It Could Happen Here Weekly 201

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to the podcast.

It's me, James, today, and I'm very fortunate to be joined by Francis, whose husband Amos is facing a date in immigration court this week.

We wanted to bring you a first-hand perspective of what it's like going through immigration court right now.

So Francis, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, of course.

We're very glad you're here.

So to start with, like,

would you like to explain your family's, I know this is a lengthy topic, your family's immigration story?

Yes.

I met.

My husband Amos in Hollywood.

We were both living in Hollywood and we dated a couple years there and then ended up moving to his home country of Tunisia because he had a big family there and I don't have much family here and we wanted to have children.

It's much better cost of living there.

And at the time, the government there was doing pretty well.

There had been an Arab Spring, which my husband was very much involved with

on this over here in the States, like helping with that.

And so he's an activist.

And at the time, the government there was pretty good.

So we lived there for eight years, had our children there and a new um presidency came in while we were living there um the current president kayas said

um and things started to change so my husband was doing a lot of organizing grassroot movement through local farmers unions and monitoring elections and doing pro-democracy activities for anti-corruption and he's really an activist for free speech and things like that so he started getting getting harassed.

He was arrested.

He was beaten up by the police and things like that.

So

it started getting very uncomfortable.

Also, I was getting harassed.

I would get pulled over a lot by the police.

They would impound our car.

They would take us out.

Yeah, the police there carry big guns, you know, as in most Arab countries.

And so it was very frightening for me.

Yeah.

They carry big guns.

They're either on their backs or even in their hands.

And they would have me and the kids get out of the car.

And it was very frightening.

So

the children and I, well, we were all planning on coming back to the States.

I hadn't been home in a while.

And so the children and I went ahead and came, assuming that my husband would be able to get at least a visa to, you know, see us.

And while once we were here, He was not able to get a visa.

He tried and tried and tried.

And I was begging the embassy to allow him to see us here and they just would not.

So we were separated for nine months.

So him being away from our children, they were about four and six at the time, or maybe five and seven.

It was devastating for all of us.

So he ended up taking a very treacherous journey across South America and made his way through many countries and presented himself for asylum at the border because, again, we did not feel safe living in Tunisia anymore.

So he presented himself for asylum at the border and they allowed him into this country with a court date.

And at the time, Biden was president.

So things are, you know, have changed a lot since then.

It, you know, the immigration system is broken.

Everybody knows that.

It takes years and years and years and tons and tons of money for an immigrant to, you know, go through the process.

You know, people who say, oh, just do it the right way.

It's not that simple.

It takes a lot of money and a lot lot of time and it's very complicated and when you're fleeing a country or a situation where you're in danger there is no other option you know there's nowhere to go back right so that's what we're kind of facing now so he had a court date we've had five master hearings and we've gone through a few different lawyers because we have found for one thing it's extremely difficult to find a lawyer these days because they're very overbooked Most of them are not taking new cases.

People tell us, oh, just get a pro bono lawyer.

It is almost impossible to get a pro bono lawyer anymore.

And, you know, who has thousands and thousands of extra dollars to pay for legal help with the situation?

We...

do have a lawyer now thanks to some fundraising that we've done.

So since he's been here, we've had to check in at the ICE office.

Like it was on sort of a basis of after you have a court hearing the next day or within a couple of days, you must go check in at ICE.

And it's been very fine.

Like the, there's a very nice officer there who knows us and

tries to help answer our questions.

So it was, it was pretty calm when Biden was president.

Yeah.

And then now that Trump's administration has taken over, we knew that there would be a lot of changes and we were very frightened.

Yeah.

So we went for a hearing earlier this year.

You know, we're just a lot more nervous.

And the hearing went fine, just kind of as normal.

We went to the ICE check-in.

I think our guard was kind of down because we thought, since the hearing went fine, this will go fine.

And the NICE officer told us, you know, well, this is going to sound a little scary, but we need you to go check in at a different place this time.

And so they sent us to a company called ISOP.

They own, I think, migrant detention centers.

So we went to this place and he was there the whole day.

They were interviewing him.

They put an app in his phone so that now he has to do these weekly check-ins where his phone makes this loud alarm sound.

He must stop everything and take a picture of himself.

There's a monthly home visit where they come to our house and take his picture and ask him questions.

There's, we have to go check in at their office.

And also he does virtual check-ins.

So it's just a lot more.

Yeah.

And everything was kind of going as planned.

We, our last hearing in July,

that was really stressful because we didn't have a lawyer leading up to it.

And at the last second, we were able to get a lawyer.

And the reason it's so important to have a lawyer is because if you don't, you must appear in person.

And that's very stressful and frightening.

Again, we have small children.

We don't even do babysitters.

Like we're always just together.

We're a very tight family unit.

And so we go to these things together.

And we really wanted this last one in July to be virtual because if it's virtual, you know, it just feels a lot safer.

We're in the comfort of our own home and we've been hearing in the news, you know, how they're picking up people outside of their court hearings.

So we got the attorney, we got a virtual hearing.

It was a very short hearing.

It was great because she just gave us the next hearing date was September of 2028.

And the judge said, okay, see you in 2028.

And we breathed a sigh of relief, crossed our fingers, did our necessary check-ins, and we were just, you know, hoping that everything would be fine.

Yeah.

Well, just here at the end of August, beginning of September, we get out of the blue a new notice.

It was very interesting, too, because this ISAP company calls us and says, good news.

We're going to lessen the amount of check-ins you have to do.

It's going to be a lot less now.

So, you know, we, it was interesting because she's like, this is great news for you.

It's like once a month.

You'll still do the weekly ones, and then it's just going to be once a month.

Okay.

But then she says, and then we'll see you after your hearing in september meaning this september and we we thought it was a mistake because we knew we had one in 2028 yeah like no no you got a new hearing notice so that's how we found out they didn't send it to us even our lawyer didn't know so we find out that we have a new hearing out of the blue there was a mix up about the dates but anyway we we it was september 11th or 15th and then our attorney asked for an extension right and the most they could give us was nine days so now our hearing is this coming Wednesday, September 24th.

And on this has never happened before, but when again, when you have an attorney, you can appear virtually.

Right.

And on this hearing notice, it said that the attorney can appear virtually, but the respondent must appear in person.

And that is highly unusual.

It's in bold at the top.

So our attorney agrees with us that it's pretty clear.

The plan is what they've been doing now is when you go to court, they drop your case.

So now it's dismissed and therefore you are just here without due process.

Now you don't have a right to due process.

It's done.

So you're just here illegally.

And then they are sometimes waiting for you in the hallway or outside the building to take you to ICE detention.

So obviously since we found this out,

I mean, we've just been sleepless nights.

full panic mode of figuring out like what to do.

And then our attorney doesn't even have answers for us.

She

does not know what to do.

She says, every, this is all new to her.

It's new to all the lawyers.

She doesn't even know what to do or who to ask.

Yeah.

And that's frightening because that's why we have an attorney.

You know, it's, we're hoping for some

support or someone who's knowledgeable about the law and what are our options.

And it feels like we don't have any.

We feel extremely helpless.

And I've never thought I would see this in my country, my quote unquote free country that I have lived in most of my life and grew up in.

Also, about two weeks ago, they changed the law where now

we are not entitled to a bond hearing.

So, if he is taken into detention, we can't even get him out because that was the first thing we thought was, well, let's just try to get some money together and we'll bail him out.

That's not even an option anymore.

So, again, more fear.

So, we're dealing with all of this and wondering what to do as far as, you know, again, we have small children.

They're now seven and nine years old.

We're extremely happy where we're living.

We live in a small community that does lean on the conservative side.

So we do feel a little uncomfortable with some of our neighbors and their flags and everything.

They're very bold.

So, you know, and you can't hide being brown.

So it's awkward.

And then.

our children because of the way that we left before when we left Tunisia it was pretty sudden

we kind of of took them out of school and just came to America and left their dad behind.

So they've been in therapy ever since.

They each have a weekly therapist just to help with if they're, you know, if they're going to have any symptoms of trauma coming up

for them.

And they're doing great, actually.

They're thriving here.

They are so happy.

They are in the best school.

I actually work at their school.

And my husband volunteers at the school and he's been their soccer coach for both of their teams, which is a lot to take on.

he also volunteers in our community at a ranch um helping with horses and at a facility for senior citizens and um he does have a work permit they granted him a work permit which took a long time to get that's good because that can take a long time it took a long time um over a year but um he does have it now so we so we got excited because he you he only got the work permit a couple months ago.

So we're very excited.

You know, he can work.

And

now it's just out of the blue.

Our world is turned upside down where there is a strong potential that he will be taken into ICE custody.

And listen,

I understand if that's how they want to do things now, but if it was like a safer situation where maybe they just, I don't know.

It's just, there's so many unknowns about where are they taking him.

There's our lawyer does not think we will be informed about where they take him.

That's one thing, which means we probably won't be able to communicate with him.

We don't know how long he'll be there.

They could keep him there the entire three years until 2028.

They might just want to keep him in detention and wait for his next year.

It doesn't make any sense to me because...

That costs money and he's a taxpayer.

Wouldn't it pay more if he's home working?

By the way, yes, he has no criminal record whatsoever.

He has not broken any immigration laws, at least when he came over the border.

It was legal to present yourself for asylum when you are coming from a country like he was, where he was, you know, being harassed, detained.

Right.

And his entire family, like we were being threatened and feeling very unsafe there.

So.

Yeah, it's a textbook asylum case, right?

Yeah, we have a valid asylum claim.

We've submitted hundreds of documents of evidence to the court.

You know, the judge actually complimented us on how well we did because at the time we didn't have an attorney.

We were just trying to do it on our own because we couldn't afford an attorney.

We were both college graduates.

So we put together a really organized

case.

And so I have filed to sponsor him as well, you know, as my husband.

We've been together 12 years, married 10, two kids, and they don't care about that.

It does not matter if he has an American family.

It does not matter.

They are taking taking anybody.

And that also is very, very frustrating.

And that's the reason that we should have due process.

They should be looking at every single case individually and have a judge make a decision.

That's the whole point of it.

Obviously, if we had hindsight, if we had known that this know, could have happened, we had no idea that this could have happened in our country, we would have started this sponsorship process a long time ago.

The reason we didn't is because he was married before and he went through this.

process with USCIS to try to get sponsorship with his first wife.

And it was extremely complicated and frustrating and cost a lot of money.

And he went through a bunch of lawyers and he was so traumatized by the experience that literally we had big legal files in our house that I had to hide because he couldn't even see them them or he would get triggered so he didn't want to put me through that and we were living in tunisia anyway and so we just figured we'd we were just kind of kicking the can down the road thinking oh we'll deal with it at some point unfortunately we waited way too long and you know didn't start dealing with it until he got here and so uscis which is where we you know file for this sponsorship yeah us customs immigration service people know familia yes thank you after we filed it they gave us a time period on when we would get the decision it was 15 months that we would have to wait and we've been checking the site checking the site checking the site has been counting down counting down and about a month ago we were down to a week oh wow okay that we would be getting a decision

and after the week passed it changed the message on the app now or the website now says indefinitely you'll have to wait indefinitely for this decision so we've been trying to ask our lawyer please push for this because if that gets you know an answer, that would be great.

But the answer could be no on that as well.

They could just say, no, come on in, and they can take him straight from there as well.

So the whole thing.

is so incredibly stressful and frightening the fact that my government, I'm in America, I'm an American citizen with two American kids, and my government is threatening to tear our family apart and take my husband away, the father of my children, and traumatize my children again to have, you know, their dad not with us.

And Lord knows where they're going to send him.

It is absolutely infuriating.

And it feels like agony too, because like every day I wake up and I'm counting down the days to this hearing and we have no idea what's going to happen.

It feels very, very threatening to our safety and our livelihood.

And that it's coming from our government does not make me feel like this is a great country to live in and I do not feel safe living here.

Yeah, thanks for sharing all that.

That's a lot to

have to put out there.

So thank you for sharing it.

I guess we should just explain for people

like

there's a lot of stuff that maybe people who haven't been through the system might not grasp within that.

Right.

So

what the government has, if I just break down like the dismissal of cases, as I understand it, what the government has been doing has been dismissing people's asylum case, right, which they got under Title VIII when they entered under the Biden administration, and then placing them in expedited removal proceedings,

which is a mandatory detention, as you said, right?

It's not a bailout situation.

And then, as you say, forcing them to fight from detention, right, which in this case would obviously stop your husband from working, stop your husband from paying taxes, and instead make him a burden on the American taxpayer while he's detained

in conditions which can often be very poor.

In that situation, your only sort of claim is a credible fear of torture, right?

Which is something that in your case it sounds like would be very real.

But nonetheless, that is a very high bar and we've seen the United States do all kinds of things to get around that.

Like we report on that all the time.

So I can understand

that fear and where it comes from.

I think people will be

shocked, but they perhaps shouldn't be to hear that like, yes, you can be a US citizen married to a non-US citizen.

This can still happen to you.

It can happen to anyone who is not a citizen in this country right now.

I wonder, like,

it must have been pretty heartbreaking to see the election, to see the rhetoric.

Like,

how

does that line up with your lives in your community?

Because I see this often, even from really conservative people, right?

Like, I know people who voted for Trump who have also shown up to like cook for asylum seekers in the desert or to help refugees living in our community.

Like it's a very strange thing.

Have you felt alienated from your community

since the beginning of this year?

Like has it I'm interested in like how your lives have changed because of that change in rhetoric?

Yes.

Like I said, we have neighbors on our street.

So there was a block party for 4th of July, which I didn't even feel like celebrating.

But we had just moved into this house.

So we felt, you know, like we should go at least meet the neighbors.

And there's a lot of Trump flags on our street, and it was very awkward.

But my husband is very charming and charismatic and outgoing.

And he just goes right up and introduces himself.

And there was one gentleman wearing a t-shirt that said, they hate us because they ain't us.

And it's got a big old, you know, Trump face on it.

And it was just so, so awkward.

So, yeah, we feel uncomfortable.

Also, like I said, it's a, it leans conservative in this community.

And our school, even like as we're doing this fundraiser, we were very careful not to share it with anyone that we live near, just in case, you know, because we have been hearing reports of people, like neighbors calling ice on their neighbors to, you know, report them and, you know, go pick up this person.

You know, he looks brown or I don't know what they're, what they're doing or their logic, but,

you know, yeah, it feels very threatening.

And even, oh, my, my.

daughter even said, can't data just cover, cover up his skin?

You know, like she was just thinking like yeah was he gonna wear a purka yeah yeah right yeah i mean you can't really hide who you are and you shouldn't have to right and it's very hard for the kids to be saying that yeah that dad should be hiding

yeah and they've asked me how can we make trump just forget about data you know and i said well he doesn't really know they don't you know he doesn't know exactly your dad he's this they're doing this to a lot of people you know right we just happen to be in that group but i will say, we have some close friends that we really adore and they are Trumpers.

You know, we see it on their Facebook page, but then when we're in their presence, they don't bring it up and it's just kind of an elephant in the room.

And honestly, as our data is getting closer, we plan on having them over to talk about it because it feels very awkward.

And

I just think they're just the kindest people.

They're extremely religious, which we are not.

We're more on the spiritual side.

But, you know, I think

they're just on a team.

They've chosen a team.

And I don't think they're necessarily paying a lot of attention to what's actually happening to people.

Yeah.

So we're hoping that just a conversation will just let them know we want to be honest with the people that are close to us and that mean a lot to us, you know, because

we don't know what's about to happen.

And

even there's members of my family that I feel very awkward talking to as well, where I've kind of distanced myself because people who are still supporting this regime at this point, to me, are too far gone to even kind of get them to come around.

I guess.

I mean, I just don't understand.

I can't understand support of Trump from the first place.

So again, if people are still on that boat, I really don't relate to them.

And it's very awkward, especially.

Yeah, people in my family who supposedly love me and my children, you know, are still supporting that regime.

And you, despite seeing all the things, maybe they don't see it.

I mean, I know they, if they are exclusively watching Fox News, then they are only receiving that information, which is not telling the whole story.

Right.

And it's definitely completely skewed to make them look like the good guys.

And anyone on that's liberal is a bad guy.

And they're very much targeting, you know, Democrats now as the enemy, the enemy of the state, they have even said.

So it's, I mean, it's, so now I'm starting to feel even unsafe for myself because I'm, I'm not super active on Facebook, but I, I am outspoken because I can't resist.

I mean, I, it's, there is freedom of speech in this country, or at least there was, and there should be.

And it's hard to be quiet at this time.

And I, we would be a lot more outspoken if we weren't feeling unsafe.

Yeah, but you have that fear.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Especially my husband, because he's always been an activist and a, you know, fighter for free speech and equal rights.

And so it's, that's one of the things that's really crushing him and his soul and his spirit through all this is that he cannot even speak out.

Yeah.

So, you know, for people like him, it's not even for himself, but just for people like him.

I know he wants to help, you know, and it's really challenging.

I know.

It's so sad to see like the whole point of the asylum system and like at least that's the sort of stated purpose of American foreign policy is to like spread democracy throughout the world and allow people who have stood up for democracy and been persecuted to come here and be safe.

And evidently the United States doesn't even believe in saying that anymore in so much as it said it didn't always do it in the past.

Yeah, it is really sad to think that like even that is gone.

Yeah.

For so many people, I think the idea of migrants is like an abstract one, right?

For your Fox News viewer, migrants are just like an abstract brown-skinned bad person.

And I often think that if those people had known migrants in their community, they would either not vote that way or they would at least not like that policy, even if there were other things they liked about Trump, which I go, that's not something I can find much understanding of.

And those people do exist, but it's just so sad to see people turned against anyone who wasn't born in this country.

Yeah.

And simply because they weren't, not because of any other character trait they have.

Particularly the brown skin, though, because you have to admit, the Canadians, they're, I mean, even though there's been a little tension with the Canadians at first in this regime,

you know, they're, they're pretty much under the radar.

And anyone from Europe or anyone, he's even said, like, send the Nordic people.

That's fine.

You know, I mean, he's being, he's very clear.

Right.

Yeah, the South African refugees are welcome.

Come on.

It's just so blatant, you know.

And I remember when I was growing up, my mom mom in particular would complain when we started to have to press one for English.

I remember my mom complaining about that or thinking, you know,

if you're here, you should learn the language.

Well, I got to say, I lived in Tunisia for eight years and I did not learn the language.

I tried to teach myself.

It's a dialect that, you know, at the time, they didn't have.

lessons that you could get on on YouTube or Duolingo or anything.

You know, if I learned French and Arabic, maybe I could piece something together.

But I, I, you know, it's not as easy as as people say.

And, and yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not.

And then just to speak of my mother, I guess I will say

she prides herself on making friends with people at the grocery store who are of another ethnicity or like really, you know, getting to know a doctor or she has a housekeeper who's been working for her for like 30 years.

And so I know she doesn't think of that person as being someone that shouldn't be here.

Right.

So, you know, so I think even if you do know a family or two who's who's an immigrant, you might think, oh, well, not them.

I don't mean them.

I mean all the other ones.

I mean all the bad guys.

Yeah, and the bad ones.

Yeah.

And if Trump was serious about getting the bad ones, go to the gang neighborhoods.

Like we do know where the dangerous gang neighborhoods are, but they're not sending the tanks there.

They're sending them to MacArthur Park, you know,

Home Depot.

It's like, if you want to get the gangs, get the gangs.

But I think they're too scared of that because these are really just regular people that they're hiring to do this work for them, to pick up people.

And that's why they're hiding their faces because they are regular people who would like to probably have a normal life outside of this new job that they've been so well paid for.

Right.

Yeah.

And certainly they're recruiting a lot more people to do that right now, which is going to only see a step up in enforcement.

Yeah.

I wonder, like, in so much as anything has helped, because people will want to help, right?

Like, I think people will listen.

They will understand your situation.

They will see the possibility of your family being torn apart and want to help.

But it's hard to help right now, right?

Unless you're an immigration lawyer and every pro bono immigration lawyer, I know, is mental health, damaging levels of overworked and stressed and traumatized.

I think so.

What can people do either for you or in their communities to like show up for people who are in your situation?

I would say donate.

You could donate to the ACLU, donate to individual families like ours.

I'm sure I think there's a lot of GoFundMes out there that people are trying to raise money for.

That's the way, you know, everything is kind of done these days when people are desperate.

And speak out.

And I think the most important thing is have conversations and get to know people.

And even, like, I, yeah, sometimes I see you know, a Hispanic person in a grocery store.

I just want to tell them, thank you for being here.

I'm, I'm glad you're here because I think they must be feeling so scared right now and so unwanted and so unappreciated when they are doing some of the hardest jobs that nobody else wants to do for very little money.

Yeah, these are essential workers, they should be paid the most.

Everything is backwards, you know, the people who are doing the hardest, you know, cleaning the toilets and picking the fields, they should be paid the most.

It doesn't make any sense, regardless of where they're from.

They're willing to do the work.

And Lord knows their background of where they came from and how with the struggles that they've been through to leave their home country.

Nobody wants to leave their home country.

You do that because it's so bad that you, you must, you know, especially if you have children, you're trying to make a better better life for yourself.

And we've been sold on this American dream prospect, you know, that we've heard our whole lives and the whole world has heard about.

So they come and now we're just punishing them brutally.

It's not even like, oh, no, sorry, we're full, you know, we're going to have to send you back.

It's like, no, we're going to punish you.

We're going to treat you like dogs.

call you animals and vermin and call you horrible things, send you to places where you're unsafe and untaken care of.

And maybe if you're lucky, you'll get sent back to your home country or you'll get sent to a random country or even a prison like a horrible prison in another country where who knows what's good it's just this is what frightens me yeah you know again if he was sent to somewhere to a place where i could you know we could have visits or calls or you know and he waits it out i i guess that would be more tolerable than the unknown of his his safety he's not going to be well taken care of that's a fact they don't care about these people.

And my husband, unfortunately, he's always been extremely strong, extremely brave, a fighter.

And I feel like his fight is gone.

He's physically and mentally at the end of his rope.

And I'm extremely frightened.

I mean, he just feels like he's tired of fighting.

He's just exhausted from this, you know, again, he, I mean, we've been together 12 years.

And again, he was going through this process with his first wife, who he was with for eight years, and he never got an answer.

He was never denied, but he just never got an answer.

And that was enough for them, for our case, just to, you know, it's going to be really, really difficult to get a yes from, from, to, for a green card.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it still happens.

I've heard of it happening even in the last few months,

but it is increasingly harder and less common.

And that is.

brutal yeah like it's horrible and the way of course as you're saying the system is designed to make you feel feel hopeless and just to,

as they call it, self-deport.

Yes.

And even our lawyer doesn't know what to do.

And I feel the judge seems like a nice person.

And I would imagine.

it must be very frustrating too to be a judge at this time where they have to be the ones that are just kind of their hands are tied.

They will lose their job if they don't do what the regime wants them to do.

So, you know, this is what happens in third world countries.

This is why America has been great because we weren't like this before with this you know cutting out free speech and things like that it's it's changing rapidly and and if if people don't stand up more and i'm sorry but it's going to have to take more than these peaceful protests unfortunately because they're not doing anything we are being laughed at by the mega republicans they do not care about our peaceful protests they're just like okay there's a protest on this day next day they're just going to keep doing it harder.

You know, sure.

Yeah.

It's not changing anything.

So something has to change.

I'm hoping more celebrities come out and start speaking up.

I think that would help because people tend to back the celebrities that they love.

And I'm kind of alarmed that more people, like, especially the most powerful celebrities like Oprah, for example, why aren't they out there every day?

Yeah.

You know, saying, this is what I support and this is what I don't support.

I think they're scared.

I'm assuming.

I would imagine so.

Yeah.

Like, that's quite a sad thought.

I do think that the mega-Republicans are outnumbered.

And I think that they're continuously going to be outnumbered as things get more and more, you know,

shocking as we're seeing our freedoms being stripped, the constitutional freedoms that we've always known being stripped.

I think it's going to get worse.

And I don't know how bad it has to get before change happens.

Yeah, I don't think any of us do.

I do think you're right that more and more people are not happy with how this is happening, but

there doesn't even seem to be a will among Democrats to oppose this in a meaningful way, which is very sad.

Yeah, even the Democrats in power don't know what to do.

I mean,

yeah.

And they seem to think that it's electoral suicide to just to be basically decent and say we need to be decent people and kind to people who come here asking us to help them.

And there seems to be something that is just inadmissible in electoral politics, which is really sad right now.

So, you guys have your court date.

We will obviously continue covering this.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, we're going to continue updating people.

We will continue talking about this and

covering this.

And yeah, we'll try and get an update out.

This is coming out.

You'll be hearing this on Monday.

We will try and get an update out within a week or so

just to let everyone know how things have gone.

and what they can do to help.

Is there anything else you'd like to say to people before we go?

Yeah.

So as we found out, you know, that there's a good possibility that he will be taken into ICE detention on Wednesday, we asked our lawyer, okay, so what are the next steps if that happens?

What, you know, he has a constitutional right to due process of law, habeas corpus, and she doesn't know.

what to do.

She's never done it before.

So therefore, we need to find a different lawyer that can help us with that.

It's not in immigration court.

It's federal court.

So we have inquiries.

We actually have a consult today with someone who maybe help us with that.

We sent sent emails out last night kind of telling our story to another lawyer, hoping that we can get some support on that front, because basically that's your next, your next step.

Once you're in detention, you raise your constitutional rights of due process of law.

But then again, it's another fight.

And again, it could be from detention, which is, yeah, more money.

I'm going to be at that point a single mother, you know, trying to support bills here in California, which is already, you know, difficult and, you know, on my own and also paying lawyers and trying to fight to either find my husband or get him out of there.

You know, we don't want to leave the country if we don't have to.

We love it here.

I don't know where else to go.

We can't go to Tunisia.

I'm American.

Where are we supposed to go?

And that's what people don't understand too with immigrants.

You know, if they can't return to their home country because of safety reasons, which is most of the cases, that's why we have asylum cases, then what are they supposed to do?

You know?

Yeah.

And I don't think a lot of people seem to care, right?

They think people, they just want people to go away somewhere.

Yeah, go figure it out.

Yeah, it's not our problem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which like in this case, it very much is.

And in every case, like, and like,

It is our problem that like we should take responsibility for one another's well-being, right?

Yes.

As humans.

We we should care about each other, yeah, like

have empathy at least.

That's the least we could do, yeah.

I know a society that says it's not my problem is not one that any of us should want to live in, yeah, yeah.

And in our case, um, my husband's particularly worried because if he does get sent back to Tunisia, most definitely he would be in jail there as well, which is also not a pleasant experience, yeah, to put it mildly, and it would be, yeah, where they torture people in jail.

So, yeah, again, we don't really know what to do or where to go but these are the the thoughts that we're having yeah and they're not unreasonable yeah if we do self-deport when do we like we're trying to push it as long as we can stay stay stay stay stay stay stay you know and then when do we let them know okay okay i guess we'll self-deport like at the last second before they take them into detention like you know

i don't know the safe way to do that right and then if we do can they give us time to get our affairs in order like leaving the country is no small task and we don't even have money to do that so you know these are our options these are literally our options and again small children second grade fourth grade you know and they're thriving here like they don't deserve this and my husband even said you know he said this the other day like our children don't deserve this and i said

No children deserve the horrors of this planet, you know, that, I mean, we're actually a lot luckier than a lot of other children.

So,

but at the same time, there are children and this is a problem that we're dealing with.

And unfortunately, they have to deal with it too.

You know, that's just what a family is.

Yeah.

Our goal is to stay together no matter what.

We want to keep my husband safe and we want to keep us together.

That's our number one goal.

So unfortunately, that may mean that we need to leave.

And I will be very, very sad if that's the case because I have always loved this country.

It's always stood for greatness.

And

ironically, the group that thinks they're going to make America great again is failing miserably.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's incredibly sad.

And like you say, you've already upped and left with your children once to come to a safe place to be safe and then to have to do it again from that safe place.

I'm sure will be.

And the older they get, the more they realize what's happening.

Yeah.

It's only two years later.

You know, the poor kids.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm so sorry you're going through this.

Yeah.

Thank you.

This sucks.

Yep.

We'll all be thinking of you.

Thank you very much.

And yeah,

if you're listening, I will try and keep you updated over the next few weeks.

Thank you so much, James.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you.

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Welcome back to It Could Happen here, a podcast where I just got vaccinated.

And boy, howdy, the shit this year hits like a fucking train.

Yeah, it does.

I got vaccinated.

It's a rough one this year.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

Oh, fucking RFK Jr.

was right.

Broadcasting through the vaccine injury today.

Yeah, that's right.

I've received my vaccine injury.

I'm complaining to the board.

Oh, man.

I'm going to nap after this.

But first, how about we talk about fucking Trendi Aragua, the fucking narco criminal group that President Trump is currently justifying blowing up boats in the middle of international waters as a result of yeah it's great it's a good thing uh that we are now killing civilians in countries where we are not at war with it's great yeah this has been something stephen miller had been talking about since the first trump administration you know and had talked with like back when the military was willing to push back against trump more people would be like what do you what the fuck are you talking about we can't launch strikes at just like random boats yeah and stephen miller would be like why not and now they're doing it yeah and this group this criminal cartel out of Venezuela has been the current justification.

As we'll talk about, most of what is said about this trend de Aragua by the administration about

their role in smuggling drugs in the United States is either just completely invented or massively exaggerated.

It is a really interesting group.

They have a fascinating history.

The literal meaning is train of Aragua.

Yeah, Aragua.

Aragua, sorry.

And it started out with labor unions that were working on on a railway project that was going to be connecting central and western Venezuela together.

And as has happened in history, what started as like labor union organizing wound up kind of morphing into direct criminal activity.

Yeah.

The guy who's generally credited as the founder, although that's kind of flattening things a little bit, is Hector Guerrero Flores, known as Niño Guerrero.

And he got put in for 17 years for murder and drug trafficking at this prison called Tocoron.

tokoron am i am i saying that right james how do we how do we say yeah tokoron yeah an accent yeah there's a little accent over the second oh is it go up or down uh up

tokoron tokoron thank you james yeah and so this one of the things that's fun about this is that this prison where they start loading these guys up becomes so heavily organized and it it eventually turns from being like a prison in the traditional sense to more being like a tiny independent city that the gang is based out of it acted as their fortress they established like nightclubs in it and, you know,

luxury facilities.

And like leaders of the gang more or less came and went as they pleased, went back to their families.

And it was not really what you'd think of as a prison in the traditional sense for a lot of these guys for a while.

A payment system was created in order to like basically you would inmates would pay for protection or for access to the nicer aspects of the prison called the cause.

And if you didn't pay, you know, they had various ways of physically abusing you.

There's a good article in Small Wars Journal that talks about the origins and the impact of this group.

And it quotes someone from inside the prison as saying the first time you don't pay, they shoot your wrist, the second time, your ankle, the third time, and you face the death penalty.

Jesus.

So like you're talking like pretty traditional criminal gang stuff, right?

Yeah.

So the journey of this group from gang that's major in Venezuela to gang that's kind of operating in larger and larger chunks of South South America, followed a pretty natural path where they got involved in more kinds of smuggling and more kinds of trafficking over the years, started setting up operations in other parts of South America.

But one of the things that the gang has sort of done is you've, you've got this kind of process by which they have these local affiliates who are not directly associated with the gang in like the strict hierarchical sense in that it's not literally the gang sending an official into another another state.

It's more like franchising is kind of the way things work.

And you have different local groups, some of whom are not even connected in any way to the original organization, claiming a line of descent in order to basically draft off of that clout, you know?

Yeah, yeah, which is kind of what you've seen increasingly.

And this has led to a situation where there's enough claims of Trend being involved in the United States and other countries that it looks a lot like a larger and more centralized criminal organization than it actually is in reality.

Yeah, I think the state understands these things like mini-states, right?

Like who like with a with a leader and a distinct authority structure and like a direct command chain.

That is not how my understanding is that they operate, right?

Because they are not mini-states.

They're a different entity to that.

Yeah.

And what is your...

Because you've actually spent time reporting and in Venezuela.

When did you first become aware of Trenton?

I mean, I became aware of like the fact that there were armed gangs and criminals.

I mean, I was robbed at gunpoint when I was in Venezuela, right?

So that made me aware that there were people who

did crime with weapons.

But I wasn't aware really of Trenda Ragua until like maybe

the 2020.

I mean, I don't report on organized crime, nor do I particularly follow it, right?

But I take an interest in Venezuelan affairs in as much as I've spent time there and I have like an affinity with the people and I understand that things are getting going from bad to worse for them under their government.

So, so I took an interest,

I guess it was like, are you familiar with the Narco Sobrinos affair?

Uh, no, okay, Narcos Sobrinos is like Narco nephews.

I think they're actually step-nephews of Maduro, if I recall correctly.

It doesn't hugely matter, they're like part of his family.

Uh, in a million, and I believe they lived in his compound, and they used

like, I don't want to make statements that are incorrect.

I believe they used a presidential hangar or runway to fly a plane to Haiti, which the USTA alleges, and it is most likely true, that that plane was stuffed full of cocaine.

Sure, many such cases.

Yeah, many such cases.

They believe they have diplomatic immunity, which they did not,

which I believe came as a surprise to them at the moment of their detention.

And so at that point, I was like, shit, we can get onto this, how the Trump administration has like basically alleged that Venezuela is a narco-dictatorship.

Certainly, there is overlap between organized crime and the state, right?

It's because the state is so poor and so corrupt that inevitably you will see like overlap between organized crime and the state.

So, I guess

whenever the Narcos Obrimos affair was, I thought I was like, okay, I need to sort of be aware of this.

And of course, in my like coverage of immigration, you hear of people

mostly their talk is just not of that their life has been made hard by organized crime, if I'm honest, so much as their life has been made hard by the government completely failing to to provide services and and the complete collapse of the Venezuelan economy you know I'm not going to ask about it explicitly but if someone mentions it I sort of take note of it as one of the reasons why people are leaving what you bring up is a really good point which is that 2014 is kind of when the most recent Venezuelan economic crisis really kicked off and 2014 to 2018 was a major period of growth for trend yep and then 2018 to 2022 is when they really started pushing in up into and involving themselves increasingly in Colombia and the United States as a result of like the increased flow of Venezuelans out of Venezuela and into other countries and eventually up to the U.S.

and to some extent.

And it's been since 2022 that the gang has really been pruned back, you know, both as a result of the Venezuelan government taking control of the prison again and like basically invading it with the military in order to deny them access to what had been like their primary centralized like hub of control.

And also due to the fact that like after expansion into Colombia and Chile, both criminal organizations and the governments of those countries increasingly pushed back against the organization, right?

Yeah.

One of the reasons why they're being targeted, but also one of the things that's like fundamentally bullshit about the administration's description of what's happening is that we're very much talking about a cartel that's on its back feet and been on its back feet for the last several years as the result of significant reversals in their business and in their political situation.

Yeah.

I mean, Colombia, right, has been, you know, the Colombian Civil War is one of the longest running conflicts in the world, but things have changed there substantially, right, in the last five or seven years.

You know, you have people from the FARC disarming.

You have the fracture of what was previously their territory and some of who were previously their militants into other groups, right?

And so that has allowed the state there to continue its conflict against what remains of that and also to to clamp down on other groups, right?

And evidently, like the flow of drugs to the United States relies on

the complicity or inability to stop it of many states.

And yeah, we've seen like a concerted effort and also like the attempts of the United States to stop smuggling, right?

So I guess if people aren't familiar, we should just explain.

The USDHS of which the United States Coast Guard is part, I think a lot of people aren't aware that Coast Guard is part of DHS, claims a universal jurisdiction or jurisdiction, at least in areas where drugs are being smuggled to the United States, right?

So the U.S.

Coast Guard had a role to play in this, in the, I guess, interdiction is the word they would use of drugs coming to the United States.

I probably haven't got data on this in the last year or so, but it certainly was the case that most drugs entering the U.S.

entered through ports of entry as opposed to like between ports of entry, right?

Like through the desert, through the mountains.

And so like these, these boats, I guess, are not just to be clear like they're not necessarily going to the United States in most cases not going to United States in most cases going to Mexico and then moving to the United States through other methods but like as the governments both south of the United States and in the United States have adapted it's become harder and harder for those people right and so it's become harder and harder for these criminal organizations to make money off these drugs and that's led to I mean a situation that one of the things that they've been accused of being by the Trump administration and internationally is essentially an agent of the Maduro regime, right?

And this is something that certainly the Venezuelan government denies.

This is not a thing where I can entirely give you this is exactly what's happening, but it seems accurate to say that as an organization, as their...

their actual like control and power have been eroded, they have been utilized increasingly as a way to, for example, deal with like dissidents who are hostile to the Maduro regime, right?

As a, as a deniable asset.

In particular, there's been cases that are reasonably well documented of dissidents against the Venezuelan regime in Chile and Trendi Aragua being used as like assassins to take out dissidents in foreign countries in a deniable manner.

Right.

And I mean, it looks to me like this has kind of increased as their actual ability to directly control things and directly contest the regime as a power center has been eroded.

Yeah.

It's kind of a classic, like, I wouldn't say they're like ideologically aligned, right?

But

sometimes their interests align.

To be clear, like Trendearagua are one of the sort of armed organized crime institutions in Venezuela, but by far the only one, right?

You have

Trendelano, for example.

You have these other groups who have also been active in anti-government protests, especially since the I'm going to use the quote-unquote election here in July of last year, right?

Like where electoral fraud is widely alleged.

And I documented that in my Dadian series if people want to listen to that.

But it's not like these two are in lockstep.

But yeah, like we can understand that sometimes their interests might align.

And in those areas, it may be beneficial for the regime to, like you say, to use them as a deniable asset.

Right.

Which does not, like, one of the things that's kind of most frustrating is hearing them described as central to the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States.

Which, like, even in kind of the most elaborate version of this group being utilized by the Venezuelan government is fanciful, right?

Yeah.

Like, because Venezuela just doesn't have that much to do with the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States.

Yeah.

Like, Venezuela and Venezuelan criminal organizations just aren't that involved in that process.

That's not where it's coming from, right?

Yeah.

And we'll talk some more about fentanyl.

But first, you know what's kind of like fentanyl?

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We're back and we're talking about fentanyl.

We're talking about like these claims because that's the justification for why we need to airstrike these boats, the most recent of which we know was boarded by another government and had drugs on board it removed before it was struck.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And we simply have no idea, no way to verify.

I have no way to verify what the administration is claiming about these boats.

We're just seeing boats get blown up.

Yeah, and everybody who was on that boat is now dead.

So there's not many, many people to contradict that story.

Should we explain the usual Coast Guard process for interdiction?

Yeah, I think that's probably a good idea.

So generally, right, what the U.S.

Coast Guard is going to do is they will have these large vessels from which they will launch smaller vessels and helicopters to intercept craft, right?

Like the most kind of, I guess, like famous charismatic, whatever, are the like Colombian, like they call them narco-subs.

There's a semi-submarines, actually, they're not like fully submersed, but they, uh, but much of the vessel is submerged.

What the Coast Guard would normally do, to my understanding, is to send a vessel to intercept them, right?

Be it a helicopter or a boat, probably both in most cases, I would imagine.

Tell them to stop, right?

If they don't stop, the Coast Guard will have like a sniper who will shoot out the engine of the craft.

They will then board.

They will then detain the people.

They will obviously confiscate any drugs that they find.

And then they will take those people back to their vessel where they're detained.

And then they'll be tried in the US, right?

And then they would normally,

they can't kind of scoop up all these ships that they've intercepted or semi-subs or whatever.

So they will normally destroy those and scuttle them so they sink to the bottom of the ocean.

I don't know how many cases they've done this in, but that would be the normal procedure for Coast Guard, I guess, pre-2025.

It's got to be fun being a fish near one of those vessels.

Yeah, yeah.

Just fish and getting lion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know what they do with all the, and sometimes they bring all the cocaine back for a photo up.

You see that sometimes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If it looks good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If it's nicely packaged, it says cocaine or fentanyl on the side or whatever.

That is my understanding of what was done previously.

The

strikes in the last month have been extremely different, right?

Yeah, and we're looking at, I think, 14 people killed so far that we've had confirmed, although those numbers are certainly higher than

when you're hearing them, right?

Because we've just had another strike in the last day or so that I don't think we have exact numbers on how many people were involved.

Yeah.

They used, from what I understand, drones from Special Operations Command to do these strikes, right?

Which in itself is quite unusual.

And then the strikes themselves consisted of.

Did they say what?

I guess it looks like a hellfire missile, but I don't know if they've said that.

It looked like hellfires to me on the videos I've seen.

Yeah.

it's not exactly like high-def video, but you see them striking.

Like it looks kind of like a like a

speedboat, right?

Like it's a surface vessel.

It's not a

semi-sub or a submarine.

It's unclear like what has happened before.

At least I haven't seen any reporting on what happened before.

Like whether they got an order to stop.

I think in one case they had turned around, right?

Having noticed the drone and begun returning towards the coast, towards Venezuela, I guess.

And they were still struck.

And it appears that in at least one case,

the drone struck them again, like it hit them once and then returned for a second run to hit, I guess, the survivors.

Yeah.

And, you know, there's a couple of facts that go alongside what we actually know and versus what the administration is claiming.

About 80% of people involved in the smuggling of illegal drugs into the United States are U.S.

citizens.

And then of the remaining 20-ish percent, a chunk of those are resident legal aliens.

And the chunk are a mix of undocumented people,

non-citizens or people whose status is unknown or extradited aliens, right?

Like this is based on the United States Censing Commission's data from 2024.

And about 85% of drugs that are brought into the United States are smuggled in at ports of entry.

And this makes complete sense if you think about it.

in part because it's pretty easy to track when you've just got like a boat trying to smuggle stuff into the country illicitly.

And the people who are on that boat, if they aren't citizens, have no right to enter the country inherently, as opposed to citizens who do have a right to enter.

And ports of entry where there's a shitload of you want to hide in plain sight with this stuff, right?

Like it just makes sense.

Like, would you rather, if you were smuggling a huge amount of illegal shit, would you rather be on your own with a van or a vehicle full of very illegal drugs?

Or would you rather be like hiding amongst the billions of tons of shit that gets taken to this country every single year, right?

Yeah.

Which is why just the reality of the data is so completely different than the administration makes it out to be.

And obviously, foreign criminal organizations are heavily involved in the smuggling of illegal drugs, particularly fentanyl in the United States.

But we're talking primarily about like the Sinaloa cartel and then different criminal organizations involved in the smuggling of fentanyl out of China, right?

Which is where a lot of fentanyl comes from, as opposed to, again, Venezuela.

The government here is going for low-hanging fruit.

I think is the conclusion I'm driven to just every time I read about this is that, like, there doesn't seem to be a better reason for focusing on this organization, which really is just not that involved in cribing the United States, nearly to the extent that groups like the Sinaloa cartel are.

Yeah, I mean, it offers a chance to demonize Venezuelan people, right?

And Venezuelan people made up a large number of the people who came to the United States to seek asylum under Biden.

Because like, if we do believe that these, like the word in Spanish would be like like a mega bandas, like mega gangs are a serious threat to the well-being of people in the United States, imagine how much more of a threat they are to the well-being of people in Venezuela, right?

Right.

And that combined with a government, which objectively sucks and which also uses extrajudicial violence, right?

And including in its battle against these gangs, leads people to want to leave.

And when they come here, the United States, like especially the Trump regime, has been engaged in this demonization of migrants, right?

This offers a very convenient narrative for that, to say that these people are bringing crime here.

The vast majority of them are doing the exact opposite.

They are coming here because the state in Venezuela has extorted them and/slash or non-state actors in Venezuela have extorted them.

The vast bulk of the complaints I hear from migrants from Venezuela are about the state.

They have no interest other than working hard and receiving a decent living wage for that.

Every Venezuelan person I spoke to, almost by none, when I ask what their American dream is, tell you that their American dream is to have a job that pays them enough to feed their family.

Right.

Like, we have next to no evidence of organized crime coming into the United States through the asylum system.

There are, sure, there will be, like, I would imagine a fraction of a single percent of cases in which that is the case, but it's being used against all these venezuelan people right as we've seen and i guess i should just clarify that like one thing about these megabandas uh that they're not like maras right like so like um ms13 being a mara right like a a gang in which members are identified by certain tattoos oh my god yes this is tattoos and emojis yes yeah yeah again like like i understand that that that is a thing that happens in some cases but that that is not a thing that is common to these gangs.

No, it's certainly not common to Trendi Aragua, right?

It's like the use of tattoos.

There's not even widespread agreement among experts as to whether or not there's any sort of centralized U.S.-based hierarchy for the group, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tattooing is just as it is in the United States and lots of other places around the world, a very common practice in Venezuela that people do for as many reasons as there are people, right?

To include because they love their mom, because they love their kids, because they're like a football team, because they are religious, et cetera, et cetera.

That is why people get tattoos.

It is not to indicate membership in any organization.

No.

And this is something that's verified again.

Like one of the leading experts on TREN is Rana Rizquez, who wrote a book, The Trendiaragua, the gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America.

She specifically told Noticias Telemundo during an interview, Venezuelan gangs are not identified by tattoos.

To be a member of one of these Venezuelan organizations, you don't need a tattoo.

You can have no tattoos and still be part of it.

You can also have a tattoo that matches other members of the organization.

So like, again, there's, there's groups and different sort of, because this is a very bottom-up sort of organization, which is often the case with criminal groups where like they will, you know, there will be money being passed in one direction or another, but there's not tight control being exercised in a top-down manner.

Yeah.

You can find groups that have tattoos in common, but it's not a centralized thing that the organization does.

Yeah.

And like the Venezuelan state, to be clear, is extremely violent.

They have like a special armed police, which deals with gangs and organized crime that kills hundreds of people.

It would be unwise to be going about in the streets with a like, I am a member of a certain gang

tattoo, right?

And so, unless you plan to live in some area where you feel completely safe from the state, that would be a very unwise thing to do.

Yeah.

And we'll talk some more about things that are unwise.

But first, it would be wise for you to buy these products.

We're back, and I want to quote from a recent piece in The Guardian on U.S.

law enforcement claiming that emojis signal membership in this organization.

This is by Sam Levin and Manvy Singh from September, a couple of days ago.

Yeah.

The first reference to emojis in the records comes from a July 2024 situational awareness alert from the NYPD, which was distributed to law enforcement across the country and warned of trendy Araguaf threats in New York City.

NYPD Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau has observed members of TDA in New York City using social media messaging platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to depict allegiance to the gang, the alert said.

TDA members often utilize emojis such as trains, ninjas, slot machines, double swords, shields, ogre, face mask, and crowns.

Members also use South American slang and Arabic language terms to mask their identities on social media.

They've cited the NYPD tattoos featuring Michael Jordan.

Fucking ninja emojis?

You're telling me that that's a TDA symbol.

That's not just something people use.

Yeah, man.

This is like, obviously, there is a large Arab or population of Arab descent in Venezuela.

That's where these slangs come from.

Like people use emojis, particularly in this context, because their education has not been the best, right?

Like their access to literacy.

is less than it would be in other contexts.

So like sometimes they use emojis, sometimes they just use them because it's funny.

But like the notion of like, and yeah, people will use slang.

People will spell shit the way they say it.

I mean, sometimes when I'm talking to Venezuelan people, you know, if I'm, if I'm talking to a source and they, uh, sometimes I have to read it aloud to help me understand what they're saying.

Yes, that is very common for people in Venezuela.

It has nothing to do with being a member of a gang whatsoever.

Yeah.

And I mean, you, there's a lot of that in terms of like the fact that the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan are popular among immigrants, right?

Like that that's particularly Venezuelan immigrants.

And a lot of it comes from like, well, a lot of Venezuelan immigrants tend to like these things in media, tend to like these musicians and get tattoos that reference these things in popular culture or these things, you know, that different Venezuelan artists have put out.

And that's...

I mean, it's certainly not a sign that like, oh, these things signal membership in this criminal organization and more they're just targeting Venezuelans and these things are more common among Venezuelans, but not certainly not exclusive to that group.

When you're saying that like a Michael Jordan shirt or tattoo is a symbol of membership in a criminal organization, well, I guess like a third of my high school were criminals.

I mean, they were, but not in this way.

Yeah, like these are very common, like the Jordan logo, I don't know what it's called, the jumping Jordan logo.

Not a big sports wear fan myself, but like, yeah, it's very common.

It's because people buy fake designer apparel all the time.

Like, you will also see people, tons of people with Louis Vuitton items.

They're not real.

It does not indicate membership in any gang.

It's just kind of an aspirational thing that you can buy any almost anywhere in Venezuela because no one's going down there to enforce copyright laws.

Like, it's not, it doesn't indicate any affiliation.

Sometimes it indicates like an interest with the United States, right?

Like, like, that these are where these things come from, and this is a place where these people would like to go.

I also saw a guy across Darien Glap in Nike Alpha Flies, like the

super fast marathon running shoes with the giant carbon-plated spring.

Like, this is not an indication of anything other than that, like, this person thought those were cool and they purchased them.

Yeah.

Are you familiar with this cartel de los Soles thing?

No.

Okay, so, like, the Cartel de los Soles, the Cartel of the Sun, of the Sun,

I guess, is another organization which the US is alleging that Maduro is like head of, right?

That, like it's a

vertically organized organization and that like Maduro is literally the

chief of it.

And I guess I just want to say like the same shit applies, right?

There are gangs all over Caracas as well whose names we haven't mentioned.

What you've got here is state failure, right?

Like in Venezuela, the state has failed to provide people with services and it does not always enjoy a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

You also have massive corruption.

So it is absolutely the case that people smuggling drugs through Venezuela will be able to buy off certain officials, right?

Particularly like military commanders and people who have control over transit and border areas.

It doesn't imply like a vertical structure per se.

To be clear, I don't think Maduro should be in charge of Venezuela.

I think the Maduro regime is bad for Venezuela and bad for the world.

But it's very oversimplified to see it straight up as narco-regime, right?

Like, there is more to it than that.

This is the country that sits on masses of oil.

This is a country that has been incredibly corrupt for an incredibly long time now.

And you're always going to see these organizations creeping into the government, right?

When the government can't even pay its own people or guarantee them a decent and dignified quality of life.

Like,

that doesn't mean that it is okay to just kill simple.

Like, first and foremost, I would imagine that if we go with the government story that the boats that they struck were carrying drugs, right?

It is unlikely that the people who were carrying those drugs were anything other than poor, desperate young men who wanted a chance at a better life and or were intimidated into doing this, right?

And maybe some of them chose to do this because they thought this was the way they could, you know, get money and

progress in a place that doesn't offer them many opportunities.

These are not the people who are in any way like making the calls, making the decisions, right?

And so killing them isn't going to do very much because there is a massive supply of poor, desperate young men in Venezuela.

And it's not going to change anything to

kill 14, 15 of them, other than it will obviously.

It's a tragedy for those families, right?

Those people who lose their children or whatever.

And so, like, I don't know, until we solve the situation that life is untenable for people in Venezuela, yes, there will be crime there.

And yes, people from there will want to come to the United States.

Both of those things make sense.

That does not mean that people coming to the United States are coming to the United States to do bad things.

The vast majority of them are coming to the United States to escape bad things.

We've had so much discourse about Venezuelan people and crime.

Even in the, you know, this has begun, I think, in Chicago in the Biden administration.

I have not seen journalists of whatever political stripe talk to Venezuelan people about this, right?

Like, with very few exceptions, it's very easy to find Venezuelan people, especially

if you work at the border and you do border reporting.

But even still, you know, lots of these Venezuelan people went to Denver.

Some of them went to Chicago.

Some of them went to the Springs in Colorado.

Many of them went to Texas.

They went to all kinds of places when they came to the United States, right?

If you speak Spanish, it's not hard to find these people and ask them, what's it like in Venezuela?

Why did you come here?

And then perhaps you can, you know, establish a picture of, yeah, it's pretty shit, right?

People work hard every day and don't make enough to feed their family.

If their kid is sick, if their elderly parents can't work and need support, it's really hard to do that.

That is why they want to come to the U.S.

That is why often young men want to come to the U.S., right?

Because the world as it is gives them the highest level of economic opportunity.

And so the family will send them to the US such that they can earn enough money and they hope one day to bring their families here.

Sometimes you also see people bringing their very young children because they realize there's no future for their children in Venezuela.

So they make the choice to try and come to somewhere which once promised a future for hardworking people and doesn't really anymore.

But like it just, it pains me so much to see this discussion of Venezuela without Venezuelan people, most of whom I found to be wonderful.

Like, I spent a good amount of time in Venezuela and even longer with Venezuelan people, and I have a great affection for them.

Like, they've been nothing but kind to me.

Even

now, like

a year after I was in the Darien Gap, I get texts all the time from Venezuelan people, the majority of them not asking for help, just asking how I am, asking, do I know what happened to the Bolivian girl?

Do I know what happened to the Zimbabwean women?

Like, like genuinely concerned, even amidst like a really shit situation for them, concerned for the well-being of other people.

And I just wish instead of talking about, yeah, the hundreds, maybe thousands of Venezuelan people who are involved in moving drugs to the United States, we could talk about the millions of people who just want to work hard and have a decent life and who are being denied a chance to do that home and are now being denied a chance to do that here as well.

Yeah.

Well, I think that's about it for our episode today.

Till next time, folks, folks, I don't know.

Best of luck out there.

Yeah.

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Welcome to Incadappa Here, a podcast where your host wakes up every morning and rolls a D6 to determine whether the government wants to exterminate her for being trans, autistic, or Chinese this week.

I am your host, Mia Wong.

We have rolled the dice.

This week is Autism Week.

And by Autism Week, I mean Anti-Autism Week.

The Trump administration, or specifically RFK Jr., promised at the beginning, it was like April, roughly, that they were going to find the cause of autism by the end of the summer.

And they are claiming that the cause of autism

is

taking Tylenol when you're pregnant.

And that's not true.

And to talk about how unbelievably vile and unhinged this is, is Crystal, who's a unionized abortion care worker, who's also Clozilla on Blue Sky, a friend of the show,

done many things.

Welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you so much, Mia.

It's always so wonderful to come and talk about horrifying things with you and be filled with existential dread together.

It's so good.

And by good, I mean the worst thing I've ever seen.

I'm like, this is such a great time to be a trans non-binary abortion care worker.

I just love, I love like being hated.

in so many different ways.

You just get like a rich tapestry of hatred towards you.

It's really great.

So good.

So, okay, that's actually kind of where I want to start about this: is that most of the media coverage of this has been purely focusing on the Tylenol causing autism.

Well, specifically that it's causing autism.

And I want to point out, because most of the news articles that cover this simply do not mention this, they are also claiming that taking Tylenol, if you're pregnant, causes ADHD.

A thing which you think would be noteworthy to point out, but has just not.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't know why people aren't reading the transcript.

I don't know why, but they're not.

Yeah.

I actually hadn't seen that part.

Like, I was literally just reading and observing just the pregnancy and what that means for, you know, pregnant people.

And I like didn't see any of the ADHD stuff.

So that was new when you brought that up to me.

Yeah, it's, it's just not being reported on.

It's really baffling.

So I want to, before we sort of really get into the wait, hold on, why the fuck are they doing this?

What is happening here?

Because, and as Chris was going to say, actually, Tylenol is safe for people who are pregnant.

It's fine.

But I want to go over a bit of like what's actually in this because it's a really, really weird.

We're going to be getting more into the sort of like into the autism angle in another episode next week.

But I want to talk a little bit about just like the actual stuff that was in this announcement where Trump is saying that A, you shouldn't give Tylenol to pregnant people and also saying like you shouldn't give it to like young children

and is like, you you know is like ranting about like mercury and aluminum in vaccines which like this isn't real like there hasn't even been anything like even remotely related to mercury in vaccines for ages and also never did anything but this is all weird andrew wakefield special he also has this this thing where he's talking about like how you should separate the mmr vaccines which is a thing that if you have seen the age bomber guy video you will know the reason that that was an anti-vax talking point was because wakefield was selling separate vaccines and so he was trying to convince parents that having all three of the vaccines at once would give their kids autism, but if you did it separately, it wouldn't through scientific things that don't make any sense, even according to his own incredibly made up bullshit.

Wakefield, by the way, is the guy who sort of kicked off the modern anti-vaccine movements

by abusing a bunch of children and publishing an incredibly fake study and then getting it retracted and then getting his medical license retracted because it was incredibly fake and abused children.

So Trump is sort of just repeating the stuff stuff that he's like vaguely remembers.

There's a whole bunch of this sort of like stuff he vaguely remembers.

Like he's, he's, he goes on a random rant about like how Cuba doesn't have Tylenol, so they don't have autism and that Amish people, and this is the one that it goes around a lot, it's like Amish people don't have autism because they don't take drugs.

And it's like, oh my God.

I also just, I want to read a quote from RFK Jr.

about this, which

again, and I want to point this out.

The actual point of this thing is announcing that the FDA is not going to recommend that you take acetametophene or Tylenol if you're pregnant.

I'm just going to read this, and I'm going to ask if you can figure out what the link between this and Tylenol is.

This is from RFK Jr.

Quote, President Trump believes that we should be listening to these mothers instead of gaslighting and marginalizing them, marginalizing them like prior administrations.

Some of our friends like to say we should believe all women.

Some of these same people have been silencing and demonizing these mothers for three decades because research on the potential link between autism and vaccines has been suppressed in the past.

So is this basically talking about kind of like the celebrity anti-vax people and like the grifters and yeah,

yeah, it's like, I can't believe that.

Well, I mean, I can believe, but like A, the fact that RFK Jr.

noted repeatedly accused of sexual assault and his response when asked to about it was, quote, I have a lot of skeletons in my closet is doing believe all women.

Oh, yeah.

But about vaccines causing autism.

Yeah.

I mean, it's only just like a talking point that they can use in their favor.

It is.

It's never actually about,

you know.

I hate it.

I hate it.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

And like, like, this is just like the average thing in this speech that isn't barely even getting news coverage.

I mean, there's also what Trump said as well, which

because I've seen a lot of that too.

And it's like between what Trump said and what RFK Jr.

said, it's like, where do you even, like, where does the media focus?

Like, how do you explain this to the American audience?

Yeah, it's, it's ridiculous.

And then they also brought in Marty Macaray, who's the commissioner of the FDA, who has a giant rant about how, like, I learned in medical school, just treat fevers, low-grade fevers with acetametophene.

Why?

What are we doing?

A study out of Hopkins actually showed treating a fever can prolong the duration of illness in a young child.

Maybe that's because fever is a body's natural way of ridding an infection.

Yeah, well, that's absolutely not true.

I mean, there's like, we know that like fevers are dangerous for young children and pregnant people.

It's, yeah, I, I don't, I don't know.

It's just, it's just total made-up bullshit.

Like, it's just eugenics, right?

Like, they, like, they're, they're like, oh, no, you shouldn't actually do anything to treat the illnesses because if the child is strong, then like, they'll go through it naturally and they'll become stronger.

And it's like, no, that's eugenics.

Yeah.

This goes for the pregnancy of it all too because it's about being able to suffer and enduring and it's it's the same case the same kind of like puritanical survival of the fittest eugenics shit whether you're talking about pregnancy or you're talking about like literally young children who have fevers

uh same same like approach yeah this also links directly back to

what they're trying to do here, right?

Because the thing that they're trying to do is get rid of autistic people.

Yeah.

Like, they don't want there to be children born with autism.

Yeah.

And in order to do this, they are willing to not take vaccines.

They are willing to, well, I mean,

I guess I should say not letting pregnant people take Tylenol is really, truly the most, some of you must die.

But that's a, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make thing that I've ever seen.

But

it's, you know, it's absolutely hideous.

There's like, yeah, these people, they don't want autistic kids to be born, you know, and that's also just straight up part of the eugenics thing that the project that they're doing, right?

There's on the one hand, the sort of pure survival of the fittest, fuck them kids, let them just die of fevers.

And then on the other hand, there's the just active like, oh, we're just going to do all this stuff that we think will just make there not be autistic kids.

Yeah, and they definitely care more about there being less autistic children than there are about actually like, you know, addressing infant mortality.

Yeah.

And it's definitely, it's treating autism as in something that can be prevented by the choice of the parents

as opposed to it just being something that some people are born that way.

Also, you know, same with being queer and trans and all these things.

It's this idea that you can like choose it, that you can, like, if the parents are strong enough and they can endure enough pain and they can suffer enough.

And if they, you know, make the right choices, then they can avoid having a child with autism.

And it's not really that dissimilar than, like, oh, what to do if you like, have a queer child, a trans child.

It's this idea that, like, that is something that can be controlled and eliminated, which is eugenics, which is, you know, as you've been saying.

So definitely.

Do you know what isn't eugenics?

The products and services.

I would really hope so.

Fucking hope.

I really hope.

I don't know.

I cannot.

I don't know what these ads are going to be.

If they are eugenics, let us know at iWriteOK on

Twitter in Blue Sky.

Actually, I don't know if he's still on Twitter.

I have no idea.

I've been on there in ages.

Woo, these ads.

We are back.

So let's talk about specifically the don't use Tylenol of it all.

Can you talk a bit about just like the importance of Tylenol and pain management for pregnant people?

Yeah.

And I bet like there's definitely probably people out there who are like, why Tylenol?

Why did they choose this?

Like where did this come from?

Is it because Trump can't say a centamenophen?

You know, a lot of people have been, you know, speculating.

And first off, I do want to say that autism predates Tylenol.

Like, oh,

like Tylenol like came to be in like the 1950s.

And, you know, autism existed before that and has probably already always been around to some degree, which we don't know.

I don't know.

It's a very complex and we're still,

you know, there's been so much stigma around it for so long that it's difficult to talk about.

But Tylenol is basically one of the only pain medications that pregnant people can take.

And that's why it's Tylenol.

I think that that is the way of looking at this where it's like, why did they single out this medication?

And it's because it's the only pain medication that a pregnant person can take because.

As we know, there's other pain medications like the NSAIDs, like ibuprofen and naproxen.

And then, of course, there's opioids, which is obviously not good during pregnancy.

They'll, of course, talk to your doctor because I'm not a doctor and you should always get this from doctors, talk to your OBGYN.

But

NSAIDs are typically not recommended in the last three months of pregnancy because they can cause issues with amniotic fluid and baby's kidneys and things like that.

So it is typically recommended that you avoid ibuprofen and other things like that, and you take Tylenol to reduce fevers, to reduce pain.

Obviously, Obviously, there is a lot to be sick with when you're pregnant.

There's a lot of sources of pain.

You know, fever and headaches are definitely something that pregnant people experience.

But pretty much like, because it is the only pain medication that pregnant people can take, then it's really easy to be like, oh, well, what are they taking?

This is what they're taking.

And then you can go from there.

And this is very much coming from, it feels so weird saying this, coming from like a biblical sense of like Eve ate the apple, Eve is the original sinner, I think.

I don't know, like, you know, Eve did the bad thing.

So Eve needs to suffer during pregnancy.

All women need to suffer during pregnancy.

That's a very much like a very biblical take on this.

And I think that is kind of why, why Tylenol, because it's what pregnant people are taking to reduce pain.

and to address fevers.

Yeah.

And I want to read a quote from the commissioner of the FDA that he gave while he was speaking about this, where he says, quote,

when my wife was pregnant and delivered our son a few months ago, they pushed her to take acetametophene for a low-grade fever.

She said no, and then they looked at me and I said, absolutely no.

I'm also here to announce good news.

Today, the FDA is filing a federal register notice to change the label on an exciting treatment called prescription licoverin so it can be available to children with autism.

So you can see like how casually he's doing this.

Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, Yeah.

Like, I'm really proud of my wife for saying no to taking Tylenol for a fever.

And like, they also look at this and it's like the like, oh, they pushed her to take acetametophene for a low-grade fever.

It's like, that's an extremely normal thing for a doctor to say to you, like, take Tylenol for your fever is like the least like medically invasive thing a doctor can possibly recommend.

Like, what are we doing here?

Yeah, it's really basic medicine.

And also like, there's like, there's ways to profit off of this too, because like you can't take any pain medication when you're pregnant, but you can take, I think they were recommending something like, I don't even know, it was like something folic acid thingy.

They were recommending that you take something, which obviously now can be like profit off of and sold.

This is a very capitalist, very grifter approach to medicine and healthcare because obviously always talk to your doctor and your OBGYN about taking any medication when you're pregnant.

Like talk to your doctor.

They're going to be the best source of information.

So the folic acid thing is a licoverin, which is a medicine for anemia and counteracting the effects of chemotherapy meds?

Yeah, I wouldn't.

And then they're specifically like, oh, this will stop your children from having autism.

Okay.

No, it won't.

No.

No.

No.

No.

I mean, like, there are, there are respected organizations speaking up right now, kind of like about like the facts, about the studies, about what's real.

So, there's like physicians for reproductive health are, you know, saying like there's decades of study of studies of Tylenol being safe to take during pregnancy.

There's ACOG, which is a big professional membership organization of like tens of thousands of OBGYNs saying like, hey, Tylenol is safe during pregnancy.

So, there's been decades of studies on Tylenol use in pregnancy.

Some of the studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that says how safe it is.

So like it is, it is, it is safe.

It is absolutely 100% safe to take to treat pain and fever during pregnancy.

So like, you know, in terms of like, who can you look to, like, definitely look to the OBGYNs right now and what they're saying and the physicians and these respected organizations because they're going to tell you the truth.

But the problem is that this information is not reaching the public.

Yeah.

And instead, yeah, they're just getting the president of the United States and all of these just weird conspiracy people that they've installed as the people running the U.S.

medical establishment being like, oh, no, actually, this is really bad for you for reasons.

Yeah, it's all very vague.

It's not really backed by like decades of medical research.

And like, also, too, there's so many people who have not taken any medication.

during pregnancy and they still have children who are autistic.

Yeah,

it's just absolutely ridiculous.

And like any way you look at the numbers, like in terms of,

you know, if you look at like the increasing rates of Tylenol usage by pregnant people versus like autistic kids, it's not like the Tylenol usage goes up way higher.

And then the Autistic Numbers don't change that much relative to it.

It's just like, it's all just like nonsense.

Well, so there is the eugenics of it all.

And there's also the aspect that we've been dealing with with the rampant abortion bans and the criminalization of pregnancy that we've been seeing over, honestly, over the decades, it's about controlling bodies.

And like this is also with trans healthcare too.

Like it's about it's about eugenics, about kind of this necro politics of choosing who lives and dies and being able to choose everything about a person's body, even how they're gestated, you know, like, oh, the parents shouldn't take this and they shouldn't do this.

And then it opens up when it comes to control and surveillance and criminalization of a pregnant person, that can go in so many different directions because, you know, they're telling you not to take Tylenol.

If they just randomly chose Tylenol, they can randomly choose anything.

They could talk about epidurals because there is like this idea that you should suffer and that you shouldn't treat the fever and that you should experience pain during pregnancy, just like that one quote that you shared about his wife.

So they're going to like start targeting other things.

And also, there's already so much criticism and control and judgment and stigma over things like if you're working while you're pregnant, if you're drinking coffee while you're pregnant, if you're eating certain things, there's already so much like policing over pregnant bodies without even touching on abortion.

But like they're also trying to control how you even dispose of pregnancies.

Like if you're looking at the states that are requiring you to call the police if you have a miscarriage, so it's like they want to control how you miscarry, how you have an abortion.

Worth noting too, because this is absolutely connected to abortion and abortion pills.

If the government is coming out and saying that Tylenol causes autism and it's not safe to take while you're pregnant or to use to treat a fever in young children, then they can also say things like the abortion pill is not safe because they've been trying to get the FDA to take away the approval of Mifopristone, saying that it's dangerous.

And, you know, if they're going to say that Tylenol is dangerous and causes autism, then it's like, it's going to be so easy for them to say that the abortion pill is deadly as well.

And they've already been doing this with vaccines in terms of like, like they've been restricting access to vaccines to people without preexisting conditions, which admittedly is a lot of people.

Like the list of preexisting conditions is really long and you should just try to get them anyways.

But like, yeah, like this isn't a hypothetical.

They are already doing this with vaccines, a thing that we do all need in order to not get horribly sick and die from plagues, a thing which there are many of right now.

Yeah.

And I think that this definitely goes to show how topics like abortion and early pregnancy loss and miscarriage and abortions later in pregnancy, like the way they've been talking about this has spread to all aspects of pregnancy and it's spreading to other areas too.

Like, so when we haven't addressed the bans and the stigma and the criminalization, it's been spreading.

It's spread to vaccines.

It's spreading to

trans health care.

It's just, it's just, I feel like I've been watching this black hole just grow and grow and grow over the years and just take away our access to these, to these really basic medical things.

And yeah, like I just see like we let it happen with abortion.

And then now all of a sudden now we can't take Tylenol during pregnancy because it causes autism.

Yep.

There's so much to say about the eugenics and autism aspect of this.

So much to say, more than like we can say right now.

Don't worry.

There will be another episode of this show about that with some doctors next week, probably.

Just like focusing right now on like pregnancy and policing pregnant bodies and

Tylenol and pain management and what's real, the fact that Tylenol is safe to take while pregnant and doesn't cause autism.

You know, really dwelling on that, but like there is a lot to say.

There's a lot to say about the implications of this, where like where this came from in our society and where it's going.

And it's all really horrifying.

Yeah, it's it's it's exceptionally bleak, but I do think, and this is, I think, a theme we're going to be returning to a lot in the coming days and weeks, but like

the only silver lining for this is that this shit is not popular.

It's just not.

People hate it.

People hate hate the administration.

They have been hating the administration.

Every day it goes by.

They hate it more.

You know, and this is part of the control strategy, right?

Part of the reason why they're making these incredibly draconian

moves into like authoritarian moves into the domestic sphere is because it's a way of suppressing dissent.

And they have to do that.

They have to suppress dissent and they have to take things from us.

And they have to continue to try to just beat everyone into submission because they can't do it through actual persuasion.

What they have is the violence of the state.

And they're going to try to keep doing that.

But the violence of the state only functions insofar as people allow it to function.

You know, and this has always been sort of the secret of the United States, which is that like a bunch of the things that they're doing or their attack assets crackdowns that they're attempting to do are effectively unenforceable because people simply refuse to cooperate with them.

And,

you know, this is a field, well, I mean, I don't know.

Until they just straight up ban Tylenol, this is a thing where I guess we're mostly just trying to spread information.

But, like, the things that they do can be opposed.

And when people oppose them en masse, they lose.

And I don't know.

I want to give people a little tiny bit of hope.

You want to be positive?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the deterioration of public health in the United States is absolutely state violence.

Yeah.

Focusing on Tylenol and stigmatizing autism and people with autism is like distracting from so many things that are actual public health emergencies.

So when they're talking about pregnancy and they're talking about Tylenol and autism, there are so much

more severe things going on in the United States right now when it comes to both the health of pregnant people and infants.

So there's the black maternal mortality crisis, which is so severe in so many states that it's just constantly like abortion bans have made that even worse.

There's terrible infant mortality rates rising in states.

So for example, Mississippi declared infant deaths an emergency because they halted that CDC information data collection program.

So Mississippi declared a public health emergency from rising infant mortality.

And there's also, I mean, I believe that the abortion bans are a medical crisis as well.

And there's also huge OBGYN deserts in this country.

Like we're seeing like the loss of OBGYN health providers where people can't access a OBGYN for miles and miles and miles.

And there's just entirely a lack of providers.

These are all very, very serious public health emergencies.

And yet they're talking about autism.

Yeah.

Well, and also as much as they're talking about is they're making all of these crises worse.

Yes.

Like specifically the OBGYN crisis.

It's like, yeah, I don't know.

They've been kicking a bunch of people off of their access to of their access to government insurance.

And like, what does that do?

Oh, wait, hold on.

It just absolutely annihilates the income and revenue base of a bunch of hospitals that already weren't making much money in rural areas.

And so more of them close because they lose their revenue sources.

And suddenly, all of these crises just continue to get worse.

Yeah.

So we have like this stigmatization of autism, parents of autistic children, trans people, trans children, when like they're focusing on this and they're vilifying and dogpiling and stigmatizing and and and all of these things, these groups, while there is this snowballing of crises, the damage already just from Roe v.

Wade being overturned in 2022, like it's like been three years and there's just been this like cascading,

just ever increasing public health disasters from it.

And

yet we're

stigmatizing vulnerable people.

Yeah, in the ways that we've been talking about, right?

Their ideology is about inflicting suffering on vulnerable people because they think that it's good.

And that's a thing that's, you know, I mean, just obviously incompatible with public health as a concept, which is, you know, part of why they're sort of dismantling it.

Part of it is that these people are all like selling their own weird anti-vaccine grift stuff that they've been selling for years and years and years and years.

And all of this has just sort of come together into just this sort of abyss where

everything that was the public health infrastructure in this country, which was insufficient to begin with, has just been disappearing more and more into.

Yeah, the erosion of our public health, you know, this isn't like new, this decades of, you know, this coming into being where we are right now.

But it's been really horrible to watch as a healthcare worker, as somebody who cares

about just like everyone being able to get like evidence-based care, have access to medical providers, and then also the ability to do whatever kind of healthcare they need to be able to do on their own as well, to just have this solid medical information.

And then, also, like, there's the public education of it all, too, because already like there's this attack on public education, which autistic children need a lot of support in order to thrive.

And schools are, you know, they could be equipped to do that.

Where I've seen wonderful programs and wonderful education services that really set people up for success.

And this goes for like everyone, obviously, like any child is going to benefit from this, but it just, it makes everything so much worse.

And like parents and families and just autistic people just don't get enough support, period.

Just like trans people as well.

And then we're all just being thrown under the bus for the capitalist class and the elites so they can continue to like, you know, hide.

their their pedophilia rings and like the whole just the fact that they're all like because like what you said earlier about rfk yeah these are all a bunch of child molesters telling us that we're not strong or brave enough to endure pain that we can easily treat with the the medical technology that we have

and i feel like i normally i feel like i used to not talk talk like this i used to not be like child molesters in the government like i kind of feel like but i'm like this is literally where we are right now somehow.

So here I am, like, you know, talking about Tylenol being safe safe for pregnant people, Tylenol not causing autism, and then talking about the fact that our government is

run by a bunch of pedophiles, not quite where I expected to be.

If you had talked to me like eight years ago, maybe it's really something.

It's really wild to be talking about this right now.

And like, we knew this was coming too.

Like, I, I, I, there's been months of whispers where it's like, oh, yeah, they're going to say Tylenol causes autism.

So like this, I knew this was coming somehow.

I don't even know how.

It's just, I feel, yeah, I feel like it's all very transparent and like there's leaks and there's whatever, but I like I knew this was coming for months.

And yet, here we are.

Here we are.

Yeah.

And I don't know.

I think that's as good of a place to end unless you have anything else you want to make sure you get in.

I just want to say again that it's safe to take Tylenol during pregnancy and it doesn't cause autism.

Yeah, absolutely.

And tell everyone you know that and share good resources like ACOG, ACOG,

Physicians for Reproductive Health, PRH, I believe is their initials acronym.

We will put links to stuff in the description of this.

Yeah.

And also ask your doctor about medication that you should take, whether you're pregnant or not.

You know, it's cool to ask your doctor stuff.

Like, just ask them questions.

Yeah, yeah.

That is what they are there for.

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G'day, good day, and welcome to It Could Happen Here.

I'm Andrew Sage, Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm here with James Stout, for those of you wondering what my last name is.

Hello, hello.

And for those who couldn't tell by my accent or maybe don't recognize it, I'm from Trinad and Tobago, born and based.

And you may or may not have seen Trinad's name being called up in JD Van's and Marco Rubio's mouths lately, particularly with the moves that the US has been making in the Caribbean Sea as of late.

So to provide a little context on the inciting incident of this episode, the current Prime Minister of Trinidad Tobago, Kamala Pasar Besesso, expressed very passionate support for the US's recent move on an alleged Venezuela-based drug vessel.

I say alleged because no proof has been provided that it was a drug vessel or anything of that nature, that the United States struck.

The prime minister said, and I quote, that she has no sympathy for traffickers and that the U.S.

should kill them all violently.

Jesus Christ.

For those, I mean, most people will not know much about Trinidad politics.

I don't expect them to.

Our current prime minister, she won this year, actually, and she kind of carried on that trend of incumbents losing their elections that took place, you know, post-COVID lockdown, 2020 era.

Yeah.

So the previous prime minister was prime minister, Dr.

Keith Rowley.

He was prime minister for like 10 years.

He became prime minister after she lost her last stint as prime minister because she's kind of a mess in a couple of different ways.

I mean, both parties are pretty corrupt, but they're corrupt and incompetent in some very critical ways, corrupt and racist, and a couple other issues.

That trend continues with her new candidacy.

You know, she's not only failing the country in some crucial ways, you know, she canceled our Independence Day celebrations.

She fired like thousands of workers from a local agency that's responsible for landscaping around the country, basically, you know, cutting grass and clearing trains, that sort of thing.

Fired like thousands of them, right?

So now the entire country is overgrown and all those people have like, like right before their children have to go to school, you know, they had no income to support them.

So it's like a lot of cruelty, a lot of corruption, a lot of incompetence.

And

in this particular case, diplomatic carelessness, recklessness, because she goes and she says this, despite the fact that not only did the U.S.

violate a law, international law, but also we are small.

You may not be able to see Trinidad on a lot of maps because we are small.

You know, we may be one of the more populated Caribbean countries, but we are still small.

Venezuela is our closest neighbor.

And she has been exceedingly irresponsible in the ways that she's approached Venezuela.

Because the previous administration actually had an agreement with Venezuela regarding the extraction of their fossil fuels in the waters that are between Trinidad and Venezuela.

We had to...

get permission from the United States to get into that agreement with Venezuela because Venezuela is currently under sanction.

And for the longest time, Trinidad has had to walk this sort of tightrope of playing nice with both the US and Venezuela.

She's basically come in guns blazing to make statements that appear to be openly aggressive towards Venezuela, towards Venezuelan sovereignty, and so on.

Now, her reasoning is that Trinidad has been ravaged by a lot of violence and addiction that has been caused by these drug cartels coming from South America, including Venezuela.

This is a very real issue, the illegal gun and drug and human trafficking that takes place between South America and Trinidad.

We are a trans shipment point for that sort of activity and that kind of thing brings violence.

The issue is that while she may be able to say things like, may God bless and protect the members of the U.S.

military, the U.S.

and the U.S.

military are in part responsible for the violence that has ravaged Latin America, but it's also not even particularly interested, regardless of what their words may say, they're not particularly interested in dealing with the drug issue.

At the end of the day, it really comes down to regime change and a desire to control Venezuela's resources.

But let me take it back for a moment and provide a longer history of what's going on.

Right?

The United States became independent in 1776.

You know, Trinidad became a colony of the UK in 1797.

Not long after that, because prior to being under the UK, Trinidad was under the Spanish.

And while being under the Spanish, it was settled by French settlers.

So it was like Spanish laws, French settlers, and then later on, UK governance.

And so the War of 1812, which is, you know, a war that took place between the US and the UK, led to some African Americans siding siding with the UK in exchange for emancipation.

And in exchange for their services in that war, that group of people, which became known as the Americans, were resettled in South Trinidad.

And I'm actually descendant from some of them, allegedly.

So there is this history of exchange taking place between the U.S.

and Trinidad.

You know, during World War II, America had military bases established in Trinidad.

We had Waller Field, which was commissioned in 1941, and the Shagramas Naval Base, which was fully operational in 1943.

And that provided strategic naval and air facilities in the Caribbean.

Thanks to the destroyers for bases agreement with the British, the British got destroyers and the US got bases in the British colonies.

Now, thankfully, the base was...

scaled back and eventually decommissioned and returned to Trinidad.

It was controlled by 1963.

But that took a lot of protest and marching to accomplish.

It was a whole thing of trying to get Yankee out of Trinidad.

Yankee did provide some benefits to Trinidad in terms of establishing infrastructure for highways and that sort of thing.

But there was also a not so positive social impact of the American presence.

You know, one Calypsoian known as the Mighty Sparrow sang in a song called Gene and Dinah that basically the American presence funded a lot of households due to prostitution.

Oh, wow.

And the song was basically about how Gene and Dinah had to go and find other work now that the Americans were leaving.

So after the failure of the West Indies Federation and the independence of countries like Jamaica and Trina and Tobago from the UK, The location of the former military base, Shagramos, also ended up becoming the temporary location of the capital of the short-lived West Indies Federation.

After the West Indies Federation broke apart, Chagramos became the place where the Treaty of Chagramos was signed between the newly independent countries of Trinobago and Jamaica and so forth, which established CARICOM, the Caribbean Community and Common Market in 1973.

CARICOM will come up later.

CARICOM is kind of like

if the EU was like entirely toothless and didn't really do much of anything.

It's

a nice idea of trying to get a bit of regional collaboration and integration and trade and movement.

But it's still more expensive to go between islands than it is to go from an island to the US.

So CARICOM hasn't exactly succeeded in facilitating island movement thus far.

But CARICOM will come up later on, right?

Tran Tobago acquired its independence in 1962.

We became a republic in 1976.

And we were under the prime ministership of Dr.

Eric Williams from 1962 to 1981.

Now, Dr.

Eric Williams was our first prime minister, and so he's respected in that regard.

He also wrote Capitalism and Slavery, which was a really impactful piece of literature on the

role of capitalism in the abolition of slavery, or rather the economic motivations for the abolition of slavery, as opposed to the claimed moral virtue of the British Empire in abolishing slavery when it did.

Right.

Right.

So he did some good academic work and he was instrumental in the establishment of Trinidad and Tobago as an independent country.

but he also suppressed the black power movement that took place a little while after we became independent because of his failures.

He also banned the Trinidad-born American immigrant Kame Turre, otherwise known as Toky Carmichael, which is like a world-renowned socialist and pan-Africanist.

Yeah.

Right.

So through the 70s, we had an oil boom and we became really, really industrialized.

We had another boom in the 2000s.

And unlike other Caribbean countries, we didn't have to be dependent on tourism.

And so we ended up going in a different developmental direction.

The thing about the oil booms is they really had more to do with certain happenings in the Middle East than really anything that we did.

You know, the oil boom just kind of fell on our laps in that way.

Right.

1983, there was an invasion of Grenada by the United States after Maurice Bishop's coup, and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, Dominica, Barbados, and Jamaica, called for the U.S.

to come and assist in dealing with this Marxist-Leninist gaining power in Grenada, while Tran Tobago, the UK, and Canada criticized the invasion.

It was a violation of international law, according to the UN General Assembly.

But as usual, the law doesn't really apply to the US, so nothing really came out of that.

Otherwise, the relation between the US and Trinidad Tobago has been: you know, we have a lot of trade, you know, we have a large diaspora in the US, there's a lot of travel between the countries.

Most of our tourism comes from the US.

We have a lot of American-based oil oil and gas companies established in Trinidad.

And

our whole consumerist culture is basically a copy in many ways of what the U.S.

does.

When they sneeze, we catch a cold, as the saying goes.

Yeah.

I know I'm establishing a lot of context, but it's to give an idea of how we are, where we are right now, right?

Yeah.

So next door to Trinidad, we have Venezuela, and we really had this sort of diplomatic relationship going on with Maduro and the USA at the same time under the former prime minister, Dr.

Keith Raudi, who was of the same party as our first prime minister, Dr.

Ark Williams.

With the issues taking place in Venezuela right now, there's been a large influx of migrants from Venezuela living in Trinidad and Tobago right now.

Well, mainly Trinidad.

Yeah.

I have a lot of Venezuelans now living in Trinidad, some of them legally, some of them illegally.

Prior to that recent wave, and by recent, I'm talking like 2016, 2017.

Prior to that wave, we had Venezuelans in Trinidad and we had Trinidadians in Venezuela because you know we're neighbors, right?

It's close.

You know, so you had Trinidadians involved in the mining sector in Venezuela, you had Venezuelans involved in the cocoa plantations in Trinidad.

So we've always been a very mixed-up group.

Right.

Right.

And this idea of strict border control between the countries is a very recent politically motivated situation.

Now, with everything going on in Latin America, thanks to US intervention and the U.S.'s constantly failing war on drugs, we have a lot of violence passing between our territories, you know, guns, drugs, human trafficking, as I mentioned.

Yeah.

And then Venezuela now is, I mean, their hands are not clean.

I'm not saying any country's hands are clean in this.

I'm not trying to paint a good guy, bad guy dichotomy.

You know, Venezuela is still holding strong to this claim that they have from since before their independence that

like more than half of Guyana actually belongs to them.

Guyana, by the way, is an English-speaking Caribbean culture

country bordering Venezuela, Suriname, and Brazil.

So Guyana recently explored and discovered a bunch of offshore reserves,

which, you know, they're really excited to capitalize upon.

And, you know, they have a lot of deals and agreements taking place where that is concerned.

All of a sudden, Venezuela is like, you know, that piece of land that we've long been saying is ours.

Yeah, that really is ours.

And they started, you know, they're putting out maps claiming that most of Guyana is actually Venezuela and all these different things.

So it's a very, it's a very threatening situation because Venezuela is a military power in in its own right yeah right guyana trinidad we don't have much military prowess so in a sense i understand why both trinidad and guyana are cozying up with the us right now but at the same time this recent administration's cozying up has not been the most tactful you know because we do have a diplomatic approach that has worked well for us for a very long time.

Now, the argument could be made that maybe that diplomatic response, a diplomatic balance cannot be maintained forever.

Our

neutrality cannot persist as things are heating up in the region.

But we had an opportunity to respond carefully, to respond in a measured fashion to the US's recent move with bombing the alleged drug boat, and we did not do that.

Yeah, that's a pretty squandered chance to just like say, you know, we should respect international law here.

And, you know, like the easiest thing to say would be, like, there's a set of procedures for doing this.

We could follow them.

Yeah.

It's not hard to say that.

That, that, that deal that we had with Venezuela, that was a deal that we were able to negotiate under Biden.

That was a deal that when Trump came into power, he just took back.

He was like, nah, y'all can't do that anymore.

So with Trump going in this, either you're with us or against us kind of direction, that calls for extra, you you know care and you know you're kind of dealing with a bomb that you're trying to work around right yeah but in the same year that trump got elected kamala passar batessa our current prime minister got elected you know she's known for being reckless she's known for being a bit of a drunkard um she's passionately pro-Trump.

She was a COVID conspiracist in the vein of

one of her famous quotes is sunlight will kill COVID.

She's passionately pro-US, passionately anti-Maduro, passionately racist, and very much anti-CARICOM.

Okay.

Right.

Now, there's a bit of a history there because Trinidad and Guyana are two Caribbean countries with very large East Indian populations, as in Indians from India.

Yeah.

When the West Indies Federation was getting its start, both Guyana and Trinidad's Indian populations had the concern that, considering the rest of the Caribbean as Black majority, they would not be adequately represented in a West Indies Federation.

And so that sort of opposition to that level of regional unity seems to have persisted within some circles of an East Indian or Indo-Caribbean politics.

Okay, interesting.

Not all.

right but some seem to have an opposition to too much caricom involvement because they feel that their voices will be drowned out by Black people.

And I mean, there's a lot of anti-Blackness in that community, but that is not the subject of this particular episode.

So that sort of opposition to the Western East Federation seems to have carried over into opposition towards CARICOM.

And when there was low turnout among PNM supporters, which is the party of Dr.

Rowley and Dr.

Williams,

as well as some third-party momentum taking place, Kamla ended up coming into power, right?

And when she came into power, she's making these moves, making these statements, and disregarding CARICOM and disregarding CARICOM's opinion, disregarding CARICOM involvement in Trinidad's moves and decisions.

As a small country, CARICOM is supposed to be our way of beefing up our voice on the international stage.

And she's basically saying, Bun, that, you know, we will do our own thing.

Right?

Yeah.

well i forgot to mention another thing about camela um just for a bit of context cambridge analytica came into trinidad and basically ran an experiment using our elections to test out some new strategies they ended up taking yeah into the us

right they they they practiced their electoral manipulation in trinidad which is how Kamala won in the first the first time she was elected back in 2010 2015 it was through collaboration with cambridge analytica so again yet another connection between the us and trinidad for better and for worse yeah

so what's happening now is that you know on the 2nd of september the u.

bombed a pirogue and claimed to kill 11 people and claimed that it was a drug boat despite the fact that they haven't provided any proof that the footage was extremely grainy.

And even if they did have proof that it was a drug boat, summary execution on the high seas is not exactly in line with international law.

Right.

Right?

If these are quote-unquote violent drug traffickers who are killing people and doing all these ridiculous things, you're supposed to bring them in, you're supposed to interrogate them, you're supposed to go through a certain procedure, right?

Yeah.

All the smoke and mirrors about drugs and fighting drugs and all these different things, it really is that smoke and mirrors, because if it was about that, they would be trying to get information to target the heart of the operation.

What the U.S.

is doing right now is flexing.

Right.

Yeah.

It's flexing the muscles in the region to show what it is willing to do.

It's trying to poke and prod Venezuela to respond in kind.

so that it has the excuse it needs or the further excuse to intervene.

There was another strike, another boat bombing on the 15th of September, and there was another strike on the 19th of September against another boat.

And it's a very, very worrying

place to be and time to be alive.

Right.

I would say.

You know, we have Guyana as a player.

You know, they're still working with U.S.

oil companies.

They're collaborating with U.S., they have this territorial anxiety with regards to to Venezuela.

And they are part of CARICOM.

Guyana is part of CARICOM trying to

work it out through that channel and through other channels.

Venezuela, in response to Camera's energy, has basically put out statements talking about, hey, this Camera lady is kind of crazy.

Y'all sure about that?

Because if any US missile comes out of Trinidad, we are responding to Trinidad.

Right.

And Trinidad is like not the same as the U.S., right?

Like, that is not like a mutually assured destruction.

exactly.

So, she is, you know, speaking very recklessly.

And in the meantime, the Venezuela is saying response: you know, if any sort of U.S.

incursion is launched out of Trinidad, which she invited, by the way, she said, Hey, the U.S.

could base whatever they want in here if they want.

We are standing ready.

We, right?

I don't know who, where she got this we from,

right?

But she's saying, oh, yeah, they could come and they could, you know, launch stuff from here.

And Venezuela is like

y'all are talking kind of crazy right now you should care about your citizens because we know your citizens don't like what you're doing so why are you doing this kind of thing yeah and it's bigger than just venezuela the us and trinidad because venezuela is also aligned with russia right it's i believe russia's only ally in the western hemisphere yeah right And while the drug issue and the crime issue is a significant concern, most of the drugs are coming from Colombia in the first place, which the US is not currently targeting.

Right.

And at the end of the day, as I mentioned earlier, it seems to be coming down to regime change and resources and the control of Venezuela's resources.

You know, we are now in a situation where our fishermen are having to stay home out of fear.

Oh, geez.

That their fishing boats could be...

struck out of the water.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, we are in a situation where Camera's fan base is

just as trumpy and cultish as the market base, seemingly, seems to be perfectly fine with what's going on.

Although, in some ways, I think that that might even be astroturfed or inflated artificially, because there was recently an expose that determined a lot of the pro-UNC, which is Camera's party, the pro-UNC, pro-Camla buzz that occurs on social media, it's bot-driven.

Like you go onto these profiles and they're they're bots.

Yeah.

Just, you know, fake names, fake profile pictures, AI posts.

Oh, geez.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just entirely fabricated.

This is also at a time when the U.S.

is building a massive embassy in our country, when Camera is seemingly opening the floodgates to military collaboration with the U.S., where we are dealing with our own economic woes and crime woes and so on.

And, you know, we also have the largest Chinese embassy in the region.

We have a lot of collab with China.

We recently made moves to recognize Palestine with a Palestinian diplomat now residing in the country.

It feels like we are putting ourselves in a very risky position.

And whether or not we could have done more or less to get out of this position, you know, considering the U.S.

has its backyard policy with regard to the rest of the Americas, with regard to the the fact that Trump has created this Department of War, that the U.S.

seems to be flailing around as a dying empire does, the fact that the Caribbean has been called out so frequently with violence in an effort to manufacture consent for what seems to be coming next, with the fact that there was a failed intervention to overthrow Maduro in the past, known as Operation Gideon, right back in 2020.

All this has me

a bit stressed.

I mean, there was a particularly insane attempt to overthrow Maduro in 2020, right?

The Silver Core thing.

Yeah, yeah.

They had this

American security firm and some Venezuelan dissidents just tried to infiltrate Venezuela by sea.

And basically, as soon as they landed, they got arrested.

Yeah, yeah.

I think some of them got detained by Venezuelan fishermen who realized they only had BB guns.

It sucks that

having spent time in Venezuela and with Venezuelan people a lot, you know, for

years now, it's Venezuelan people who are going to pay the price for all of this, right?

Like, it's not, and potentially people in Trinidad and Tobago as well.

Like,

they very clearly do not want Maduro to be running their country, right?

Like,

we saw that in the election.

We saw that in the protests after the election.

They have every reason to want to leave their country and go somewhere safe, but that's not possible for many of them.

Yeah.

I mean, like I said, there's a lot of Venezuelans in Trinidad right now.

Yeah.

So any moves that Venezuela is making, they're obviously going to make with consideration to the fact that they have their own people in Trinidad as well.

Yeah, exactly.

And like they're being demonized, even though they've done everything they can to separate themselves from Maduro.

And like they are being.

Yeah, there's unfortunately a lot of xenophobia in Trinidad.

Yeah, it's really sad.

Like, and we see it here too, right?

This allegation that they're all gang members, which is like, if we think that gang violence is bad in venezuela and in parts of venezuela it is bad then surely it would make sense people who don't want any part in that might leave and go somewhere else yeah and rather than supporting them we do we're just killing like the

the the lowest tier people right like even if we entertain the idea that the boat could have been carrying drugs and we put aside the fact that that hasn't been proven or the boats plural the people driving the boats are not the people like making the calls calls here but yeah they're the people being killed exactly exactly it's the same principle with all these these these drug busts and and and and gang busts that take place in trinad you know they go and they they roll in and they they arrest these small fries but the the big bosses calling the shots unharmed yeah you know the multinational criminal empires that are moving the people moving the drugs moving the guns in the region they're untouched yeah and like even the uh

maduro's two nephews like they were released after they were detained for trying to run drugs for haiti right like like you say the people making the real decisions are largely insulated from all this it's it's working people in venezuela who like

they don't have other opportunities right like i have heard the most

disheartening stories, especially from Venezuelan fishermen, right?

Like their economy is so bad that they they are not able to put fuel in their boats.

It wouldn't be economical to put fuel in their fishing boats.

Even if they caught a full load of fish, they wouldn't be able, no one has any money to buy the fish at a high price.

So they can't pay for the fuel.

And this is a country which sits on a massive oil reserve.

Yeah.

But yet, yet people can't afford to put fuel in their fishing boats.

You know, these people are victims of a system that has left them with very few opportunities.

And the way we're responding is by killing them and by destabilizing a whole part of the world.

That

no one asked for this, there, you know, apart from apparently your prime minister.

Yeah.

So, I mean, this was a very rambly episode, more rambly than my usual.

But I just wanted to get the word out on what's going on in my corner of the globe to let the Americans in the audience know to, you know, please do what you can to stand, to speak out against this American intervention.

to educate yourself on what's going on.

For the trineies who may be in the audience, you know, probably hunker down and have a

crisis bag or emergency bag set up if worse comes to worse.

And everyone else, really, just get the knowledge and do what you can in your area to disrupt this machine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's it for me.

All power to all the people.

Peace.

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This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis.

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

This week, we're covering the week of September 18 to September 24.

Luckily, nothing that remarkable has happened, so this will be a short one.

Another famously slow news week in the United States of America and abroad.

Only the most stable out of all democratic countries.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, of the democracies, we're easily the most democratic.

Shining city on a hill.

It's a hill.

That's right.

That's right.

Elevated.

Yeah.

So let's talk about this guy who opened fire at an ice detention facility to start off with.

Then, sure.

That's the big news story today: there's been a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas.

This is not the first shooting at a North Texas ICE facility this year.

Two detainees were killed and one injured last I saw.

They were in an ICE van, it looks like, and the shooter killed themselves pretty quickly, it seems like.

Yeah.

Like fired a few rounds and then killed themselves.

Yeah.

Cash Patel, who's the director of the FBI, shared pretty quickly after the shooting on X.com, the Everything website, a photo of a stripper clip of what looks a lot like eight millimeter Mauser ammunition.

One round had the word anti-ice

written on it in blue pen in block capital letters.

Yeah.

Lazy?

We can agree on that.

Yeah.

Like,

especially compared to etching them onto a bullet.

This has been, I think, immediately adopted by God.

I mean, it seems like I haven't done a deep survey, but most of the liberals and leftists that I follow on both Twitter and Blue Sky.

and on just looking at friends on Facebook have pretty immediately gone after this as a false flag or something.

Liberals and leftists are casting doubt on the authenticity of this.

Yeah.

I'm seeing both people be like, well, the shooter must have been a right-winger who lazily put anti-ice on the bullet, or this is some sort of federal conspiracy, but a lot of conspiracism here.

Yeah.

We simply don't know very much about the shooting at this point.

It's unclear who the shooter was aiming for if they were just aiming at ICE property, like unknowingly shooting like migrant detainees inside.

Did they they think whoever was in that van was a cop?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Most of this lines up with the person being the sort of person who ends up being a high-profile shooter, right?

Like they're not so much an ideologically motivated person as someone who, like you say, pretty, pretty low effort, wrote anti-ice on their bullets at the last minute, not on the bullet, but on the casing that holds the fucking powder that the bullet goes in.

Like I understand how that works.

And this just fits, and this is something I try to talk about pretty regularly.

Shootings in the United States are heavily driven by mimetic spread, right?

This has been happening since Columbine.

There have been more than 100 copycat shootings of Columbine.

And you do have shooters who are, let's say, original, right?

Like the Christchurch shooter, where they have new ideas for things to do in mass shootings.

And then in the wake of those, because whenever someone does something really new, it gets a lot of attention, right?

Like if there's a mass shooting that like gets a lot more media coverage than other ones, there will be people who copy it and who copy specific aspects of that shooting.

And what I'm seeing with this guy that kind of just fits into that pattern is you had a really high-profile North Texas shooting at a nice facility, then you had a really high-profile shooting where somebody with a hunting rifle shot.

at targets from the top of a roof, right?

And I'm seeing both of those things in this shooting.

And I guess it's just like, yeah, that kind of scans to me you know yeah i guess uh another thing that has been fueling this conspiracism is that the guy used a

mauser rifle different type of mauser rifle to the last one it looks to me uh like a car 98 yeah the the previous one was a very old mauser that had been rebarreled the 30 odd six which is a very common american round this one looks to have been an original car 98k that was still an eight millimeter mauser which was the gun the nazi that was that was the standard battle rifle of the wehrmacht during World War II.

Yeah.

It's not weird.

He would have access to that.

He probably didn't have to buy it or pass a background check to get it.

Looking at Garrison found his mother's Facebook.

They'll talk some more about that.

But one of the things that was on there is her talking about how she recently had to clean out like a barn and a farm that her grandfather and dad had owned and get rid of a lot of their stuff.

It kind of makes sense to me.

One of them very likely was a veteran, could have brought back a car 98k as hundreds of thousands of GIs did from the war, and it would have just gotten passed down onto the family, right?

Not weird, yeah.

Nobody at all.

Like you say, there are probably hundreds of thousands of these in the United States.

It was very common, and again, that's more or less probably what happened with the Charlie Kirk shooter, why they had a Mauser, right?

Yeah, because it was their grandpa's rifle, probably had it re-barreled or whatever, you know.

Yeah, not uncommon at all for someone in, especially somewhere like Texas, where, you know, those rifles, even if you didn't bring them back from World War I, like could have been obtained by private party transfer anytime in the last 75 years.

So he'd been placed on probation for a 2016 marijuana offense for which he pled guilty and received deferred adjudication.

I guess in Texas it's considered dealing marijuana, but it just seems to be that he was in possession of an amount greater than a quarter ounce, but less than five pounds.

Maybe that's I'm not that familiar with Texas law in that regard, but that is a thing that we found out about him.

I'll just add that like, I don't know if that affects his ability to obtain a new firearm by doing a 4473.

It's unclear, but it wouldn't matter in Texas because, again, you can just meet a guy in a parking lot and buy a gun.

Exactly.

Yeah, it's not relevant.

As I did when I lived in Texas almost every month.

What the great state of Texas.

Yeah.

It's easy to get a gun in Texas.

How did he get the gun?

He could have gotten it by accident.

He could have traded groceries for it.

Like, you just don't know, but there's no barriers to him owning this.

Yeah,

we still don't know very much about this guy outside of his like public arrest record.

I have like a LinkedIn that hasn't been updated in a few years.

Yeah, he voted in the 2020 Democratic primary.

We know that from Texas voting records.

His mom's Facebook has a few political sentiments, but not expressed very commonly.

She's posted a few times about Greg Abbott's pro-gun stances.

Yeah, she was definitely like anti-NRA, anti-Abbott.

Anti-NRA, upset about Abbott and Senator Corrin and Cruz not taking action for gun control.

Damn.

Yeah.

This isn't the sort of gun that would ever be impacted by

proposed gun control legislation, right?

Like this is.

kind of central to the gun that people generally feel is reasonable to people to own.

Yes, assuming that it was something that they inherited from a grandfather or great-great-grandfather, even like gun control bills that are looking at stopping face-to-face sales wouldn't stop this because the DIMMs always tend to include an exception for like, yeah, inheriting your dad's hunting rifle or something like that, right?

Right.

Yeah.

On an old Google Plus profile that's cached,

his profile picture is like a Soviet communist caricature.

But again, that is no indication of a recent political alignment.

We still don't have a detailed look at this guy's politics.

But people have been quick to call this a false flag, when I think this appears more like a manifestation of this reality brainrottedness that we've talked about vis-à-vis the years of lead paint.

Like brain rot inspires like ill thought or illogical actions that maybe appear akin to a half-baked false flag.

But this is like just a result of this weaponized unreality.

Fiction inspires reality and then reality is seen through the lens of fiction.

So people project onto the state this like 1950s CIA staging world events thing.

Like everything's become so like Eddington-pilled.

Yeah.

I remember there was a really big example of this.

Someone, I forget exactly what it was, like

someone like graffitied like Chuck Schumer's garage

or something.

And everyone that I knew was convinced it was a false flag.

Like it was all over Twitter.

It was all over Blue Sky.

Everyone thought it was a false flag.

And it's just like all of that has just accelerated alongside this process that Garrison, you're describing, where you have the unreality tunnel of all this is a false flag.

And then you have the other unreality tunnels that are like generating these people and they're just sort of like flowing parallel to each other.

Smashing into each other.

Yeah.

No, like people are so quick just to point the black's rule image to discount every single thing that might confuse you at first glance.

Like if you cannot understand that someone who is suicidal would do a crazy thing like this this inspired by recent events and scribble something onto a bullet, trying to shoot at ICE equipment or ICE agents, ICE property, inadvertently killing actual ICE detainees, if you have no way to understand that as a premise and the only way that you can see something like this happening is like a beat cop walking up to the crime scene, realizing he has to alter it to fit an agenda.

That is a way more disjointed and like broken reality to like force yourself to believe than just take the facts as they come and evaluate them slowly without jumping to a very quick assumption that satisfies your like emotional reaction to a tragic event like this where multiple people have died.

With Trump in power again, I think it's entirely possible that oppositional political violence will take a form that resembles quote-unquote left-wing attacks increasingly through the next few years.

It's not 2018 anymore.

And calling this guy a leftist right now doesn't make any sense.

We don't have a clear look at his politics or if he really even had serious politics.

But there are a lot of like seemingly normal people who are depressed, demoralized, and angry, and might not write a stupid Twitter-brained manifesto, and scribbling anti-ice gets a point across, whether that's sincere or some kind of ironic shitpost.

If anti-ice sounds weird in comparison to fuck ICE or abolish ice, again, not everyone is part of like the leftist Twitter-brained terminology circle.

It seems like he wasn't really thinking things through intently anyway, as is common with these like quick copycat style attacks.

And attacks like this are also sometimes just partially driven by suicide, wanting to like do something as a part of the suicidal act.

And like who knows what this shooter was aiming for or what they thought they were aiming for.

We do not have enough information yet.

And it's worth noting, NBC has interviewed his brother.

It's kind of sounds like from the text of the NBC article, like they broke the news to him, which is

that's fucked up.

Not great.

Yeah.

But he said the last time he'd seen his brother was two weeks ago.

He was not particularly political.

He had never mentioned anything about ICE.

As far as his brother knew, he had no hatred or particular feelings about ICE either way.

He was registered as political independent.

His brother said that his parents had a rifle and that he knew that his brother knew how to shoot it, but that he didn't think he knew how to make a shot like that.

I don't think he knew anything about the quality of shot, and it doesn't sound like he did anything but shoot into a van and then kill himself.

So he was recently unemployed and was looking to move to his parents' land in Oklahoma, but he was raised in Allen.

The whole unemployed didn't sound like he felt like he had a lot of maybe opportunity going forward.

His life was not going great.

Like, I don't know.

Like, I'm not having trouble seeing this all add up.

No, I mean, the people who do some crazy shit like this often have a suicidal impulse running through an action like this.

And sometimes it manifests through something akin to, like, you know, this is like a bad term, but like, suicide by a cop, right?

And, like, similar to what Robert said about like mimetic and like copycat shootings, you can see some of what's on display here in the lineage of Luigi, Mangioni, allegedly, writing denying to pose on bullets, then the Charlie Kirk shooting with stuff written on bullets.

Yeah.

But this is something that's now like in our zeitgeist.

It doesn't require you to be like an online communist to do something like this, nor is it relegated to a cop trying to manufacture a fake narrative to cover up a murder of immigrants to frame it in this left-wing violence spike that the right is currently really running with.

Yeah.

Look, folks, if you are convinced that this is a conspiracy, I really doubt much that we say is is going to convince you otherwise.

Yeah.

It's, it's kind of a, I don't want to go on too bleak of a rant here, but like, I almost feel like there's not really a point in trying to stand up for basic reality anymore.

Cause number one, people are increasingly going to dig into the reality tunnel that's most comforting to them.

And that's going to be the one where like they don't have to deal with the complexities of the world that like some people who on paper have espoused beliefs that are similar to you will also do fucked up shit right like that that's just america that's living in a country with 400 million guns that's living in a country where mass shootings go viral and where people act based off the virality of shootings that they watch or see or hear about yeah and honestly like there's a part of me that feels like caring about the reality of the situation is almost a vanity project that like it doesn't win you anything it doesn't get you anywhere it doesn't it doesn't help you make the world better Maybe just embracing a false, like the right has gotten very far in embracing completely fraudulent realities.

So why do I even care?

I mean, this is something I've talked about with like the flattening of tactics with the right adopting state-sponsored cancel culture and the left getting more conspiratorial.

In like replies to tweets and blue sky posts talking about how the bullet markings have to be a false flag, I'm seeing people share memes, like Pepe, like SYOP memes, but like leftists and like

liberals sharing these memes that you used to just see under like unhinged right-wing accounts to talk about how big world events are all staged or the feds are faking everything.

And it's just this complete like swap, more accurately, a flattening of tactics.

And yeah, like it, it, it sucks to be in a position where I'm trying to be like slow and methodical in how I evaluate things and not just jump to posting funny reaction images about how everything is a psyop and how everything is a false flag.

Elameo, obvious psyop, work done.

Because that seems so much more emotionally compelling.

And instead, I'm just tired.

Yeah, just tired all the time.

Anyway, go on and believe whatever you want.

Let's continue the episode.

All right.

Let's talk about Antifa when we come back.

Comes from our mind control partners.

Speaking of false flags, Antifa.

Antifa, I hardly, no, that doesn't.

Garrison, just continue.

I don't have anything to say about that.

All right.

Listen, folks, we're going to be doing, well, James is going to be doing with our collective lawyer, Moira Meltzer-Cohen, an episode on what this actually means legally.

And we will be doing that with a lawyer who is competent to speak on that more than we are.

Yeah.

I guess kind of what we want to do briefly in this episode is is try and pull people back from a ledge if you're feeling like you're on one right now, because it's bad.

The current situation is bad.

The administration is absolutely going after people on the left.

They absolutely will be increasingly applying terrorism enhancements to charges for anything that can be deemed as politically motivated by the left.

But this declaration, as people have pointed out, it's not like a thing, the president declaring something a domestic terrorist group.

Like it's not like none of this is anything that like has a legal force behind it, which doesn't mean again that they're not going to continue to go after people.

But this is stuff that started under the Biden administration, applying RICO charges and whatnot.

This is stuff that goes back to the 90s.

Right, right.

To the fucking Korean scare.

Yeah, with environmental organizations.

There is no real domestic terrorism designation.

That's why they're trying to go after funders and trying to find ties to international groups to have that terrorism label make more legal sense.

But Trump did actually sign an executive order to quote-unquote designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

Quote: All relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations, especially those involving terrorist actions conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa, or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support, including necessary investigatory and prosecutorial actions against those who fund such operations.

I mean, like anything in the United States, if you're going to be prosecuted for a federal crime, the US attorney has to bring a case against you and there has to be a crime that you have committed.

Right.

The executive branch does not make law.

But they're sure trying.

The legislative branch makes law.

They tried a lot last time as well.

They did.

I do want to remind everyone that right now we still have courts.

And as we're seeing seeing in Los Angeles and in other places, grand juries are not returning indictments when the AUSA brings a shoddy case or tries to prosecute someone for something that isn't a crime.

That right now is the case.

I'm not saying it will be forever.

I'm saying that that's where we're at.

And we can take a step back from the ledge if we know that, I hope, for people who are understandably very afraid.

Yes.

And I'm not saying don't be afraid because these are scary times.

I'm just saying, like,

don't assume that there's no point to fighting back or there's no way to do so, that you'll just like wind up in a fucking camp because people are going to court right now and winning.

Yeah.

And

those

court cases have not been invalidated by the administration.

They're not just taking people into custody anyway.

Like people have repeatedly gotten off for charges of assaulting ICE officers because they were bullshit charges, right?

Yeah.

So that's all I'm trying to say right now.

Yeah, you know, in terms of what these people are actually worried about, I think if you read the executive order, you can see

what they're scared of, right?

You know, to do the mildly cringe Andor quote, authority is brittle, oppression is the mask of fear.

You, JD Pritzer,

God,

God

is stealing my shit.

You and Pritzer holding hands meme, quoting Andor.

Apparently, he's a big Star Wars guy.

But if if you if you if you look at like what's actually in there right like okay i mean some of it's like obviously 2020 stuff but then they're talking about like violent assaults on immigration and customs enforcement and other law enforcement officials and routine doxing and other threats against public figures and activists like they are very worried about the fact that everywhere ice appears a whole bunch of people most of whom are just like random people in sweatpants.

I have seen so many pictures from every single city that there's like large-scale ICE deployments are.

There's just like people in sweatpants who just like walk out out of their houses and start taking pictures of ice agents.

They are very much concerned about this, right?

This is why they're trying to do this crackdown because the resistance to this stuff is actually working well enough.

You know, it's not that they like haven't been able to do ice raids, but it has degraded their capacity to do it significantly.

And that's why they're rolling this shit out so that they can, you know, as an attempt to intimidate people and as an attempt to

get people to stop doing the stuff that they've been doing, which has been

like effective enough to really shift the way ICE has been forced to do these things.

And

yeah.

Yeah.

Like if you go back to the like one of the first incidents of people like opposing an ICE raid, it was in South Park in San Diego, right?

These people are not like

organized members of Antifa.

Like South Park is a pretty bougie place.

It's like a vegan small plates restaurant and cocktail place.

They're people who are pissed that their neighbors are getting abducted.

Yeah, 100%.

They're just people who were there and were like, no, fuck you, this seems wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And again, like we talked about this last week, like this is happening in Wheaton.

Like people in evangelical college towns are seeing, are seeing ice trucks roll up and like just walking over to them and yelling at them and filming them.

And that sometimes is enough to make them just run away.

And that's what this is, you know, they're terrified of the fact that they live in an entire country of people who don't like that you're dragging their neighbors away at gunpoint.

And that's a sign to do more and not, you know, sort of give into fear every time there's some executive order bullshit that happens.

Yep.

Talking about things where the regime has not been as successful as it wanted to, right?

Let's talk about the case of the Guatemalan children.

We spoke about this on ED, I think, last week, potentially the week before, right?

These were the kids who were grabbed from their beds over Labor Day weekend.

And in that time, Judge Sparkle Supmanan Suknanan issued an emergency protective order.

But we've now seen a class action which would bring a more permanent protective order for these children.

Judge Timothy Kelly, I'm going to quote him here.

He was talking about the government's case and he said it had, quote, crumbled like a house of cards.

This is in part because a whistleblower's account contradicted the government's claim.

And this claim was made by acting director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Angie Salazar.

Salazar said under oath that the children had been screened to ensure they would not be subject to abuse or neglect.

The whistleblowers claimed that at least 30 of these children had been deemed ineligible for return because

they have indicators of being victimized by child abusers before.

So returning them would obviously return them to that situation of abuse or potentially do so, right?

The whistleblowers further stated that this was in an ORR database, Office of Refugee Resettlement database,

and such that the acting director would have access to that information.

The printed a lot of other evidence to Judge Kelly, who granted protection to the children in the case, and to quote all unaccompanied Guatemalan children who have received neither a final removal order nor permission from the Attorney General to voluntarily depart the United States.

So, if you remember, the government had previously said that they were resettling these children and that the DHS had nothing to do with it, that it was an Office of Refugee Resettlement operation

and that their families wanted them home and the families didn't want them home.

They dropped that claim later.

So this is a win, right?

They couldn't take these little children away in the night and spirit them off to somewhere where they would be in danger.

Let's move on to executive order number two for this week's episode.

This is one that you probably heard less about than the Antifa one, but this is the quote-unquote gold card executive order.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

So the gold card.

Trump has been truthing about this, right?

He truthed about it in June.

Also in June, Howard Luttnick announced that there are already 70,000 people waiting for these gold cards.

Applications could be made at trumpcard.gov.

Great.

And although the original stated price was 5 million, the executive order signed this week slashed the cost to just 1 million US dollars.

1 million?

1 million American dollars.

And as our currency continues to crush it, that will only get more affordable for folks elsewhere in the world.

So that's great.

It's good.

This is Trump's promised plan to sell permanent residency, right?

When he first announced this, we kind of wondered, how's he going to do this statutorily, right?

How's he going to do it legally?

Well, it turns out his plan is to consider the donation as evidence that the person is, quote, of exceptional business ability.

And that makes them eligible for an EB2 visa.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

So like you you could have never engaged in business in your life, right?

You could receive a small loan of $1 million from your parents.

Sure.

And that would allow you to get one of these.

Now, people will go through all the usual background checks, right?

Which, according to the EO, will be expedited, right?

You can't be like

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

He's dead now, but like you couldn't be him with a million dollars, right?

And do this, for example.

I like the idea that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would like try to move to the US, but would put his real name and his

application for a visa because he would see it coming.

No one's gonna get a check for this.

But everyone's like, oh, damn it, unfortunate man, he shares that name with a bad guy.

And there's like a 50% chance that it would have gotten approved.

That just like no one would have liked, would have had his name on a list.

Yeah.

It's chicken out.

Well, look, guys.

The caliph of ISIS is like fucking living in Brooklyn.

Oh, yeah.

He's going to all those founders meetings, you know, with other CEOs to discuss managing a large organization.

I'm excited for his TED Talk.

He's put his address as a tunnel in an HCS-controlled area of Syria.

No, okay.

So, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to be clear, is dead.

It was killed in the first Trump administration.

Yes.

A corporation donating for an individual would pay $2 million, right?

So it's more expensive if a corpse is doing it on your behalf.

And the cards will supposedly be gold and have Donald Trump's face on them, which is nice.

At the same time, the Trump administration added a $100,000 bill to the H-1B visa application.

So it's the visa application fee.

The H-1B, if you're not familiar, is an immigration scheme for skilled non-immigrant labor.

I'm particularly interested in this because this was one of the moments that the Trump coalition began to fracture in the early days of the Trump administration.

Like we saw the kind of tech right

as exemplified by Elon Musk going like, no, H-1Bs are good.

They allow them to bring people to this country and pay them not very much and take advantage of their skilled labor is what they allow the tech industry to do, right?

Sure.

And then we saw the more straight-up white nationalist right being like, but those people aren't white.

We don't want them here.

And it seems like it is that cadre of the Trump coalition, that part of

his ideological sort of support base, which has won out in this instance, right?

Because companies cannot save money paying someone 20 grand less if they have to pay 100 Gs to get them into the country, right?

Like individuals could make that donation, I guess, and get the visa that way.

Like if they came from a wealthy family and in another country and wanted, just desperately wanted to work in the US.

But generally H1Bs are used because employees, they can't leave, right?

Your visa is tied to your employer.

So the employment can be much less favorable, especially in the tech industry where people are always shopping and changing jobs to try and get a better wage, better benefits, et cetera.

They can't do that.

And so that will be coming to an end.

Finally, I want to talk about immigration judges.

The Trump administration has fired even more of them, according to NPR.

When Trump came into office, there were about 735 of these judges.

There are now fewer than 580.

What?

Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's quite a remarkable cut, right?

Not all of them were fired.

Some of them took advantage of the quote-unquote fork in the road offer, if we remember like early,

early Trump 2.0 Doge stuff.

Immigration judges, just so people understand, like people are like, what?

They fired a judge, how can they do that?

Immigration judges are not part of the independent judiciary.

They are a better way of seeing them would be as civil servants.

Nonetheless, they have, in many cases, I guess, worked to bring the trappings and the procedures of due process to the immigration.

world, right?

Like in many cases, they have, you know, they're not just rubber stamping deportation orders, right?

People do have a chance to make their case in front of immigration judges.

And even in Trump 2.0, people are still getting asylum in the United States.

The

courts right now are extremely backed up, right?

People are getting hearing dates in 2028, as we heard earlier this week.

Some courts, I read that one court is now running at 25% of its capacity.

Like it's supposed to have 21 judges and it has five.

Yep.

So this means that people will be in detention for longer.

I mean, that's like kind of intentional, right?

Like

yeah, well, one could make that case very, yeah.

The DOJ has reduced requirements for staffing these positions and the Trump administration has authorized about 600 JAGs, so military lawyers, to take on the role.

I don't think they're going to get the rubber stamp on deportations from those people that they expect to get.

It depends on if they sort of handpick those JAGs or they just got a bunch of people from the National Guard, but I don't think that that's going to be the just like straight up deportation factory that some people might assume it to be.

But nonetheless, right now, what we have is 580 judges, tens of thousands of people in detention, and detention

numbers and detention overcrowding growing every single day.

So that is not good.

Detention facilities are terrible at the best of times and conditions are pretty awful for everything I've heard right now.

Talking of things things that are pretty awful, here are some products and services.

We're back, and next, I think we're talking about tariffs.

Wait a second.

Do y'all hear that music?

caspa rocking caspa Tyre don't like it

Rockin' Casper Rockin' Caspa

oh wow we haven't had the song for a while that was nice wasn't it yeah that was good that was good just like old times bring it back just like old times several months ago Garrison has a sterile arm clock do you garrison

no okay okay good I think you put that would be that would be too much

that would be too much I would I We would need to intervene.

Listen, if you're listening and you do, stop it.

All right, Mia, how are tariffs B Do?

So we have some tariff news.

One is that we have a Supreme Court date for the case over whether a whole bunch of the tariffs are going to be allowed to continue or not.

That is going to be on November 5th.

We also have something, a no movement, which I think is pretty interesting.

So when last we spoke of tariffs, we mentioned that there were two countries that had gotten political tariffs on them.

Brazil for arresting Bolsonaro and prosecuting him and India for buying oil from Russia.

And there was a lot of speculation that these would be fairly quickly resolved.

They have not been.

They are both still into effect.

This is having massive consequences on a whole bunch of stuff.

And the place that I want to focus on with this is U.S.

agriculture, because we have been seeing some extremely alarming things out of the American agricultural sector that has really not broken out of like Midwest agriculture circles very much.

So one of the major consequences of, in some sense also the tariffs on Brazil, but one of the major consequences of the U.S.

tariffs on China is that like China did in 2018, China has simply refused to buy any American soybeans.

The U.S.

grows for export 52 million tons of soy every year, and more than half of that is sold to China.

And again, if you're conspiratorial and believe that like, you know, the soy, the soy is ruining people, you shouldn't support this.

Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You should be opposed to this because you should be wanting to export soy to China.

So that

you can make the Chinese woken soy.

Yeah, that's what I was saying.

Oh, yeah, yeah, there we go.

Yeah, you should support the export of soy to China.

We're getting it out of the U.S.

and to our greatest geopolitical enemies.

The other people who support the export of soy to China are American farmers.

So,

I guess this is like the farming thing that I say on this show.

I did technically, there was technically a farm behind my house growing up.

This is something that's very common in Midwestern agriculture: a soybean corn rotation.

Doing a soybean corn rotation is good for the soil.

So, it's very, very common in American agriculture.

Sure, you can fix nitrogen in soil with legumes.

Yeah.

But in order to do this, you have to be able to sell the soybeans.

And when this happened in 2018, this was kind of

behind the scenes.

So there was a whole big trade standoff in 2018.

And one of the things that played a big role in ending it was the fact that China just didn't buy soybeans from the U.S.

for a year.

And it really, really, really messed with the American agricultural market.

I'm going to read an account from the Progressive Farmer.

This is a quote from McGuire.

For most soybean farmers in North Dakota, you're looking at about $100,000 to $150 loss per acre on every acre of soybeans planted, Grackle said.

On his own farm, he expects losses could top $400,000 this year.

Grackle said the losses are not just tied to individual farmers.

It's the small businesses, local grocery stores, hardware stores, our local schools, our financial institutions.

They are all feeling the hurt from this.

Yeah.

So what is happening right now is that there is a bunch of soybeans that are being, that are just sitting there.

Yeah.

You know, like no one wants to buy them.

And I've seen a few things talking about like, okay,

there's processing plants opening up.

We can turn them into like soybean oil and

use like in the U.S.

and do that.

But like

this is becoming a really serious logistical problem because the thing about corn and soybeans is that it's not like you store them in different things, right?

Because if you're a farmer, you're growing both of them.

The sort of storage hubs that they use are the same ones.

And the problem is that there are basically stockpiles building up of these soybeans that can't be sold.

And this is becoming an increasing problem because there's the corn harvest and you have to put the corn somewhere.

It's a good example of the kind of little miniature logistical nightmares that are cropping up all up and down the supply chain as these tariffs sort of continue to roll in and as the instability of them continues to roll in that you and I aren't seeing yet, or we haven't seen much of the the effect of other than some small price increases.

But down the supply chain, there are increasing parts of the population who are just dealing with these just horrific logistical nightmares.

This is going to be, we're going to see the acceleration of this with the de minimis exemption being eliminated.

And in the meantime, China is just basically going to the country that the U.S.

slapped 50% tariffs on.

They're going to Brazil and attempting to basically supply their entire soybean demand largely from Brazil, which is like the other major soybean exporter.

So this is also very important politically because the American farming sector is very, very powerful.

There have been some bailouts already, but they're not going to be able to sustain the American farming sector, especially if this goes on for more than one year.

There was only one year in 2018 when they didn't buy it, and it was a fiasco.

If this goes on for an extended period of time, it is going to cause significantly larger problems.

Also, the economy was doing a lot better in 2018 than it is right now.

I mean, it was still kind of a mess, but yeah, so this is going to turn into an increasing sort of political thorn for Trump among a bunch of people who are supposed to be his base because people are very, very frustrated about this and it is getting very little press attention.

This has been the American farming tariff update question mark.

No, I mean, why would we want to hear about farming tariff news when instead we can just keep the culture war machine going to have everyone just gobsmacked over that instead like that's the whole point of their political machine it's it's not that everything is a distraction from something else right it's that if you keep everyone engaged with this with like culture war nonsense left-wing terrorism charlie kirk whatever like all of this stuff no one's gonna care about farming tariff news even if you're a big liberal outlet right you put this out there and like half your fucking audience is gonna be like lol la mau they voted for trump sucks for them like yeah

yeah and and the question effectively is are the people who previously had been kept in line by woke bathroom anti-dei

like trans women in sports stuff going to be able to be kept in line when the soybeans are rotting in the field and we will we will see we shall see yeah speaking of some uh charlie kirk culture award

The Department of Education has partnered with the America First Policy Institute and Turning Point USA for a new civics program.

This is called the America 250 Civics Education Coalition.

They'll work with over 40 national and state organizations to, quote, spearhead nationwide initiatives to engage students, educators, and communities in conversations about liberty, citizenship, and America's enduring values, unquote.

Other organizations a part of this coalition include Prager U, Moms for Liberty, Alliance Defending Freedom, Heritage Foundation, and three explicitly Christian lobbying groups.

Now, all of these groups are basically Christian lobbying groups, but three with like Christian or religious

names in the title of the organizations, now partnering directly with the state for this educational coalition.

Let's play a video from the new website explaining the initiative.

American education was once a shining light, guiding generations,

built on faith, heritage, patriotism.

But over the past 60 to 70 years, that brilliance has been dimmed.

A great institution has been crumbled from within.

Playing footage of the civil rights era.

Fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Oh, that's a triggering phrase for me.

Protocol race theory, gender, queer, dry queens.

Now, on the 250th, Linda McMahon emerges,

the Department of Education, the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, and partners across America are reigniting that light, restoring understanding, and returning education to the states where it belongs.

For this was what

we had a light that inspired the world.

And under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary McMahon.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Are you fucking kidding me?

AI-generated lighthouse.

Oh my God.

It's one of the craziest things I've ever seen.

Oh my God.

So the framing of the video is that this lighthouse has gone out and Linda McMahon emerges, polishes, and fixes the lighthouse, which now shines across the nation,

igniting our patriotic education.

They couldn't find a lighthouse in America, so they AI'd one.

With audio from WWE

Secretary McMahon, it's like the most hyper-reality American brainwashment.

What do you even say to that?

This is like the years of lead paint thing that we're talking about.

Talking about how American education has been totally destroyed, and they're playing footage of like civil rights era, like protests, and like leaders.

You can't parody this.

Nah, no.

And it's all set to to the soundtrack and edited in the manner of like a big budget Hollywood summer blockbuster from 15 years ago.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Which I guess, you know, fucking conservative Christians are always about 15 years behind.

Yeah, and their culture shit.

Like, so that scans.

But yeah, like it, this is like, it sounds like a fucking,

who's the guy who did Independence Day?

God damn it.

You know what I'm saying?

I don't know shit about popular culture, but yeah, we should just know that 70 years ago, education was segregated in this country.

Well, yeah, yeah, that's by

what they want.

Which is, yeah, yes.

I just want to

sort of drop that nugget.

I've listened in person to Charlie Kirk argue that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act.

Like, that's what these people want.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just want to join the dots for folks who haven't.

And history is inherently revisionist.

That's what we do.

We don't just go like, oh, we've done it all now.

We've worked it all out.

No need for any more historians.

That's not how history works.

The chief education officer of Turning Point Education, this is his real name, Dr.

Hutz H.

Hertzberg, Triple H, said that, quote,

that was also WWE character.

Is he the same guy?

No,

this is a Christian educator.

Oh, okay.

He says, quote, Turning Point USA is more resolved than ever.

to advance God-centered, virtuous education for students flourishing across our nation.

With that in mind, we are honored to partner with the distinguished organizations that comprise the America 250 Civics Education Coalition to restore, revive, and reclaim robust American civics education for all students throughout our country.

Unquote.

Earlier today, Wednesday, the state of Oklahoma has announced that they will be establishing TP USA chapters in every high school across the state.

Oh, great.

Here's the Superintendent Ryan Waters of Oklahoma.

I'm excited to announce today that every Oklahoma high school will have a turning point USA chapter.

We have seen the outpouring from parents, teachers, and students that want to be engaged in the meaningful work going on at Turning Point.

They want their young people to be engaged in a process that understands

free speech, open engagement, dialogue about American greatness, a dialogue around American values.

We're so excited to partner with Turning Point USA with this initiative.

For far too long, we have seen radical leftists with the teachers union dominate classrooms and put push woke indoctrination on our kids.

They fight parents' rights, they push parents out of the classroom, and they lie to our kids about American history.

What we're going to continue to do is make sure that our kids understand American greatness, engage in civic dialogue, and have that open discussion.

We will continue to do all that we can.

to make sure Oklahoma students have the best education possible.

Part of this announcement, he has written on Twitter, quote, radical leftist teachers' unions have dominated classrooms for far too long, and we are taking them back.

I think, uh, Robert, we talked with this guy last year at the RNC.

Yep, yeah, we should.

We might do something with that interview at some point.

I wish he'd got he'd been out of a job by now, but life,

life, huh?

The last thing I want to discuss today is quote-unquote transgender terrorism, something I've seen many uh friends and posters across the internet be really, really concerned about

for a lot of good reasons.

Ken Klipenstein has released a few articles the past few days.

The first one from last week, quote, the FBI readies a new war on trans people.

The FBI is preparing to label transgender people as violent extremists in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder.

That is how Ken framed that on the headline and for his tweet alongside the article.

Other outlets like them.us has spread this reporting even further.

Quote, FBI to categorize trans people as nihilistic violent extremist threat group.

Report says the Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly preparing to categorize transgender people as violent extremists.

This framing is incorrect, and I will explain why in great detail shortly.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is not getting ready to categorize transgender people as like a a category, as like a class of people as violent extremists.

There is no evidence that this is currently what they're doing.

There's no internal communications arguing this.

Even the Heritage Foundation's proposal to create a new category of trans terrorism is not arguing this, as I will quote from here shortly.

But let's get into what the first article from Cliffenstein actually wrote based on a source inside the government.

Quote: The senior official explains that there is no process per se for dealing with trans people as a quote-unquote threat group, but feels that trans individuals will be increasingly targeted under the banner of violent extremism.

Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender subjects as a subset of the Bureau's new threat category, nihilistic violent extremists, unquote.

We've talked about nihilistic violent extremists on this show before, back in spring.

And we all know that the Trump administration has been targeting trans people.

Like this is something that everyone who listens to this show is aware of.

This is a real thing.

But there is not actually any new verifiable information in this report there's rhetoric from people like donald trump jr and and and right-wing influencers talking about transgender terrorists and this trend of transgender terrorists as they have been for the past two years me and mia did that piece about uh fake trans terrorists like almost two years ago That was two years ago now?

We've been tracking this rhetoric for a long time.

So stuff like that fills up a lot of the space in articles like this, but new verifiable information is actually quite short.

In this article, Ken has a single unnamed official who quote unquote feels like trans people could be labeled nihilistic violent extremists.

Now, in Ken's previous reporting about this label, he misunderstood the NVE label.

This label exists just essentially for 764, the child exploitation group that operates on the Discord and Telegram and branch off groups from that.

We've talked about them on the show here before as well.

And the nihilist violent extremism term predates the Trump administration.

This isn't a cash patel thing.

This predates the Trump admin.

This was active last year.

And it primarily is to categorize and map these child sexploitation rings and some overlapping communities like the school shooter fandom.

But in Ken's article here, there's no like leaked documents in this report showing like current memos or communications on this topic.

Ken's great for leaks, but there's not leaked documents in this report.

Now,

as we all know, and we've reported, the right-wing hate campaign against trans people is a real thing.

It's real coming from the Trump administration, from state-level government, as well as the entire conservative media apparatus.

But I think right now, especially, it's really important to read reports like this very carefully.

Trans fear-mongering massively boosts social media engagement, which then can encourage people to use framing like this that might actually kind of be irresponsible.

Now, a few hours before Hilbert Stein published published this first article, the Heritage Foundation and their oversight project released a petition to have the FBI designate a new category of violent extremism, which they call trans-ideology-inspired violent extremism, or TIV.

Quote, TIV is based on the belief that violence is justified against those who do not share radical views of transgender ideology.

It has led to an increasing trend of TIV domestic terrorist events across the country.

In recent years, TIV has played a role in the majority of mass shootings at schools.

That is the Heritage Foundation's claim.

The petition includes a list of quote-unquote TIV-motivated attacks, including multiple attackers who either were not trans or were clearly not motivated by trans ideology, as reporting at the time and government documents have shown, including acts from the past like six or seven years.

But Heritage writes that, quote, experts estimate, no citation, that 50% of non-gang related school shootings since 2015 have, quote, involved or likely involve trans ideology, unquote.

50%

have involved or likely involved.

Yet in this list, they can only list three school shootings.

They can only list three, even in their own list, which they say 50%

likely involve trans ideology.

There's been more than three school shootings this year.

This month.

There's been more three school shootings not involving trans people this year.

This, this is a wild, wildly atrocious is sad.

Yeah, it's just fabricated, right?

Like, and again, like, reality doesn't matter.

Like, that's, that's the point.

Like, no, this is the Heritage Foundation.

Like, come on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But importantly, like, a violent extremism designation.

would not mean that all trans people as a class are deemed violent extremists.

What it would do is it would create a category to use for investigations into violent acts, graph patterns of violence, argue in court documents, and possibly include some preemptive surveillance on people or groups that are deemed as threats as a part of this threat group.

But in the petition, Heritage says that no, not all transgender individuals or their allies are domestic terrorists.

Quote, they are even free to engage in offensive and hateful speech under the First Amendment so long as they do not stray into unlawful incitement, defamation, true threat, obscenity, or some other category of non-protected speech.

The domestic terror destination becomes relevant only when individuals or groups, one, are motivated by an ideology that encourages, promotes, or condones violence, and two, take or incite unlawful violent action or threats based on that ideology.

Both criteria must be met.

Unquote.

That's from the Heritage's own petition.

It's not, there's nothing in Heritage's own petition or Ken's article that says that trans people entirely are going to be deemed terrorists or a domestic extremist threat group.

That's not what either heritage or what the actual details of articles like Ken's is saying.

And to further kind of show this divide, the Heritage Petition also addresses the nihilist violent extremism label as a completely separate thing, unrelated to trans people, that they do not want combined into one single category.

I don't know why Ken keeps pushing on this label so much.

It's really important to understand how trans people are actually under threat right now, because they are, right?

The biggest threats to trans people right now are access to healthcare, specifically for people who are under the age of 18, and things like bathroom bans and trying to restrict transgender people from public life.

But the other biggest threat to trans people right now is like ourselves.

And we don't need to do the government's work for them to keep us so demoralized.

Spreading misinformation or unverified reports like this that just makes everyone panicked and freak out actually harms us and our community.

The trans panic industrial complex complex is dangerous, and people need to be very careful about this because it's an extremely dangerous time and having an accurate assessment over what's going on is going to be crucial to survive the next few months to years.

No.

And again, we've seen this on the right in, and this has played a role in radicalizing a lot of people on the right and getting them to do fucked up shit is years of like, they're coming for you.

They're coming for you.

They're going to be coming for you tonight, right?

Like you're already already dead, you know?

There's money in pushing and there's clout in pushing hopelessness.

And I don't want to be telling people everything's good because it's not.

Things are very dangerous for trans people right now in a way they have not been at any point previously in very recent history.

Things are much worse, right?

Nobody's denying that.

But

you have to look at like the facts of how they're worse as opposed to not reading an article or analyzing what the article actually says or analyzing what the Heritage Foundation says and saying

they're declaring all of us terrorists, right?

Because that's not going to end well.

No.

Yeah.

Don't panic, organize.

That's the actual solution to this.

I also want to briefly note on, I've seen a lot of comparisons of this to the black identity extremism

designation.

And I want to bring this back to something that Garrison mentioned earlier about the way that the nihilist extremism category was like specifically designed to target like a specific sort of complex network of

pedophile Discord servers.

Yeah, this is the same methodology that was used for black identity extremism.

Black identity extremism wasn't a category they conjured out of nowhere to go after all black people.

It was a category that was specifically designed to go after specific activists in the wake of Occupy and the wake of Ferguson.

Yeah.

And

this is completely just not

the process that is happening for this, right?

Like we're not, we're not dealing with, okay, there is a specific group of trans activists that the government wants to target.

So they're creating a label for it, right?

We don't have any evidence of that at all.

What we have is anonymous sources saying they feel like something might happen.

That trans people could be targeted.

And you're like, yeah, trans people have been targeted.

Like, that's what's happening.

Yeah.

Are they going to be labeled denielist violent extremists?

at this point, unlikely.

Could the FBI consider adopting something like the heritage proposal for Vrativ?

Yeah, possibly.

Yeah,

that is absolutely a possibility.

Would that come into reality the same way that people are talking about it online or the way that headlines are framing it?

No.

It's not about designating all trans people as terrorists as a class.

It's not about that.

And it also wouldn't function like the black identity extremist thing because again, that was a like they already had people they were going after and they wanted a legal category that they could deploy in order to go after them that's not what's happening here they don't have like a list of like trans discord servers that they're about to round up for like doing a protest like that's not what's happening here no but they could go after people who make threats online and that's something that i'm sure cash patel's fbi yeah would love to do and if they can sort those people into a category like tiv to argue in a prosecution or to or to make like a flowchart to direct investigations, then that's the realm they're going to use.

Yeah, but even that, we are so far away from them even like starting that process that you should be concerned about the actual threats from like, I don't know, I mean, just like literally,

there's been a series of attacks on trans people just like in neighborhoods in Seattle by just like gangs of dudes, right?

That's like an actual substantive thing that is happening that is not this, that is not a sort of nebulous, like we are relying on opinions of unnamed officials.

We can look at and evaluate and figure out what we're going to do about it instead of just giving into the panic industrial complex and panicking about it.

Yeah.

Things that are framed bombastically like this go super viral and they spread a lot.

And that's what the algorithms are encouraging.

I mean, same thing with the algorithmic boosting of false flag conspiracy theories because those are so much more satisfying.

They spread like wildfire across blue sky and Twitter and like even things like Instagram stories and just be very careful about anything that goes viral because that claim is trying to influence your brain it's trying to worm its way into your brain to take the form as a thought that you had yourself and be super careful because this type of weaponized unreality has been used so successfully the past 10 years against the right this is how the whole like you know migrant panic wave started lies about immigration this like panicked framing these things spread like wildfire online and now you have large swaths of the country believing in this genuine, like, like, you know, migrant crisis.

And this is how social media functions to influence how your brain thinks and how your brain processes fact from fiction and forms like a collective sense of reality.

And you are also being targeted by this same process in different ways than the right is, but this process is still targeting you as well.

And

it's like super important to like read things critically and take time before jumping to conclusions because I don't think we need more quick, emotionally satisfying conspiracy theories in our life.

Yeah.

Anyway.

That's the news this week.

We sure did report it.

Yeah, that's the news this week.

We reported the Hannah Venia.

Go away.

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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