It Could Happen Here Weekly 199

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

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What's up, y'all?

It's your favorite cousin again.

Prop is in the building.

You know what I'm saying?

Well, in your earbuds or speakers, however the hell you listen to this, your favorite cousin is here.

I am going to assume that that is the truth.

And since you can't answer me, we just gonna go with that.

It's been a while since I tapped in with y'all.

I ruined your music festivals and then told you about your municipalities and your waters.

Somebody reached out to us who, you know, gestures wildly.

We have not been able to give back to her, but about how she was a part of an effort to non-privatize the water inside of her neighborhood and district.

And they won.

So shout out to you.

We apologize if you've, you know, our job has not been boring.

And since the start of 2025.

But today I'm going to bring you some blackness, some genuine blackness, and then some, this has to be a black conversation because you motherfuckers are racist.

I have to approach it like this because crime has become a color mute term in the era of Trump.

It kind of always has been, but it's really obvious now with the National Guard being unleashed onto the streets of Washington, D.C., there's this some sort of clearly obvious conflation between the houseless population, poverty, crime, black folks.

Like, it's all kind of like one thing with this fool, which is not rocket science for y'all.

It's just, you know what he's talking about.

You know how I know this, how he thinks, is because whenever he talks about black people supporting him, he talks about criminal reform.

Because apparently that's what all black people care about only.

Just Just like, you know, when he says immigration, he means Latino.

And the whole not feeling safe is just because, you know, the crime that the houseless population of D.C.

have is being ill.

That's the crime.

Because they, no one has ever given me a legitimate reason as to why not having a place to stay is a crime.

Hell, you know, Margaret Killjoy and them have this whole joint about loitering and loitering laws like truancies.

Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The point is the crime is that you exist.

So today,

I want to talk to y'all about something that y'all already know, which is it's never been about the crime.

All right, now, first of all, some stuff that don't matter.

Y'all still following Drake?

I don't know if y'all like, okay, my crowd is following Drake.

Let me stop making a difference between us, but listen.

So you know Drake suing UMG and his label over, you know, not like us and just proving that he's not like us.

Anyway, the new thing in this man's lawsuit is he's demanding umg bring evidence over the push of teeth thing what do i mean by the push of t thing when push of t came at him which we can all agree if you in the rap he won also shout out the clips so when you go back to the push of teeth time this is the back to back and i'm charged up that time he was like Yo, I'm going to show y'all the emails and y'all bring in the emails from when you guys were suppressing Pusha T's stuff, when you guys were like making sure that like it got copyright claimed and stuff getting off the streamers and pulled down all to say, man, you helped me suppress this man's music when Pusha T came after me.

Why y'all don't do it with not like us?

Which means, yo, corny ass,

you just told on yourself.

Oh, so pusher was right.

So what you saying is, in you trying to take down Kendrick, you done snitched on 2018 you, right?

Okay, so because you had the label interfere with this battle, fam.

Now, if you want to hear some more like real just rapping ass rappers, there's this great battle that was going on between Joey Badass and Ray Von, and then somehow it became a triple with this dude named Daylight and this other brother named Reason.

These were some really, really dope bars.

Now Absol got into the middle of it, but now Ab Sol, Rhapsody, and Joey are going on tour, which sucks because I'm on the same management team as all of them, and I ain't on that tour.

I wish I was, though.

It'd be a rapping, rapping tour, but I definitely don't do the numbers they do.

Anyway, today, you know, in light of, like I said, the feds in DC, Trump keep claiming these emergency cases that gives him these powers to do these different things.

And as a side note, remember when J6 happened and he was like, well, Nancy Pelosi should have called in the National Guard.

She ain't called in the National Guard.

What was President Trump supposed to do?

Well, I would think what he's doing now, because they used to say these same people that was arguing that Trump ain't had a power to stop it, meaning he didn't have the power to call in the National Guard, are also praising him right now for using his presidential power to call in the National Guard.

Boy, I tell you, racism make you dumb as hell.

But in light of this, despite all evidence showing that the crime rate has dropped 30% in D.C., this man still keeps talking about the crime wave and the safety or the lack of safety that people feel in D.C.

Now, I'm going to let Bridget do a full episode on really what's going on in Chocolate City.

My mama from D.C., you know, my whole mama's side of the family is still out there.

So I used to spend every other summer in D.C.

Now, don't get me wrong, being down 30% is absolutely a positive, but D.C.

ain't safe.

Now, it depends on what part you're in.

See, that's the thing about crime statistics.

But before I get into crime statistics, I need to talk about the concept of crime, period.

This will be no surprise to y'all because you listen to Cools On Media.

Crime is made up.

Now,

criminal crime, I think it's very important to understand that it is a social construct.

Now,

what do I mean by that?

What I mean is it's situational, right?

How the same act can mean two different things.

Now, this is a conceptual thing that obviously our felt experience is a little more real, but let me give you an example.

Let a disaster hit.

A hurricane, an earthquake, a flood.

If I go into that grocery store and get some bread, am I looting or scavenging?

Am I stealing or surviving?

And the answer is, depends on what color you are.

Crime's a social construct.

Because if that's the case, how is George Zimmerman still walking?

Having said that, one could take this argument and go super bonkers on it and say the same thing about pedophilia.

Like, who's to say that what Epstein did is a crime?

Because like you said, crime is a social construct.

Here's my answer to that.

It's social because we live in a social society, fam.

Although borders are made up, so is money and so are driver's licenses.

Of course, there's no force field at the 49th parallel that separates Canada from America.

However, we have decided that before you

get behind the wheel of a car, You better have passed some sort of examination for us to know that you safe enough to drive behind this.

You could physically drive this car, but we live in a society that says, hey, homie, I need you to make sure we need to have some sort of due diligence.

We have decided as a species that is self-aware that our children matter.

Their safety is important to us.

The person standing next to you has the right to exist.

Whether you like that person or not, they have the right to exist.

You cannot hold them against they will that's habeas corpus apparently unbeknownst to christy gnome who clearly don't know what habeas corpus means that's a whole other topic what is criminal and what is lawful is something that we've agreed upon in our social contract now we however live in a modern secular democracy which says that we have a say in what becomes laws or not so we ain't got to just lay down and let you just call stuff a crime that ain't a crime or that shouldn't be a crime now speaking of what is and isn't a crime, here's the thing: Black people have been telling you to answer for a long time, specifically rappers.

Okay, now I saw a TikTok about this, and it's very irresponsible of me that I can't remember Lil Homie's name.

And I can't, you know how you get the suggested, you know, or yeah, just stuff pop in like the for you.

I cannot find Bre Bruh's TikTok.

Black man's super brilliant, but he reminded me of some lyrics that Freeway said that captures the point of what we trying to make.

I love this dude's TikTok, man.

God, I got to find it.

Hopefully I'll find it and put it in the show notes.

But Freeway's verse with a song with Jay-Z says, we still hustle till the sun come up.

Crack a 40 when the sun go down.

It's a cold winter.

Y'all niggas better bundle up.

I bet it's a hot summer.

Grab an onion just to rock it down.

You hot now.

Listen up.

Follow me.

You don't know the cop's sole purpose is to lock us down.

Throw away the key, but without this drug shit, your kids ain't got no way to eat, huh?

We still trying to keep mom smiling.

Cause when her teeth stop showing and her stomach start growling, then the heat start flowing.

If you from my hood, you know, you feel me keep going.

The sneaks start leaning and the heat stop working then my heat start working i'm gonna rob me a person okay now listen these are the lyrics that lil bra quoted in

his tick tock

and the point he's making which is the same point i'm making is that he's talking about the solutions to crime like He said it right there, like, I just want my mom to smile.

My kids don't have any other way to eat.

And then he says, when the heat stop working, then my heat start working.

I'm going to rob me a person.

It is resources.

But

again, follow what this bruh is trying to tell you is that you putting law enforcement in our neighborhoods doesn't fix anything.

That's what he's saying.

He's like, no, you just want to lock us up.

That is not solving the problem.

The problem is I'm hungry.

My mama's hungry.

My kids are hungry.

My sneaks start leaning.

What he's talking about is his tennis shoes, his sneakers.

They're leaning.

You know, when you walk on your sneakers too much in the back, your shoes in the back, how it starts running around the side, then it starts thinning out.

So it's like the back of your shoe just looks uneven.

That's when your sneaks are leaning.

This is what he's trying to say.

My stomach is rumbling.

Had we had better funded schools?

Had we had more opportunities?

He was like, I'm robbing this person because there there is no other option.

Now, are there other options?

Maybe.

But if you're going to do the math, listen, this is simple economics.

If you want to make $1,000 tonight because the rent's due tomorrow, you go over to Spanish Jose's house.

Spanish Jose say, hey, listen, you ain't got to do nothing.

Just put this bag in your back seat.

and drive to park slow.

Drop it off and come back.

Or you can go work $20 an hour at McDonald's.

Ain't no uncles with endowments.

And check this out.

Let me push you even further.

Even if you a smarty aunt, even if you a smart one, the government just told Harvard that they can't recruit in my neighborhood, even if I got the grades for it, because that's woke shit.

So what you want, what the fuck you want me to do?

Now.

Here's the premise of what I'm talking about, which is

we know the solutions.

It's never been about crime.

Okay.

But let me talk about some folks, some black folks who do care about the solution, who do care about crime.

Because if we're talking about crime in our urban areas, who the fuck do you think the crimes are against?

And see, that's the part that make me so mad when I be talking to these people.

You think we don't care?

Because who are these crimes getting carried out against?

You think we happy to see all them police?

One would think if it worked, we would be happy to see all these police in our streets.

But you know what?

The shit don't help.

Okay.

What I'm going to do in the rest of this show is prove to y'all based on decades of research, what does reduce crime.

We're going to link all the things in the bio.

I knew I had to come on my A-game if I'm going on It Could Happen Here because these some of the smartest people like y'all listen, the people on this show, y'all be reasonable.

Y'all is like real journalists.

I'm just a rapper that knows how to explain shit.

So I needed to make sure that I had my ducks in a row.

So I'm about to show y'all a trillion examples of where if you really from these blocks, if you really do care about the welfare of black people, then maybe you should listen to black people.

See, and let me bring in my trans community here because they problem with you.

This,

to be honest with y'all, I'm going to be transparent with you.

This is part of what radicalized me.

Why I really started to understand the trans experience is because the shit they say about us is the shit they say about you.

Your crime is we just don't like you around.

At the end of the day, all these laws against trans people is really just because you just think they gross.

And so with us, it was just like, you like, what is redlining?

Discriminatory practices in jobs.

You just don't want us around.

What is white flight?

You just don't want us around.

And your justification of this is this made up ass word named crime.

And that you care that crime matters, but nigga, you don't.

Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let's take a break.

All right, here we go.

I've calmed down.

So the first thing you want to think about is how crime is reported, right?

And the ways for which it's reported.

And then the geographical locations that we're talking about so when you say the crime in washington dc

it's not like the crime happens in an evenly distributed thing like it's not all of dc if you will there's northeast northwest southeast south southeast and southwest now

due to gentrification southeast which is where Anacostia is, and was at one time the sort of mecca of just like Black DC of Chocolate City.

Chocolate City's the whole city was chocolate forever.

Like, I said, I know this because I spent every other summer there and my mama from there.

But, like,

Southeast DC is the last non-gentrified area.

Now,

do you think it's thugs sitting on the national monument sipping 40 ounces?

No, you out there with the tourists sipping matcha.

So,

in one sense,

when you say crime is dropped 30%,

it's like 30%

since when.

Okay.

And is it averaged across all of DC?

Or are you talking about in its areas where things like carjackings, homicides, and stuff like that happen?

Right.

Now, remember what I talked about a long time ago, at least on my show, hopefully y'all remember this, that the crime rates in America is always a weird situation because we don't live in America.

You live in your city.

So maybe it's going crazy in your own local neighborhood.

So you feel like, damn, this place is wild.

Or maybe, like I said, maybe you're in like northwest Portland, you know what I'm saying?

Like, you know, over there off Gleason, you feel me?

And like, it's nice.

You know what I mean?

Like, you don't never see a single, but if you live over there in Chinatown next to voodoo donuts, dog, you seem like you walking over zombies.

I don't know.

What I'm trying to say is sometimes the statistics can be deceiving.

Now, Granny and them,

who, you know, bought their house a long time ago, they see the graffiti on the wall and they think, you know, yada, yada, the boy's like loitering outside.

How do you fix it?

Well, allow me to introduce you to Philadelphia, which coincidentally is where Freeway is from.

So the data is pretty clear.

You know, if you look at the violent crime reduction report, it's literally, it's at the Department of Justice.

You can read it yourself.

It tells you exactly what has worked to drop homicide, violent crime, carjacking, theft.

It tells you what has worked, what has not worked.

A simple Google, right?

And the intro of this is, this is a violent crime reduction between 2021 and 2025.

And it says, for the past three years, the Justice Department has been executing comprehensive strategies to reduce violent crime rooted in local communities.

And we're seeing trends in the form of crimes being prevented and lives saved.

According to available data from 2023, murder, rape, robbery, and aggregated assault is in a considerable decline.

In nearly 90 major cities across the country, violent crime has continued to drop.

during the last six months of this year compared to the same period last year, including a 17% decrease in homicides.

This is the Deputy Attorney General Moncayo on September 17th, 2024.

Now, to keep it very real, again, violent crime rates being up and down are obviously relative.

Now,

one thing was, well, we were in a pandemic, so there's that, right?

Another thing is...

It's almost like how everybody was complaining again that crime was up is like, y'all forgot the 90s existed.

Like I lived it and baby, this ain't nothing.

You know, the actual fear of pain

and

suffering, this pales in comparison.

We live in a great place in relation to what we went through in the 80s and 90s.

Now,

again, we're talking national trends.

Right.

Again, in your local neighborhood,

it may be a green light happening.

I don't know.

I'm just saying for you to say that our country's becoming a cesspool means you not reading the data.

According to the conversation, it's like independent journalists, this author, her name is Katarina G.

Roman.

She's a professor of criminal justice at Temple University.

And as a side note at Temple University, my homie Timothy, he's teaching a class on Kendrick Lamar and his lyrics and hip-hop and justice.

I actually spoke at his class a couple of times.

So that was pretty dope to hear what he's doing.

But now, check this out.

According to her writing, it says that Pennsylvania spends roughly $200,000 a year for each juvenile it incarcerates, according to the 2021 report from a bipartisan Pennsylvania juvenile justice track force.

That's 50 times the cost.

to deliver evidence-based family therapy that would prevent kids from going into the justice system in the first place.

I'm going to tell you before I even read the rest of of this, because I lived it, we just be bored.

It ain't nothing to do, there are no opportunities.

When the heat stop working, then my heat starts working.

In Philadelphia, juvenile incarceration involves the confinement in city-ran Philadelphia juvenile services and other residential placement facilities.

Young people leave these facilities with lower chances of graduating high school, frayed mental health, and a higher likelihood of rearrest or being shot.

Can I again please speak from my own experience?

When you go into these juveniles cases, you have to pick a location of people that you would be your protection.

Even if you don't run with them, even if you don't know them niggas outside of here, when y'all get outside, y'all may never talk again, but in here, even if you went in there over something stupid, like shoplifting, some damn spray paint, whatever the case may be, you now got to run with the people that got your same skin tone and are from your part of town.

You have to.

Kids don't go in being members of gangs.

You have to join one to stay alive.

Now, check this out.

When you get out, part of the terms of your probation is you can't be around certain criminal festivities or activities or people with criminal records.

Where you going to go?

If I just happen to live on 60th Street, next to my uncle, I just live here.

You mess around, go visit your granny house, and then got to report to your P.O., you've been fraternized with known gang members.

You probably going back.

This shit don't work, y'all.

But what does?

Now,

again, back to this article, drawing from about 35 years of work in Philadelphia and other cities to understand what makes neighborhoods safer, I believe the surest returns home from prevention strategies aimed at young people who are not yet immersed in robberies, shootings, and gun activities, right?

So they give some examples of the things that they've done.

First of it is a school-based case management in Barthroom High.

Now in Southwest Philly, John Barthram High Schools has a youth violence reduction initiative that launched in 2023.

It was designed by former school safety chief in Philadelphia, now Philadelphia police commissioner Kevin Bethel, school safety officer programs manager Ken Rosa and criminal justice researcher Brandi Blasco and this person that wrote wrote the article.

Students who have been involved in fights or show other risk factors of violence and street gang involvements are referred to this program.

The initiative's core idea is simple.

Earn students' trust through consistent, credible mentorship and step in when needy.

Stepping in means teaching conflict resolution skills, running engaging workshops, buying a meal, intervening when a fight is brewing or a student is on the verge of being expelled.

Each week, a team of administrators, counselors, school safety officers, and community outreach workers, most of whom are based in the school, review the participants' progress.

The tracks follow through referrals and coordinate communication with family, school, and staff.

This is a tightly managed, relationship-driven safety net that gives students quicker access to help.

make school climates calmer and safer.

This seems so obvious.

You just need somebody you trust.

Listen, one of the things even in my own house, my own life was I knew my neighbors and my neighbors knew me.

And if they caught me outside standing with the wrong people, I knew they was going to tell my mom.

Sometimes, since they're teenagers, they don't have conflict resolution skills.

All they know is to pop off.

You ever been hangry?

You don't think kids be hangry?

Your teacher in there asking you about your algebra homework, your stomach rumbling.

I ain't got shit to say to her because I'm hungry.

And sometimes it's just a meal.

Sometimes it's just knowing somebody cares.

Sometimes it's just, you feel like, I know I've experienced this too.

I feel like it's not even, there ain't even no reason to explain my position to you because you're not going to believe me or you just going to call the police.

I taught a kid, I've said this story so many times, who used to show up late.

in class when I used to teach.

He's show up late in class, maybe three to four times a week.

Always had his homework in his hand.

You tardy that many times we supposed to call the truancy officer.

Ain't no way in the world I'm calling a truancy officer because that mean they mama gonna have to pay a $2,500 fee, number one.

And number two, now he got a record.

All I did, guys,

I just asked him, why are you late every day?

He say, because he trusts me.

My daddy be drinking too much at night, so he can't get up and take us to school.

So I take my brother to school first and then come here and this is just the time i get here i never marked him tardy since all you gotta do is ask right which leads me to the second thing the power of credible caring adults it's real simple you got people that care you got food programs all right let me nerd it up again now

According to the Youth Justice Services, Relationships, Rehabilitation, and the Reality of Young People Involved, a metasynthesis of qualitative literature.

This is a scholarly literature reviewed results that says that just having an adult who

you know cares,

just having one that care.

Changes significantly the chances of a student getting into a life of crime.

But just knowing somebody care

I'm gonna link in it again into these show notes all of the data, all the stuff I've been looking at so you can check it out yourself.

I know it seems like a gross oversimplification by the way that I'm just saying it right now.

Usually, you know, I'm saying, if we was doing the it can happen here thing, I got to be able to read this stuff out to you, but I can read a part of it.

It says that that

The themes that broke out after interviewing 150 kids is that young people reported first being pessimistic about entering these services and their past experiences impacted their ability to trust and were initially cautious of professionals.

But watch this.

These were the themes and sub-themes.

They felt valued and finding worth within their system.

The reciprocal nature of understanding and respect.

These kids felt respected.

The importance of having one good person, creating a secure base for exploration and development, and then showing a genuine care by going above and beyond.

So basically just be kind

and it helps

a

student

succeed.

Ain't that crazy?

But at the end of the day, homicides in Philadelphia are at the lowest level they've been in 25 years.

How?

It's a long time

and it takes effort.

But next, I want to talk about, whoo,

the city of Baltimore.

Boy, this new mayor up there cooking.

All right, next.

All right, we bike.

Now, Baltimore, I don't know if you know this, which I love about it.

And of course, you probably don't know about it because

a black man did this.

Baltimore's homicide rate has fallen 40%.

Now, Baltimore, you understand this is where the wire took place.

Don't get me wrong about Baltimore.

Baltimore active.

Murder capital of the dog.

Oh, listen.

Baltimore was active.

Now, according to The Guardian, violent crime in America's big cities has been receding since the pandemic for about two years.

But even in comparisons, Baltimore improvement is breathtaking.

Fewer people have been killed in the city over the last seven months than any other particular period for 50 years.

Here's the funny part.

Mississippi talking about sending a National Guard up to D.C.

to

help with the crime in D.C.

Meanwhile, Jackson, Mississippi got a higher murder rate than D.C.

right now.

Y'all people is weird.

It's never been about crime.

Now, back to Guardian.

As of 15 August, the running 365-day total for murders in Baltimore stood at 165 dead.

Assuming the city remains at death's pace, the murder rate will finish below 30 per 10,000 residents for the first time since 1986.

If it remains on pace since the 1st of January, it would have finished 2025 at 143 murders.

A rate of about 25 per 100,000, the last seen in Baltimore since 1978.

Now, check this out.

Y'all may not remember this, but y'all remember Freddie Gray, the boy that got killed in the back of the police halting tank?

See, that's what happens when you just bring cops into a place.

It ain't about the crime, though.

Back to The Guardian.

Since 2015, there has been here in Baltimore this acknowledgement that the equity needs to be the priority, right?

Mayor Brown said.

The riots.

were as much about the conditions of poverty as it was about Gray's death.

I hope you're hearing that.

People losing their homes and foreclosures to water bills, for example, as they were about police brutality.

But the heavy-handed response of the cops to the protests failed to hold the police accountable for misconduct, right?

Eviscerating the relationship between the Baltimore police and the public.

Baltimore state attorney Marion Mosley laid murder charges on the officers involved in Baltimore's police union closed ranks in response, eviscerating the relationship between the police and politicians and serious scandals at the city hall and the state's attorney office and the failure of Mosley's charges to result in convictions.

Violence skyrocketed.

But here come this young brother, Brandon Scott, young black man, right?

He's a former city council member, right?

He's been a long observer of the violence, you know what I'm saying?

And before he became the mayor in 2020.

Then he implemented what he's calling a comprehensive three-pillar approach, right?

The first pillar is called public health approach to violence, right?

The second pillar is community engagement and interagency coordination, right?

The third pillar is evaluation and accountability, right?

So like I said in the beginning, it starts with the community.

All right, so check this out.

Again, from The Guardian.

Against Baltimore's police budget, topping a half a billion dollars, the largest police budget per capita of any large city in the USA, the political establishment gave its new millennial mayor room to experiment with $50 million of Washington's money.

So they took that budget that was a half a billion, gave him $50 million, right?

And since trust was like so low, the first step was to get everybody aboard.

So he took that money, the cops, the hospitals, the jails, the school, the social services, the State Department, the feds, and he appointed this dude named Richard Worley,

who was the city police commissioner in June 2023.

Woesley was a lifelong Baltimore officer picked in part to bring the rank and file in line with Scott's anti-violence program.

Scott emphasizes partnerships as an important part of the process.

Now, he took other federal grants and he gave the money to the people that actually do the services.

He ain't just keep it for them.

Now, here's the thing, cuts my mouth to say it, but if you are going to stop violence in the situation that we live in, the cops got to be involved.

Because most of the time, the cops are the problem.

It's always punishment and prison with them.

They only come with a stick when something already happened.

So you got to get them on the table and you got to get them at the table with somebody that's going to be willing to be held accountable.

And remember, that's pillar three.

Now, now, far be it from me, because I don't live in Baltimore.

Would I ever shill for no mayor like this?

I'm just telling you what the data says.

And I got family in Baltimore.

Now, what Scott said is, again, we focus on the individuals and groups that are most likely to be the victim or perpetuator of violence.

We go to them.

Listen, they knock on doors.

There's a social worker that comes to the door with a letter from the mayor that says, yo, you trying to be a part of this?

And they're only targeting kids or families that they know got low poverty rates and high chances of crime.

You looking for the people who are most likely going to fall a victim to perpetuating it or receiving it.

Because remember how we started this whole thing before.

You think we don't care about crime?

We the ones that it's happening to.

So he says, quote, Curtis Palomero, who runs the youth violence prevention nonprofit Raqqa in Baltimore, says, we're talking about young people with the elevated risk.

We're not talking about the young person that says F you to his teacher or tells his mom and dad or grandpa he don't want to do XYZ.

We're talking about kids who have literally probably have two tracks, jail and death.

He knocks on the door while a cop is carrying the mayor's letter.

And as often as not, he has to knock on a dozen doors before he gets a chance.

Why?

Because niggas don't trust the cops, right?

Why would they?

But

since there's no single thing that is preventative, trust must be built, right?

Moving on in this article.

There are two types of people that are most vulnerable, NASA says.

The people in their early 20s who are feuding over trivial matters, someone looked at me wrong, somebody bumped into somebody, right?

Or other people who are in the drug game.

More around the violence that has to do with other criminal enterprises are so much more calculated.

Critically, it's not.

every young person with Instagram beef and not every stand-down neighborhood street dealer that rises to their attention.

The risk factors creates a reasonable, articulatable, legally defensible basis for contact, which means you're not being hunted by the cops.

Do you understand the peace I would have felt had I known that since I wasn't involved in none of this shit, they may not be coming up to me.

You've already calmed my nervous system down, right?

There's another story about a young man who was recovering after a gunshot.

And then this life coach, nigga from a youth advocate program approached him.

And Jalen said, this is this man said, he just had been in the wrong part of West Baltimore at the wrong time.

Now, most of us who grew up like this, that's true.

He wasn't especially receptive to this first life coach at all.

He said, I thought there was a catch.

I thought I'd have to pay them back in the future because when the police do it to you, that's exactly what it is.

You got to pay them back later.

But this person is funded by the city to just be a life coach.

I ain't asking you to snitch on nobody.

I ain't asking you to make yourself, put yourself in danger outside.

It's somebody who understands what it's like to live out here.

This life coach says it's about follow-up.

Today, they might say, get the fuck out of here.

Tomorrow, they might be wanting some services.

It might be something tragic that happens and they need change.

Like I said, my mother's not smiling no more.

I need a way to pay my mama's light bill.

Can you help me with that?

Here's what's crazy.

Yes.

I can help you with that.

We have services.

Why?

Because I'm talking to the other departments, right?

On the law side, here's the prevention.

They dismissed 34%

of nonviolent charges.

I was a nonviolent offender.

It was graffiti.

Like,

just make me pay the fine.

Like, it's fine.

Like, I'll pay the fine.

I don't care, right?

You have like a nickel bag of weed in your pocket.

You looking at five years.

The shit is not working.

That's over-policing.

But if the district attorney look at you and say, nigga, some weed, man, get the fuck out of here.

Go take care of your mama.

Matter of fact, I want you to talk to this brother over here.

He's going to help get your plumber's license.

Oh, so there's job placement, right?

There's all that.

And then finally, evaluation.

Listen, you got a caring adult.

You got services available to you.

And you know, if somebody in this program, if any of these law enforcement, these city people act the fuck up, there are consequences.

That is pillar three.

I'm going to link all this stuff to you.

There's a four-year evaluation and you will get fucking fired.

If I know that if you treat me right, something is going to happen to you, I might think a little different.

Listen, the heat stopped working, so my heat start working.

But if my stomach is full and the bills are paid and there's after school programs to go to, and I know these old people around me aren't going to trust me when I tell them stuff, when I'm dealing with situations that may or may not be out of my control, when I got big homies pressing me to do this, and there's somebody I could trust that I could talk to, that's not going to turn me into a snitch.

Because you ain't telling the cops just to get them to give me information about a crime that happened over there.

That's not what's happening right now.

You are trying to prevent the violence.

You're not trying to catch a criminal.

You're trying to prevent criminality.

And it's at a 50-year low.

But sure, go ahead and send the National Guard.

Now, listen, obviously,

this ain't the system I want, but it's the system we got.

This is not ideal.

You would never see me shill for no police department or mayor.

But cities like Philly and Baltimore are proven, nigga, if you just care and you spend money on trusted sources and provide resources, the crime,

it drops itself.

Seems so simple.

But you know, what do we know?

We're just black people.

And all this tells me what we already knew.

It was never about crime, ever, because there's research that shows what actually works in reducing crime.

What this about, you just think we're you.

And

you're a white supremacist.

You just want a white world and you think it's cool to have military in our streets.

Don't get me wrong.

You didn't invent that.

You was in Trump.

You know how I know you ain't invent that?

Because there's an amendment in the Constitution

that says that we don't want to live in a world where the military is on every corner.

But apparently, you do.

It's clearly not about crime.

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Welcome to ACADAP Here, a podcast about a world on fire and how to put it out.

I'm your host, Mia Wong.

The world is fucked.

It's the one thing everyone agrees on.

In the vacuum of a defeated Democratic Party and a hideously unpopular fascist takeover that is nevertheless on the march, ideologies vie for the mantle of resistance to the fascist purge.

Soran Mamdani's victory in New York represents a resurgent social democracy.

In the streets, everyone from liberals to communists to anarchists are fighting against ICE and the National Guard occupations.

To get our bearings in the swirling vortex of ideology, let us check in slightly further to the right, but still firmly in the grounds of liberalism, on a new movement called abundance.

What is abundance?

Thrust into prominence by a book in March 2025, simply called Abundance, by liberal stalwart Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who is slightly less well-known, it features people like Matthew and Glasius.

They argue that growth is good.

They argue we should make more things.

They argue we should have bold visions of the future with, to quote Malcolm Harris's description in the baffler, desalinated ocean water flowing from the taps, skyscraper farms growing our food indoors, and quote, star pills manufactured in space, clean air and super-fast planes.

Think big, think fast, solve problems by building more.

They even have a new magazine run off of Substack called The Argument, which is supposed to be about bringing these new ideas to the left.

It includes social democratic stalwart Matt Prunek.

Isn't that nice?

Semaphore, in the reporting on the launch of the argument, wrote:

Many of the argument's writers have supported, or in Thompson's case authored, the ideas of abundance, a recent book advocating for reforms to improve government efficiency, lower the cost of housing, and improve public transportation, among other initiatives.

And those sound like good things, don't they?

Let's take a look at who's funding the argument.

It's funded in part by Emergent Ventures, which was created by the Koch Brothers Burcantus Center with seed money from Peter Teal?

Wait, what?

They have a conference every year.

They had one in 2024.

The 2025 conference was last week.

Who is speaking?

The Opponents Conference 2025 speakers include Charles Lehman from the right-wing Manhattan Institute, an organization founded by Ronald Reagan's director of the CIA.

Well, let's hear him outs.

Let's see what he thinks.

Lehman advocates what he calls deportation abundance, which is his plan to make a more

efficient deportation machine that could actually deport every undocumented person in the U.S.

Wait, what?

This conference is also sponsored by the Koch family's organization Stand Together.

It includes speakers from the American Enterprise Institute.

One of the co-sponsors of the event did another conference with special guest Kevin Roberts, the guy who wrote Project 2025.

Isn't this supposed to be a liberal movement?

Oh no!

What's going on here?

Could Abundance really be funded by all these right-wing billionaires and tech fascists?

Oh no!

As you may have guessed from the title, Most of today's episode is going to be about what the people behind Abundance actually want.

And it's not what you or I want.

It is

what Peter Thiel wants, what Mark Andreessen wants, what J.D.

Vance wants.

In a sense, it is what Donald Trump wants.

Because abundance as an ideology is an attempt by the tech oligarchs to take over the left the same way they took over the right.

And that makes the ideology extremely dangerous.

As we are going to unveil, this project is directly tied to many of the worst people in this country right now.

It is tied to Peter Thiel.

It is funded by Peter Thiel.

It is funded by Mark Andreessen, who is another effectively Tealite who believes in most of the same, if not all of the same things that Thiel does.

These ideas are normally unacceptable on the liberal left.

But because abundance is wrapped in the ideology of liberalism, because it wears the faces of liberal stalwarts like Ezra Klein, it can be smuggled in in a way that leaves the left and liberalism as a whole susceptible to broad ideological capture by the very same tech fascists we are all trying to oppose.

Before we fully get into what the funders of abundance actually want, let's talk a little bit about what the ideology of abundance is.

The very, very basic ideology of abundance is that we need more things, we need to build more, and that government regulations are standing in the way of building things.

Now, if this sounds suspiciously Reaganite to you, that's because in a sense it is.

Ezra Klein describes this as progressive supply-side economics.

Now, supply-side economics famously is Reagan's thing.

You will note that basically everyone across the entire political spectrum at least sort of when pressed will agree that supply-side economics simply does not work.

But let's hear them out.

I think another way to understand what abundance is and why it works the way that it does is to look at it in the context not of American political ideology and debates, but of Chinese political debates.

Now, Chinese political debates have for much of the last decade, really a decade and a half, taken the form of arguments about either increasing the size of the pie or splitting the pie more evenly.

On the left, you have a case for redistribution, right?

For higher taxation, for higher welfare benefits, for giving people things from the state and redistributing it from rich people to the poor.

On the right, you have growing the pie, which argues that instead of redistributing wealth, we should simply grow more wealth and that wealth will trickle down to everyone else.

Wait, this is just Reaganism again.

It's all Reaganism.

This is the very frustrating thing about abundance, is that when you actually go past the language they're using and you look at what they think will happen, it's just trickle-down economics again.

It's just trickle-down economics, and abundance is on the right-wing side of it.

Now, you know, there are definitely arguments for places where we do, in fact, need to build more things, right?

And this argument has become particularly prominent with the rise of Yimbyism.

And, like, yeah, I don't know, building more houses is good.

I mean, it was, it was, it was literally a demand of the Hungarian Revolution, right?

Like, yeah, we, we, we need more of it.

But,

we need to be very, very careful here because the way that abundance structures its arguments and the ways that, for example, a really, really vulgar version of YMBism has been deployed by these people in order to just sort of wholesale oppose government regulations, and we're not just talking about things here like eliminating zoning requirements, right?

We are talking about, as we'll get into later, the people behind this movement want to create their own city-states and special economic zones where no government regulations apply.

But the fundamental argument here is that lifting government restrictions on production will increase the size of the market.

And because price is just supply and demand, prices will fall because there's more supply.

None of this is how markets actually work.

One of the crucial insights of anthropology is that markets are not simply neutral objective forces that function according to precise mathematical laws.

They are socially constructed, even in neoclassical economics, by their own logic.

Price is not just supply and demand.

That's something that's only true in perfectly competitive markets.

And perfectly competitive markets do not exist.

They probably cannot exist, but they do not exist in the real world, and they do not represent something like the housing market.

In the real world, markets are defined by power.

Neoclassical economists attempt to explain the role of power in markets through monopoly, right?

You know, you can look at monopoly and monopsony.

There are a bunch of very different things that they think are sort of deviations of this perfect competitive market where people band together to build power and thus are able to distort what the perfect free market should be doing.

And this is a feature of basically every market that actually exists, right?

There aren't perfectly competitive markets.

They all have power.

in them and they all have degrees of monopoly to use a sort of Marxian term in them as well.

Now, do you know what else has a degree of monopoly?

That's right.

It is the products and services that support this podcast.

So what does this actually have to do with abundance?

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I explained rent on this show.

And this is specifically here, rent in the context of what you pay to your landlords.

I promise this will circle back to, this will circle back to sort of abundance Yimbyism in a second.

I attempted to explain rent by drawing on the work of the legendary Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil to argue that the rent that we pay to our landlords functions similarly to oil rent, where price is not set by supply and demand, but instead by the social power of oil producers.

Now, people got very, very mad at me for this, but the long durée of history has vindicated me.

In the real world, it turns out, I was right.

The most powerful example of this in the housing market is the case of RealPage, a service that allowed landlords to get recommendations on their pricing based on information from all the landlords who submitted their data, thus creating an algorithmic machine for price fixing.

This got bad enough that even the Biden justice department got involved.

Here's from the Department of Justice's lawsuit against RealPage.

Quote, RealPage acknowledged that its software is aimed at maximizing prices for landlords, referring to its products as, quote, driving every possible opportunity to increase price, avoiding the race to the bottom in down markets, and quote, a rising tide raises all ships.

A RealPage executive observed that its products help landlords avoid competing on the merits, noting, quote, there is a greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry down.

A RealPage executive explained to a landlord that using competitive data can help identify situations where a landlord may have a $50 increase instead of $10 increase for the day.

Another landlord commented about RealPage's product, I always like this product because your algorithms use proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents and terms.

That's classical price fixing.

Now, I was derided for arguing that landlords would ban together using their social power to prevent rents from falling, even with units sitting empty.

And it turns out I was right the whole time.

They were doing exactly that.

It turns out in the actual real world of the market, all of these companies and all of these landlords had found a way to band together in order to use their social power and use the information in their possession to fix the price of rent.

Here is from Reuters, drawing from yet another lawsuit, this time from the Attorney General of DC.

A monthly report from WC Smith in 2022 showed the company had increased revenues per unit by 4.6 to 4.7%

despite decreased occupancy levels according to the lawsuit.

So what is that saying?

That is saying that the actual number of people in these apartments is decreasing.

The number of apartments staying open that have no one in them is increasing.

But the price is not going down.

Even though there's more supply, the price is still going up.

Why is the price still going up?

Well, well, well.

The Justice Department calls this price fixing, large-scale collusion, to disrupt the functioning of the perfectly normal competitive market.

The anthropologist Fernando Coroniel, as I argued before, calls it absolute rent.

Rent extracted by virtue of the social power of the landowner.

As I wrote in that episode, quote, absolute rent does not obey the law law of supply and demand.

It is the product of social power, of the power of landownership itself and the organization of the landowning class and their backing by the state and its militaries and police.

And this causes economists attempting to use supply and demand to explain rent to get very, very important events very wrong.

Morris Edelman, the famous oil economist, predicted in 1972 that the price of oil was going to collapse based on oversupply and competition.

Instead, it increased 400%

between 1973 and 1974 because oil producers banded together to exercise their power and their organization, known as OPEC, became a genuine world power.

As Coroniel put it, quote, the sharp increase of 1973 and 1974 in oil prices did not result from a world shortage of oil.

It was, rather, the outcome of a long historical process by which OPEC nations, acting as landowners, developed a means to extract a rent on the basis of their ownership of the oil fields, an absolute rent, in addition to the differential rents they had collected in the past.

In 1973, a set of converging political and economic conditions helped establish their collective ability to restrict the world's supply of oil.

With this power, OPEC felt entitled to set the market price of oil, thus freeing the level of rent from the previous constraints of market price.

Now rent itself, absolute and differential, would determine the market price of oil.

What does that sound like?

Oh, it sounds like Real Page's price-fixing algorithm.

Why does it sound like Real Page's price-fixing algorithm?

It's because, in the real world, markets are not neutral institutions that operate according to neutral laws.

They're institutions created and enforced by the state.

Landlords can jack up your rent because they wield collective power together and have the ability to use the state to drag you out of your home at gunpoint.

Abundance is, to a large extent, an attempt to harness widespread discontent over the price of goods, the price of rent, the price of food, and argue that you can simply produce more and this will make all of the prices go down.

But as we've seen here, as long as the social power is held by the rent extractors, they can simply set their own price.

None of this is addressed in abundance, and there's a simple reason for that.

The people funding the abundance agenda are the very same people profiting from their social power.

So let's talk about the money.

I'm going to be quoting here from a report from Prospect, which is very good.

The Institute for Progress, IFP, which co-hosted Abundance 2024 and is listed as a key institutional partner by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, has a bevy of corporate ties.

In 2022, IFP received $110,000 from FAI and has FAI's executive director on its board.

Now, FAI is the Foundation for American Innovation.

I'm going to read, this is also an Abundance co-host, which is very funny.

I am going to read a quote from from kate willett who has also done some excellent reporting on this and she describes how the fai hosted another conference in 2024 called reboot quote the quote surprise guest of the conference was kevin roberts president of the heritage foundation and chief architect of 2025.

Now, back to the Institute for Progress.

Part of what's going on here, right, is that this is, this is an incredible, you know, and what I'm trying to emphasize by how confusing this whole thing is, is that Abundance is composed of a series of think tanks and weird institutes that are all tied into a bunch of tech money right keeping the acronym straight is very difficult you do not need to hold all of them in your head the other thing that you need to understand about this right is if you look at who is co-hosting these conferences and who is behind these books and who is behind these media outlets a very very clear picture starts to emerge i'm gonna i'm gonna go back to quoting from prospect One of the funders of the Institute for Progress was Emergent Ventures, which is a product of the Cokeback Mercantis Institute at at George Mason University.

Emergent itself was launched by a grant from Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel is a right-wing billionaire with a vast influence network at the intersection of techno-futurism and anti-democratic thought, who has called technology an alternative to democratic politics, small D democratic, by the way, he means the concept of democracy, to quote unilaterally change the world.

Vice President-elect J.D.

Vance is a known scion of Peter Thiel.

Let's look at the Chamber of Progress, another one of the groups that is heavily involved in abundance.

Chamber of Progress, which self-identifies its work as part of a growing abundance policy movement, is a trade group started with Google Seed Money by Google alum Adam Kovakovich.

Kovakovich proudly touts his college activism, leading an effort to cross a united farm workers' picket line.

The Chamber of Progress's partners, read funders, include A16Z, Circle, Coinbase, Google, Kraken, Ripple, Waymo, and Dries Horowitz, or A16Z, is a venture capital firm heavily invested in AI and crypto.

Co-founder Mark Andreessen believes the technology is the solution to every problem.

He's also on Meta's board.

He is also a theolite tech fascist.

This is, in some sense, a very, very interesting...

collusion of forces, right?

We have the Koch brothers, who are, you know, sort of the ancient libertarian right

side of Republican dark money.

They are, you know,

the people who have traditionally funded right-wing movements in the past.

They are the Tea Party people.

They are, you know, they are sort of the boogeyman under the bed for anyone who has wanted to make the world a better place for a very, very long time.

And they and their organizations are working with the emergent tech fascist right.

You know, people like people like Mark Andreessen, people with Peter Dihl.

And these are the organizations that have gotten in bed together in order to do this.

Now, these people have a bunch of absolutely hideous beliefs.

We're not even going to get into the eugenics here, but like these, the people funding this thing are huge eugenicists.

We literally do not have time to do all of the eugenic shit associated with this because if I were to actually do the eugenic, I mean, we talked about some of like Maddie and Galasius' bullshit on this podcast earlier, but like, If I actually went through and did this, this episode would be like 12 hours long.

I am going to cover this sort of network state peer theolite eugenics circle at some point later.

That is a forthcoming episode.

But yeah, for now,

here are these ads, which hopefully are not eugenics.

Woo!

So let's get back to who I think are really the two primary villains of this story.

And that is Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen, who are two of the most dangerous people in the entire world.

Thiel and Andreessen are fascists who believe the state should be a corporation run by the tech elite.

They do not believe in democracy.

And particularly Thiel has said that democracy is the enemy of freedom, right?

When these people talk about running the state like a business, they mean that there should be an unaccountable fucking philosopher CEO king and that there shouldn't be democracy.

A common feature of this and you know the metaphysical manifestation of this thing is an idea called the network state.

And a very common theme of the founders of abundance is their support for the network state, both as a concept and in terms of building them.

So what is the network state?

The network state is to a large extent the thing I've just been describing, right?

The version of it that they pitch is that these are like, they're like opportunity zones, right?

They're these like tech cities, you know, that will eventually become like real states that are, that are based off of special economic zones where, you know, special economic zones where like the normal regulations of the state do not apply.

So you can, you know, do whatever you want, right?

You can, you can, we can build prosperity by, by having no government regulations and run everything through corporations.

These network states would be, again, actual straight-up corporations that own and control territory and run it as the state.

These states are already coming into existence.

Maybe the most important is Prospera, a corporate city for profit in Honduras that is run by a corporation, again, in a special economic zone where the state does not apply.

It does not have a mayor.

It has someone appointed by the corporation who runs the city.

This is happening all over the world, particularly in developing countries where it is being pushed by all of these just absolutely demonic tech ghouls.

And they're also being started and attempts are being started to run them in the United States.

I'm going to quote here from Shane Lee's venture capital blog, Venture Capital Status, which is a very, very good resource on the network state, which we'll be covering more fully later because we don't have time to do much more than a brief introduction to their ideas here.

In Solero County, California, a cartel of venture capitalists associated with Andreessen Horowitz, which is again

Mark Andreessen's firm, bought up over 65,000 acres of rich, fertile farmland and using secretive and threatening methodologies, including suing local farmers.

They plan to build a city with weapons developments and manufacturing, aerospace and robotics companies, shipbuilding, homes, and schools.

This network state is called California Forever.

Also in California, there has been a discussion by network state operatives of taking over Presidio in San Francisco.

And there is a network state planned in Simona County.

Its founder is a, quote, former promonist venture capitalists.

These are the same people funding abundance.

Here's from Kate Willett again.

One of the California Forever Billionaires, California Forever is, again, the name of the network state they want to set up by buying a bunch of land in Saleno County.

One of the California Forever Billionaires, Patrick Coleson, the CEO of Stripe, looms large in Abundance Worlds.

Along with Open Philanthropy, he donated to fund a $120 million abundance grant tied to Ezra Klein's book release.

Coulson is a key backer and inspiration for the Institute for Progress, a think tank which works closely with others in the Abundance Network, including the Abundance 2024 conference.

The goal of the network state movement is to accelerate the destruction of the United States and create these corporate network states in their wake.

They want the world to be composed of these networks of venture capital tech corporations run and ruled by them, by the tech elite for profit.

These are the people that are funding all of these fucking movements.

These are the people funding the argument.

These are the people funding the abundance conference.

These are the people that people like Ezra Klein have been brought in to run cover for.

These are Trump people.

They are the forces behind JD Vance.

They want to inflict their vision of tech fascism on the world.

But they are hideously popular in power.

In order to achieve their agenda, they cannot simply rely on their incredible hegemony on the right.

They need you.

They need your buy-in.

They need the support of good and kind-hearted liberals who they can radicalize into Trumpian tech fascists.

This is their opening gambit, and they've played it well.

But there is still time for them to fail.

There is still time for us to build a future built by us and for us, by and for each other, based on mutual aid and the benefit of all.

A world without death squads and ice.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart.

One such thing, frequently falling apart, is any notion of privacy or digital privacy.

Ever-encroaching surveillance is one of the biggest global issues affecting free expression and a free press, both directly through surveillance technology, but also by chilling speech.

I'm Garrison Davis, and this past week, news has swept the internet that ICE is using software from an Israeli company called Paragon, which allows ICE, or DHS, to secretly hack into any smartphone, break encryption, access messages, track real-time location, and turn your iPhone or Android into a walking listening device.

All of which sounds very scary, and some of which is true.

Though, some of these claims are exaggerated or even likely false based on what we can currently infer from published research.

Due to legitimate fears, we live in a world of surveillance paranoia, which can lead to surveillance myths.

This is a core function of the Panopticon.

People should take ICE's new enhanced smartphone surveillance capacity seriously, but to adequately do so requires an accurate understanding of the threat model, model, which we will get into later this episode with some help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But first, let's address the newsworthy aspect of this story.

What has actually changed recently?

DHS first contracted with the US branch of Paragon in September of 2024 for $2 million.

But later that October, the contract was put on hold thanks to a Biden executive order restricting government use of foreign spyware.

And ever since then, the contract has been frozen pending a compliance review.

But then on September 1st, 2025, just last week, investigative journalist Jack Paulson reported that the stop work order affecting the Paragon contract had quietly been lifted, allowing ICE to follow through on the contract and start using Paragon's spyware technology.

most likely including their flagship product, Graphite.

What is graphite?

Great question.

One that I felt underqualified to fully answer myself.

So I spoke with an expert, Cooper Quinton of the digital rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You'll hear from him throughout the episode.

My name is Cooper Quinton.

I'm a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

There I do...

a lot of different things.

Most specifically for the purposes of this talk, I do malware research on malware that targets activists, journalists, and civil society.

So Graphite is a type of spyware that is

able to read your messages from your phone the same way that you or, you know, maybe a cop could if they had physical access to your unlocked phone, right?

That is the main capability that it has, according to the reporting published by Citizen Lab.

Its main job is to hook into WhatsApp and into other encrypted chat apps and just read the messages in those apps, like in the messages you've already sent and any future messages that you send.

That's really it.

That's the meat of Graphite.

Something that sets Paragon apart from their fellow Israeli competitors is that Paragon has marketed itself as the ethical choice for spyware.

One of their early investors, an Israeli firm called Red Dot, wrote, quote, Paragon builds best-in-class cyber intelligence software to empower democratic countries, providing cutting-edge capabilities that make the world safer, unquote.

On their U.S.

website, Paragon says that they are quote-unquote empowering ethical cyber defense, and that they provide customers with quote, ethically based tools, teams, and insights to disrupt intractable threats, unquote.

Though they use the term cyber defense on their U.S.

site, Paragon's startup page reads, quote, Paragon is an offense-focused cyber company using digital intelligence for smartphone and internet surveillance solutions.

The company applies strict moral restrictions on itself, limiting its extraction of information from targeted devices to conversations on chat apps.

Paragon works solely with police forces and intelligence agencies that meet the standards of an enlightened democracy, which includes only 39 countries.

Unquote.

One of Paragon's senior executives told Forbes in 2021 that they would only sell their technology to governments that quote unquote, abide by international norms and respect fundamental rights and freedoms, and that, quote, authoritarian or non-democratic regimes would never be customers.

Unfortunately, Paragon was not pressed on what their definition of authoritarian regimes includes.

In recent reporting, there's been a lot of misconceptions about the capabilities of Paragon's main product, Graphite.

The Guardian wrote, quote, By essentially taking control of the mobile phone, ICE can not only track an individual's whereabouts, read their messages, look at their photographs, but also open and read information held on encrypted applications like WhatsApp or Signal.

Spyware like Graphite can also be used as a listening device through manipulation of the phone's recorder, unquote.

But research into Graphite by the surveillance watchdog group Citizen Lab has not indicated that Graphite has all these capabilities or tries to quote unquote take control of the entire device.

But other tech journalists have since parroted the Guardian's unfounded claims that Graphite fully takes over a phone and can record audio through the microphone.

This is actually less full-featured than other spyware we've seen in the past, like NSO Group's Pegasus spyware.

Other types of spyware that I've seen tend to have a lot more capabilities, right?

They have the capability of like turning on GPS location tracking, the capability to turn on a hot mic, to do all these other things.

And this seems,

as as far as Citizen Lab has reported, to not be present within the graphite malware.

And I think this is because Paragon has presented themselves as kind of being the quote-unquote responsible malware manufacturer, right?

And they're like, like trying to minimize the amount of data they collect.

It doesn't mean they couldn't add this stuff in the future, but that's the gist of it.

It's actually kind of a very stripped down malware.

I don't want to minimize like how impactful it would be for this malware to get all of your messages, right?

Like, that could have a huge impact for people, but we don't need to make up capabilities that our adversary has, especially under fascism, right?

Like, we can

just work with the capabilities that we know they have.

A lot of reporting and discussion of graphite and Paragon frame it as an equivalent to NSO's spyware Pegasus, which has been banned in the United States for four years.

Pegasus seeks to completely hijack the target device more broadly, similar to Guardian's claims about graphite.

But by forcing this comparison, people might be inadvertently boosting Paragon's brand with free marketing by making their product out to be something that I'm sure Paragon would like to have people think it is, but doesn't actually equate their realistic threat model.

Similar to how predictions of an evil, super intelligent AI actually currently serve to boost the stock price of AI companies.

I think a lot of people are doing the work

these companies that are aligning themselves with fascism, right?

And

I don't think it's a great trend, actually, right?

Like,

people are assuming that Palantir is sort of watching everything, right?

And really, Palantir is just like fancy visual graphing software, essentially, right?

Like the danger of Palantir is combining these two government databases, right?

This malware, the graphite malware, right?

Like, yeah, it's not good, but you know it's not magical right it's not omniscient it's not able to you know i don't know go eat the fridge out of your food and and you know beat up your dad or something like you know well now we're talking now now that's a good app

if only if only tech bros could solve such social problems no no they would never No.

But yeah, you know, it's not, it's not magical, right?

And we don't need to do their work for them, right?

We don't need to do their myth-making for them, right?

A bigger threat to the majority of people in the us

is getting your phone seized by the cops right totally there's nothing this malware can do according to public reports at least that the cops can't do if they get a hold of your unlocked phone right having face id or a four-digit passcode is is much more dangerous to your digital security yes as an average person even is it like an average person like going to a protest Yes, yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

You know, Celebrate, which is the machine that police plug your phone into to make a copy of all the data on it, is much more dangerous to the average American than Paragon is.

You're much more likely to encounter that.

This is more of a niche gripe, but one that's still important.

There's been claims that, quote, ICE can now hack any phone and break encryption.

But Graphite doesn't actually, quote unquote, break encryption.

It's not going after the encryption on Signal or WhatsApp.

Instead, Paragon tries to circumvent end-to-end encryption by trying to gain access to content on a targeted device once it's been unencrypted by an application like WhatsApp for the user to read.

Similar to how, if you have push notifications on for an application like Signal, if the police sees your phone and push notifications display messages from Signal, that doesn't mean the police have quote-unquote broken Signal's encryption.

Now, in order for graphite to extract messages from your phone, it needs to get onto your phone in the first place.

Graphite is just the implanted code that can read and extract your messages.

First, it needs to get onto your phone via what's called an exploit, which is usually a message sent to a phone number or a WhatsApp account that attacks a vulnerability in your phone's code to gain permissions to load the graphite onto the messaging apps.

Graphite and the exploit are two separate programs that work together.

But exploits need to be frequently changed to keep up with software security updates, and that's expensive.

You need different exploits for Android and iOS.

Paragon has been using zero-click exploits, meaning the owner of the phone doesn't have to manually click a link or intentionally download a file for the exploit to try to gain permissions on the device.

You don't have to click or do anything.

You just have to receive the message, and then the spyware gets to work.

Which is very scary, but this technology cannot be deployed en masse because of how expensive and specific it needs to be in order to work.

The other thing that I think is missing a lot from the conversation about graphite in particular is that the malware is just the program that runs when it gets on your phone.

And first, before they can install graphite, they have to get onto your phone through some sort of exploit.

If your phone is up to date and fully patched, this will have to be a zero-date exploit, which means it's an exploit that has had zero days for Apple or Google or whoever to fix it because it is is unknown to them.

And these exploits cost millions of dollars, right?

Now, Paragon is not going to pay that millions of dollars for each person they're exploiting, but there is a large per-person cost to ICE for each person they're going to exploit because Paragon doesn't want to blow their zero day, which costs them millions of dollars to either buy or develop themselves.

Welcome back.

I'd like to get into a little bit of Paragon's backstory and how they've grown as a company.

Paragon was founded in 2019 by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Ehud Schnorsen, a former commander of the IDF's Cyber Warfare Unit, basically Israel's equivalent of the NSA, called Unit 8200.

Three other Paragon co-founders are also ex-Israeli intelligence.

The startup got early financing from a Tel Aviv investment fund called Red Dot Capital, though Paragon also received backing from American Venture Capital.

In 2021, Forbes reported that the Boston-based Battery Ventures had invested between $5 to $10 million in Paragon.

Bloomberg Capital has also supported the company.

In 2022, Paragon launched a U.S.

subsidiary and started recruiting former U.S.

feds to help break into the American market.

The New York Times reported that the DEA has used graphite as far back as 2022.

Former CIA Assistant Director John Finbar Fleming became the executive chairman of Paragon U.S.

in January of 2024, according to his LinkedIn.

In December of 2024, Paragon was acquired by AE Industrial Partners for $900 million.

AE Industrial Partners is a Florida-based private equity fund with a specialized security portfolio.

Once they bought Paragon, it merged with another AE asset, the cybersecurity company Red Lattice.

Back in 2021, Paragon had about 50 employees.

Now it has over 500.

In June of 2025, they were hiring 150 more.

Just a week ago, Executive Chairman John Finbar Fleming shared a recruitment post that Red Lattice was hiring, quote, emerging and offensive cyber engineers, unquote.

Next, let's discuss the biggest case study of graphite being deployed that we know of.

On January 31st, 2025, Meta's encrypted messaging app, WhatsApp, sent a notification to 90 accounts that their smartphones were suspected of being targeted by spyware, which has since been traced to the Paragon product Graphite.

People targeted were journalists, human rights activists, and members of civil society across Europe and the Mediterranean, but primarily based out of Italy.

This was a zero-day and zero-click exploit, meaning it both attacked a previously unknown vulnerability and required zero user interaction to infect the device.

At first, the Italian government denied knowledge, but Paragon canceled two contracts with customers in Italy.

and a parliamentary oversight committee later confirmed the Italian government was using Paragon technology for spyware attacks against sea migration activists.

One thing that's interesting to me is that we talk about this technology as being very expensive, very like individual.

They have to individually target you, but then you see 90 people on WhatsApp and you're like, that's, that's a lot of people.

So can you talk about how this attack was like structured and what we've learned from it?

For sure.

90 people is a lot of people for such a targeted attack.

Although it's, you know, in terms of most malware, like most commercial malware, 90 people would be a very, very small attack, right?

Like it wouldn't be worth your time.

So, you know, it depends on the scale of things.

I don't know what the scale of Italian civil society is, right?

But 90 people is likely, I think, a small fraction of the whole of Italian civil society.

But yeah, those so those people that were targeted by Paragon, the ones that we know about, you know, one was a Italian anti-fascist journalist, right?

I think another, there were a couple of other journalists that were covering migration issues.

And, you know, just a sort of a large swath across Italian civil society.

So the way they were targeted was on WhatsApp, they were added to a group and then they were sent a malicious PDF, which they didn't even have to open and they didn't have to approve being added to the group.

But as soon as that malicious PDF was received by their WhatsApp app,

by their WhatsApp client, the WhatsApp client processed the PDF and it contained code which exploited WhatsApp and allowed graphite to start running.

So graphite doesn't actually install anything to get a little bit technical.

Graphite only runs in memory of the phone, right?

It only runs in the like temporary RAM, so to speak.

Okay.

Right.

So rebooting the phone would have cleared out the graphite infection and they would have had to reinfect the person.

Interesting.

Right.

In this case.

Yeah.

It's possible that in the future, Paragon will find a way to make graphite persistent, but it does make it it more stealthy.

It makes it harder to detect.

It makes it harder to forensically analyze for people like Citizen Lab and like EFF if it just runs in memory.

Sure.

Right.

So it kind of makes sense that they would want to keep running it in memory, even though rebooting it would clear out the infection, because you can just reinfect the person.

Even like developers like WhatsApp or like Apple might have a harder time

realizing that they've been attacked if it can get cleared out so quickly, I guess.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And in this case, WhatsApp did realize they had been attacked they quickly figured out the pattern and and you know to their credit warned everybody immediately often the only way i think people will find out they've been in you know infected by this spyware is if whatsapp or you know somebody else maybe apple warned you that's not great um but it is but it is better than the alternative where they just don't warn you at all right after the targets were notified of the spyware attack some including journalists and migrant refugee activists in Italy, agreed to participate in a forensic analysis of graphite by Citizen Lab.

They found that Paragon spyware had spread from WhatsApp to at least two other apps on the device.

In April of 2025, we got forensic confirmation of graphite spyware on iPhone with a zero-click exploit attacking iMessage.

Citizen Lab was able to analyze the devices of a prominent European journalist who requested to remain anonymous and an Italian journalist linked to the previous cluster cluster of attacks in Italy.

iPhone is slightly harder to target than your average Android, but certainly not impervious to this sort of attack, as we've seen from these examples in Europe.

To date, Citizen Lab has also identified suspected Paragon deployments in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore.

Though the encrypted messaging app Signal is not mentioned in the Citizen Lab reporting, Their analysis did find that Graphite had the capability of going after several different messaging apps, and it's probably safe to assume that Signal would be one of the apps that Paragon would want to extract messages from.

We don't have much information about this spyware targeting Signal, possibly because Signal does not have as large of an international user base compared to other apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, or Telegram, despite Signal being much more secure.

So what can you do?

Though Graphite might not be the total phone hijacking super spyware that The Guardian and others claim it to be, it still poses a significant security threat.

Some basic digital security precautions apply here.

Get into a habit of regular digital cleaning.

Remove unnecessary content from your device.

Save space.

Old photos can be uploaded to an external encrypted hard drive and question if you really need years of messages stored on your phone.

Use an encrypted chat app like Signal, which has disappearing messages so that there isn't a large backlog of communications that could be suddenly accessed by a hostile actor.

Be very wary of cloud backups.

They're often one of the least secure aspects of your digital life, especially if they are unencrypted.

And though it won't deter zero-click exploits, it's still best practice to avoid clicking mysterious links or downloading files and photos sent to your phone.

Another tip is to regularly reboot your phone.

Contrary to claims that once your phone has been targeted by Graphite, it's now compromised forever, something called malware persistence.

To our current knowledge, rebooting can wipe Paragon's exploits.

It does not appear that Paragon spyware is at the moment reboot persistent.

And it seems that rebooting would actually remove it from the phone.

My reading is that rebooting it would remove the malware from your phone until you were re-exploited, which so, you know, if you just reboot and you don't update or, you know, the zero day isn't out yet, right?

They're just going to run the exploit again.

I think it's a fair bet that they're just going to run the exploit again.

But it would be enough to get it off for that time.

Right.

And I mean, I think as far as a mitigation, my friend recommends that people like reboot their phone every morning when they're brushing their teeth.

Right.

And I don't think it's a bad bit of security hygiene.

If these guys are going to infect you, you might as well make it more of a headache for them.

Right.

You might as well make it more costly for them because there is going to be a charge to them for each time they have to reinfect you.

Right.

But yeah, it's certainly, I think, overblown to say that, you know, once it's on your phone, it's on your phone forever.

There's, you know, you just got to, you know, throw your $1,000 phone in the trash and go buy another one.

Like, no, you can, you know, if you don't feel safe just rebooting it, right?

Like a factory reset, that would be the next step.

Right.

I think that would, that would most likely get rid of any persistence mechanisms that were installed.

I'm not familiar with any iOS malware, certainly, that would survive a factory reset.

But probably the most important thing, besides using Signal is to keep your phone software updated.

That's the simplest and best way to make it harder for spyware like Graphite to make it onto your phone in the first place.

Out-of-date software has many more known vulnerabilities to attack.

For extra protection, enable lockdown mode on iPhone or advanced protection on Android.

So the reason it's important to keep your phone up to date and always install the latest security updates, even if it's a pain in the ass, and I know it's a pain in the ass,

is because this makes an attacker have to use zero-day exploits.

So if you have an old version of the software on your phone, there are known exploits.

Known exploits are, you know, more or less free, right?

They are already out there.

They are already burned.

They do not matter, right?

Like the company already knows about them.

An exploit loses basically all of its value as soon as the company knows about it and it's patched, right?

So if you have out-of-date software on your phone, if you have out-of-date software on your computer, it changes the entire economics of attacking you, right?

It's basically free for me to exploit your phone at this point.

And I will exploit it as many times as I want.

And I don't care if that exploit is burned.

I don't care if you find it because, again, it's free, right?

Zero-day exploits for especially for Apple, for like

Android Pixel phones, for graphene, the alternative Android OS, not graphite.

This has been giving me real problems lately.

Zero-day exploits, meaning exploits that the manufacturer does not know about and has not had a chance to patch cost millions of dollars for these platforms.

And a zero-click exploit where the victim doesn't have to interact with it at all, right?

I don't have to click a link.

I don't have to do something.

You just send me...

you know, a PDF, an infected PDF or a magic file, right, or something, and my phone is infected.

Those are the most expensive of all right those those are sort of the those are the golden ticket for

malware companies right and million these cost millions of dollars and if you burn it right if it gets caught like like um you know what happened with whatsapp and uh citizen lab in italy right that's millions of dollars down the drain for paracon you know they're going to pass that on to the Italian government, to ICE, to whoever their contractors are, right?

So keeping your phone up to date totally changes the economics of running a malware attack against you, right?

Like anybody can run, you know, out of their office old, you know, end day, right?

More than zero day malware attacks against the enemy, right?

Like those are cheap.

But if your stuff is patched, no, it's going to, it's, it's, it totally changes the entire game.

And you got to be doing really good work for ICE to, to want to burn that much money on you.

All these tips can make it considerably harder and more importantly, extremely expensive for this spyware to get onto your device.

These exploits could only be deployed against individual targets, and that gets quite expensive.

Just because ICE could theoretically hack your phone, that doesn't mean that your phone is necessarily at a high risk of being hacked by ICE.

Who are the possible targets for graphite spyware?

Who is at higher risk?

Journalists who report on ICE and immigration, people who work for immigration advocacy organizations, immigration lawyers, as well as high-profile activists.

It goes without saying that anything you do on your phone or on the internet carries a level of inherent risk.

We'll close this episode with a longer segment from my interview with Cooper discussing who's at the most risk of ICE using Paragon software and more of Cooper's recommended surveillance mitigation practices.

This is not something that can be deployed at a protest and sweep up thousands of people.

This does go after individuals because of its cost and the way that it needs to be deployed.

Who would be the people that you would say are most at risk of this?

Like, is this your local

food not bombs organizer or like an immigration lawyer?

Like,

who should be concerned, I guess, and take this threat more seriously?

Definitely.

I think

people who should be concerned are, I mean, you hit the nail on the head, right?

The people that should be concerned about this are people who have, you know, been a special pain in the ass for ICE in particular,

right?

You know, people who might be under HSI investigation, right?

People who, you know, have been threatened by the president or by Pam Bondi, you know, specifically, right?

Like had their name called out specifically, right?

People who are, you know, very loud, very active, right?

Like the, the, the sort of leaders, what's the term, tall poppies, right?

Like the people that are really have their heads sticking out, right, in a way that's like very public and very well known.

If you have risen to the level where like Tom Homan knows your name personally, right?

That makes it a pretty good chance that that, you know, you might become a target of this, right?

Like that's, but that's who we're talking about.

Well, and like, as we've seen in Italy, like that can, that can include, like, like anti-fascist journalists.

Yeah, definitely.

People who work for like migrant human rights organizations, yes.

High-profile activists.

Um, and I think, like, there's a real concern with, with, you know, trying to compromise the phone of journalists because of how journalists, like, talk to sources, how journalists might have information about like other people besides the journalist on their phone.

Yeah.

They may be targeting through the journalist, but trying to get after other people who they're talking to.

Same thing with like immigration lawyers.

And like, there is real concern about harm spreading from those factors.

And I think that's why if you are in those sorts of like roles at the like at like a human rights organization, a journalist or a lawyer, you need to be like extra careful about keeping your like phone updated, regularly engaging in like digital hygiene, having disappearing messages, maybe putting on lockdown mode onto your iPhone, be very wary of being added to mysterious group chats.

These are just general practices that are, I think, worthwhile to like engage in, whether or not you're actually going going to get targeted by this.

Absolutely.

And I want to especially single out lockdown mode there.

Like we are not aware of any infections of any malware, right?

Pegasus, Graphite, right, any others that have managed to successfully infect an iPhone on lockdown mode.

So if you are worried about this, lockdown mode is the single most effective thing you can do to protect yourself against this malware, right?

Is go turn on lockdown mode.

If you're on Android, I think Google calls it.

Advanced protection mode.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Advanced protection mode.

So advanced protection mode used to be

not very comprehensive.

And I think like with the new Android update with Android 16 that came out, you know, I think like last week or something, it's now much more comparable to lockdown mode.

So, you know, I highly recommend turning that on if you're on Android.

All my homies love lockdown mode.

Yes.

Yes.

That is the number one protection, right?

The other the other thing I strongly recommend always, and I be this drum like every day is turn on disappearing messages.

If you're on Signal or WhatsApp, go turn on disappearing messages, right?

Because this is good against, you know, a lot of different things, right?

Like this is good against Celebrite as well as Pegasus, as well as Gravity, right?

Like if the messages are gone by the time you get infected, there's no way to recover those, right?

You're minimizing your footprint, right?

Yep.

Go delete old chats, right?

Like if you, if you get a second, right?

right like we've all google has trained us to all be digital hoarders right and keep depending how old you are 20 years of email 10 years of email whatever right never never delete anything right and that's don't ignore them ignore google google doesn't want you to delete things because they want to use all that data for selling you ads right delete everything i want more underwater data centers yes yes exactly delete everything delete your files you know like

get rid of those old group chats right get rid of those old chats that you don't need anymore you need to be like that lawyer in death note yeah delete yes delete

oh the death note reference dam

do you want to do you want to plug uh citizen lab slash uh eff and tell people where to find both your work and then also other people who are doing research into graphite and like you know if you've been suspected of being targeted by you know maybe a notification yeah how you can participate in forensic analysis to help everyone be more secure against this in the future.

Yeah, for sure.

So one of the best ways to find out you've been targeted by state-sponsored malware is to get a notification from Apple or Google or WhatsApp or some other large company that you have been targeted by state-sponsored malware.

Typically, these notifications don't contain much more information than we believe you've been targeted by a nation state or by state-sponsored malware.

But if you do get one of those notifications, take it very seriously.

You know, reach out to Access Now or to EFF or to Citizen Lab and let us know.

Right.

And we will help figure out what's going on.

Right.

Like this is this is the number one indicator, right?

Because like this malware is usually fairly stealthy, right?

Like it's not, it's not actually like, you know, I don't know, flashing you're infected on your screen, right?

But yeah, Citizen Lab is always doing amazing work.

I'm a fellow there, so I get to work with them sometimes, which is very exciting.

They are based out of the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

And their website is citizenlab.org, where you can find a lot of really excellent research on the types of threats that target civil society.ca.

Oh.

But I'm Canadian.

You are probably correct.

I can never remember.

the current as a Canadian.

I was very, I was very put off by you erasing our nation's history of our of our coveted dot CA.

We love our dot ca i am not trying to start a war with canada uh

well many many people are so listen i'm firmly on the side of canada in the war against canada okay

please take me in please

yeah

uh your solidarity is uh is uh noted so citizenlab.org actually redirects to citizenlab.ca so we were both right there you go or you were maybe more right so yeah citizenlab.ca and yeah they're they're really fantastic uh a lot of really good research going on there.

At EFF.org, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we're a U.S.-based nonprofit, been around for 35 years defending civil liberties as they intersect with technology.

So a lot of free speech work, a lot of privacy and Fourth Amendment work.

And we also have a really excellent set of guides called the Surveillance Self-Defense Guides, which are at ssd.eff.org, which I highly recommend people go and check out.

It's the most sort of evergreen guide for defending yourself online.

A lot of the problem with the online security guides is they get out of date very quickly.

And we have a whole full-time version dedicated to making sure that our guides stay up to date.

I'll put a link in the description.

Yeah.

And we're a non-profit, member-supported nonprofit.

So, you know, if you like to work, throw us a few bucks, we work for tips.

And yeah, those are the two places that I'm at that I want to plug.

Only other thing to plug is, I guess you can follow me on social media.

I'm at cooperq.com on Blue Sky and CooperQ at masto.hackers.town on Mastodon.

Hell yeah.

And yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you for the work you do at EFF and Citizen Lab.

Thank you.

Yeah, I guess we should always throw away our phones since there's no way to use our phones safely anymore.

I mean, throwing away our phones isn't a terrible idea.

That's why I'm bad at it.

You know what?

I could be onto something.

I think for our own sanity.

Just in general.

No, I think they're making us more connected and I think they're making us more stable.

They are making us more connected, that's for sure.

In that I get 5 billion notifications per day, if that's what connected means.

Yeah.

All right.

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

My My name is Dana Elkurd.

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

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

What a wild time in the Middle East, am I right?

I mean, not to be flippant, that's putting it mildly.

Today before I recorded, Israel bombed the capital of Qatar, Doha, in an assassination attempt against Hamas leadership.

They bombed in a residential area in the middle of the city, surrounded by nurseries, schools, businesses, and, you know, people.

I have a lot to say about Arab-Israeli relations historically and what's happening on that front today

and the sometimes shared interests of Arab regimes with the Israeli state.

So stay tuned for a deep dive episode on that topic soon.

Today I want to talk about the issue of Palestinian statehood.

It's been in the news quite a bit these days.

A number of different countries have expressed a willingness to recognize Palestine as a state.

In July, for example, France announced it would recognize Palestinian Palestinian statehood, and it was soon joined by a number of other countries: Canada, Malta, Belgium, the UK.

Kier Starmer, the Prime Minister of the UK, actually made it into an explicit threat.

Basically, we will recognize the state of Palestine if the Israelis don't agree to a ceasefire.

I'd like to underscore the absurdity of that comment for a second, but we'll get back to that one.

For all these countries, they say that they are recognizing Palestine as a state because they desire a two-state solution.

Their condition for recognizing Palestine as a a state also includes Hamas being completely out of the picture, quote, demilitarized in the language of French President Macron.

As NPR reported back in August 1st, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney also said that the Palestinian Authority needs to hold elections in this scenario, but one that excludes Hamas.

So all of these recent announcements are coalescing around the same conditions.

I guess the big deal here is that these are major powers, France and the UK, who have veto power in the UN Security Council, for example.

So the plan to recognize Palestinian statehood has gotten a lot of press and attention.

But the thing is, 145 countries already recognize Palestine as a state.

Palestine was given observer status at the UN in 2012.

And the Palestinian Authority has been working for quite some time to get more recognition internationally and to be able to use the international legal system to advocate for themselves.

So what does this recognition recognition actually mean?

A state that is occupied entirely by another and is currently undergoing ethnic cleansing at different levels of severity in all parts of its territories.

What state is actually being recognized here?

What does statehood mean in the context of occupation and ethnic cleansing?

It might help to go back to the Oslo Accords that were signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, and the State of Israel.

This was the first time that Israel and the Palestinians agreed to something directly.

A stipulation of the Oswald Accords was mutual recognition, meaning Israel would recognize that the PLO was the representative of the Palestinian people, and the PLO would recognize Israel's right to exist.

This was later criticized as uneven by Palestinian negotiators such as Hanan Ashrawi because the PLO was already internationally recognized as the representative of the Palestinian people.

So her argument more recently has been they accepted Israel's control for getting recognition in return.

The U.S.

Ambassador to Israel at the time, Daniel Kurtzer, concurred with that assessment, saying to the New York Times that the Oslo agreement was full of holes.

The mutual recognition was asymmetrical, and that was to hurt the Palestinian negotiating position for years to come.

End quote.

Nevertheless, the Oslo Accords of 1993 are widely understood to be the attempt to bring about a two-state solution of some kind.

And it's been the framework that many international powers have paid lip service to ever since.

By the way, September 2023 marked the 30-year anniversary of the accords.

We all know what happened October 7th, just a few days later.

Thing is, the OSL framework didn't say two states.

The Oslo Accords just said that they would continue negotiations on some eventual final framework.

Now, Palestinians wanted a state, of course.

And the Israelis were committing to negotiations.

So the Palestinians were told to start building up a sort of state, a quasi-state in parts of the occupied territories, to start governing themselves in particular ways.

And this was called the Palestinian National Authority.

I talked about this at more length in the episode for It Could Happen Here titled Palestine's Stolen Future.

So if you're interested, you can listen to that one.

The OSA records split the occupied territories into three parts, Area A, B, and C.

All of which remained under the Israeli occupation's control.

But still, there were some differences between them.

In Area A, which is less than 20% of the land, that's where a lot of the urban centers are, the Palestinian Authority was allowed to function, build, and run institutions of governance.

So if you go to Ramallah, for example, you'll see big buildings with Palestinian Authority insignia.

In Area B, the Palestinian Authority had partial access.

And in Area C, which is the majority of the territories, the Palestinian Authority was and continues to not be allowed to function.

But the PA did use this as an opportunity to create the basis of a state, creating ministries, beginning a parliament, writing laws, and importantly, creating security forces.

Throughout all this, Israel maintained military control over the entire territory, and Israeli settlements continued to expand.

So what the Israelis got out of the OSO Accords was they got out of providing certain services, and they let Palestinians do that for themselves, but they didn't actually cede meaningful control over any part of the territory.

Now it's important to pause here.

An occupying force is obligated under international law to provide services to the population it occupies and to return the land to the sovereign, the occupied people, as soon as possible.

As the European Society of International Law notes, quote, the 1907 Hague Regulations, the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, and modern body of international human rights instruments contain a number of provisions which protect protect the lives, property, natural resources, institutions, civil life, fundamental human rights, and latent sovereignty of the people under occupation, while curbing the security powers of the occupying power to those genuinely required to safely administer the occupation.

End quote.

And if the occupier occupies indefinitely, then it's not really an occupation anymore, is it?

Again, as the European Society of International Law notes, the concept of prolonged occupation may well become a legal guise that masks a de facto colonial exercise and defeats the transient and exceptional nature which occupations are intended to be, end quote.

But that is exactly what has continued before and after the Oslo Accords.

The Oslo Accords never ended the occupation, never gave back land to Palestinians.

All it did is strip the occupier of its responsibility under the guise of working towards a two-state solution.

And really, anybody who has looked at what has transpired honestly would say that there has always been a mismatch between what the Israelis wanted and were willing to give and what the Palestinians wanted, even to the degree of what both sides meant when they said state, has always been mismatched.

So I'll explain what I mean.

Palestinians have always wanted a legitimate state.

What does that mean?

Well, a state has sovereignty.

It has control over its own territory.

It has the monopoly on the use of violence within its boundaries.

That's the most basic definition of state sovereignty.

Israel never intended for any of that.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords in his final address to the Knesset before he was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli, clearly stated that what was on offer for the Palestinians was something, quote, less than a state.

Yitzhak Rabin was in the Labor Labor Party, but again, if people are being honest, this is a bipartisan position in Israel.

Israeli political leaders have, at best, offered something less than a state, and at worst, offered surrender or annihilation.

I'm not being hyperbolic here.

Basil Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party, who is now the finance minister, has for years actively promoted his quote decisive plan, which has become the policy of the state today.

The plan proposes that one, any Palestinian who is willing and able to relinquish the fulfillment of his national aspirations would be able to stay and live as an individual in the Jewish state, not as a citizen.

And two, any Palestinian who is unwilling or unable to relinquish his national aspirations will receive assistance from them to immigrate to one of the Arab countries.

So essentially, what he's saying is: Palestinians have to either give up and be a subject or leave, surrender, or transfer.

The U.S., as a supposed mediator and third party, has not really strayed from that.

Sovereignty has always been approximated with self-governance from the United States perspective.

Jared Kushner, for example, in his Peace to Prosperity Plan, which was the linchpin of Donald Trump's Israel-Palestine proposer back in the first Trump administration, invokes the idea of sovereignty, only to insist that it should no longer be the crux of negotiations.

According to the Trump administration, quote, the notion that sovereignty is a static and consistently defined term has been an unnecessary stumbling block in past negotiations, and this amorphous concept is best put aside to focus on pragmatic and operational concerns.

Ironically, the liberal version of a two-state solution, espoused by every democratic administration, essentially envisions the same endpoint: a Palestinian entity, demilitarized and subordinate to Israel's economic and security concerns.

But Palestinians want a state.

They want a state in the full meaning of the term.

And that state has to be legitimate, not only internationally, but in the eyes of the Palestinian people.

Political scientist Tanya Alberts argues that sovereignty is an identity of states.

It's constituted by the norms of international society.

States are recognized as sovereign if they achieve self-determination for a group of people.

The fact that on rare occasions the international system has refused to recognize certain political entities as states, specifically because they had violated the right of self-determination, highlights how we now think of political authority.

So, for example, the international community did not recognize Rhodesia as a state because it violated the self-determination of the black majority in that country, even though white people in Rhodesia did exercise material control over that country.

In other words, the state's right to sovereignty must flow from some sort of legitimacy.

A state rules because society approves.

This doesn't mean that every sovereign state is democratic, but simply that states derive their status from the citizens' buy-in.

And because the state claims to represent the will of maybe a certain ethnic or civic identity, it's understood as an executor of the law enacted by the people who are sovereign.

So sovereignty then should also be understood as the ability of people who consider themselves of that place to exercise control over a territory and have a say in its future.

Populist movements, secessionist movements, and other movements that challenge a certain state sometimes claim popular sovereignty, legitimizing their assertions with reference to their historical legacy or continuity or indigeneity, even in the absence of a representative state.

And Palestinians are one such group.

They've struggled not merely for the right to exist, but also for political control and state state institutions that represent and uphold their national identity.

And the legitimacy of their sovereignty claim stems not only from their long ties to the territory, but also from the fact that they have long conceived themselves as a nation, a nation that has never ceded its demand for a sovereign state with the promise of subjugation, subsistence, or integration into another state.

So to make this very clear, Palestinians want a state state that is sovereign.

They certainly don't mean self-governance.

And Palestinians, after 30 years of Oslo, that has only left them worse off, certainly don't want to go back to trying the same process again.

So, when these countries recognize Palestine as a state, as a way of pretending to pressure for the two-state solution, They're not saying anything about what happens to the territories that are currently being wiped out.

Like literally all of Gaza and even parts of the West Bank.

They're not saying anything about Israeli settlements.

They're not saying anything about reparations.

And because of that, some Palestinians have argued that these statehood recognition things are a cynical ploy to distract from the inaction of these countries on addressing the genocide in Gaza, basically pretending to act without actually doing anything.

Palestinian analyst Maein Roubani said this to NPR recently, quote, in the end, simply recognizing Palestinian statehood is a low-cost option.

It may placate a domestic audience demanding action while doing very little to actually change the situation on the ground.

End quote.

Others have argued even further that not only are these declarations of recognition a cynical ploy to distract, but they may even be a sort of trap.

Legal expert and Professor Nura Ra'at and international lawyer and Professor Shad Hamouri wrote for Jadaliyah on this, which I'll link in the show notes.

They argue effectively that the best thing to come out of this is a challenge maybe to the U.S.

quote, the greatest promise of this renewed statehood bid, the most recent push being in 2011-2012, is a united front to challenge U.S.

intransigent support for Israel, end quote.

However, they also point out that, quote, States do not need to recognize Palestine to end the occupation, to end the genocide, and advance Palestinian self-determination.

They argue that states, quote, need decisive will to impose arms and energy embargoes and trade with and investment in Israel, uncede it from the UN, hold Israeli war criminals and complicit corporations accountable in their national courts, and arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in compliance with the ICC's arrest warrant, end quote.

So, the bid for statehood doesn't solve problems.

It only gives states the fig leaf to actually delay solving problems.

On top of that, it risks empowering a legitimate and corrupt Palestinian leadership in any future negotiations.

I'm talking a leadership that includes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who 80% of Palestinians polled said they want him to resign, and an institution like the Palestinian Authority that only 15% of Palestinians are satisfied with, according to the latest polling.

As Ara'at and Hamouri note, quote, the terms of the high-level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine convened in New York, led by France and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, confirm these risks.

The Palestinian Authority is glorified in at least seven clauses entrusted with governing the state, effectively paving the way for a police state alongside a settler colonial entity.

End quote.

None of the talk of recognizing Palestine, amid all of these conditions and stipulations, ever say anything about the power imbalance between the two parties or address the root causes of conflict.

Now, on the other hand, political scientist Paul Post, writing for World Politics Review, says, quote, recognition isn't just theater.

Recognition is a long-standing legal institution that has the important function of identifying major actors in the international system.

And for policymakers, recognition is the looseness in the rules that that allows them to use recognition not only to identify actors, but also to express opinions about them or to secure concessions from them.

So from his perspective, these declarations of recognition are meaningful in some shape or form.

Here's my take.

Statehood recognition is not meaningless.

In fact, it's probably dangerous in this current moment, because what it's trying to do is to cement the conflict in its place.

These countries recognizing Palestine want to hurry the current Palestinian leadership into accepting a state and name only that is not sovereign.

They want to force the Israelis to the table to do that.

And they want these conditions to become the precedent for future negotiations.

And we see signs of this in other ways.

For example, the international community and regional powers pressured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas into changing the rules of the PLO's internal governance in order to appoint a successor because they were were afraid he was going to keel over.

And he appointed a very unpopular figure named Hsayn al-Sheikh.

As I wrote for The Guardian alongside Palestinian Chilean activist Pablo Abu Fom in May of this year, Abbas also expanded the central council of the PLO and appointed friendly people to it.

All of this shows that the international community, in pressuring the Palestinian leadership in these directions, has no interest in democratic buy-in, in actually getting the buy-in of the Palestinian people, really thinking that a legitimate negotiation would ever be sustainable under these circumstances.

This state of affairs, these schemes, where international powers try to ignore what the Palestinian people want yet again, is the reason Palestinians don't really have any hope in any solution.

In polling on one state, two states, etc.,

47% prefer the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, 15% prefer a confederation between the two states, and 14% of Palestinians prefer the establishment of a single state with equality between the two sides.

24% of Palestinians polled said that they did not know or did not want to answer.

Also, when asked about the public's support or opposition to specific political measures to break the current political deadlock, 68%

of Palestinians supported joining more international organizations, but still 50% supported resorting to unarmed popular resistance, 46% supported a return to armed intifada, and 42% supported the disillusion of the Palestinian Authority.

26% supported abandoning the two-state solution and demanding one state for Palestinians and Israelis.

What this sort of polling shows is that Palestinians now understand very clearly that the international system is screwing them over.

International law hasn't been able to help them.

And that the solutions for a two-state solution being proposed with all of these conditions won't ever actually get to two states and won't give them real sovereignty.

The mass protests and actions that took place in 2021, Palestinian activists called this the Unity Uprising or Intifada, show that this has always been about sovereignty.

In the Unity Intifada of 2021, Palestinian activists spoke of a shared struggle against Israel's continued erasure of Palestinians.

Palestinians living under Israeli rule across the country, whether they had citizenship or they didn't, rejected the old style of politics, they rejected what they saw as artificial fragmentation, and they insisted instead on their national identity and shared struggle.

As a result, at that time, we witnessed an extraordinary amount of organizing across the Green Line, so in the territories and in Israel with Palestinian citizens of Israel.

And it was a way of reclaiming Palestinian sovereignty.

The same activists and groups involved in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Sharach,

linked up with those organizing in Haifa, in Umm al-Fahim, they built on these connections to launch campaigns over and over in Masafiriyatta, the Naqab, and much more.

Sovereignty has always been an animating demand for Palestinians since before October 7th.

And that's surely on everyone's minds now that the war in Gaza has extended this long.

So the takeaway here is: recognition isn't the solution.

Statehood may not even be the solution, at least not in the terms they're offering.

Sovereignty has always been what the demand is, and these pushes for recognition miss that point yet again.

That's it from me.

Thank you for listening to another Palestine episode, and I'll be back with more soon.

Take care.

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This is It Could Happen here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what is happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis.

Today I'm joined by Sophie Lichterman, Robert Evans, and James Stout.

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

Never for wait, remember?

Wait, what?

Never forget.

Whichever one of those we're supposed to do.

So we had a very big news week already, and then a very big piece of news happened.

Yesterday when we usually record executive disorder, but this is Thursday.

We waited a little bit to get some more information before we talk about this story, which will probably be the biggest story of the week, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

So on Wednesday, September 10th at Utah Valley University at around 12.23 p.m.

Mountain Time, Charlie Kirk was shot during a campus event.

It was a big outdoor event.

The crowd, I mean, there's some good footage of elevation of the size of the crowd.

It was, it looked like several thousand people who had shown up to, I think it did all, it seemed like largely supporters, but there was certainly a mix of supporters and protesters around.

Yeah.

And yeah, Kirk was shot once from a distance of, I think the, right now the best estimate is around 150 yards.

But I mean, that's precise, not accurate, because people are kind of basing it on just sort of like looking at the images and doing.

like

satellite estimation.

Right, right.

But that does seem credible based on what I've seen, about 150 yards or so,

which is not long range.

That's not like short range.

It's like low, medium range for a rifle.

And they found, or at least the FBI is saying they found the rifle.

And the pictures show it to be an extremely normal-looking bolt-action-hunting rifle.

Kirk was shot once in the neck.

It hit his brainstem.

You can kind of tell by the way his arms moved after he was shot.

So he probably lost consciousness immediately.

And he was declared dead about two hours later at the hospital.

But that's largely because that tends to be how it's handled when somebody is shot like this they don't like to announce their death immediately even if they died immediately like that's just kind of it's best prep you want to make sure you've contacted the family and everything like that so that's what happened yeah in his case the family were present i think at the uh at the event I mean, I'm sure some of them, but there's

like not every, like they would have probably wanted, like, I doubt his parents or whatever were all there or whatever, like, even if his wife and kids were sure yeah totally makes sense yeah yeah yeah those are the facts that we can verify and there's actually fairly little besides this other than some time stuff that we can verify perfectly like they they're currently saying that about 11 52 a.m mountain time the shooter arrived near campus because they do have some videos of the person they think was the shooter.

There were at least two people who were taken into custody right after the shooting who proved not to be the guy.

I think they were just grabbing people.

Like it did not, there did not seem to be any good reason.

One of them had a pellet rifle.

The first guy started shouting after the shooting, and I'll do it again.

And this prompted him to be detained, but was later found to not be a legitimate suspect in the shooting.

No, because he was right next to the shooting.

Yep, had no weapon, nothing.

So, I mean, those are the facts as they stand right now.

The photo that has been released of the guy they think did it looks like about 80% of the male population of Utah, clean-shaven, but otherwise he looks just as nondescript as like this dude takes his hat off, maybe shaves his head.

Like it would not be wildly difficult for him to hide because he does not look like pretty grainy pictures, not as clear as something like the United Healthcare CEO shooting.

And the FBI did offer a reward of up to $100,000 for information.

We do know that.

Yeah.

Which points towards the usefulness of the tips they have been getting so far.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The rifle, just for anyone who's interested, it looks, they thought it was a Mauser.

I guess

it didn't look like one from the photos that they released, but maybe that, maybe that was yet again not the gun, because the FBI has said a lot of things and then backtracked on that.

Yeah, the New York Post has a picture of a sporterized Spanish Mauser with a composite stock.

Have you seen that one, Robert?

Yes, that's the one I saw that

it looked like a savage to me, but

is that a sporterized 8mm that was rebarreled to 30at 6?

That would be my guess.

The Spanish Mauser is the only one I'm aware of that has the bolt turned down in that way.

Good idea.

But it's not a great picture.

It could also be something else.

Because it just looked like any hunting rifle on a store rack.

the the photo that i saw yeah yeah no i think it's someone has done a sporter job on it yeah What's somewhat interesting about that, like other than just being a dweeb, is that potentially one could acquire a gun like that without having filled out a 4473 form, right?

Like

an FBI background check.

I know they will, if they have the weapon, they will certainly be pursuing trying to trace that as one of the ways they're trying to locate the shooter.

Yes.

So if this person's either a relative could have acquired it before it was necessary to do a 4473.

Yes.

Or I think with curios and relics in some states or antique weapons, you don't have to do a background check.

No.

And you don't have to do a background check.

I mean, face-to-face sales are, I believe, legal in Utah.

Yes, private face-to-face sales are legal in Utah.

So if this guy bought, basically what that means is if this guy just bought a gun in cash from a dude, there's not a record of that, although said dude might come forward.

Sure.

That said, the fact that this is a sporterized old Mauser means this could be a gun that's been in the family a while that he sporterized, in which case there's absolutely no record of it.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

You know, I'm guessing I've seen people call it a high-powered rifle and stuff.

Like, just be aware it's kind of an old gun.

It's an old gun.

I mean, if it's 30, if it is 30at 6, I would say that's a high-power cartridge.

Yeah, no, it is.

That's a big round, but it's a full-size rifle cartridge for sure.

People hunt deer with 30at 6 all the time.

It's an extremely normal hunting rifle.

Yeah, like probably top five most common kinds of rifle for someone to have in this country.

And that was bolt action hunting rifle was my assumption as soon as I saw the video because the guy fired one shot.

And it's relatively uncommon for people who are shooting in mass crowded public situations like this to limit themselves to a single round.

which it just suggests number one like a bolt action which i also thought was likely because they didn't leave any ammo behind yeah and if he was firing something like an ar those can fling brass so widely that you can't easily catch it Like if you're, especially if you're trying to escape immediately after shooting.

And yeah, I would guess I'm seeing a lot of people online.

Obviously, conspiracies start.

I'm seeing so many people say, like, this had to have been a hit.

This was a professional, only a professional could have done this.

This was Trump distracting from Epstein.

This was the massage.

This was any number of unhinged theories around this event.

And I will say right now, as pertains to the competence of the shooter, anyone who had picked up a gun for the first time couldn't have easily done this.

Like, I doubt this as someone who was new to firearms, but anyone who like shot a deer once or twice a year could have made this happen.

Anybody who went to the range, you know, once or twice a month for a while could have gotten competent enough to make a shot like this very easily.

Very doable for like hobbyist shooters, which there are many of in the United States and many of in Utah.

I would be shocked if like less than about 80% of the adult male population of Utah could have made this shot, right?

You do not need like military training.

You do not need to be a veteran to make this shot.

Absolutely not.

And I think it's very irresponsible to see so many people, like including people who are journalists, speculating like that.

Like, I know that generally firearms are not covered well in the U.S.

media, despite them being ubiquitous here.

But in cases like this, it's okay not to know, but it's better to be quiet if you don't know.

Yes.

The other thing I guess we should get into is in terms of the escape and what we know.

This is also not something that necessitates fucking Navy SEAL training, right?

Like, you're a white, clean-cut guy in fucking Salt Lake City.

If you have a bag that you can hide your gun in and you get down, maybe throw on a different jacket or something like that over your shirt or change shirts,

walk away, get to your car, drive off, very hard for them to track you.

Salt Lake City is not New York.

It's not blanketed in cameras, not like New York.

There's not a massive police presence for this rally.

And there certainly wasn't a massive police presence doing concentric circles around the rally.

This was not like a fucking president's in town and the secret service is locking everything down for two miles.

No, and Charlie's own security tends to stay close to him at the event.

They're not set up with giant perimeters.

No, because none of them expected something like this.

Yeah.

I'm sure that Charlie Kirk has received threats before, but I mean, there's only so much a private individual can do, right, in these situations.

He often wears a bulletproof vest.

Yes.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's only so much a private individual can do, and there's only so so much you can do if you're holding an event outside.

Yeah.

Like to stop somebody who's got a

scoped rifle from getting on top of a roof, right?

Like I'm sure his family is firing their current security right now, obviously.

But I really don't know what they could have done, like what his personal security could realistically have done.

Other than say, don't do an event outside, Charlie.

Yeah.

A few other notes that we should touch on.

On Thursday morning, some unverified information related to the ongoing investigation notes leaked online through fellow campus debater Stephen Crowder.

Stephen Crowder shared an internal memo which contained unverified information, which reads in part, quote, ATF and other law enforcement located an older model imported Mauser 306 caliber bolt action rifle wrapped in a towel in a wooded area near the campus.

The location of the firearm appears to match the suspect's route of travel.

The spent cartridge was still chambered in addition to three unspent rounds in the top Fed magazine.

All cartridges have engraved wording on them expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology, unquote.

So this claim linking the shooting to transgender and quote-unquote anti-fascist ideology, whatever that means, spread around the internet like wild, as expected.

Though a few hours later, the New York Times reported: quote: According to a preliminary internal report circulated inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, federal and local officials recovered ammunition with the shooter's rifle that appeared to be engraved with statements expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology.

But a senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that report had not been verified by ATF analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence, and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted.

Yeah.

In fast-moving investigations, such status reports are not made public because they often contain a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information.

Yes.

And again, when that person with the pellet rifle was arrested, Cash Patel, director of the FBI, posted on Twitter, We have the man who killed Charlie Kirk, and then had to post like an hour later, nope.

Which is not a thing you saw with previous directors of the FBI for a good reason.

Yeah, like their handling of this has been pretty unorthodox.

No, and I can see why a fucking Steven Crowder fan in the ATF would want to get that out immediately.

Totally.

Especially because he probably knew at some point that's going to get corrected.

But what matters is it gets out for some degree of time.

Yeah.

And then that bakes into the reality of a certain number of people forever.

Yeah.

Right.

And that's what matters, whether or not it's true.

We don't know yet.

Is it true or not, right?

We simply don't know.

Hey, this is Garrison.

This is just a short update.

On Thursday evening, law enforcement gave a press conference where Utah Governor Spencer Cox cautioned against, quote-unquote, a tremendous amount of disinformation circulating online about the killing of Charlie Kirk, and specifically cited bots from China and Russia, which were encouraging violence and instilling disinformation into discourse around the shooting.

Now, while there certainly have been many on the left who have been joking or even celebrating this shooting.

Oh yeah, lots of people.

Rhetoric from the right has been similarly violent with calls to do mass violence or purge the Democrats or people on the left.

I'm going to play a video that the White House released late Wednesday night of Trump giving a statement on the shooting.

It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today,

and it must stop right now.

My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.

From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others.

Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.

The Trump assassin was not left-wing.

No.

No.

He was a registered Republican.

There is currently no indication of the political alignment of this shooter.

Whatsoever.

Just because they killed Charlie Kirk does not mean that this was a left-wing Antifa super soldier.

Charlie Kirk has had a meme-fied status on the internet for the past few years, which has encouraged vitriol and threats from those on the extreme right as well as the far left.

Yeah, he's particularly disliked by the hardcore anti-Semites on the right.

And the Groupers have long had fun with making threats against Charlie Kirk in the quote-unquote Grouper war, which we don't have time to get into.

But it's not just Trump's worrying statement there, promising a degree of crackdown.

Jesse Waters on Fox has claimed, quote, we're going to avenge Charlie's death.

Yep.

Here's a clip of Jesse Waters on Fox News last night.

Trump gets hit in the ear.

Charlie gets shot dead.

They came after Kavanaugh with a rifle to his neighborhood.

They went after Musk's cars.

They just shot two Jews outside the embassy.

Think about it.

Scalise got shot, barely survived.

It's happening.

You got trans shooters.

You got riots in L.A.

They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not.

They are at war with us.

What are we going to do about it?

How much political violence are we going to tolerate?

And that's the question we're just going to have to ask ourselves.

Now, Charlie would want us to put as much pressure on these people as possible.

Dana nailed it.

This is unacceptable and has to stop.

And it has to stop now.

And everybody's accountable.

And we're watching what they're saying on television.

And who's saying what?

The politicians and the media and all these rats out there.

This can never happen again.

It ends now.

Greg's right again.

This is a turning point.

And we know which direction we're going.

He made a turning point joke, huh?

Yes.

That's Jesse Waters doing a turning point on.

Also, the

use of rats to refer to other people is,

I don't know, it's giving like radio mil colin vibes.

It's also worth noting, Republican Representative Clay Higgins from Louisiana is saying that he's seeking to have social media companies place lifetime bans on users who celebrated the assassination.

It's not just Jesse Waters calling for war.

Other commentators are employing very similar rhetoric, including Alex Jones and Steve Bannon.

We're in a war.

The left has been saying saying, put a bullseye on Trump, a bullseye on his supporters.

Charlie Kirk's a casualty of war.

We're in this country.

Chaya Raichek tweeted on the Lips of TikTok account, quote, this is war.

The Oath Keeper founder Stuart Rhodes announced on InfoWarriors that his militia would be reforming to help with security at right-wing events.

Great.

Oh, gosh.

There was a good Wired article Wednesday night, which collected various calls to violence among the right in the aftermath of the shooting.

Quote, Ed Martin, U.S.

Pardon Attorney and former acting attorney for D.C., wrote on Twitter, quote, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord, citing Romans 12, 19.

Elon Musk posted, the left is the party of murder, then quoted a post blaming the left-wing and mainstream media, as well as figures like Gavin Newsom for radicalizing people against right-wing figures like Kirk.

Katie Miller, who works with Musk at Doge and is the wife of Stephen Miller, wrote on X that even liberals condemning violence, quote, have blood on their hands.

You could be next, influencer and unofficial Trump advisor Laura Loomer posted on Twitter: the left are terrorists.

Christopher Ruffo, a conservative activist who popularized the demonization of critical race theory, suggested in a Twitter post that the radical left was responsible for the shooting and urged the U.S.

government to, quote, infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all those who are responsible for this chaos.

Unquote.

There's many, many more.

This is after the right has long celebrated

certain types of political violence.

Oh, yes, constantly.

Yeah.

Like that old guy in Panama who shot a protester blocking the street.

Yeah.

The entire right rallied behind that man.

Kirk himself has embraced Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two people after a plastic bag was thrown in the direction of Kyle Rittenhouse.

Kirk was vocally supportive of the man who tried to attack Nancy Pelosi in her home.

And did attack Paul Pelosi.

Yes, specifically, specifically urged urged his audience to bail him out.

It was like not even two months ago that a Minnesota state senator and her husband were killed.

Political violence exists across the spectrum.

This is not a left-wing problem.

This is an American problem.

Yeah.

I mean, the vast majority of political of like terrorist attacks that are politically motivated in the U.S.

are right-wing, like and have been for the last several decades, per the FBI.

From the 2012 to 2021, 55% of murders tied to political extremism came from white supremacy, 14% anti-government, 6% other right-wing, 20% Islamist, 4% left-wing.

And the white supremacy 55% are far-right Nazis.

Yeah.

In terms of who did this, yeah, I think we touched on Groipers a little bit.

We should probably talk a bit more about

the kind of online feud between a chunk of Nick Fuentes' fan base and Charlie Kirk.

It was certainly more prominent a few years ago as Kirk himself has moved further to the right, has adopted great replacement theory, the feud kind of dissipated, but it certainly was like a legitimate thing in the right for like years.

Yes, to the extent that that's a number of folks are kind of have suspected that like maybe that's who did it.

Again, we really have no idea.

I'm just bringing this up to make the point that like there's a variety of reasons why this guy could have done this, why this person could have done this, including could be an Epstein-related thing, right?

There's a lot of anger at figures who kind of bought into the Trump line that we're done now with the Epstein stuff.

There's no way to know.

And I think that's, that's kind of where we have to end that part of our discussion here is we don't know why this was done and to extent it doesn't matter.

If it comes out tomorrow that this guy was like a White House staffer working for Donald Trump who did it because he thought Charlie Kirk had disregarded.

Like if some crazy shit like that happened, it wouldn't change at all the way that they're talking about this shooting.

Like it just doesn't matter like we're we're we are where we are with them and they're saying a lot of the same stuff like that this is an escalation in rhetoric but it's not a massive escalation in rhetoric over the way they've been talking about fucking the people changing like like the cracker cracker barrel logo we have to go to war we have to go to war we're at war right i was thinking about that when you said that like uh the lips of tiktok had tweeted that we're at war like i you could probably go back and see dozens of other instances of almost exactly the same statement right And is this something that could lead to mass could this be because I've seen people comparing this guy like Charlie Kirk to Horst Wessel, who was a Nazi, literally a pimp that was a member of the Nazi brown shirts who was murdered and it became a huge rallying cry for the Nazi party, right?

They made a song about him.

It was a big deal.

I think that's kind of a very silly comparison for one thing.

Horst Wessel is meaningful because he was killed before the Nazis came to power and they used his death in order to get to power.

And Trump is in power if you're not aware.

They don't need to invent excuses either to like crack down on the left or no or carry out their policies.

They're already doing that.

I've seen people go into complete panic mode because they're going to be like, they're going to use this

shooting to now do terrible things as if they're not already doing terrible things.

Like they don't need to wait for events to happen.

They are more than willing just to do whatever they want when they want to.

Yes, Yes,

that is exactly like the

that's exactly what I would tell you.

And in terms of like comparisons,

I don't even think it's super useful to try to compare this to specific figures from fucking German history.

Because there's really

a viral TikTok of a man talking about the Book of Mormon like

seconds after the shooting.

Standing next to where Kirk died, and we now know that he stole a bunch bunch of shit from the booth that was covered in blood to sell it online like go go read all of the books

in germany you won't find anything like that in it

yeah like like a better historical comparison we will see right might be jose carlosotelo like who whose death did immediately sort of was one of the things that accelerated the start of the spanish civil war i guess yeah but even then like no one was tick-tocking and and grabbing merch that was stained by his blood no and there's no, you can like say like, oh, well, this figure's assassination preceded this kind of violence.

But like, okay, was that figure a guy who did what Charlie Kirk did and was connected in the way?

No, like, this is an American thing.

This is new.

This is a novel moment in history, and we don't know what's going to happen.

I'm not saying don't, you know.

If you're the kind of person who has been worried about right-wing violence accelerating, you shouldn't be less worried right now.

And I think that's a good thing to be worried about.

There's been a spree of bomb threats called into like historically black colleges today.

Um, and DNC headquarters, uh, last I checked.

I don't think anything actually has been done, but it makes sense.

It's an anger reaction from the right.

You know, you've got some people who woke up pissed off this morning and decided to call in some bomb threats, apparently.

We'll see, you know, who the culprits were there.

But

I did want to touch on something else that I've seen in the wake of all this that is pretty novel, but we should do an ad break first.

All right.

Coming back, I wanted to talk briefly about the way AI is being used by

civilian investigators to try and crack this caper.

People have been using AI to enhance the images that the FBI released of the maybe shooter.

Again, we don't even know that that guy's the shooter because they fucked up very badly on this initially.

But people have been using to like clarify, and we know that the AI is doing a bad job because, again, he's wearing a distinctive shirt.

People found the shirt online.

And when the AI was like...

Solidifying the image on the shirt, it did it wrong.

Like it put like a silhouette of a man on there that wasn't on there.

Like it like...

You can also submit the same image to like five different AI imaging programs and get five wildly different results for what the face, quote unquote, looks like.

And I just brought that up because I haven't seen that happen before with one of these things.

And it was like, oh, okay, cool.

That's a fun new.

This is going to be something we're going to have to deal with now for every single preceding event.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Whatever this hellscape of the American Century of Humiliation looks like.

Yes.

The other thing I wanted to bring up is within about like two to three hours after Kirk was killed and after, again, it had been announced that he was dead, people were asking Grock, is this video?

Because the video was spreading wildly of him dying on everywhere, really.

But people asked on Twitter, they asked Grok, Elon Musk's AI, is this real?

And the response that was posted initially was, Charlie Kirk takes the roast in stride with a laugh.

He's faced tougher crowds.

Yes, he survives this one easily.

And then someone responded, Grok, he got shot through the neck.

What are you talking about?

And Grok responded, it's a meme video with edited effects to look like a dramatic shot, not a real event.

Charlie Kirk is fine.

He handles roasts like a pro.

So, again,

I bring this up just because

this is going to only become more of a factor in the immediate wake of shootings and terrorist attacks and disasters, is people going to AIs for information about the validity of videos, about the validity of threats.

And what scares me is not, this didn't do any damage, right?

Like, this doesn't

hurt the manhunt for the killer.

It didn't like do anything.

It's just ridiculous.

But let's say you've got videos of a disaster ongoing,

like a fucking fucking natural disaster coming or whatever, and people are being told to leave their homes.

And somebody asks a fucking Grok, hey, do I need to heal?

I'll plug this video in.

It'll tell me if the storm's going to hit my house or if I can stay here.

People are going to do shit like that.

Like that's going to happen.

Yeah, you're right.

Anyway, just as heads up.

Oh, that's bleak.

Yeah.

That's pretty terrible.

All right.

Well, that's, that's, I think, all we got to say on this.

Yeah.

We'll keep updating you as we learn more.

I'm sure this will keep developing over the weekend.

Yeah, this is going to keep being a major story.

I'm sure we'll do a dedicated episode on it next week.

Yeah.

Something else that happened on Wednesday, the same day as the Charlie Kirk assassination, was a school shooting in Colorado.

Two students were shot before the shooter killed himself.

Police have said, quote, we are looking at a motive.

We don't have one yet.

He was radicalized by some extremist network, and the details of that will be down the road.

And we wanted to give you that much about maybe a mindset for him, unquote.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess it's, it's just a marking of what kind of shootings Americans are inured to and not.

School shootings.

That's business as usual.

Yeah.

Especially if it's just a regular white male teenager.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll be kind of following that one as well to see what its online radicalization was that they've already found so early.

But yeah, it's pretty tragic that two school shootings happened in a day.

It was reported in multiple outlets last week that the Department of Justice was considering restricting gun ownership rights for transgender Americans in the wake of the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting last month.

This was first reported by the Diggly Wire, who quoted a source inside the Justice Department saying, quote, Individuals within the DOJ are reviewing ways to ensure that mentally ill ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable and unwell, unquote.

CNN said that their sources described the proposal for a trans gun ban as, quote, preliminary in nature.

And since then, the DOJ and the Trump administration have not made any clear statements confirming or denying this reporting.

A DOJ spokesperson acknowledged these reports with a statement reading, quote, the DOJ is actively evaluating options to prevent the pattern of violence we have seen from individuals with specific mental health challenges and substance abuse disorders.

No specific criminal justice proposals have been advanced at this time, unquote.

Trump declined to answer a question about a possible trans gun ban last Friday.

This is something right-wing influencers have been advocating for years now.

Yeah.

On September 5th, the NRA made a statement reading, the Second Amendment isn't up for debate.

The NRA supports the Second Amendment rights for all law-abiding Americans to purchase, possess, and use firearms.

The NRA does does not and will not support any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.

Yep.

Which, you know, is consistent with the NRA's messaging for years?

Because the line is...

The recent messaging.

Yeah, definitely.

Well, I mean, the line has been for as long as I have been a gun owner, which is 20 years now.

from the NRA that after the civil rights movement.

Yeah, yeah.

Registration and like laws forcing people to register their guns and it like gun control laws in general are that that restrict at all access to firearms are a prelude inevitably to mass confiscation right like that has been the that has been the line for a long time this does not surprise me yeah no the stance doesn't the fact that they said something publicly during this does because the nra has been quiet a lot when there's an issue like for example the the shooting of philando castile right who was legally carrying a concealed firearm when the police murdered him in his car, they kept pretty fucking quiet about that.

So I am a little surprised that they said something, but what they're saying is very consistent with other shit they've been saying.

Yeah.

There's no current legal mechanism that exists for them to do this.

They would have to invent or heavily alter the current way that gun rights can be taken away, which is right now through individual court cases where a judge finds an individual person, quote unquote, mentally deficient.

Yeah.

And it's highly unlikely that the gun lobby will support any policy proposals that start adding certain diagnoses to a list that excludes you from gun ownership.

Because sure, if you add gender dysphoria now, that might not be a huge problem to many on the right.

But let's say a Democrat administration and Democrat House and Senate come into power.

Now there is this precedent that you can add diagnoses to take away gun rights, which would enable adding things like depression or PTSD, which a lot of veterans have.

And this is like the slippery slope that the NRA warns about.

So it makes sense that they would be taking this stance.

Similarly, I don't necessarily see a very clear path for them to like restrict HRT through this mechanism.

Cis people, including a lot of men who own guns, take testosterone and cis women take estrogen.

So that would be a very tricky way to handle this, I think.

The only way they could, again, would be if they try to restrict en masse like the prescription of hormones specifically to people with gender dysphoria or trans people,

which is difficult for a lot of reasons, but would provide like a pretext for, okay, these people are now taking stuff

an illegal substance, and you can go after people with guns for that.

But

I feel like I don't know how you would judicate that, how you like force like the federal government does not theoretically have the ability to force the medical community to say nobody who's got gender dysphoria gets hormones ever again.

Yeah, I mean, you could maybe do something through the FDA, but I don't see how you could do it just to trans people and not cis people.

Oh, right.

Like, how, how would you keep it legal for all of Joe Rogan's friends?

And that's just

through the FDA, right?

I literally just don't know.

Yeah, I'm not super familiar with that.

But this is obviously something that we will keep an eye on.

This is like a possibility that we've discussed the right wanting to enact for years now.

And the fact that the DOJ might even have some people in there who are doing preliminary considerations obviously is a worrying sign of the general position on trans rights and trans gun rights.

Yeah.

For our immigration update this week, I want to start by talking about the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court confirmed in its case that CBP and more pertinently, ICE, can continue their policy of racial profiling.

This overturned a lower court judge's order that prohibited them from stopping someone in Los Angeles based on ethnicity alone.

It didn't just look at ethnicity, it said that it prohibited them from using either one or a combination of four factors, which were apparent race, their accent or their use of a non-English language, their job.

There are jobs that tend to have a higher proportion of undocumented people, right?

Like construction and some agricultural jobs, and their presence at a certain place, again, right?

Places like a home depot or a farm.

Garrison, smiling at how I correctly pronounced the word depot there.

CBP has always been able to profile you at the border, right?

That's kind of what they do.

There was a 1975 Supreme Court decision.

That one was called USA versus Brigione.

I think it's Brigione, like Italian, Brignoni Ponce.

That decision looked at a roving traffic stop up here in, I believe it's in San Clemente.

And in that case, the CBP had stopped someone not at a checkpoint, but while sitting by the side of the highway in their vehicle, and they had done so solely based on the apparent ethnicity of the driver.

That was ruled unconstitutional.

And the standard that officers needed to have was, quote, reasonable suspicion that pertains to roving stops, which is kind of what ICE is doing in LA, right?

CBP officers have also previously been sued more recently for using language as a sole basis for detention.

Like if you're speaking Spanish.

Yeah, exactly.

That was the case, right?

It's Sudo and Hernandez versus U.S.

Customs Customs and Border Protection.

That one was in Montana.

The ACLU of Montana sued them.

Two Spanish-speaking ladies were speaking Spanish in a store.

They actually said hello to a Board of Troll agent in English who proceeded to detain them on the basis that not many people speak Spanish in Montana.

I think the name is from Spanish, like Montaña, but maybe I'm wrong.

The

State Department has also issued guidance that non-immigrant visa applicants can now only schedule interviews in their own country.

So, this is a further burden for people seeking visas to come to the United States, right?

Previously, you could do it at another US embassy or consulate.

For instance,

if you were, let's say, French but resident in Spain, you could apply at the consulate or embassy there, right?

Now, you have to go to your country's embassy.

In some cases, there are designated embassies or consular places for nationals to states where the US has no embassy or a similar presence.

Like the US hasn't got an embassy in Afghanistan right now for pretty obvious reasons, right?

So I believe it's Islamobad for those people, for example.

Finally, I want to get on to the case of the dozens of Guatemalan children who came to the US unaccompanied by adults they're related to and who the Trump admin attempted to deport over the Labor Day weekend.

Sometimes I don't like the phrase unaccompanied minors because maybe they are accompanied by someone who's just not in their family, right?

Like people have taken care of them on the journey, almost certainly.

And I've seen this myself.

And so I don't know the idea that they're not just walking alone, but they're not with their relatives, right?

They've undertaken this journey themselves.

So Judge Sparkle Sukhnanan temporarily halted their removal in the early hours of Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend.

This is an extremely unusual decision.

right but the judge decided it was warranted because not doing so would put the children in potential extreme danger the government categorically attempted to remove these children

very quickly and literally got them out of bed, right?

Like got these little children out of beds in their foster homes and attempted to shove them on a plane to Guatemala.

Their attorney literally ran onto the tarmac at the airport to tell flight control personnel that they were likely in violation of a court order if they allowed the plane to take off.

It couldn't be more last minute than this, right?

They were literally working all night.

Judge Tim Kelly now has to rule on the legitimacy of the government's claims.

The claim the government makes here is that it was, quote, reuniting children with parents abroad, not deporting them.

And that would mean the children don't have the statutory protections that they do if they were being deported as quote-unquote unaccompanied minors, right?

Previously, the government had made the claim that the children's parents wanted them to be returned.

It's dropped that claim after Reuters has published a Guatemalan government document, which completely refutes that.

None of the children's parents seem to want them to come home.

So what the government is claiming here is that the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is under HHS, is moving the children, not the Department of Homeland Security.

So they're not being deported, they're being reunified with their families.

Yeah.

That's a pretty sketchy claim.

Meanwhile, the kids are in shelters.

Many of them were in long-term foster care, right?

And have been now removed from that environment and they're in shelters.

Lawfare, which is an online publication, has a pretty good account of the courtroom exchange that I've linked in the notes.

I also, several people have asked about this, so I should talk about it.

I wanted to talk about the Hyundai

plant.

In Georgia?

I don't know what to call this raid.

Yeah, in Georgia.

I guess raid is the right word.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, like more than 300 South Korean workers were detained at the plant.

They should be going home today.

They were supposed to go home yesterday, but there were some delays.

So far, ICE has claimed that these people were working without proper authorization and slash or were not in the U.S.

with proper authorization.

The lawyers have claimed, and the Guardian has found leaked documents that confirm that many of them had B1 visa status.

B1 is like, you can do some work on a B1.

It also can be just an extended-term tourist visa.

You can do certain jobs, but not other jobs.

And you still get paid at home when you're on a B1, which seems to be what these people were doing, right?

Like they can supervise construction on a B1, but you can't do construction.

And it would make sense for people who are very expert in the construction of these highly technical buildings to supervise that construction.

It seems that they were in the country to supervise the setting up of this car plant.

Correct.

Yeah.

Most South Koreans can also get ESTA visa waivers, which like it's not exactly the same, but it's kind of a ninety-day B1 visa.

So there are some people who cannot, right?

Like if they they have been convicted of crimes and such, they'd have to go through the B1 process.

But it seems very unlikely, at least, that they were not in the country without any documentation because like that would just be a strange thing to do when they can get a best of visa waiver.

What's really weird about this is the state of Georgia has invested millions, if not billions, in bringing this plant to Georgia, right?

It has created a significant economic boost.

Something like 90% of the products that go into the car come from there.

So there are lots of small businesses and local businesses that have started up to provide this factory with the goods it needs.

You know, there are all the other services that come with that, right?

Like it's brought economic benefit to the region.

I know the state has spent more than 300 million on improving the roads.

Apparently, they've deepened ports in some regions to allow larger ships to arrive.

It's brought in over 12 billion investment, more than 8,000 jobs.

It's received massive tax breaks.

It's going to total over $2 billion, according to reporting that I'll link to in the notes.

Yet, Georgia state police blocked off roads as part of the raid.

And it was Georgia Department of Corrections buses that took people away.

This seems an odd choice for Kemp.

Brian Kemp, right, Georgia governor.

He's not Trump's favorite.

Maybe he's trying to become Trump's favorite.

But previously, even Republicans in Georgia have been very behind this.

I mean, Garrison, you lived in Georgia for a bit, right?

Like this was a thing that the Republicans have supported as a way to revitalize a place where there wasn't much economic opportunity before.

Well, and this follows the whole point of Trump's tariffs where you're trying to bring manufacturing to the United States.

You have these specialized workers to help supervise.

the like construction and managing of equipment to get this plant up and running.

And

even if you're doing that, even if you're bringing manufacturing back to the States, somehow you still get bitten.

Yeah, big time bitten by the Trump horse, I guess.

Yeah, I mean,

it does sort of line up with this working closer to the Führer hypothesis, right?

That you have these countervalent impulses and everyone's just trying to do things that they think Trump will like.

And kind of sometimes those can directly contradict each other, as is happening here.

There's not really a coherent policy platform.

No, they're just so focused on trying to get the base numbers up, like trying to get the number of deportations higher than it's ever been.

Yeah.

And therefore, you have this sort of series of impulses which motivate Trumpism, one of which is deport as many people as possible.

Yeah.

Another is broadly writ, bring manufacturing jobs back to America, but not if foreign people are helping supervise the construction, I guess.

Understandably, South Korea is very upset.

More so, I think, because these are like middle-class professionals who have been detained, right?

They appear to have negotiated a voluntary departure for these people, which it's not like a voluntary departure, like you came on holiday, Disney landed, you're going home on the plane.

It can still have long-term consequences, but the hope there is that it won't make it harder for these people to get US visas in the future if they have to come back, because obviously it's going to be very hard for this company to build a plant in Georgia if they can't bring any of their staff to Georgia.

Yeah, that is about all I have.

I'm going to keep looking, especially this Georgia story, see if it develops any further.

And if it's worthy of a whole episode, we'll do a whole episode on that.

Speaking of Georgia, the long-delayed Cop City Rico case has finally made some progress in the courts.

I have been working on the final scripted piece of my Cop City coverage for basically this whole summer.

I've been slowly chipping away at it.

Part of the reason why I have not finished that yet is because essentially the whole court case, like the 61 defendant Rico case, got reset in May.

They changed judges and that has delayed an already long delayed case even further.

So I was waiting to see a little bit of the results of the court case or at least get a better indication where the court case is going to go before I finish that final piece.

And we're going to get that final piece out probably in the next like month or two here.

But I will give this small update because it's pretty substantial.

This past Tuesday, September 9th, the defense successfully successfully argued that the state attorney general's office did not have the jurisdictional authority to prosecute the 61 defendants under the state's RICO statute.

This was due to simple procedural error in neglecting to first ask Governor Brian Kemp if the AG's office could prosecute the case.

Judge Farmer found that the AG does not have the authority to prosecute Count 1 of the RICO indictment, which is the racketeering and conspiracy charges affecting 61 people.

So without the sweeping RICO charges engulfing the 61 defendants, just five defendants would be left with count two of the indictment, the domestic terrorism charges, which the AG does have the authority to prosecute, and count three, which is the arson charge, which Judge Farmer indicated could be thrown out on a similar technicality as the racketeering and conspiracy charges.

This is still heavily in flux.

The prosecution is going to appeal this decision.

And it's unclear how this ruling will affect how the rest of the Cop City case will unfold, as removal of the RICO charges kind of undermines the rest of the indictment.

On Wednesday, they were arguing about the constitutionality of Georgia's domestic terrorism statute, which has never been tested in courts before.

So, a lot of this case is currently up in the air, but this is a positive sign for the defendants at this point.

One brief RFK Jr.

update: I guess.

RFK Jr.'s soon-to-be-released autism report from HHS is reportedly going to include the claim that use of Tylenol during pregnancy could cause autism in children.

Jesus Christ.

This is not believed to be true by reputable medical authorities.

But the report is set to release sometime in September.

It was announced like months ago when RFK Jr.

said that by September, we will finally know the cause of autism, quote unquote.

And it seems the report is still churning away, but set to be released this month.

And it will include a few other claims, which we will report on in more detail once the report is actually out.

But the Wall Street Journal got this little heads up about the Tylenol inclusion in the report.

Fantastic.

So I heard from somebody who is waiting on their work permit, a Kurdish woman who came to the United States to claim asylum from Turkey, from northern Kurdistan.

And because she doesn't have a work permit yet, and she's going to be waiting for her work permit sometime, she's asking for help to cover her basic sort of day-to-day expenses.

And this is a thing that people often find themselves in a situation, right?

They have come here, done all the documentation, but it can take a long time to get their work permit.

And without friends or family, it can be very hard for them.

The website is gofund.me slash d a39f7d0b.

We'll have that link link in the show notes as well.

If you'd like to email us, you can do so.

The way to do it is to reach out to coolzone tips at proton.me.

That is an encrypted email address.

All that means is that you will have to also use an encrypted email address if you like it to be end-to-end encrypted.

All right, and here's some ads.

We're back, and I guess it's time to drop some bars about Jeffrey Epstein.

Somehow, Epstein has returned.

Yeah, that joke.

It always gets old.

So, one of the big pieces of news this week before the thing that we started the episode with, I mean, this was the story before that happened.

Yeah.

Is that as a result of the ongoing investigation into Epstein and whether or not, you know, how involved was Trump?

How involved were Democrats?

Do we care?

That the book, the first 50 years birthday book, that that drawing that Trump is accused of having done, where he signed his name as the pubic hair of a very obviously young girl with a poem that seemed to hint at child molestation, that the whole book.

that Epstein had has been released to Congress and is now public, right?

Yeah, the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Epstein birthday book from Jeffrey Epstein's estate once the estate made a statement saying that they have the book and would cooperate with a subpoena.

And there's a bunch of news articles summarizing it.

If you want to read the thing for yourself, just Google Document Cloud Jeffrey Epstein 50th birthday book and the whole thing is in there.

Yeah.

Right.

I would say, like, just to have a slight diversion, I guess, between this and the Charlie Kirk shooting, maybe.

You don't need to.

Give yourself a break.

You don't need to.

I'm not saying you should.

No, no, no.

I just wanted to let people know where they can get to the original source if they don't want to have it mediated by a meeting.

It's always good to do that.

We're going to mediate it for you now.

Yeah.

So it opens, as far as I can tell, the first, well, I mean, there's a list of contents.

The prologue is written by Geelan Maxwell.

Then there's letters from the family.

Paula, Seymour, and Mark, who I guess are relatives.

Then it's split into Brooklyn.

So there's friends of his from Brooklyn who are Warren Eisenstein, neutral.

I don't know who that is.

Terry Kafka.

Very funny that there's a Kafka involved.

Dr.

Stephen Levy and Michael Bucholes.

The next section is all girlfriends.

They're letters from girlfriends.

All of those names have been blacked out for reasons that should be obvious.

The section after that is children.

God almighty, I don't know who's kids because this is blacked out too, but whoo boy.

Yeah.

And then we get to the section that is friends.

That is all the letters from friends.

And the friends are Leon Black is on there, Bill Clinton is on there, Alan Dershowitz is on there.

The Dersh himself is the Dershowitz

letter is really unsettling.

Yeah, Donald Trump is in there.

We'll get to that in a second.

Yeah, Donald Trump is in there, obviously.

These are not Mort Zuckerman, is on there.

Leslie Wexner is on there.

So a number of like very prominent people, unknown is at the very end.

I don't know.

That's like literally how the book listed it.

So they just have a letter from someone who's presumably his friend, but didn't put a name.

I mean, that's uh, that's a smart move if you're doing things which are federal crimes.

And then, after that, you've got the letters from scientist friends of his, which include people we brought up on my episode about a bioscience company who pretends they're cloning dire wolves.

Uh, Marie Galkin and Martin Nowak are both on here, so that's great.

Oh, good.

And then after that, I just noted Girlfriends is like the third group of people who had letters, and all those names were blacked out.

But then, under science, there's another section that's girl dash friends

that's longer and all of those names are blacked out.

No fucking idea what that is supposed to mean.

Yeah.

But upsetting.

It's not good, whatever it is.

Yeah.

Anyway, there's some more names on there, but they're not super relevant.

Gillen Maxwell's prologue is handwritten, or at least the note in front of it is handwritten.

I know you will enjoy looking through the book, and I hope you will derive as much pleasure looking through it as I did putting it together for you.

Happy birthday.

Love, Gillen Maxwell.

So that's the prologue.

One of the first pictures, I mean, the first picture in the book is Jeffrey Epstein standing around with a bunch of soldiers.

They look like, I mean, I would guess from some African country.

They're all in a camo pattern that's not immediately familiar to me.

And yeah, I can't fully read what it says down here.

Some of the lines say something about a president and the secret service to greet you.

I don't know who these soldiers were that Jeffrey's standing around.

I kind of want to know, but it's a weird photo to start.

And then immediately after that is Jeffrey Epstein's Cub Scout graduation photo.

They've got that in there.

And it's just a bunch of like pictures of Epstein throughout his life.

Like that's kind of how this thing opens before we get down to the letters.

Yeah, one thing I wanted to get at.

So there's on page 57, there's a photo of Jeffrey Epstein wearing a weird shirt with a bunch of hand prints on it when he was younger.

That's just titled Girls on My Boat.

We picked up girls on beach, went out on boat.

I tell them with knife in my hand to take suits off, but Warren tells me, Don't worry, his name is Jay N.

He's just joking.

He lives at so-and-so.

I tell Mark to throw him into water.

He did.

No idea what the fuck that's about.

But like a lot of it's like that.

It's like very upsetting stories that are handwritten crudely, I think, and often by Gillen.

But yeah,

it's like pretty deeply upsetting stuff.

Okay,

I do kind of want to read this Bill Elkis letter.

It just starts with, it's no secret that Jeffrey appreciates beautiful women, that not many people know he can create them out of thin air as he did in Iowa in 1988.

Good to give a place and time when discussing things that are illegal.

Yeah,

this guy says that he was managing the money of a family who lived in Fairfield, Iowa.

Hog farming is a serious industry there, and many people feel there's more than a little truth in the saying that it's hard to tell the difference between the girls and the hogs in southeast Iowa.

Jesus.

Jeffrey came to Fairfield to check in on their investig on their investment opportunities.

He asked about the nightlife and we could only laugh as we dropped him off at the local motel.

The next morning, a group of four of us picked up Jeffrey to give him a tour of the area.

At our first stop, we parked in front of a bookstore.

As we were getting out of the car, a spectacular tall, blonde woman suddenly came out of the store, walked directly up to Jeffrey, and announced, I am new to this area.

What's going on?

It turns out she was a sales representative for a firm selling academic-branded athletic clothing.

She was literally driving through Iowa visiting local campuses.

Jeffrey invited her to join us and did his magic.

Within a few hours, he had invited her to return to New York with him for the weekend.

Yeah, a lot of stuff like that.

We should probably read Dershowitz's letter.

Yeah.

Yeah, one sec.

Yeah.

You can do that.

Okay,

here's Dershowitz's.

Who was that man with Epstein?

is the title of the letter.

Inquiring minds are asking, who is that man with Epstein?

Jeffrey Epstein is, of course, one of the world's most famous men, a household name throughout the planet.

His picture has appeared on the cover of every magazine in the world.

Everyone knows his story, from his humble roots on Coney Island to his rise to one of the most envied public figures in the Western world.

But what is he doing flying to Africa with an obscure former politician from Hope, Arkansas?

Who is that politician, and why would Epstein have picked him for the coveted seat on his private jet?

Vanity Unfair was determined to get to the bottom of this mystery man and to reveal the story behind the story.

Normally, we would not pry into the private life of an obscure Arkansas politician, particularly one who has tried so hard, up to now so successfully, to keep his private life to himself.

But the moment this obscure man stepped under the Epstein jet, he became fair game for probing inquiry.

Why would a man like Epstein, who can pick and choose his companions from princes to professors, select a flying companion from the Ozark Mountains?

To be sure, he was a Rhodes scholar, but we all know how easy it is to get a Rhodes if you're from Arkansas.

There must be something else.

Vanity Unfair decided to snoop around.

This obscure politician reluctantly agreed to an interview on the express condition that it was completely off the record.

This is what he told us.

And then it's blank.

The letter ends.

It comes with a note note

reading, Dear Jeffrey, as a birthday gift to you, I managed to obtain an early version of the Vanity Unfair article.

I talked them into changing the focus from you to Bill Clinton, as you will see from the enclosed excerpt.

Happy birthday in best regards.

And then there's a fake Vanity Unfair article.

Yeah.

Or a cover.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That who is Jack the Ripper?

Was it Jeffrey Epstein?

Al-Qaeda in South America, financed by Epstein.

Jeffrey Epstein stole my heart in other courtroom dispatches.

It's like really crudely animated, but

yeah.

I mean, it's

what do you even say?

Oh, there is a quote on the fat on the Vanity Fair cover attributed to Epstein that says, Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.

So I guess that's a Jeffrey Epstein original.

Wow.

How profound.

Before we talk about the Trump letter, there's this one other image I'd like to discuss.

This, what I can only describe as a grooming-themed drawing

given to him as part of his birthday card depicting Jeffrey Epstein in 1983 giving balloons and a lollipop to three young children girls like children children and importantly his pockets are turned out out and the pants he's wearing are like patched and old he's clearly poor and in this and in 1983 by the way he was working as a tutor and a teacher like he was teaching kids at private schools like so that's what's represented here yeah the other section of the drawing is in 2003 and has Jeffrey Epstein sitting on the beach with four women touching his body.

One woman is very clearly touching his genitals and has J-E tattooed on her ass.

Jeffrey Epstein's jet is flying above.

We know it's his jet because the actual in-number of his real jet is written on the side of the jet.

Yeah.

And on the beach, he is on a lawn chair outside of what sort of resembles Trump's Mar-Lago Resort in terms of the architectural style, the arched doorways, the tiered structure, and layout of the palm trees and the beach.

This building does not match his house in Florida or his house in the southwest or his house on the island, which appears very different with blue roofing.

I'm not saying this necessarily is Mar-a-Lago, but if I were to try to draw Mar-a-Lago from memory, it might look something like this.

There's certainly a resemblance,

which is notable.

Yeah, we should talk about literally the next photo from this is a picture of Jeffrey Epstein holding a check for $22,000 to him from Donald Trump.

There's three people posing next to him.

One of them is a woman whose face is blacked out.

There's also another woman with her face blacked out behind them, but the man who's sitting next to the woman at what looks like a dinner table does not have his face blacked out.

I don't know why.

And it says on this, Jeffrey showing early talents with money and women, sells fully depreciated, and then the name of the woman who is being sold is blacked out to Donald Trump for $22,500.

Shoot early people skills too.

Even though I handled the deal, I didn't get any of the money for the girl.

So pretty sickening joke.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Genuinely like nauseating.

Literally, yeah.

Like him holding up a check Donald Trump gave him for a girl.

Like a fake novelty check signed by someone who's not Trump, just someone signing Donald Trump, not Donald Trump's signature, but people joking

about Jeffrey selling a woman to Trump for $22,500.

Was it fully depreciated?

Was that the phrasing used?

That is the phrasing.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's fucking disgusting.

And then we get down to the original Trump letter, which we've talked about on the show.

We've read it to you.

This is the one where Donald says it's framed as a conversation between them, and Donald says enigmas never age.

Have you noticed that?

Anyway, the only thing noteworthy about this is now we have the drawing of the woman.

It's drawn around the script, and it's, I would say, pretty clearly a pubescent girl.

Like, there's breasts drawn on.

The breasts do not look fully developed.

And they do not look, they're not large.

No, and the position of them is higher.

They look like underdeveloped breasts.

Yes.

It looks like a drawing of a young girl, like

of a child.

It's so much more creepy than anyone who like tried to draw what this might have looked like has like previously imagined.

Like they were all drawing, you know, like conventionally attractive like adult female bodies.

This is much more creepy.

Now, I will say it doesn't look like his signature is meant to be pubic hair here.

It's in a similar position, but no,

this is a very abstract drawing.

Yes.

His signature is just his first name, Donald, which he signs a lot of personal notes with, not his full Donald Trump signature.

Trump is maintaining that he did not sign this, that this is a forgery.

He is unaware of this letter, even though the signature matches other signatures from him around this time.

And this just feels like a very Donald Trump thing to do.

Yeah.

And is worded similarly to how he talked about women in this era.

He now makes statements being like, I don't talk this way.

All my, everyone who knows me knows I don't talk this way.

And if you watch like clips from Donald Trump in the early 2000s talking about women, it is this type of language.

It is, it is very gross.

Yeah.

Like, everyone remembers the Howard Stern clip.

Like, come on.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

Now, I should, it's also worth noting, one of the last things in the book is a recipe for like chocolate chip cookies.

I'm trying to figure out who put the recipe in there, but their name is blacked out.

They're right under Henry Rossofsky and right above Les Wexner.

I don't know who put that chocolate chip cookie recipe in here, but I might try to make those cookies.

The Epstein biscuit.

Yeah, I wouldn't eat those.

Yeah.

A few other things before we close this episode related to Epstein.

On September 5th, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that Trump was actually a secret FBI informant tasked with taking down Jeffrey Epstein.

I hadn't heard it.

They did a great job.

Yeah, well.

I'm saying that what Epstein did is a hoax.

It's a terrible, unspeakable evil.

He believes that himself.

When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mir-a-Lago.

He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.

The president knows and has great sympathy for the women who suffered these unspeakable harms.

It's detestable to him.

He and I have spoken about this as recently as 24 hours ago.

There should be documents that could corroborate that, one would imagine.

One would think.

On September 8th, Mike Johnson walked back.

His FBI informant comments

telling reporters he was referring to what Epstein victims attorneys has said that Trump was, quote, willing to help law enforcement to go after the guy who was a disgusting child abuser, sex trafficker, all the allegations.

That's what they heard.

I don't know if I use the right terminology, but that's common knowledge, and everybody knows that.

I was repeating what has been common knowledge for a long time.

The president was helpful in trying to get Epstein for the law enforcement to go after Epstein.

Unquote.

Great stuff from Mike Johnson.

Sure.

A day later, White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt confirmed that Trump was not, in fact, an FBI informant.

One other weird Epstein story from this week is how the DOJ has been beefing with James O'Keefe's Project Veritas.

Yeah.

Project Veritas did an operation against a DOJ employee in which they recorded him saying this.

But those files do exist.

Yeah, thousands and thousands of page of the five.

They'll redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal, democratic people in those files.

And then they visited that Maxwell person

and also involved.

Got transferred to a minimum security prison too recently, which is against BLP policy because

she's a committed sex committee.

They're offering her something to keep it on.

That was the acting deputy chief of the Office of Enforcement Operations, Joseph Schnidt, telling a stranger about the FBI and DOJ's handling of the Epstein files.

The DOJ responded to O'Keefe saying, quote, Joseph Joseph Schnitt had no role in the department's internal review of Epstein materials.

He has confirmed his munch to leadership, and we plan on publishing his written statement to that effect when we have it.

In his words, the comments he made were based on, quote, what he learned in the media, and he has, quote, no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Miss Maxwell other than what was reported in the news, unquote.

And then, Schnitt used the Department of Justice X account to post

what it could be described as like an Apple notes apology statement with 30% battery displayed on his phone where he talks about

where he talks about meeting a quote woman named Skylar on Hinge a dating app in July 2025.

Her profile is no longer findable.

We had two dates.

She gave no clues that she was a reporter or recording our dates.

Had I a clue, the first date would have ended immediately and there would have never been a second one.

My profile indicated I I did quote-unquote government work, but did not specify for which agency.

I never discussed what I do at DOJ.

The comments I made were my own personal comments on what I've learned in the media and not from anything I've done or learned via work.

Incredible.

The United States government, everybody.

Yeah, and James O'Keefe out there with the journalism thirst trap, I guess.

I wonder if it's

a one-party consent.

This is in DC, right?

I don't believe DC is one-party consent.

Yeah, I I would be shocked.

I'm not sure how O'Keefe pulls all this stuff off legally.

He could get in trouble for this one.

Yeah.

My understanding would be, just to be clear, for people who aren't in on the jargon, like in most states of the union, I think you need both people's consent to record a conversation.

You could argue, I guess, he didn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy sitting out there, but I think this is very clearly a clandestine recording.

Oh, wait, no, no, no.

Sorry.

D.C.

is a one-party consent area.

Damn.

Okay.

Oh, there you go.

Wow, okay, I did, yeah, did not know that.

Yep, so only

he's safe, yeah.

I guess if that date was in DC, you got a lot of

jurisdictions around that bumping up, but yeah, that's surprising.

No, he's good.

All right, well,

I think that's all we have for this week, which is a lot.

This was a massive news week.

This is an extra long episode, but sometimes that happens.

Congratulations on making it this far.

Yeah,

and uh, may every day be a new wonderful secret as

Donald Trump told Jeffrey Epstein.

Stop him.

Just turn it off.

We reported the news.

We reported the news.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Thanks for listening.

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