the United States is in good shape, is going to serve out the remainder of his term and do great things for the American people.

And if, God forbid, there's a terrible tragedy, I can't think of better on-the-job training than what I've gotten over the last 200 days, unquote.

It sounds like he's ready to take the reins right now.

Sure, man.

Yeah, you're trained up now.

Over the weekend, people spread AI-altered images of Trump's face looking more swollen and sickly than it actually was.

And rumors circulated that roads to Walter Reed Medical Center were closed.

Yeah.

When, in fact, there were no irregular closures and screenshots of maps supposedly showing these quote-unquote closures were actually just showing old security gates.

Because, yeah, you can't just like walk or drive up to the front door of Walter Reed Medical Center.

Yeah.

It's in a military base.

This is the occent of idiots, right?

Which is people seeing something that is described as being one thing in this like little clip that they get of it in social media, and they don't actually do any further checkup.

It's the same thing with like the Pentagon pizza

orders that people are like, oh, when pizza orders peaked the Pentagon, we're about the U.S.

is about to go to war.

And it's like, no, sometimes people just order pizza near the Pentagon because the Pentagon is surrounded by a city, right?

There's like, there's people.

The Pentagon Pizza Tracker was part of these weekend conspiracy theories that they were like trying to decide how to handle Trump's declining health.

And people just like pizza, guys.

Like, it's one of those things.

I'm certainly not saying there's no way you will wake up tomorrow to hear that Trump has died because you know what?

He's 79.

It wouldn't be weird if his health took a sudden turn in the next day.

Just statistically, it wouldn't be weird because he's 79.

But like the people pointing out, it's the same thing they were doing with Biden, pointing out like, oh, like the marks on his hand.

And it's like, yeah, that isn't it for both of them.

This is evidence that they are older than you should be to be president.

But like my grandpa had shit like that because my grandpa lived with us for the last like 10 years of his life.

His hands looked a lot like that for like a decade.

Like, so people live for a long time after it becomes clear that they're very sick and old.

It's not a sign that they're about to kick off this weekend.

That guy in Congress who looks like a turtle has had weird bruises on his body for as long as I can remember.

Connell.

Yeah.

But no, like accounts were baselessly theorizing that like Putin poisoned Trump during their last meeting.

And this is is why he's in a rapid health decline.

Oh, my God.

Why?

Why would he need to do that?

Why would that benefit him?

So baffling.

Yeah.

And when people noticed, looking at the White House schedule, which they realized just existed a few days ago,

but when looking on the schedule, they saw that, quote-unquote, the president was to give an announcement on Tuesday afternoon.

And because of this, rumors spread that it would be Trump resigning for health reasons, or Vance would come out and announce Trump died and he was the president now, like some like really bad Aaron Sorkin movie.

That's how it works.

Also, I just want to also put this out there.

Yeah.

That White House leaks like a fucking sieve.

There is no way you could cover up the president dying without it being out immediately.

Like, come on.

No, I'm sorry.

Like,

they couldn't keep it hidden when he got sick.

You think they're going to keep the fact that they're going to weaken Bernie's head?

It's ridiculous.

Yeah.

When this press conference got delayed an hour on Tuesday, this too was used as evidence of Trump's declining health.

But sure enough, right before 3 p.m., Trump came out with a huge gaggle of people, which is probably why it was delayed, because he had like 20 guys with him who like multiple people spoke to announce that they were moving Space Command.

And Trump seemed normal.

He seemed like normal Trump.

Like he is an old guy, but no, this was just normal trump yeah does he seem older than he did in 2016 for sure man he's slightly more wrinkled but like no no he's older exactly like he did before these conspiracy theories started yeah i mean he looks old like he looks older than he did 10 years ago yeah i'm just saying oh he's so much less coherent than then but like yeah he's not like yeah dying i i don't have any particular reason to expect he's about to drop dead like as opposed to like three months ago or six months ago you know yeah like does it appear as if time is continuing to march on his face?

Yes, of course.

You know?

Exactly.

During said press conference, Trump himself was asked about his alleged imminent demise and responded like this.

You see that?

No.

People didn't see you for a couple days.

1.3 million user engagements as of Saturday morning about your demise.

Really?

You didn't see that?

You know, I have heard, it's sort of crazy, but last week I did numerous news conferences, all successful.

They went very well, like this is going very well.

And then I didn't do any for two days, and they said there must be something wrong with him.

Biden wouldn't do him for months.

You wouldn't see him.

And nobody ever said there was ever anything wrong with him, and we know he wasn't in the greatest of shape.

No, I heard that.

I get reports.

Now, you knew I did an interview that lasted for about an hour and a half with somebody, and everybody saw that was on one of your competitors.

That's a remarkably coherent Trump by Trump standards.

No, and he's talking about how he was sending out very poignant truths over the weekend on True Social.

Okay, that's for current.

Yeah.

And yeah, he just took a nice little

golfing holiday.

And like, it is Drew.

He is the oldest elected president.

And the White House recently announced he was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency a few months ago to explain his ankle swelling.

And the bruises on his right hand have become more noticeable, which the White House has attributed to frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin.

That is really funny.

Yeah,

he shook too many hands.

He just can't stop shaking hands.

That's actually hilarious.

But the aspirin thing is real.

And people of his age, frequent aspirin use can lead to hand bruising.

Yeah.

but i just finished up my blue and on research and then this whole weekend as i was like literally finishing those episodes this this whole this whole giant wave of these like trump health conspiracies just just completely took over and i felt like i was like losing it like everyone around me everyone everyone around me was indulging this and like usually from this place of like half joking but not really joking like when yeah when that line gets blurry between are you indulging in this like ironically because it's fun or does it is it actually kind of altering your brain like is it it actually slowly making you convinced of this stuff in like a small way?

This gets to what is at the root of all conspiracy culture, regardless of like the political ideology, which is the need, the emotional need to believe that you are the possessor of secret knowledge.

Yeah.

Right.

Like that, that, that is so much a part of this that like, no, no, no, I'm, I am privy to secrets about the world that the average person is not.

And the degree to which that's like comforting and also emotionally necessary for quite a few people.

And that's part of the problem with humoring this is that the instant you let it into your life, it starts taking more and more power because it becomes part of your ego.

It becomes part of your coping mechanisms.

It becomes like, yeah,

you become dependent upon it.

Yeah.

And I think it's also worth noting, like, you know, people are confused all the time about how does the right come to believe all of these things?

How does the right sort of,

you know, like, how do, how does like vaccine conspiracism

spread?

spread how does like q anon spread it's like it spreads like this

right this is what it looks like and you're also not immune to it just because your politics are better it's still really really easy to fall down those pathways because they're addictive and fun and

that's spreading so much unhinged

yeah the root of a lot of madness comes with thinking that you're better than other people and you're not cognitively i can play around with this stuff without it affecting me the way it affects other people.

Yeah.

Or just because this is, because the politics of this counterfactual belief system are better than their counterfactual belief system.

This is not a counterfactual belief system.

Totally.

Yeah.

And like, we see this with the way some people talk about like Russia.

And like, I've, I've faced a little teeny bit of pushback on some of the ways that I was framing like Russia gate in the Blue and On episodes.

And like, there is a difference between a social media disinformation campaign to influence elections, which Russia does.

Like, we, we know this.

Absolutely.

That's not in question whatsoever.

Yeah.

There's a difference between that and like straightforwardly stealing an election in such a manner that the election results are themselves illegitimate, right?

And this is the big question always, if you're, if you're saying that, like, no, they literally did steal this election in the 2016 election, then like, but they just like fucked up for 2020.

They just like couldn't get their shit together in time for that one.

Like, what's it?

Or is it that they have influence campaigns like everyone else?

And they're influenced, like that doesn't mean saying that they're not problems, but it doesn't mean pretending that's the only reason shit broke their way.

You know, in part, a big reason why things worked the way that they have and have worked the way that they have is that the disinfo campaigns that

the Russian government was engaged in were complementary to campaigns of disinformation that have existed for decades on the U.S.

right.

Yeah.

Look at the way they were funding right-wing content creators through tenant media, right?

And like, you know, same thing with Trump, like publicly encouraging Russia is not the same thing as actual collusion.

And there is no clear indication that the 2016 Russian influenced operations or even like their accessing of voter registration actually made a meaningful impact on the results of the election.

And this is the same thing with, you know, like.

the rights legal methods of voter disenfranchisement, voter suppression, or changing mail and voting rules, right?

There's, there's that versus talking about like hacking voting machines, right?

The former doesn't mean that the election was quote unquote stolen.

No.

Just because they do voter suppression, right?

The results still need to be accepted.

Like that's not illegal election interference.

It's not good.

We should oppose it, but it's not a legal election interference.

And like, this is kind of just like a coping method that passes the buck to avoid accepting that Republicans were better at winning these elections.

And it may be emotionally easier to like blame Russia than to actually like reflect on ourselves.

And I've seen the same thing when people talking about how for the 2024 election, on election day, there were bomb threats to swing state polling places that were traced back to Russia.

And like, while this is nominally true, this did not influence the result of that election.

And then this can very quickly devolve into like just like basically like just asking questions, right?

Like you can't prove a negative.

And this just turns into like a very cartoon version of understanding reality, like with like people in ski masks fixing elections or changing votes or like hackers compromising election, like voting machines, instead of just accepting that a lot of people voted for Trump and he won.

Well, and

part of the other problem is that I think when you lose yourself in patterns of thinking like this, it also leads to a failure to accurately gauge the strengths and the capacities of the enemy.

Like

if you're unwilling to see where they've made smart decisions and where they've made good investments that have paid off for them, then you are unable to follow and properly counter those kind of things.

And I think part of why this is so difficult is that so many people, so many liberals and people on the left, I don't think, I think both sides have differences in how they do it, but I don't think there's a massive difference in the degree to which either side does it.

But you find on both ends of the political spectrum, this emotional need to be like, these people are idiots.

And the coalating factor with that is that like, and I'm not, right?

Like, I'm smarter because I'm not one of these people, because I'm not one of these fools who buys into this right-wing propaganda.

And if you're, if you're more obsessed with that than you are with seeing where your enemy has made smart decisions, then you're going to continue getting dunked on by them endlessly.

You're going to get blindsided.

And that's, that's where we are right now.

People are getting dunked on repeatedly because they refuse to see the things that Trump does that are based in actual intelligence and the things that the far right has done, the things the Republican Party has done, the architects of this movement have done that have been successful.

You know who else is successful?

Genius?

The products that support this podcast.

Yeah, that's right.

And we are back.

So on Tuesday, the mayor of DC ordered that the city will continue cooperating with federal law enforcement past the expiration date of Trump's crime emergency declaration, which is set for September 10th.

She has established the quote safe and beautiful emergency operations center

for DC to indefinitely coordinate with Trump's safe and beautiful task force.

This is like a caving and like an acquiescence to prevent some kind of larger legal fight over Trump's ability to exert power over DC.

It's giving him a little bit of what he wants while trying to maintain a degree of sovereignty, but in doing so, you kind of just play into what he actually wants in the end.

This operations center will work on, quote, centralized communications, formulate post-emergency planning and operations, and ensure coordination with federal law enforcement to the maximum extent allowable by law within the district, unquote.

Later in her order, she quote-unquote requests that federal partners adhere to effective community policing practices to maintain community confidence in law enforcement, such as by not wearing masks, clearly identifying their agency, and providing identification during arrests and encounters with the public.

Great.

Quote, the safe and beautiful emergency operations center will continue to prioritize D.C.

National Guard for typical mission-focused activities, unquote.

So they are requesting.

that federal partners not wear masks.

And that's kind of the strongest amount of pushback the mayor is allowing in regards to Trump's federal control of over law enforcement in D.C.

Great.

That'll solve it.

You know,

a while back, I said that like one of the most important sources of support that the Trump administration has is a bunch of the Democratic mayors and governors.

And oh boy, is this one of them.

Yeah.

However, comma, it's worth noting that this has not been the response of all of the Democratic governors.

And I think we're going to turn here towards the impending occupation of Chicago.

Yeah.

So Trump has said that he is going to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, ostensibly also because of crime.

As of 2.32 Pacific time on Wednesday the 3rd, we don't have a timeline for the National Guard deployment.

That could change.

The situation is evolving rapidly.

We will get to more in a second.

We also have conflicting reports where Illinois Governor J.B.

Pritzker has said that the Texas National Guard is being staged

to sort of participate in this sort of occupation of Chicago.

Graham Abbott has denied this.

We sort of don't know

what exactly is going on with that.

But it is worth noting that both Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have been very, very clear that they do not want a federal deployment in Chicago.

They have said go home.

Yeah.

There isn't really, because because this is a federal deployment, there isn't really much they can do about it outside of legal stuff.

And the Trump administration has been a lot more careful about this than they were in L.A.

in terms of how they're doing the deployments legally.

So we'll see what happens with the National Guard deployments.

However...

And this is something that I think is getting very, very little coverage, which is that the actual threat model on the ground in Chicago, and

the day this is going up, we will have run in an interview the day before with Raven, who's a journalist from the Chicago-based outlet Unraveled,

about

what the response in Chicago has been to all of this and how people are repairing and what the threat model is.

The actual thing people are worried about in Chicago is not the National Guard so much.

It is the deployment of federal agents from Homeland Security, including ICE and the Border Patrol.

Very, very specifically, there is significant concern about Border Patrol because while there has been ICE operation in the city and it's obviously very bad, as we sort of talked about, there really hasn't been any significant border patrol deployments.

And that seems like it's about to start as an indication of how fast the situation is moving.

So that interview was recorded Wednesday morning.

September 3rd.

Yeah, September 3rd.

In the time between that recording and now, which was maybe three hours, we got more information about the federal deployment.

So the Sun-Times is reporting based on reports from government officials that 230 agents, including Border Patrol, are being sent from LA to Chicago.

30 agents are already here.

They've been doing training in anti-riot stuff with flashbangs.

They've also apparently moved 140 unmarked vans.

to this naval base, not really in Chicago.

We'll get to that in a second, but they've moved moved 140 unmarked vans to do these kind of raids.

This very much suggests that they're going to do the kind of smash and grab raids we've been seeing in LA.

That's the thing people are very worried about.

And we've seen TikToks from the senior leadership of the Border Patrol talking about how they're...

TikToks.

I know.

It's bleak.

Yeah, no, literally, it's like...

It's TikToks of him going, like, we're trading our palm trees for skyscrapers.

Geez.

It's really bad.

It seems like they're going going to be deploying the kind of smash and grab raids they did in LA.

But, comma, there's one final thing I want to get to.

This naval base is not really in Chicago.

It is really far north of Evanston, which is like a thing that's like not Chicago.

It's like this naval base that they're deploying from is closer to Kenosha than it is, like Kenosha, Wisconsin, than it is to like even the north.

side of Chicago.

It's like really, really far north.

Again, like even getting to, I mean, neighborhoods that are pretty far north, it's like an hour out, right?

It is a multiple hour drive into the center of the city.

So it's going to be kind of difficult for them to deploy in the middle of the city.

This is something I talked about with Raven.

It looks like they're trying to hit the more outlining areas more with raids because those areas are less well defended and there's not as much sort of rapid reaction stuff there.

That's sort of what this looks like.

People are preparing because

I guess there's one more important thing, which is the naval base is where they're running their operations out of, but the naval base has declined the request to house them.

So they're probably going to be in hotels.

People are going to target those.

But yeah, that's where things are at.

As of Wednesday,

they're staging in this weird naval base that is

really

not close to the city.

Yeah, I mean, the real focus on this anti-crime crackdown is also a way to like Trojan horse slightly obscured ICE operations.

And when people are talking about like National Guard deployments to cities nationwide, the actual main mode that National Guard will be operating in is logistical and like paperwork support for ICE operations.

Yep.

At least for these like broader nationwide deployments.

With the specific deployment in D.C.

and in Chicago, there's more preparation for like carrying out ordinary law enforcement actions.

But those actions also exist in coordination with immigration crackdowns.

And like that's a lot of what these like more militarized occupations are going to be focused on.

Yeah.

And it's worth noting like just logistically, like they're not going to be sending the guard into the parts of Chicago where there like are is crime sometimes.

Although again, it's worth noting crime rates are way the fuck down.

Yeah.

But also like every story about this is like, oh, there were shootings over the weekend.

And it's like, yeah, it's not good,

but like the National Guard is not going to be deployed to stop shootings.

They literally can't get there.

Again, it's like three hours out.

No, they can't get to the north side of Chicago.

And as we all know from the song Bad, Bad Libroy Brown, the south side of Chicago is the baddest part of town.

Jesus Christ.

I'm just going to ignore that.

Yeah, you should just ignore that.

There are places in North Side they could deploy, but if you're trying to get to the actual south side, it is at least a three-hour drive.

And that's like assuming that like the traffic isn't bad.

Like it's at least three hours.

It's possibly larger than that.

I didn't even bother checking it because I looked at where this was and I was like, this is basically in Wisconsin.

What are we doing here?

So like this is, you know, this is, this is as Gus Gerson was saying, this is a, this is a giant show of force thing.

And it's, but it's mostly just

this is the sort of shock and awe thing to frame this as crime so that people aren't focusing on

I mean, obviously, like, it's bad having just like troops in the streets, but like the ICE enforcement and the border patrol deployment is what the actual threat threat is here.

And yeah, and like, yeah,

the Pentagon and the Trump admin are planning a lot of different scenarios that they would like to enact.

But Trump's actual comments on like a larger like military-style deployment to Chicago have been a little bit flip-floppy.

I think they're still trying to reach some kind of deal to like work with the local government and state governments in a way that is less bombastic than like a like a completely like adversarial deployment would be.

Yeah.

Even that press conference where the shambling corpse of Trump made an appearance,

his comments about the possibility of deploying to Chicago

seemed still pretty exploratory.

Like

there's still like conversations being had about how to actually do this.

They are not as brazen as what they were in LA.

They don't have as much justification to do what they did in D.C.

to a city like Chicago.

So they're still trying to work out some kind of deal with like the local governments.

Yeah, and it's really unclear to me that they're going to be able to reach a deal with Brandon Johnson and with Pritzker, who's leading it.

It seems that Brandon Johnson's less willing to work with Trump on this than the mayor of DC.

So props to him for that, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's just also a thing where Brandon Johnson is like very deeply unpopular in Chicago.

However,

the actual federal deployment there is so unpopular that you have you have the fact that the Sun-Times is pointing out in their reporting of this that crime rates are down, which they have never done, like ever.

That's not a thing they ever talk about.

It's so unpopular that there is really, really significant pressure on both Pritzker and Johnson not to do this.

And, you know, maybe they cave.

I have, I have a kind of low opinion of them from like my like time in the city doing politics there, but I don't think they're going to cave on this.

No.

And I think what that means is that it's mostly going to be the Homeland Security, like ICE border patrol deployments.

Yeah, because Chicago does fall into our very loose definition of like a border town.

Uh-huh.

Yes, which most towns are.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Speaking of J.B.

Pritzker, I mean,

he has a lot of corporate interests.

He may have stock in one of the companies advertising on our show.

We'd have no way of knowing.

We're back.

I just got a text from J.B.

Pritzker.

Oh, yeah.

He's recruiting for the private people's militia to defend the free municipality of Chicago.

That's right.

He's recruiting horse archers for the con.

Yeah, yeah.

You've got to be able to lose 12 arrows a minute from the back of a war pony

in order to make the cut.

Protesters did shoot arrows at the cops at Hong Kong, so

it's not without precedent.

Yes, they did.

Yes, they did at the university.

Yeah.

Well, and you know, if Florida National Guard deploys to Illinois, they may be able to use biological warfare because the Florida Surgeon General has just vowed to end all of the state's vaccine mandates, equating them with slavery.

Not just the COVID mandates, all vaccine mandates across the state.

After he announced this, he got like over 30 seconds of applause, like non-stop.

I will play a little bit of the end of this announcement.

Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.

Okay.

Who am I as a government or anyone else?

Or who am I as a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body?

Who am I

to tell you what your child should put in your body?

I don't have that right.

Your body,

your body is a gift from God.

You really want to say your body your choice?

Uh-huh.

What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God.

I don't have that right.

Oh, really?

Oh, really?

Oh, wow.

Unless it's trans healthcare, in which case you simply cannot.

A little on the nose there.

God.

Yeah.

It's frankly wild.

Yeah.

Motherfucker.

It's like that commercial that was, I don't know, you might be too young for this.

There was this commercial with this old man with like a dollar on a fishing rod going, you almost got it.

It's literally that.

It's literally that.

No, no.

Very close into walking into a full-body autonomy argument there.

Even though, you know, for reproductive health care, that is unrelated to general public health, which is why these mandates exist, which can affect people besides you.

Yep.

Ron DeSantis announced during the same press conference the creation of Florida's own Make America Healthy Again Commission, which will

enforce Robert F.

Kennedy's policies to the fullest extent in their state.

Grand.

He was the least charismatic person we saw speak at the RNC last year, just saying.

Yeah.

DeSantis?

Yeah, in my opinion.

No, no.

Who was worse?

JT Vance.

Yeah, Vance was there.

That lady did fall asleep.

Man, and people were outwardly contemptuous of Vance at the RNC.

Like, like Republicans were contemptuous.

But remember the women for Trump?

The woman who fell asleep next to us while watching the Vance speech.

And then mouthed, he's so dry.

Yeah, yeah, that was really good.

Yeah.

But I would say DeSantis is a solid number two.

Maybe Abbott three.

Don't know.

Maybe they should have got a vaccine to boost their charisma stats.

That's right.

That's how that works.

Yeah.

Lax aura.

So this is really dangerous.

This is going to put a whole bunch of kids in harm's way.

Yep.

Worrying trend.

Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about Ukraine.

Ukraine.

Specifically, kind of the present situation of the war in Ukraine.

Just kind of another little update because people

catch little bits here and there on the news about what's happening.

And I felt like we should probably update people as to like what's been going on.

Kind of the most recent news you've probably heard is that Russian forces have been advancing in the Donetsk Oblast and recently broke into an eighth region of Ukraine and started taking villages in the Dnypro-Petrovsk region, which is like a major industrial center that's next to the Donetsk region, where Russian soldiers had not been recently.

At this point, gains in this new region by Russia have been seemed to be fairly minimal.

They've entered two villages in the eastern part of the region.

The Russian defense ministry claims that they captured both of the villages.

The Ukrainian defense ministry has said, well, they're in the area and they're basically contesting them, but they haven't entrenched or built fortifications.

Like, fighting is ongoing.

I'm sure neither country is giving out perfectly accurate data, but it seems certainly fair to say and verifiable to say that Russia has made an incursion into this region and the fighting is ongoing, however solid their gains may or may not be.

This is not the entirety of what's going on in the conflict overall.

Basically, the whole line of contact with Russia, which is about a thousand miles long, is in play at the moment.

But there have not been like massive gains over the last couple of months.

And in fact, as of August of 2025, Russian forces occupied about 19% of Ukrainian territory.

They first hit 19% back in October of 2022, right before Ukrainian forces liberated a large chunk of the Kherson Oblast.

So basically what we're seeing here is Russian forces reached this peak like three years ago.

A Ukrainian counteroffensive pushed them back.

And over the last three years, Russian forces have kind of clawed their way back to where they were near the end of 2022, right?

If you're looking for like, what is the overall progress of this war over the last three years?

So that's obviously not going well for Ukraine, but it's also not, this is not a situation where Ukrainian forces are in any kind of collapse.

Like you're looking at, it took Russia three years to get back to where they were three years ago.

So this is, I mean, this continues to be a grinding and hideous conflict, but it does not look like one at which the end is in any way in sight still, even with the kind of pulling of support from the U.S.

of Ukraine, with the reduction in arms shipments and whatnot from the United States to Ukraine.

There's not any signs of like a generalized collapse.

And in fact, over the last couple of years, there's been a fairly minimal increase in occupied territory.

Right now, the pace of Russia's advance in Ukraine, per a recent AP article, has slowed by 18% just over the month of August.

So Russian forces took about 460 kilometers of territory in August and had been seizing more like 500, 600 square kilometers of territory a month in the couple of months prior to that.

So that's kind of what you're looking at in terms of the overall like pace of the conflict.

One of the major changes that we've seen over the last like really specifically like a couple of quarters in the conflict is Ukraine has been increasing their capacity to hit Russian strategic targets behind the line.

Like well behind the line, we're talking fuel and we're talking power infrastructure, which has been extremely successful.

One of the things that's allowed Ukraine to hit these further back targets has been they've started producing an indigenous style of cruise missile codenamed the Flamingo, which has an 1100, almost 1200 kilogram warhead and a 3,000 kilometer range, which puts it about 1,000 kilometers past kind of the maximum range, the one-way attack drones, like these one-way suicide UAVs, which had been Ukraine's like furthest in way to strike Russian territory.

Those only reached in about 2,000 kilometers.

So this puts a significant amount of like Russia's infrastructure within Ukraine's ability to target.

They're currently producing, I think, they're hoping to get up to by the end of the year, seven missiles a day by October.

Now, these new cruise missiles are fairly easy to shoot down with like modern air defenses, but modern air defenses are in short supply.

So it's a matter of if you're able to produce an increasing number of these and you're flinging as many of them as you can out every day, the Russians will have to make choices in terms of what infrastructure are we actually going to devote anti-missile assets towards.

And, you know, that's that's always going to be less than the total like number of targets there are to hit.

And the, in terms of like evidence that these strikes have been successful, there has been increasing limitations on personal fuel use inside the Russian Federation and increasing power outages.

Like all of that has gotten more common over even just like the last several months in particular.

So kind of overall, what we see if we're looking at this conflict is a grinding, high casualty endeavor.

where the Russians are slowly pushing back Ukrainian lines at the cost of a pretty nightmarish number of casualties, right?

Like this is still a meat grinder conflict and that dimension on the ground for the Russians hasn't changed.

The main thing that has changed is Ukraine has gotten better at striking behind the line, which has been met by a significant acceleration in Russian strikes, particularly even on like civilian assets in Ukraine.

Like there have been more missile campaigns, more drone bombardment campaigns on the capital and civilian targets than previously.

Like some of the largest raids just took place like three or four days ago.

You know, that's kind of a broad update as to what's going on.

It continues to be a very ugly war.

One of the main things that we've learned about what modern warfare is going to look like is that it is almost impossible for infantry forces without air supremacy to break and make large advances and then hold that territory if they do not have air supremacy.

When you're looking at two peer combatants, that's almost impossible to do.

And so a significant amount of the fighting devolves into who can fling drones and missiles behind the lines and hit different sort of strategic assets with more efficacy.

And that's what the war has bogged down to at this stage.

Speaking of aerial strikes, do we want to at least reference the attack on the Venezuelan alleged drug smuggling vessel that was announced during Trump's death press conference?

Yeah, we blew up a boat.

We did it.

A boat in international waters that was claimed to be a Trin de Agua, which is a Venezuelan, kind of analogous to a cartel organized criminal organization.

One of the biggest boogeymans of the second Trump term.

Yes.

They're primary like Latin American boogeyman.

And yeah, we blew them up.

The administration is claiming it was, you know, filled with fentanyl or whatever.

I don't believe there is as of yet any independent evidence that this boat was in any way affiliated with Trinidad Agua or carrying drugs or headed to the United States.

We simply don't know.

A lot of times, like just the way that Trindagua works, this is not like the Sinaloa cartel.

This is not a cartel that has a massive degree of international capacity that extends to the United States.

Like there's even significant debate as to how much they are extended into other parts of Latin America.

They've had like really limited success expanding into Colombia because different insurgent groups like the FARC and the ELN have provided a significant counter-veiling force to them.

And I wanted to note, because one of my sources is an article on Trindagua by America's Quarterly.

And in talking about their kind of troubled expansion into Colombia, this article notes: tellingly, even in these spaces, TDA operatives subcontract smaller local gangs and authorize them to use their name to generate fear and compliance with their victims.

And this is a really common thing with Trindagua, where when you're seeing, oh, this is, you know, TDA affiliated or whatnot, these guys may have no actual communication or very much to do at all with the centralized group.

They're just kind of using the name for branding purposes because it, you know, scares off other gangs, because it allows them to like act as if they're connected to this larger organization, but they really are not in a very meaningful way.

In the same way, a lot of you'll see a lot of articles that'll be talking about like, these are Trindagua tattoos.

Like none of them are actual like tattoos affiliated with the group.

This is like largely nonsense because Trendagua doesn't have a tattoo tradition per the people who are actually experts on Trendagua.

There's a lot of good articles, particularly in Insight Crime, Jeremy McDermott being one of the authors that have tried to bust a lot of these myths about TDA.

We'll be doing more coverage on them in the future, but like, yeah, that's kind of the situation.

Speaking of international shipments, oh boy.

lacking

rocking chessboard, rocking your chest

Ah, that's good stuff.

Jesus Christ.

Okay, so nobody being murdered in cold blood to post a video on X.com, the everything app in this one.

But

probably its own fair share of harm.

Yeah, so at the end of last week, the official end of the de minimis exemption for packages under $800

finally fully went into effect.

We're going to talk about this more next week when it's more clear what the large-scale ramifications of this are.

We have been talking about this for a very, very long time.

The other really big news this week, and this is, I think, most of what's been going on here has been the U.S.

Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

ruled that most of the tariffs that are in effect are illegal.

Now, the court also basically put in a thing saying that this ruling doesn't go into effect until October 14th so that Trump can have time to appeal this to the Supreme Court.

He's already appealing it to the Supreme Court, trying to, he wants a, quote, expedited ruling from the Supreme Court.

He started ranting about how

if the tariffs go back into effect, or are not allowed to be in effect, the U.S.

will, quote, turn into a third world country or may turn into a third world country.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

So.

Not a third world country.

Oh, God.

The American century of humiliation continues to chug on.

Yeah.

So, okay,

it actually is worth talking about this case a little bit because it goes to the core of what's been happening with these tariffs, which is that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so in the Constitution, if you read it, it says that the power of taxes and tariffs lie with Congress.

It really explicitly says this.

I'm going to read a thing from the ruling.

This is a quote from the ruling.

Quote, the Constitution grants Congress the power to, quote, lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, and to, quote, regulate commerce with foreign nations.

This is the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8.

And

I'm going to stop here to note that everything that's in the Bill of Rights was not in the original draft of the Constitution.

That got tacked on later.

So like freedom of speech and like freedom of assembly and like freedom of religion were considered less important by the people writing this than Congress or the other people who could do taxes.

I'm going to keep reading from this ruling.

Tariffs are a tax, and the framers of the Constitution expressly contemplated the exclusive granting of taxing power to the legislative branch when Patrick Henry expressed concern that the president, quote, may easily become king.

Debates in several state conventions,

Jonathan Elliott, 1836, James Manison replied, this would not occur because, quote, the purse is in the hand of the representatives of the people.

So

I cannot believe that we have a president doing a t-tax for foreign terrorists.

I know, I know.

Where's Boston when you need it?

Robert, do the voice.

No,

I'm not your fucking monk.

This thing, this is the only way to stop Robert from doing the voice is to try to get him to do the voice.

Because if oppositional defiance.

Yeah,

that's what rules me.

Okay, speaking of what rules us.

So Trump has been using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and he declared a state of emergency over drug trafficking in order to do this.

This is nonsense, gibberish.

And this is actually where I think there's a very, very significant part of this case here, which is like, okay.

What power does Trump actually have?

Like, can he continue to just sort of rule the United States?

Many people are asking these questions.

And I'm going to read this line from CNN, which is quoting the court draft.

Quote, notably, when drafting the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Congress did not use the term tariff or any of its synonyms like duty or tax, the court said in its majority ruling.

The absence of any such tariff language

in the act contrasts with statutes where Congress has affirmatively granted such powers and included clear limit on that power.

So this law does not say that he could do this.

He has simply been doing this the whole time with using a law that literally explicitly does not say the word tariff in it.

So, the court is extremely unhappy about this.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

It really is.

I think this is, this is genuinely, just on a basic constitutional level, this is one of the most staggering ones of these I've ever, in terms of just like, does the Constitution still exist?

The answer is, eh?

Like, this is Article 1 of the Constitution.

It's Article 1.

This is the first shit they wrote.

This was, like, literally the whole point of the American Revolution was that the king can't levy taxes.

It has to be the parliamentary representatives of the people.

That's like the whole thing.

It was the slogan was, no taxation without representation.

Yes.

Yeah.

And like, like, obviously, that's the stated goal of it.

You can obviously go into your there's like a million other things you can go into your like territorial expansion, you can go into your slavery, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But like, this is what it was supposed to be about.

And has just claimed this power from himself.

And we're going to get a real test in the Supreme Court.

So the Supreme Court comes back from their recess in like a month.

So we're going to probably get a real test on how far the Supreme Court is willing to let

Trump just straight up rule by executive fiat.

But in the meantime, all these tariffs are still in effect.

And yeah, this has been tariff talk.

We have talked about the tariffs.

Excellent.

Well, I believe that does it for us here at It Could Happen Here.

All right, everybody.

Until next time, you know,

just if anyone tells you the president is dead, assume they're telling the truth and go live your life.

We reported the news.

We reported the news.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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