It Could Happen Here Weekly 200

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Speaker 71 Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 71 So every episode of of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

Speaker 71 If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 71 Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here.

Speaker 71 It in this case being an incredibly political shooting and the thing that's happening, Garrison and i wading through a river of disinformation and fever dreams to try and pull out some degree of truth in what is a very truth light environment right now garrison how are you doing truth fluid certainly truth fluid yeah that's that's a better way to phrase it i have a growing headache that i think grows larger by these seconds yeah just will not will not cease i guess you should first discuss how the shooter has been identified identified and arrested.

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 75 We are recording this Friday evening for context.

Speaker 71 Yes, early evening. There will be more information on the shooter and on the shooting.

Speaker 71 By the time you listen to this, we may include an update at the end, but we will be talking about stuff that is timeless, as in things that we know are false or true at the moment, and just generally our ethics on.

Speaker 71 When do we feel confident saying a shooting or other kind of attack was left-wing or right-wing or something else. Like, when do we feel confident making those judgments and why?

Speaker 71 Because those are really relevant topics. And a lot of people just kind of go with what seems right based on the flow of info they're hearing, which is how disinformation spreads.

Speaker 71 So the last time we would have talked about this would be the ED episode that came out, what was that, Friday, Garrison?

Speaker 75 Yeah, Thursday night, Friday morning.

Speaker 71 And basically right after we covered that, early in the morning on Friday, President Trump was doing a media appearance on Fox News, and he was the person who announced that they had a suspect in custody, who they were pretty sure was it.

Speaker 71 Obviously, since the FBI had given the wrong,

Speaker 71 accused the wrong person at least twice of doing this, people weren't sure if that meant anything.

Speaker 71 But it did come out very soon after that that a young man had essentially confessed to his father, who negotiated him turning himself into the authorities. This young man is Tyler Robinson.

Speaker 71 He was born and raised in Utah, I think, as far as we know. I woke up in the the middle of the night right as his name came out.
I don't know why. It was weird.

Speaker 71 And so I just immediately started looking at the social media for his family because I was able to find his like mom and his dad's Facebook.

Speaker 75 The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Speaker 71 So I can tell you, and this is something you'll find in the reporting. He came from a pretty normal Utah family, politically conservative.

Speaker 71 That's based on articles I've seen interviewing people who know the family and just based on publicly available information.

Speaker 75 Grunt-style t-shirt wearing father.

Speaker 71 Right. He dressed as Donald Trump, seemingly in a positive fashion for Halloween Halloween one year.
His family were pretty, a very normal Utah family.

Speaker 71 I found posts where they like took pictures of them camping with their RVs, going out hunting. He was hunting from a young age.

Speaker 71 He had access to firearms from a young age, including assault-style weapons from a young age. Again, very common for Utah.
And yeah, his family hunted and fished.

Speaker 71 And he seems to have been a very normal kid. uh in that regard.

Speaker 71 Kind of the thing that I found when I was doing my first dive into this that I thought was worthwhile and the one thing that I really pulled out of that to share with people was in 2018, he dressed as a meme for Halloween.

Speaker 71 And the specific meme was this meme that is not inherently political, but is one that this group of far-right people who follow a guy named Nick Fuentes called the Groipers like, which doesn't mean that he was signaling to that, because again, Like all of this stuff, it's not just the Groipers who like this squatting Slav guy meme.

Speaker 71 That's what he dressed as. If you've seen this meme of like the squatting Slavic guy in a tracksuit with a cigarette and a beer, he dressed like that for Halloween.

Speaker 71 There's a Groiper version of that squatting Slav guy.

Speaker 75 Well, no, there's a Pepe version. You're right.

Speaker 71 You're right.

Speaker 18 I need to be precise.

Speaker 71 There's a Pepe version, and it is a meme that you can find shared in Grouper spaces, which again does not mean it's a Grouper meme. And I've seen that mistakenly and really tried to push back on this.

Speaker 71 Does not mean he definitely was, but it does mean that he was a very online kid. And he traveled in spaces where he would have had access and would have been aware of Groupers.

Speaker 71 And that would have been one chunk of the online fever swamps that he would have been connected to and he would have had access to.

Speaker 71 We don't yet know at the time we're recording this what he believed or what his motivation was.

Speaker 71 The reason I thought was relevant to publisher of this is that like, okay, we are dealing with an extremely online weirdo, right?

Speaker 71 And immediately after that, it came out exactly what was carved onto the bullets that he had shot.

Speaker 71 And this was relevant in part because yesterday, the first day of news that we had about the bullets, the immediate claim that was leaked to Stephen Crowder through a source of his in the ATF was that transgender symbols had been carved onto the bullets.

Speaker 71 That was not accurate. If you want some levity from this whole scene, listening to the sheriff

Speaker 71 giving the press conference, read the things he carved onto these bullets.

Speaker 75 We should just include some of those clips here.

Speaker 73 We'll put it in here.

Speaker 77 Inscriptions on a fired casing read, notices bulges, capital OWO. What's this question mark? Inscriptions on the three unfired casings read, hey, fascist exclamation point, catch exclamation point,

Speaker 77 up arrow symbol, right arrow, and symbol, and three down arrow symbols. A second unfired casing read, O Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow Chow.

Speaker 77 And a third unfired casing read, if you read this, you are gay, L-M-A-O.

Speaker 71 Just absolutely outstanding stuff. I mean, hearing a law enforcement officer say that is beautiful.

Speaker 71 It reminds me of having to explain Bitcoin to all of the elderly detectives in West LA when I got a death threat against me. But this is like extremely online gamer nonsense.
Gamer.

Speaker 71 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Average white male overly online gamer at this point. That's what it looks like.

Speaker 75 It could have developed in a far far right direction, could be developed in a far left direction, could be an ironic centrist. It could be any number of things.
There's no single clear indication.

Speaker 71 It could be someone who doesn't map easily onto any of these traditional political compasses. Like, we don't know at this point.

Speaker 71 And what's kind of important that, and the reason what I thought was really important to get out to people is that there will always be terrorist attacks from a wider church.

Speaker 71 It's never, even if you want it to just be right-wingers, it's never just right-wingers who do domestic terrorism. That's never been the case and it never will be the case.

Speaker 71 And one of the things that we're seeing and we will increasingly see is that even while there will be varying political motivations behind different attacks, the language that people who are carrying out attacks like this use is all kind of coming to a point together, right?

Speaker 71 They all have more in common with the way they message.

Speaker 18 The Christchurch shooter and this kid.

Speaker 71 both found the need to put memes onto the weapons they were using.

Speaker 75 Inscribe the internet onto

Speaker 75 tools of killing. Mechanisms of death.

Speaker 71 Literally inscribing the internet onto tools of death. That is a thing both of them did.

Speaker 71 Maybe for wildly different reasons. Maybe this guy was coming from a left-wing perspective, right? We just don't know.

Speaker 75 But this is where it's all coalescing around.

Speaker 71 Yeah. And I think that is really important to note, right? The way that that happens.
Now, again, we wanted to talk about the thing that we can definitely say is disinformation.

Speaker 71 And one of the first counters to the whole transgender symbols carved onto bullets that came out was people putting up pictures of there there's a Turkish manufacturer called Turan and they make bullets and their logo like on the back of a bullet if you're not a gun person every bullet has the logo of the manufacturer and the name of the caliber stamped onto the back right i mean just for basic safety reasons right or nearly every bullet 22 is a little too small but like if you've got like around a nine millimeter or around a 5.56 or around a 30 at 6 which was the caliber he used apparently on the back of it you'll see the name of the the manufacturer and then the caliber stamped in there right And so on the back of Turan bullets is stamped T-R-N.

Speaker 71 And so people started posting online, this must be why they thought what they thought was transgender, that like they saw a Turan bullet and assumed it was trans.

Speaker 71 And we know that wasn't the case because this was a 30 out 6 and Terran does not make 30 out 6 ammunition.

Speaker 71 We also know this was the case because they have now come out and said what was written on the bullets and what was mistaken for transgender arrows.

Speaker 71 And the thing that was mistaken for transgender arrows was a reference to the video game Helldivers.

Speaker 75 A fucking hell divers meme. Yes.

Speaker 71 Again, very gamer online kid.

Speaker 75 Side note, it's not completely clear which bullet casing was attributed to transgender ideology. It could be an interpretation of the arrows, or it could be the notices bulge, oh woe casing.

Speaker 75 And on that note, notices bulge oh woe is not a groiper meme. It's a meme making fun of furry sex role-playing, which predates the existence of groipers by years.

Speaker 75 And as a meme has since been reclaimed by furries and trans shitposters online, or trans only fans creators, or just trans people in general in the internet, many of which are also furries.

Speaker 75 But now we have various types of opposing or overlapping groups of people who use this meme online. It's not a right-wing meme just making fun of furries.

Speaker 75 It is also a meme used by people on the left and furries on the left and probably furries on the right too and non-furries. It's just a general internet meme.
It's a Reddit tier joke now.

Speaker 75 I will say the Helldivers meme also gives us kind of our,

Speaker 75 not a clear look, but a look at a possible political motivation. Now, it could be ironic in use.
It could be just referential in use.

Speaker 75 But the full Helldivers referenced bullet reads, hey, fascist, catch.

Speaker 75 Followed by the Helldivers D-pad input for the 500-kilogram bomb.

Speaker 18 Right.

Speaker 75 Which is the arrows.

Speaker 18 Yeah. That's the down arrows.

Speaker 75 I think up arrow, side arrow, down, down, down arrow, which some ATS agent or someone initially thought could have been a reference to the transgender symbol or the three arrows symbol coupled with the hey fascist section of that reference.

Speaker 18 Right.

Speaker 75 The helldivers video game does use fascist as a term, but this also could be a more general political reference, either ironic or sincere, by referring to Charlie Kirk as a fascist.

Speaker 75 We do not know the actual intentionality behind this reference yet.

Speaker 75 One thing that is possibly tied to anti-fascism is that another bullet reads Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow Chow, misspelling Bella Chow, which is a popular anti-fascist anthem, though the song has more recently also been used by groipers and fans of Hearts of Iron 4.

Speaker 75 A diverse political bunch, one could say. We have talked about Bella Chow on this show before.
In fact, we've used Bella Chow on multiple cool zone media shows.

Speaker 75 It was originally an Italian anti-fascist song that has since been adopted by anarchists and anti-fascists all around the globe.

Speaker 75 I've heard Bella Chow get played on loudspeakers countless times at anti-fascist events on the West Coast, as well as anarchist events on the East Coast.

Speaker 75 Though the song has since gained a whole other life through pop culture popularization with EDM and like dubstep style remixes going viral.

Speaker 75 Most normies probably first heard it on the Netflix show Money Heist and has been adopted into gamer culture via its use in Far Cry 6 and Hearts of Iron 4.

Speaker 71 So again, it could be an anti-fascist reference, could be video game shit, could be griper shit. There's just not enough to say at this point.

Speaker 75 Or it could be a centrist,

Speaker 75 apolitical hodgepodge that has resulted in this nihilistic outburst of violence similar to some of these like TCC school shootings. Yeah.
We don't know.

Speaker 75 But there's currently a lot of people on the right who thinks it's an Antifa super soldier leftist. A lot of people on the left who think this is a Nick Fuentes pilled groiper.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 And either of those could be true, but neither could be true. It could be a much weirder third option.

Speaker 75 We don't have direct evidence to support a full reading of either of those things yet.

Speaker 71 And this is one I have seen people get kind of heated about being corrected on, particularly the bullet thing. And I think the reason why is that

Speaker 71 it seems like such a smoking gotcha. Of course, they'd be this stupid.
You really want it to be true.

Speaker 71 And it's when you feel like that about a case like this, about an attack like this, that like, oh, I really want this to be true.

Speaker 71 It would be really satisfying if this was the thing that had happened, that you need to be most hesitant to embrace that, right?

Speaker 71 I think that's, that's that's what I'd say.

Speaker 75 Absolutely. If it's too good to be true or it feels too convenient, you should introspect greatly.
Yeah.

Speaker 71 Robert and Garrison will be right back, but first, here's some ads.

Speaker 73 And we're back.

Speaker 75 There's been other things that is kind of influencing this political uncertainty.

Speaker 75 A reporter for The Young Turks, only the most reputable news outlet, has claimed on Twitter on Friday afternoon, quote, according to Utah officials and police interviews with his family, Tyler Robinson hated Charlie Kirk because Kirk wasn't conservative enough.

Speaker 75 Robinson reportedly admired Nick Fuentez. GO peers are now scrubbing ex-posts about Dems faster than DOJ erases Trump's name from in Epstein files, unquote.
Yeah.

Speaker 75 This claim from David Schuster, the reporter for the Young Turks, unsubstantiated.

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 75 But it is being spread as exact fact, and it seems like this claim is most likely misquoting and editorializing from a statement a family member gave to police, which has been described by the governor as a family member and the shooter discussing Charlie Kirk's upcoming visit to UVU campus.

Speaker 75 They talked about why they didn't like him and viewpoints he held. The family member also stated Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate, unquote.

Speaker 75 So that has been altered and shifted and interpreted in a lot of different ways to say that the shooter stated Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate, even though that's not what this interview segment necessarily means.

Speaker 75 Just that, quote unquote, they, meaning the family member and the shooter, didn't like Kirk. And that's really all you can extrapolate from that piece of this police statement.

Speaker 75 But it's been spread and editorialized to mean a wild collection of different things.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Including by people on the right who are interpreting this statement as evidence that the shooter has said that Kirk was spreading hate, even though that's not actually clear from this interview either.

Speaker 73 No.

Speaker 75 It says that the family member stated Charlie Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate, not the shooter.

Speaker 71 And likewise, one of the things I'm seeing spread a lot is a claimed voter registration for Robinson. A.

Speaker 75 Tyler Robinson in Utah. Yeah.

Speaker 73 Again, Again, there's a lot of them.

Speaker 75 A lot of Tyler Robinsons in Utah.

Speaker 71 The one that is spreading the most has a voter registration date of 0101-2001, which he just simply couldn't have.

Speaker 71 Now, that said, people have pointed out that Utah's voter registration shit is bad, and this does seem like a placeholder that someone put in.

Speaker 71 But also, the county is not right because he didn't live in Lehigh, Utah, and that's where this is listed for.

Speaker 71 I'm not saying this guy definitely wasn't or he may have been a registered Republican, but it looks like we don't have the information to say that yet.

Speaker 71 Likewise, there's an article that was published recently in The Guardian where they talked to someone who was a friend of his in high school who said that he was like the only leftist in a family of Republicans and was angry about it.

Speaker 75 The exact quote was that Robinson was quote pretty left on everything, the only member of his family that was really leftist. The rest of his family was very hard Republican.
Yep.

Speaker 75 And that Robinson would quote always just be ranting and arguing about them.

Speaker 18 unquote.

Speaker 71 And it does look, CNN is saying that they have found Tyler Robinson's actual voter registration data.

Speaker 71 And CNN says he's registered as unaffiliated with a political party and is listed as inactive, which means he has not voted in either of the two last general elections.

Speaker 18 Sure.

Speaker 71 So again, there's just nothing clear we can say, right?

Speaker 75 Yeah, it's hard to take both this young Turks reporter and a high school friend from four years ago. not great sources for someone's current political outlook.
Absolutely not. And contradictory.

Speaker 75 So it's really, really unclear. Also, this is just one friend.
You would want more than one source to substantiate this claim.

Speaker 75 And perhaps by Sunday night when this airs, there will be more information. Quick update on this.

Speaker 75 Literally minutes after Robert and I recorded, The Guardian retracted those quotes from the shooter's alleged high school classmate, which described the shooter as a leftist.

Speaker 75 The source contacted the Guardian again and said that they could not accurately remember the details of their relationship in high school.

Speaker 72 So the Guardian has pulled those quotes.

Speaker 75 But certainly right now, the way people have latched on to narratives to satisfy the current emotional turmoil that people are in because of the hyper-reality around this shooting and the possible consequences it could mean for the fate of this whole country.

Speaker 75 I understand why people are quick to really hook their version of reality onto these claims. Yes.
But currently there is no clear version of reality.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 71 And I just want to caution people, if you care about knowing reality yourself, and there's two different questions here, right? What is useful? What is valuable? What like protects people?

Speaker 18 And then what gets us closer to the truth, right?

Speaker 71 Part of why, as soon as I found that photo of him dressed as a meme for Halloween and recognized the implications of it, I put it up there is because I thought it was relevant, that it said something about his background.

Speaker 71 But also it it got discussion and just people bringing up how complicated this guy's background is did a a positive thing, which was it got discussion away from absolutely baseless allegations that this was a transgender terrorist attack and all sorts of all the kind of shit that had been spreading on their right, right?

Speaker 71 And that was valuable. However, I've been really careful about not saying this guy is a Groiper, even though that sure would be convenient.

Speaker 71 Because again, at the time we're recording this, there's just not that evidence. Every new fact that comes out about this guy right now is wavering in this

Speaker 71 gray area where, you know, like I, one of the other things when I I posted correcting the voter registration card, somebody posted like, okay, but he donated to Trump's campaign.

Speaker 73 No, he did not.

Speaker 71 A different guy with his name donated to Donald Trump. The Tyler Robinson, who is currently in custody for shooting Charlie Kirk, has no record of federal election donations per CNN, right?

Speaker 71 These are very convincing when you see them just sort of sliding across your newsfeed. And if you're not checking up on every new thing you see, it feels like obviously this guy's a right-winger.

Speaker 71 Obviously, he's a groiper. I've seen so many pieces of evidence when you actually haven't seen any evidence at all.

Speaker 75 And even those two things can get conflated, right? Saying he's a groiper is different than saying he's

Speaker 18 a right-winger. Right.

Speaker 75 Like, like a groiper is a very specific branch of alt-right slash far-right.

Speaker 75 community slash ideology revolving around the America first streamer Nick Fuentes and a collection of memes associated with this movement, which have historically beefed with Charlie Kirk for not being sufficiently to the right as some more openly white supremacist neo-Nazis have been.

Speaker 75 This beef between Fuentes and Kirk was largely dissolved after Kirk started adopting more and more far-right beliefs and adopted the great replacement theory, which settled down the quote-unquote Grouper War, which many people are assuming that this shooting is a part of, with some Grouper, Nick Fuentes fan, killing Charlie Kirk, possibly as a legitimate part of the quote-unquote Grouper War, but also maybe just as like an ironic memetic act.

Speaker 75 So when you say Grouper, that should refer to a very specific thing, not necessarily just this guy used right-wing memes or these memes aren't even right-wing, but like...

Speaker 18 No, they could be, but they're not inherently.

Speaker 75 This man could be,

Speaker 75 but they're not inherently. Nor are they really the main use of this.
Saying, haha, if you read this, you are gay. Right.
Could just be an average overly online male gamer on the internet.

Speaker 75 A lot of people talk like that. A lot of gay people talk like that.
A lot of fascist people talk about that.

Speaker 71 Is this homophobia or a 20-year-old?

Speaker 75 Right?

Speaker 75 It could be either or. Yeah.

Speaker 75 And we don't need to just jump to one specific thing to build a singular narrative when a fluid situation is still rapidly unfolding. Yeah.

Speaker 71 Not if, again, you want to feel like and you want to really be better than the other side who don't give a shit about the truth, who just care about what's convenient and how many people they can get to believe a convenient fact, right?

Speaker 71 If you don't want to be that kind of person, if you think that's bad, and I do, and you do, and we all do here at CoolZone, then you do kind of owe it to yourself to care about stuff like this, even if it's less convenient.

Speaker 71 By the way, if you're not an investigator, you don't have to be delving into all this. It's enough to just know the fact that I saw something that looked like evidence this guy donated to a campaign.

Speaker 71 Do I know that that's him? Do I absolutely know that that's him? Because it's possible multiple people have the same name and some of them may have made a donation or not, right?

Speaker 71 Don't just pass your eyes over stuff like this and be like, all right, I've done all I need to do. But do purchase from these advertisers.

Speaker 71 And we're back.

Speaker 75 One other aspect that people's reaction to the shooting is demonstrating, and we've seen this with other major events, major political events, violent political events the past few years, is how this shows a new fracturing of reality.

Speaker 75 Because what eventually gets proven about the shooter will probably be insignificant to the narratives that people have already latched onto and have baked into reality so far.

Speaker 75 And this conceptual splitting of reality is going to fall squarely along some partisan and political lines, right?

Speaker 75 Conservatives will have a conception of the shooting which differs heavily from the conception of the shooting held by people on the left.

Speaker 75 Many people on the left are going to believe that this shooter was a groiper forever.

Speaker 75 No matter what comes out in the next few weeks to months, they will have in their version of reality the idea that this guy was a groiper.

Speaker 75 Similarly, people on the right are going to believe to the fullest and truest extent of their hearts that this guy was Antifa.

Speaker 75 The actual reality is going to matter very little compared to these two beliefs. And like the killing of Charlie Kirk has mimetic potential for several large, discrete and overlapping online groups.

Speaker 75 Many different online communities or groups could have encouraged or influenced this killing. Anti-fascists certainly could have.
Leftists. The Groiper right could have.
The 4chan right could have.

Speaker 75 Terror Gram could have. Yeah.
All different and possibly overlapping communities. Incel culture.
Yeah. Irony poisoned centrists.
J-Reg, nihilists, accelerationists.

Speaker 71 A normal garden variety Trumpist Republican who got angry over Epstein stuff could have done this. There's no evidence of that.

Speaker 71 I'm not saying, but I'm just saying, like, there's, we literally, like, it could be so many things at this point.

Speaker 75 And as satisfying as it is to just collapse this guy down to Antifa or Graper,

Speaker 75 it's very likely it could just be a third weirder option.

Speaker 18 It could be the weirder option, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Especially if you look at the nihilist trend of violence that we've covered on this show from TCC with ties to other extremist groups.

Speaker 75 The multiple school shootings that have used nostalgia and online references and references to previous shootings, this could also line up with that framework.

Speaker 75 As Robert said, the inscription of memes onto tools of death is a commonality across many of these gruesome acts of violence, from Christchurch to the Minneapolis school shooting just a month ago to this assassination in September.

Speaker 75 Yeah.

Speaker 71 Now, I think it is worth talking about how Groipers and how Nick Fuentes himself has responded to this, because that is telling.

Speaker 73 right? Totally.

Speaker 71 Whether or not this guy is a groiper, a lot of groipers have publicly speculated that he is their guy.

Speaker 75 Or people on 4chan have speculated that he is a groiper. Not your average 4chan user necessarily is a groiper.
I think this distinction is also important.

Speaker 18 That is valid. Yes.

Speaker 75 But yeah, you have seen a lot of people on the right suspect that this guy could be a groiper. Certainly some groipers have themselves as well as 4chan users.

Speaker 75 And Nick Fuentes does seem a little bit nervous, but he could be nervous for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 71 He put out a video.

Speaker 75 I watched the entire Nick Fuentes stream last night.

Speaker 18 Oh, good.

Speaker 71 Thank God.

Speaker 75 He was acting a little bizarre, talking very philosophical, almost as if he was like doing ketamine beforehand.

Speaker 75 Like he was talking about how the structure of society and like a spiritual structure as well will influence society to cause events to happen, which kind of stress test and demonstrate the direction of society going.

Speaker 75 And he basically talked about the assassination as one of these events of society unfolding itself to determine what path is going to get taken. Are things going to get more violent and more divisive?

Speaker 75 Or will this event alter reality's course in a more positive direction?

Speaker 75 It was very interesting. He was talking about how he feels some responsibility for the arc that this country has gone on, how he's made a lot of mistakes when he's younger.

Speaker 75 You could interpret this as trying to pick up new supporters and try to fill in the Charlie Kirk-sized hole in the American right.

Speaker 75 But it's unclear. He was talking quite emotionally emotionally about what the past few years of his life have been.

Speaker 71 And again, making that comment that like, I want all of my fans to stand down, et cetera, it's noteworthy of where Fuentes' head is, right?

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 71 And of the media environment he must exist in terms of like personally what comes to him.

Speaker 71 And I'm very curious if I could, if I could somehow know everything Nick Fuentes has been texted and been texting over the last 72 hours. God, that would be fascinating.

Speaker 75 He said the people on the left were telling him it's his responsibility to try to turn things down. And he was kind of upset about that.

Speaker 75 And during the stream, Fuentes was not discussing the shooter as if the shooter was a Groiper or even suspecting the shooter was a Groiper.

Speaker 75 Nick telling his audience or whoever listening to put down your arms and not jump to quick emotional violence was in reference to retaliatory violence against the left for their killing of Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 75 That was the way Fuentes was talking about the shooting through the course of this hour-long stream. It did not seem to me that he was trying to cover his bases in case the shooter was a groiper.

Speaker 75 That wasn't how he was discussing it. He certainly laid a lot of blame on the left.
And he seemed very scared about the direction of the country.

Speaker 75 Someone showed up with a weapon to his house less than a year ago. And I think some of his fear is absolutely genuine.
It's not just trying to cover his ass in case this guy turns out to be a groiper.

Speaker 71 No, he's in danger because of the things he did. He invited the danger into his life by being Nick Fuentes, but he is in danger.
Yeah.

Speaker 75 Yeah.

Speaker 75 No, it was, it was a very odd stream. I tune into Nick Fuentes every once in a while just to keep track of what he was doing.

Speaker 18 Like a healthy person.

Speaker 75 It's my job.

Speaker 71 I know. I woke up at 4 a.m.
to stalk a murderer's family on Facebook, Garrison.

Speaker 75 So it it was in the first 15 minutes of the stream where Nick discussed these more theoretical elements, how spiritual or societal forces kind of use people as puppets, not in a like fully NPC way, but as an evolutionary method of charting the path of society.

Speaker 75 Nick then went to go on to discuss Charlie Kirk, how he's beefed with Charlie in the past, how they've disagreed on nearly everything, but goes on to say some nice things about Charlie for the first time, and then calls for everyone to lay down their arms.

Speaker 75 Now is not the time to jump to quick action. We should reflect, et cetera, et cetera.
But in those first 15 minutes, he talks about like what this shooting means for American culture.

Speaker 75 And I've been watching some of his other recent streams where he's kind of been going after some of his fans for just being completely like brain dead, just repeating racist tropes with no real thought, just talking about Hitler in this meme-ified way.

Speaker 75 And it feels like he's sort of reflecting on both what he's done with his life ever since he's been a teenager and the world that he has helped bring into being.

Speaker 75 He talks about never having much of a actual sincere participation in politics, how it's always been so bombastic and mimetic. And it appears as if he's kind of stuck doing this bit forever.

Speaker 75 Like he decided that this is what his life was going to be as a teenager. And now he's in his mid-20s.

Speaker 75 And from these other recent streams, it feels like he's kind of fed up with how his audience is just appearing completely mindless, very LARPy, endlessly repeating Hitler references, reflexive racism, and how he's trapped himself in this political game.

Speaker 75 And a quote he said is that this is not a game. This is life and death.
And as we've just seen, like, this is literally life and death. This is not just...
online memes anymore.

Speaker 75 We can't treat politics as an online meme game anymore because these real life characters are getting killed.

Speaker 75 And he framed a lot of this in very spiritual warfare language, like they killed Charlie for being Christian, for talking about Jesus.

Speaker 75 Though stressing to his listeners, like Jesus, not actually pick up arms and fight. Yeah.

Speaker 75 And people should calm down and reflect because how the country handles this event will be heavily deterministic. Yes.

Speaker 75 what the country looks like going forward. And that's, and that's what he was expressing.

Speaker 71 Right. Yeah.
And I think that that's that's a really important point for people to get across, that like

Speaker 71 there's there's the immediate battle in front of us, right? Which is why it's so tempting sometimes to take the easy. Oh, this guy was one of theirs.

Speaker 71 That means we don't have to keep thinking about it, or it means that we can kind of just like move forward with this as another right-wing attack.

Speaker 71 And there's a degree to which, you know, it's good just for the rights narrative machine to get upset by the fact that even if it turns out this guy had a left-wing motivation, he's weirder and more confusing than they want him to be.

Speaker 71 And he's not, you know, the transgender terrorist they were hoping he would be.

Speaker 75 Certainly not trans. Right.

Speaker 71 To give them permission to do all the fucked up shit they wanted to do, you know?

Speaker 75 If they need permission.

Speaker 71 I mean, they seem to feel like they need an excuse, I do think.

Speaker 75 Trump creates permission. Some of his followers might appreciate permission, I guess.

Speaker 71 Yeah. One thing that is undeniable is there was an extreme desire from a lot of these guys for this to be tied in with their ongoing attacks on trans people and the left.

Speaker 18 Totally. Right.

Speaker 71 And so I understand even the argument that like anything that disrupts their narrative train there, even if it winds up not being accurate, there's a value in it. I do understand that argument.

Speaker 71 But on a larger thing, if we just care about terrorism and like why people get radicalized to do things and how and understanding these phenomenons.

Speaker 75 Like actually understanding how our country is unfolding. Right.

Speaker 71 That influence all of our lives. Right.
And usually, usually what happens is not a single guy getting shot for a specific reason.

Speaker 71 Usually a bunch of people who had had nothing to do with the grievances expressed getting shot, right? That's usually when somebody decides to pick up a gun and go into public because

Speaker 18 they got radicalized.

Speaker 71 Usually a bunch of random innocent people die, which is again why it's just really important to try to understand the underlying dynamics, even in a specific case like this.

Speaker 71 And why I actually do care about the truth here, even though that's not as convenient maybe as. it we'd like it to be.
I don't know.

Speaker 71 What else do we want to talk about here?

Speaker 75 No, I mean, like, I think this event will be extremely important. Yeah.

Speaker 75 Something that Fuentes talked about is how even if you've never met Kirk,

Speaker 75 whether you hate Kirk or whether you love Kirk, Kirk has been a parasocial force in probably everyone who's listening to this

Speaker 75 their lives for years.

Speaker 75 And watching him bleed out gruesomely. is massively affecting.

Speaker 75 I think the reason why people are reacting to this so much more strongly than the murder of a state senator and her husband is that we did not have a personal relationship with that state senator, nor was there a video of them gruesomely bleeding out.

Speaker 75 And people's emotions affect how they understand reality. And the Charlie Kirk murder has been emotionally affecting for a lot of people, both positively and negatively.
And it was very graphic.

Speaker 75 And it's spread around, like watching someone who you know, whether personally or parasocially, die on video through the medium in which they gained their fame is going to be a very large to use of really bad pun turning point for the USA.

Speaker 75 And I think that's part of why everyone's so volatile around this issue, because I think everyone realizes how important this moment will be, despite the deaths of Palestinian children vastly, vastly outnumbering the deaths of one conservative commentator.

Speaker 71 Yeah, and you know, like logically, we could all say that that's wrong and fucked up, but like, you just, you know, that's how people work, right? It's how people work.

Speaker 71 We all know that's how people work. I'm not saying that's okay.

Speaker 75 I'm just, you know, no, but it's, it's, it's, it's the way, it's the way things work. Yeah.

Speaker 71 And I don't know, like, because again, we, again, still cannot say at this point, there was just a Vanity Fair article came out that's kind of repeating some of the Groiper stuff, but I looked and my, my post is their source on that.

Speaker 71 So they don't have anything new on the Groiper front.

Speaker 75 So no, they're just thinking that the squatting slav meme is evidence tied to the Pepe version of the meme,

Speaker 75 which is then linked to Grouper, which is a specific type of Pepe, not the skinny Pepe.

Speaker 75 I'm so tired, Robert.

Speaker 71 I'm really tired. I don't know if this guy liked Nick Fuentes.
I will say he probably had an opinion about Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 18 He was aware of the dude, right?

Speaker 71 Like he was that level of online for sure.

Speaker 75 Yeah, I mean, which 22-year-old gamer male doesn't? And that's the thing.

Speaker 71 Right, exactly.

Speaker 71 Again, it's like I was talking about when, before we knew who it was, when we just had the video, because I did accurately anticipate that it was someone who learned how to shoot through hunting with a a bolt action rifle.

Speaker 71 That's just what the shot looked like to me when I saw it, which wound up being accurate.

Speaker 71 And there were a lot of people who were like questioning that on the grounds of like, well, no, this had to be like a trained sniper or something like that.

Speaker 75 And it's like, this looks like a professional hit to me, Robert. That's a good idea.
Or a massage agent, either or.

Speaker 71 Yeah, like, no, literally all we knew is that it was somebody who was able to like competent with a firearm. That's all you could say.

Speaker 71 And probably it was not a semi-automatic because people in stressful situations, if they can, usually keep shooting, right?

Speaker 75 They would have fired more than one shot and was like, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 71 That's all we could say, which narrowed it down to everyone in Utah.

Speaker 75 Like,

Speaker 71 that's what I try to emphasize is that like, what I can say from this is that anyone in Utah could have shot Charlie Kirk at that point. And sure enough, it turned out being almost like...

Speaker 75 Average 22-year-old Utonian. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Utah.

Speaker 71 You're going to composite a normal Utah kid. That's what this guy looks like so far.
Yeah. And

Speaker 75 there's a lot of like semi-racist or semi-misogynist gamers out there they're not necessarily groipers right and we don't even know how racist this guy was there's no indication one way or another he certainly had an awareness of online culture but everyone who makes a helldivers 2 reference is going to have a pretty large awareness of online culture and that does not indicate what his quote-unquote beliefs are, just an awareness and an existence within that culture.

Speaker 18 Yep. Well,

Speaker 71 I can't think of anything else to say at the moment about this. It's unclear to me the degree to which this has shifted the national discourse on it.

Speaker 71 I have seen, it looks like the way in which the conservatives are talking about this guy in the shooting, it looks like they have changed some of them.

Speaker 71 Just because it's less clear, at least the number of people, right? We're seeing.

Speaker 75 The Groiper counter-narrative has introduced doubt, which will influence some conservatives' understanding of the shooting. Others will

Speaker 75 keep hitting

Speaker 75 that leftist Antifa line.

Speaker 75 I have seen certain people claim that the Graper narrative is even changing the way Trump talks about the shooting because Trump is not referencing Charlie Kirk as much or is avoiding questions about how he's feeling in regards to Kirk's death.

Speaker 75 Trump has never cared about Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 75 Vance certainly has. He's like closer to Vance's orbit, but Donald Trump doesn't give a single fuck about Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 71 Absolutely not.

Speaker 75 This little puny man. Like, no, Trump does not care.
It makes sense that one asked how Trump feels about Charlie Kirk's death. And if he's feeling okay, he's like, yeah, I feel fine.

Speaker 75 What I'm really excited about is that we're constructing the new White House ballroom.

Speaker 18 The rose garden?

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Like, that's not indication that Trump's been told that this guy's actually a rightist and now has to not talk about how the left is ruining the country. No, it's that.

Speaker 75 Trump does not care about Charlie Kirk that much and it's been a few days. So yeah, he's going to move on.

Speaker 71 Yeah. And that's, you know, if you're wanting to game theory this out, of the ethics of just muddying the waters to disrupt their momentum, well, there's an argument to be made there.

Speaker 75 I can see the utility in that. Yeah.
My utility is, I would say, at the very least equal to that. Right.
And that's having an accurate understanding of

Speaker 18 these events

Speaker 75 to predict future trends and like understand the trajectory of political violence in the United States.

Speaker 75 And that's what my interest in stressing evidentiary standards for understanding the motivations behind this attack and the online communities and cultures that this attack has emerged from.

Speaker 71 Right.

Speaker 71 And I would say, if you're looking in your own life, how can I tell which side of things I'm on?

Speaker 71 Just imagine everything was reversed in the case where like you think this is really clear evidence that this person was motivated by whoever you hate the most and that whatever ideology you hate is why they did it.

Speaker 71 If it were the opposite and that this same level of evidence was being used to accuse someone who was on your side of things, would you consider the evidence presented enough?

Speaker 18 Right.

Speaker 71 And that's where what I'm looking at is I have not seen enough evidence to buy into either side fully yet.

Speaker 71 I can make a case in my head that he's a groiper and there's some pieces of evidence that fit with that. And I can make a case in my head that he's a guy who hates Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 71 And there's quotes from some interviews that would back that up. But neither of them is a solid, at the moment that we're recording this, is a solid hypothesis to me.

Speaker 75 Or just a vaguely right-wing board gamer. Right.

Speaker 75 Or just a right-wing board gamer who has zoomer angst, and it manifested this way, as many other people have manifested their zoomer angst through an act of political violence. Yeah.

Speaker 75 Like Groiper, a very specific term means a specific thing. It doesn't just mean a Gen Z conservative.

Speaker 18 Yep. No, it does not.

Speaker 71 And I think that's where we're going to have to leave you for the day. We may have appended an update to this depending on what else is out.

Speaker 71 I do think that most of what we're talking about is pretty, even though there will be more information by the the time you listen to it, pretty timeless in terms of how you should think about shit like this.

Speaker 75 How you react to whatever the next assassination is going to be, because this is an increasing trend in American politics.

Speaker 71 Look, if you care, and if your stance, if your principled stance with all the evidence is, I don't care, all that matters is defeating the right.

Speaker 71 So all I care about is what's convenient in terms of disrupting their narratives, then go on and live your life. But that's not the way we're going to do things here when we look at these attacks.

Speaker 71 We are going to try to figure out what happened, even if it's inconvenient. And it may be, you know, we don't know with this guy yet.

Speaker 75 Touch some fucking grass.

Speaker 75 Before you touch grass, I'm recording one more update Sunday morning.

Speaker 75 Yesterday, right-wing outlets and then Axios and now even more mainstream outlets started reporting that the shooter, Tyler Robinson, had a transgender roommate.

Speaker 75 And that investigators believe the two had some sort of romantic relationship.

Speaker 75 Some information from law enforcement officials about this investigation has been shown to be dubious at best, but it is true that the shooter had a roommate who does appear to be transgender.

Speaker 75 The roommate's TikTok can be traced to a Reddit account where they post about being trans and post on r slash trans, r slash transdiy,

Speaker 75 as well as r slash for tran, and also posts on r slash green text and r slash 4chan.

Speaker 75 Also active in a variety of video game subreddits, Magic the Gathering, meme subreddits, r slash distressing memes,

Speaker 75 r slash reddit moment, r slash unpopular opinion, r slash lord of the rings memes, r slash prehistoric memes, r slash dank meme, r slash nothing ever happens.

Speaker 75 Also post on r slash by IRL, r slash anarcho-capitalism, r slash Jordan Peterson, as well as the 4chan themed subreddits.

Speaker 75 I should also note that scrolling these subreddits is not necessarily indicative of someone's political orientation.

Speaker 75 I myself scroll many of these subreddits, as do largely apolitical friends of mine who check out these subreddits regularly just for shits and giggles. This is politics as meme.

Speaker 75 Subreddits like Political Compass and TPUSA are popular political subreddits with explicitly comedic purpose, including making fun of Charlie Kirk in a meme-fied fashion.

Speaker 75 And I don't know if the roommate visited those two specific subreddits, but I'm just using them as an example.

Speaker 75 Utah Governor Spencer Cox says that the roommate did not have any knowledge of Tyler Robinson's planned attack and has been incredibly cooperative throughout the course of the investigation.

Speaker 75 Sources have told Axios that investigators initially wanted information about the roommate's gender identity to not be publicly reported.

Speaker 75 The right is certainly eager to make any sort of transgender connection to this shooting. The New York Post has referred to this shooting as another shooting by trans people and their advocates.

Speaker 75 The actual motivation of the shooter is still currently unknown. Governor Cox has described his ideology as leftist, while also noting, quote, there was a lot of gaming going on.

Speaker 75 Friends have confirmed that there was that deep dark internet, Reddit culture, and other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep. You saw that on the casings.

Speaker 75 I didn't have any idea what those inscriptions meant, but they are certainly the memification that is happening in our society today. Unquote.
That's pretty much all we know so far.

Speaker 75 Now go touch some grass.

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Speaker 1 Here, the last time that you and I spoke was about 12 hours after Trump announced the takeover of DC's police force.

Speaker 1 It had really just happened, so I didn't really have a ton of clarity about how things were going to be taking shape and what resistance or pushback would look like.

Speaker 1 Now, today that we're speaking, Friday, September 12th, it's been a little over about 30 days since all of this went down.

Speaker 1 And I feel like we're due for an update from my hometown, the District of Columbia. What do you say?

Speaker 75 Absolutely. We're at the deadline.
So now Trump can no longer do anything. The city's back.

Speaker 1 God, I wish.

Speaker 75 You're free once again.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, from your lips to God's ears. So I did want to set the stage a little bit up top.
You know, I'm a journalist, but I am also an advocate for DC statehood.

Speaker 1 First and foremost, I feel like I need to make sure something is super clear, which is that how entwined all of this is to DC's lack of statehood.

Speaker 1 After the last time that you and I spoke, Gare, A listener said, oh, why is she making this whole thing about statehood? How would DC being a state change anything?

Speaker 1 How would two more Democratic senators change anything? Why are you making it about that?

Speaker 1 And I thought, oop, I did not do a good enough job of making clear why the takeover in DC could happen at all and the ways that D.C.'s lack of statehood is at the heart of that issue.

Speaker 1 This is just sort of the soup that I swim in all day, every day. So I forget that's not true for everybody.

Speaker 1 For some of you, this might be a refresher and you might know this already, but the reason why Trump started all of this in D.C. is because DC is not a state.

Speaker 1 You know, as president, Trump has a lot more authority over D.C. than he has over any other place in the country.

Speaker 1 So while Trump talking about sending the National Guard into other cities is awful, he wants to do it to Chicago so bad. So bad.

Speaker 75 But he doesn't have the ability to.

Speaker 75 And he's really upset about that, so much so that he's probably going to cancel a degree of the plans for National Guard deployment to Chicago, instead, going to cooperate with Louisiana because the governor is okay with working with Trump on that in Louisiana.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Did you see, this is like a non-sec order, but the tweet that he put out, like the AI-generated tweet that's they're going to find out why we call it the Department of War.

Speaker 1 And then it was like, oh, we were just kidding. And just

Speaker 1 delete that tweet. No, that was just that.
This is the joke.

Speaker 75 Which isn't to like downplay the amount of federal resources currently in Chicago. ICE and DHS have been very busy in Chicago.

Speaker 75 And I believe Friday morning, the day that we recorded this, ICE killed somebody in Chicago during an enforcement action. So this isn't to say, you know, Chicago's freed from Trump's federal forces.

Speaker 75 ICE is still operating in Chicago as they have been. But at least the National Guard deployment, like mass military-style occupation, is unlikely in the near future.

Speaker 1 Yes, that is great context. And I think it also illustrates why what's happening in D.C.
is so unique and could not happen anywhere else in the country.

Speaker 1 So while Trump is talking about wanting to send the National Guard to other cities, he does not have the broad authority to take over local police forces in those cities the way that he did in DC.

Speaker 1 And even if he did, let's say, exercise what authority he could have over local police in other cities, say like in an emergency situation, it still wouldn't be the attempt to take over the police force like we saw in DC.

Speaker 1 Like when this first happened, Pam Bondi was literally trying to replace DC's chief of police briefly successfully until DC's attorney general, Brian Schwab, sued, right?

Speaker 1 And so Trump does not have the authority to oust local leaders in other cities and states. Even if Trump sent the National Guard to Memphis, Memphis still has a mayor.
Tennessee has a governor.

Speaker 1 There's senators. There's congressional representation.
Because D.C. is not a state, Trump, working with Congress, could take over our city, oust our mayor, and our city council.

Speaker 1 He has been talking about doing that as recently as this morning. I want to play a quick clip.
He does lie in this clip because technically he doesn't have the authority.

Speaker 1 It has to go through Congress. But, you know, I don't see our Congress really standing up to whatever Trump wants anytime soon.

Speaker 1 And so if Congress were to revoke DC's home rule, then Trump would be able to appoint whoever he wanted to run DC. So I want to play a clip of him talking about this.

Speaker 1 Weirdly in a presser about the Charlie Kirk murder. Here's what he had to say.

Speaker 87 Well, the mayor has asked us to say, you know, we have a Democrat mayor.

Speaker 75 He was asked us today.

Speaker 87 And DC is a little bit different because I could federalize it if I want. You know, D.C.
is a little bit different.

Speaker 18 So we have a lot of, a lot.

Speaker 87 We have actually more power in DC because it's, you know, I can change the mayor if I want. I can do whatever I want.
I haven't had to. We've had a great relationship with the mayor.

Speaker 87 We've had a great relationship. Everybody's happy.
And the mayor was not in favor of it. At first, we, you know, forced, and then she saw the results.
And everyone's going up and thanking her.

Speaker 87 We have no crime anymore.

Speaker 1 Okay. I got to stop it because

Speaker 1 I can't even listen to him blow the eight on that.

Speaker 1 But again he's kind of lying here but there is a reality where trump single-handedly is in control of dc so it would have to take congress overturning dc's home rule but i don't think that would be terribly difficult for him to achieve and if that does happen he is right that he could appoint whoever he wanted to to be in control of dc And so the GOP has already introduced legislation that would revoke DC's home rule entirely, something that Trump says that he wants to do.

Speaker 1 To be super clear, this would mean that all of the little things that you rely on and probably take for granted about your day-to-day local life, your social services, your trash pickup, how your streets are run, your public transport, Trump would be in charge of literally all of that.

Speaker 1 For me, it's important to me that people understand how bad of a situation that would be.

Speaker 75 Yeah, that would be unprecedented.

Speaker 1 So just to put a pin in that, even though Trump is talking about sending the National Guard to other cities, D.C.'s lack of statehood really makes what's happening here unlike any other place in the country.

Speaker 1 D.C. is uniquely vulnerable.

Speaker 1 In addition to all of the like racial equity and democracy implications for statehood, the reality is everyday lives of more than a half a million people who live here like me are made more vulnerable by D.C.'s lack of statehood.

Speaker 1 So when I am like on my statehood soapbox, That is why, because the lack of statehood in DC just makes us very vulnerable to having somebody like Trump really exercise an unprecedented amount of control that we will not see anywhere else in the United States.

Speaker 1 So just wanted to make that clear. Okay, so now I have some updates about the situation.
As you said, Garrison, the crime emergency in D.C., which sort of kicked all of this off, has come to an end.

Speaker 18 Free.

Speaker 18 That's over.

Speaker 1 Mission accomplished. We did it.

Speaker 75 Mission accomplished.

Speaker 1 So it lasted 30 days and it's come to an end. However, there is no guarantee that Trump couldn't just declare another one.

Speaker 1 The optics of that would be a little weird because he's been talking, as we just heard in that clip, he's been talking about how crime is down to zero in D.C., except for domestic violence, which everybody knows isn't really a crime, right?

Speaker 1 Like he made it very clear that he feels like crime has gone to zero. So it would be pretty weird to then institute another crime emergency in DC.

Speaker 75 He kind of got what he wanted too with the mayor agreeing to cooperate with him somewhat.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 So to be super clear, even with the crime emergency in DC ending, that in no way means an end to things like the National Guard in our streets or checkpoints, which have just been horrifying, and the surge that we're seeing in federal law enforcement, because those are two distinct things.

Speaker 1 And in the last few weeks of this, what's really become just abundantly clear is that this whole thing was about immigration.

Speaker 1 Even after all the talk of crime in DC, it became very clear that this is less about crime and more about enforcing Trump's immigration agenda.

Speaker 1 As you sort of alluded to early on, before she really changed her tune, about two weeks into the takeover, our mayor, Muriel Bowser, held a press conference where she said, well, if Trump's goal was to deport migrants and bring in ICE, you know, he didn't have to take over MPD to do that.

Speaker 1 He should have just outright said that's what he wanted to do instead of making it this whole thing about crime. Don't ask her to repeat that sentiment now because I don't think that she would.

Speaker 1 She's really, really changed her tune, which we'll talk about in a moment.

Speaker 1 And And so one of the things that makes it complicated is that when you're talking about immigration detention versus other kinds of arrests, it just becomes a lot harder to have transparency into what's going on.

Speaker 1 But the Associated Press reported that data from the federal operation analyzed by the AP shows that more than 40% of the arrests made over the month-long operation were related to immigration.

Speaker 1 They spoke to Austin Rose, a managing attorney for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, who said, the federal takeover has been a cover to do federal immigration enforcement.

Speaker 1 It became pretty clear early on that this was a major campaign of immigration enforcement.

Speaker 1 And that's just, it's really hard to deny that this was just another increasing plank of the president's agenda on immigration.

Speaker 75 Yeah. And I think you can certainly look at the anti-crime narratives getting a lot of traction on the right with that pretty gruesome murder in North Carolina last week as well.

Speaker 75 And like, absolutely, the crime angle is part of the rhetorical strategy Trump is using. And yeah, a right-wing populist president doing a crime crackdown.
Oh, this is unheard of.

Speaker 75 This is unprecedented. No, like, of course, they're going to use that angle.

Speaker 75 But yeah, the underdiscussed element of this is how much this has just been a cover to do a rapid increase in the number of immigration actions around DC. Well, like you said, that was like 40%.

Speaker 75 So still another 60% of arrests is just affecting the other DC residents. And a lot of that is tying to this national crime wave narrative that these people are also pushing.

Speaker 75 I think these things work together. They're not necessarily like oppositional analyses of what's going on.
But the immigration angle has been very like under discussed in the DC occupation.

Speaker 1 I agree. It's hard to discuss because I think we have to really have some honest conversations.
It is true that DC experienced a surge in violent crime in 2023. That surge, thankfully, went down.

Speaker 1 But I think that Crime is just one of those issues where people who otherwise are invested in telling nuanced, thoughtful stories about complex issues.

Speaker 1 I see a lot of that nuance and thoughtfulness go right out the window when we're talking about crime. And I think that we really

Speaker 1 let the right dominate the conversation about crime in our cities and in some ways hijack that conversation. And I do think that dynamic is part and parcel to how we got here now.

Speaker 1 I have a bee in my bonnet about some of the sloppy journalism, like local journalism, people who really should know know better about crime.

Speaker 1 You know, we had a wave of businesses shut and they would say, oh, we're shutting because of crime.

Speaker 1 And it's like, yeah, look, you actually look and you're thinking, oh, well, this is a cashless business. What kind of crime were you experiencing?

Speaker 75 Yeah, there's no way. Using crime as its excuse in post-COVID economic decline has been extremely convenient for a lot of corporations.

Speaker 75 And yeah, I guess like the degree to which we've ceded territory on that, same way, you know, we ceded territory on like the border and immigration, but specifically seating territory on discussion of crime, allowed operating space for Trump to deploy this narrative, which then was used to hurt a lot of immigrants.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 And in D.C., we saw much tighter coordination with immigration officials, with our local police force, especially at checkpoints where police would work with ICE, even if someone was not otherwise detained or in custody.

Speaker 1 I did an interview with Washington Post's Tayu Armis, who covers immigrant communities here in D.C., And he told me that this whole thing was essentially an attack on the policies that make a city like D.C.

Speaker 1 what is commonly thought of as a sanctuary city. I don't, I don't love the phrase sanctuary city, but you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 You know, laws that do not require police departments to coordinate with immigration officials.

Speaker 1 Really, that it was an attack on those. Yeah, totally.
Yeah. I mean, and I think that it's important that we call that out for what it is.

Speaker 1 And this is difficult for me personally, but not get lost in debating what Trump is laying out about crime.

Speaker 1 Because when you understand that it's not really about crime, then you don't have to do that debating, right? Then it's like, well, it's not really about crime.

Speaker 1 So let's not waste time debating what we both can plainly see this is not really about.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 75 Because DC is just faking all its crime stats anyway, right, Bridget?

Speaker 1 Oh, gosh, don't even get me started, Gare.

Speaker 1 And so, something that Teyu told me in our interview that I found very troubling is that, again, when someone is detained because of a suspected immigration-related issue, we just have a lot less information and transparency than if they were being arrested for another kind of crime.

Speaker 1 He described it as a black box that is difficult to penetrate, which is obviously heightened when you have masked agents pulling people out of cars at checkpoints and doing things like literally hitting delivery drivers with vehicles, right?

Speaker 1 Like it becomes very difficult to really even understand what's going on. And that's by design.

Speaker 75 It's hard to find them in the system because these people often aren't even charged with a crime. Remaining in the country past the expiration of a visa isn't a crime.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 75 So though these people are branded as quote-unquote criminal migrants, that often is factually incorrect. If factually incorrect even matters anymore, which it increasingly does not, it seems.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I mean, as you said, we know that immigrant communities are not committing more crime than the rest of the population.

Speaker 75 And so estimates would show less, actually. Exactly.
Because they don't want to get deported.

Speaker 1 And, you know, again, I feel myself getting pulled back into Trump's.

Speaker 1 He gets me go like circling the drain with this, where it's like, well, if you really cared about crime, you would want immigrant communities to feel comfortable talking to police with the understanding that they weren't going to be deported if they reported a crime or if they witnessed a crime or if they saw a crime.

Speaker 1 But again, it's not really about crime. So I don't have to, I don't have to get myself pulled into that.

Speaker 75 No, because it's entirely racialized. That's like the big common denominator here, even with the anti-crime narrative and the immigration stuff, is that it's all racialized violence.

Speaker 1 Yes. And I mean, I am glad that you brought that up.
Just as a personal note, I live in Columbia Heights, which is a heavily black and brown neighborhood, a very thriving Latino population.

Speaker 1 And it really just has been awful, right? I live on a very busy street that runs right through the city and like checkpoints on either side of my street.

Speaker 1 And I was listening to, I think it was a Kara Swisher podcast and she also lives in DC. And she was saying, oh, well, I haven't really noticed any big changes.
And I'm thinking, Kara.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Yeah. I bet.
I bet you aren't noticing many changes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I bet you haven't noticed any changes. And yeah, I mean, I lived in DC most of my whole life.
I've never seen checkpoints where people are physically dragged out of cars and in this way.

Speaker 1 So I, I mean, if you don't live in a neighborhood like this, you might get be able to get away with saying, oh, I haven't seen any big changes or nothing's really changed.

Speaker 1 Or maybe I just see the National Guard when I leave my house. But in neighborhoods like mine, the change is very real.
I'll put it that way.

Speaker 1 So you brought up the mayor, which I did want to briefly touch on.

Speaker 1 I have been called out on this very podcast for being too sympathetic to our mayor, which is actually funny to me because on my other podcasts, all we do is call her out.

Speaker 1 But the point that I have tried to make, and I think this is...

Speaker 1 the nature of that of that critique is that I do think it is important that people understand that our lack lack of statehood in DC does put our mayor in a position where her authority is just realistically a lot more limited than other elected officials.

Speaker 1 But even in that situation with realistically limited authority, her play here has been cozying up to Trump. And that is 100% a choice.

Speaker 1 That is not something that other elected officials in DC have done. That is 100% a choice.

Speaker 75 And it's a choice in an attempt in some ways to defuse the situation, to not have Trump escalate, escalate, to not go into

Speaker 75 even more like legally uncharted territory, right?

Speaker 75 To not accelerate the conflict.

Speaker 75 And I think a lot of people who are critiquing this move actually would be very interested in this point in accelerating this conflict, seeing what Trump will actually do, stress test even more of our democracy.

Speaker 75 And a lot of people are interested in watching. the results of that happen.
And I can see how someone like Bowser doesn't want to do that, but that opens her up for a lot of critique.

Speaker 75 And I'm interested in what you said about like other city officials. That's, that's not something I've heard as much about.

Speaker 75 Is her kind of cooperating with Trump compared to the stance of other city officials?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, look at DC's Attorney General Brian Schwab, who has been out here suing the Trump administration somewhat successfully and has been a much more obvious fighter for DC, right?

Speaker 1 So like he is certainly not playing nice. He's like, oh, we're going to fight this in the courts.
If you want want to try to take over our city, we will see you in court.

Speaker 1 I'm, I'm so curious what the conversations are like between Bowser and Schwab, but it just reveals to me that capitulating and cozying up, I'm not going to say it's not a strategy, but it's certainly a choice.

Speaker 1 And to your point earlier, there are definitely people who say, hey, she's playing nice with Trump. DC still has home rule.
DC still has a mayor. And the crime emergency has ended.

Speaker 1 Those are all good things. And being a resident of DC, I will happily say, I don't want to see how far Trump will go on this.
I want this to end.

Speaker 1 I want, you know, I'm not, I'm not someone who was like, yeah, like let the chips fall where they may. I want my trash picked up.

Speaker 1 I want my, you know, my neighbor's kids to be able to go to school, all of that. I'm not, I'm not.
That's understandable.

Speaker 75 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's the complex thing.

Speaker 1 I do think that, you know, early on in this, Bowser was talking about how crime in DC was down.

Speaker 1 And then Trump said on social media, oh, Bowser better get her story straight on the crime numbers, or things are going to get worse. And days later, she was singing a very different tune.

Speaker 1 She did a press conference where she thanked the federal government. She did stop short of thanking Trump specifically, but thanking the federal government for helping DC with the crime issue.

Speaker 1 And I guess, as somebody who's been following Bowser for as long as I have, it wasn't terribly surprising.

Speaker 1 In an episode I did of It Could Happen Here, I think back in January, we talked about how her stance with Trump this time around was like concession after concession after concession.

Speaker 1 So it wasn't surprising.

Speaker 75 This falls in line with that, I guess.

Speaker 18 Correct.

Speaker 1 And I do think that people need to understand that, in a lot of ways, Bowser, and I don't mean this in the way that it's going to sound, but like, I do think that there is alignment between Bowser and Trump on a lot of issues, crime potentially being one of them, right?

Speaker 1 When we were talking about how Trump wanted Bowser to dismantle encampments in DC, it wasn't like Bowser is some friend to the homeless.

Speaker 18 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like the specific encampment in question, she already had plans to demolish just later on on a slower timeline.

Speaker 75 There is a class alignment among people in the political, quote-unquote, elite, right?

Speaker 75 You can look at Gavin Newsom's extreme anti-homeless policies and compare that to Trump's extreme anti-homeless policies.

Speaker 75 And yeah, they have class alignment on that issue, even if Gavin might be against Trump on some other issues, though he has his own fair share of concessions to Trump.

Speaker 1 Oh, you said it, friend.

Speaker 75 Also, I like that I'm on a first name basis with Gavin.

Speaker 1 I know, Gav.

Speaker 75 Podcaster Solidarity. And as we've seen the past week, podcaster solidarity, most important thing.

Speaker 18 Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Speaker 1 Also, also fellow iHeart podcaster, I believe.

Speaker 75 For Gavin, yeah.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Hope he joins the union.

Speaker 1 Yeah, same.

Speaker 1 And I guess I should say to your point about the complexities about, you know, the way that Bowser, our mayor, is playing this.

Speaker 1 It's true that it's good that the crime emergency has ended, that DC still has home rule. We still have a mayor.
We still have a city council as of today.

Speaker 1 And even if you would say, like, well, that's, you know, the mayor cozying up with Trump, like you have that to thank. That's why that's happening.

Speaker 1 Our mayor is really making no friends with other black mayors in cities like Chicago and Baltimore, I have to assume.

Speaker 1 When she does press conferences where she talks about how having federal troops in D.C. has been good for this city, how crime has gone down.

Speaker 1 When you have these other cities that are currently trying to fend off federal takeovers from Trump. So even if her cozying up with Trump has led to D.C.

Speaker 1 specifically being able to enjoy home rule for another day, at what cost if it enables Trump's actions in other cities, you know?

Speaker 75 Me putting on my skull mask as I bring out my chessboard depicting the accelerationist collapse of D.C. and how that affects the larger political situation in the United States.

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 75 How much of D.C. am I willing to sacrifice to see how far Trump will go?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's tough. It's complicated because obviously as a D.C.
resident,

Speaker 1 I want to have a safe and peaceful existence for myself here in D.C., but it's not happening in a vacuum. And so I also have to think about the national implications for other cities.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I don't envy our mayor, I guess.

Speaker 75 I don't envy many mayors.

Speaker 1 Oh, I am firmly believe if you want to become the mayor of a city like D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, something has to be wrong with you.

Speaker 75 And Bridget Todd has come out against Zoran Mamdani officially on the Incould Happen Here podcast. No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 I'm just saying, I mean,

Speaker 18 yeah, I'll say it.

Speaker 1 Who wants a job like that?

Speaker 18 No, it sounds like a nightmare. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I had a friend who was like... vying to be the head of comms for the Baltimore Police Department.
And I was like, wow, you are a masochist.

Speaker 18 That's even weirder. That's even weirder.

Speaker 1 That's like the, I can't imagine to never know peace and not get into heaven.

Speaker 1 He's probably listening and thinking, why is she talking shit about me? And so it is complicated.

Speaker 1 And I do think it's important, as important, as much as I want DC to be a safe place where I can walk outside and not see people getting dragged out of cars and federal checkpoints and all of that.

Speaker 1 We do need to think about the larger picture here.

Speaker 1 And people that I've talked to with regards to the mayor, they tell me that, oh, it seems like she is just not interested in the like the polling of these decisions.

Speaker 1 Because the conversations that I am having, people are not happy with her. In the spaces I am in, the conversation is like, how do we recall this mayor?

Speaker 1 Like, even though we might have these sort of things that you consider victories, DC enjoying home rule, still having a mayor, a city council, all of that, people are really, really, really not happy with our mayor.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So looking ahead at what's coming up next, even though the crime emergency is ending, this whole thing is very far from over. The fight for the self-determination of D.C.

Speaker 1 is far from over in ways that have, in a lot of ways, nothing to do with Trump. There are 13 bills in the House aimed at directly taking action at D.C.

Speaker 1 Many of them are direct assaults on D.C.'s home rules. There are provisions that would make it easier for Congress to overturn D.C.
home rule.

Speaker 1 There are provisions that lower the age of when you can be tried as an adult for crimes from 16 to 14. There is a provision that would give Congress longer time to review D.C.'s laws.

Speaker 1 Right now, it's 30 days. They would change it to 60 days.
All of DC's laws have to go through Congress. It is a nightmare.
Like it is a whole thing.

Speaker 1 The biggest of these bills in the House right now is, of course, wanting to overturn DC's ability for district residents to elect our own attorney general instead of having an attorney general appointed by Trump.

Speaker 1 If that bill were to become law, it would mean that our current attorney general, the person who I would argue has sort of emerged as the, if there was a single person that you could look at and be like, oh, this person is trying to fight for DC's home rule and authority, Brian Schwab, he would be fired immediately and Trump would be able to replace him with whoever he chose, not somebody that district residents elected or voted for or campaigned for, just whoever Trump wanted.

Speaker 1 And that term would run concurrent with the president of the United States.

Speaker 1 So obviously, you know, some of these pieces are not overturning home rule entirely, but they are clearly attacks on DC's ability to govern itself and the self-determination of folks here in the district.

Speaker 75 Are you going to discuss what's going to happen with the safe and beautiful task force?

Speaker 1 Oh, no, but I can.

Speaker 75 Because past the expiration of the order, Bowser's establishment of the task force to continue federal cooperation.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 75 I guess is like one of the most immediate, like continuing aspects of this story. And it's like unclear how much this heightened federal presence will last past the expiration of the order.

Speaker 1 So in a press conference, I have to say Bowser was pretty tight-lipped when asked. directly about all of that.
And so a lot of it sounds like wait and see. Like she really did not give clear answers.

Speaker 1 And so I walked away from that presser being just as confused as you probably are, just as confused as listeners are.

Speaker 1 I do think in part that speaks to the unprecedented nature of the way that Trump is dealing with DC right now, of like they might genuinely not know, but the fact of the way that she has been so tight-lipped, I hate giving this answer, but I think it's a wait and see kind of situation.

Speaker 18 Yeah, fair.

Speaker 1 Hi, this is Future Bridget coming in on Monday night to say that we actually got more clarity on the question of whether or not police in DC would continue working with federal immigration officials after D.C.'s crime emergency ended.

Speaker 1 D.C.'s mayor, Muriel Bowser, was still being pretty tight-lipped about this when Gare and I were speaking about it on Friday.

Speaker 1 But on Monday, September 15th, it was reported that Bowser had announced that DC's police department, MPD, would no longer be assisting immigration officials with immigration enforcement the way they had been during the crime emergency.

Speaker 1 Bowser said, Immigration enforcement is not what MPD does. And with the end of the emergency, it won't be what MPD does.

Speaker 1 Trump did not like this.

Speaker 1 And on Monday, Trump renewed threats to federalize DC's police again if the department does not cooperate with ICE, saying, quote, under pressure from the radical left Democrats, Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has presided over this violent criminal takeover of our capital for years, has informed the federal government that the Metropolitan Police Department will no longer cooperate with ICE in removing and relocating dangerous illegal aliens.

Speaker 1 If I allowed this to happen, all caps crime would come roaring back. To the people and businesses of Washington, D.C., all caps, don't worry, I am with you and won't allow this to happen.

Speaker 1 I'll call a national emergency and federalize, if necessary, three exclamation points.

Speaker 1 And so I guess one of the big questions that I've been wrestling with is what does all of this mean for the future of DC?

Speaker 1 There was a time where it felt like lawmakers had DC's back, but it's really become clear that the days of D.C. being able to count on the Senate and Congress are over.

Speaker 1 I did an interview with a longtime journalist here in D.C., Mark Seagraves, and he reminded me that D.C. is, has really been the most reliable jurisdiction in the country.
There is for Democrats.

Speaker 1 There is no other place that has given more electoral votes for president to Democrats every single election.

Speaker 75 It's extremely consistent.

Speaker 1 Extremely. I mean, have you seen that map where it's the election for Reagan and it's, it's a whole big splotch of red and only, I think, Minnesota and D.C.
are the only splotch of blue.

Speaker 1 Like nobody backs Democrats like D.C. backs Democrats every single time.
California can't say that. Massachusetts can't say that.
And in return, the party has essentially abandoned us.

Speaker 1 They circulated messaging nationally telling Democrats to tread carefully about how to talk about what is clearly an attempt at a fascist takeover of our city.

Speaker 1 DC has given Democrats this unwavering support since we had the ability to vote in presidential elections, which it hasn't been that long, only since the 60s, but still, right?

Speaker 1 Like, and this is how they do us. And we have known for years that Republicans like Mike Lee and others have had their eye on DC.
They want to overturn DC rules, overturn DC laws.

Speaker 1 even things that have nothing to do with crime and public safety, things like abortion. It is so clearly about control.
They have been eyeing control of DC for many, many, many, many years.

Speaker 1 And now we have this big, wide open, breezy window allowing them to do that.

Speaker 75 Is DC spiritually Midwestern? Because, like, it's...

Speaker 18 Sorry, that's an insane question.

Speaker 1 Tell me more about what you mean by this.

Speaker 75 Because, like, in some ways, you know, it is like a coastal elite place. It is like the, you know, the heart of political power.
But DC to me always has kind of had Midwest vibes.

Speaker 75 I don't know how to express it any other way. Maybe it's because so many people from the Midwest move to DC to do politics work, but I'm sure people from all over move to DC to do politics work.

Speaker 75 But like DC and like Minneapolis feel like very similar cities to me in some ways. I have said this before.
See, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I have said this before.

Speaker 1 Like, I think there is something to this where, and in that interview I did with Mark Seagraves, he kind of, he kind of gets at it a little bit, but I do think that DC is the kind of place where you can just sort of take for granted that

Speaker 1 i will always live in this sort of progressive city i will always sort of live in this city like i think it's easy to take things like home rule in dc for granted and i think dc the nature of dc is a little bit weird that as you kind of alluded to it's a very transient city and so there are people living in dc who have only known one mayor bowser because she's been mayor for like 10 years right they don't know mayor gray they don't know mayor fenty they don't know how kind of tenuous a lot of what holds DC together actually is.

Speaker 1 And it can be really easy when you're living in a city that historically has enjoyed low unemployment, has been pretty moneyed, is pretty progressive.

Speaker 1 The kinds of fights that we were having in DC before all this started, they seem so quaint now. Bike lanes, tipped minimum wage, like all of these, you know,

Speaker 1 it is sort of like Minneapolis in a kind of way. You're not, you're not wrong.

Speaker 75 Well,

Speaker 18 I'm glad my vibes meter is still accurately attuned

Speaker 1 yes and i did want to spend a little bit of time talking about the protests and pushback that we've seen because dc is not taken this quietly there was a massive protest in march that i will say i'm a little sad that it didn't get more national coverage weirdly it got a lot of international coverage but not a ton of national coverage which is sort of part and parcel for dc so many national outlets only think about DC when it comes to federal implications and when it comes to what's happening locally in our streets and at Malcolm X Park and all of that.

Speaker 1 They're like, DC, who? We don't know her. So, like, that protest was quite moving.
We also have local groups like Harriet's Wildest Dreams and Free DC, who are great resources.

Speaker 1 Free DC, a lot of their work has been at the community level, leading things like cop-watching trainings, like training residents to film enforcement stops.

Speaker 1 which when you consider what Tayu Armis told me from the Washington Post about how these immigration immigration detentions and arrests are often just a black box.

Speaker 1 Like we've seen video where a resident is being detained by immigration officials and they are speaking to the person recording like, please record this, please record this.

Speaker 1 You know, and so I do think like things like that are super important when you're dealing with this black box dynamic of immigration detentions and arrests. We also have

Speaker 1 things like educating residents on their legal rights. And this is like a weird thing in DC.
DC has a ton of parks, actually, more parks than any other part of the country.

Speaker 1 We're consistently voted the number one city in the country for parks. And so because D.C.
is just a wonky place, sometimes you don't know if you're on federal versus city property.

Speaker 1 So you could find yourself in a park that's just a tiny little triangle of grass. Oh no, you're actually on federal property.

Speaker 1 So if you get arrested there, you're actually in a federal jurisdiction, even though you're miles from the White House and you thought, like, oh, I'm just hanging out in in a public park.

Speaker 1 So we have seen local activist groups and organizing groups really try to educate folks on their rights and some of those distinctions of like, hey, if you commit a crime here, you're technically on federal property and you should understand that.

Speaker 1 And I wanted to mention this because I do think it's easier to think of resistance as this big, loud, visible thing happening in the streets.

Speaker 1 And as moving and powerful as that big protest was, so far, I think a lot of the powerful resistance has been community-oriented, right?

Speaker 1 It's not as exciting as, you know, being out on the streets necessarily, but it is no less important.

Speaker 75 Yeah, the non-flashy stuff often goes underrecognized.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I will also say that folks might know DC has its own style of music called go-go, which is sort of a city local artistic expression of music here.

Speaker 1 And I've even seen groups like Harriet's Wildest Dreams trying to organize joyful go-go jams in public spaces just to remind folks that joy is also part of resistance, just so that the only thing that we're talking about is not defending our cities and being on the defense, but also reconnecting to the things that make our cities joyful and exciting and

Speaker 1 lovely places to be. And I think it has been important to me when you're sick to death of reporting about all of this,

Speaker 1 also getting to remember that joy is part of it. That's like why we're doing this is so that we can experience joy in our cities.

Speaker 75 Yes, I agree.

Speaker 75 We will allow a little bit of joy, I suppose, in this semi-unjoyful time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a tiny bit.

Speaker 1 I will, speaking of joy, I wanted to end on one last teeny tiny little tidbit about resistance, which is that when we were talking last time, Gare, I told you, I think this was like the day that the takeover was announced, there was that guy who threw a sandwich at the federal agent.

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 1 Well, they popped this dude on felony charges, but DC's grand jury failed to indict and now he's down to a misdemeanor. So he pled not guilty, I think, just a couple of days ago to just a misdemeanor.

Speaker 1 So yeah, I mean, grand juries, they used to say like, oh, you could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. I guess not if it's thrown at a federal officer, you can't.
Not in DC.

Speaker 75 This is like the only good piece of grand jury news I have kind of ever heard in my life.

Speaker 75 Whenever I hear news about a grand jury, it's always like terrible. I'm like, oh no, that sounds awful.

Speaker 18 Yeah. This is

Speaker 75 the first based grand jury I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes. I mean, if you're listening in, if you're listening in DC and you're on a grand jury, you know what to do.

Speaker 18 I'll just, I'll just put it that way.

Speaker 1 But yeah, that's all I have, really. I would just say, you know, if you happen to be listening in a place that is not the district, we really need your voice.

Speaker 1 You know, when stuff happens, there's not really anybody I can call. We have a congressional representative, Eleanor Holmes-Norton.

Speaker 1 She has been a lifelong fighter for DC and DC's self-determination and civil rights. She is also, I think, the second oldest person in Congress.
And I'll just say it's showing.

Speaker 1 I think, you know, we don't really have a lot of people who are fighting for us and

Speaker 1 being a voice for us. And so, yeah, stay checked in to DC, even if Trump moves to, you know, deploy National Guards in other places, other kinds of takeovers.
What's happening in DC is unique.

Speaker 1 It cannot happen in any other place in the country. And we're so often overlooked and ignored.

Speaker 1 And so if there are bills moving through Congress, call your Congress people and please advocate for the self-determination of DC residents because we have no one to advocate for on our behalf.

Speaker 1 So please be our voice.

Speaker 18 Thank you for talking about D.C.

Speaker 75 Once again, Bridget, where can people find you online and your other shows?

Speaker 1 You can check me out on my podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet on iHeartRadio. I co-host a podcast called CityCast D.C.
about local happenings and politics and news in D.C.

Speaker 1 You can check that out. I'm on Instagram at Bridget Marie in D.C.
I'm on TikTok at Bridget Marine DC. And I'm on YouTube at There Are No Girls on the Internet.
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 18 Okay, cool.

Speaker 75 I'm glad we figured that out.

Speaker 18 I know.

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Speaker 18 What up? It could happen here. It's your favorite cousin prop.
Y'all already know what it is. I'm about to black this mug up because y'all don't be blacking it up enough.

Speaker 71 Anyway,

Speaker 18 all over our country, there's this sort of narrative around. crime, which is verifiably false.
But we also understand that a lot of times the feeling of crime and safety is a lot of times a vibe.

Speaker 18 Like it's kind of how it feels.

Speaker 18 You could tell me the crime rates is down across America, but in my city, if I still feel like, you know what I'm saying, not safe or safe, you know, your perception of that.

Speaker 18 Anyway, point I'm trying to make is

Speaker 18 there are truly verifiable, data-driven ways to actually create safety and reduce harm in a city. And a lot of that is around trust and services.

Speaker 18 So what I decided to do, y'all, is to bring y'all who I lovingly call the Nipsey Hustle of St. Louis.

Speaker 18 Ladies and gentlemen, can I introduce you to the homeboy Thistle? With the red shirt on.

Speaker 18 Look, man, you already flamed up.

Speaker 1 I wasn't going to bring up

Speaker 18 the flame of it all.

Speaker 18 Hey, I'm like.

Speaker 18 Got to throw the red shirt off for prop. Oh, man.
Happy to be here, though. Yeah.
Man, we happy to have you, bro. That was the one.

Speaker 18 That's funny because that's the one asterisk next to your name with me. It's all that red.
You beware.

Speaker 18 Hey, man. It been like this since I was little.
Yeah, I know. You got to be who you are.
I would not respect you were you to not be flying your whoop. You know what I'm saying? So I appreciate it.

Speaker 18 I'm retired. Tired, homie.
He said, look, look, that's what I love to hear.

Speaker 75 We're going to get into it.

Speaker 18 So we're going to get into it. So this, this, like I said, the Nipsey also was St.
Louis. When we first met, I had no idea people out there really actually said thir.

Speaker 18 yes i thought that was a joke i thought y'all was doing too much and then i met this and he was like oh it's over there right thor i was like wait y'all really say that no joke at all that's really y'all slag none that's really how we talk we really talk and the crazy thing is i slow down talking you know what i'm saying sometimes it'll be like here and there but if i just get the goal and be like her dirt her dirt there yo yo yo yo cold switch all right perfect so first of all let's tell them what you do now.

Speaker 18 So, kind of give them a brief introduction, who you are, what you're doing, and then we'll go to the origin story. So, like he said, my name is Disney Travis Tyler.
That's what my mama named me.

Speaker 18 From St. Louis, Missouri.

Speaker 18 And,

Speaker 18 man, I be trying to figure out what am I sometimes.

Speaker 18 Like, for real. Even when I was doing music, I never felt like I was a rapper.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 I felt like I was an artist. Yeah.
You know, and I still feel like I'm an artist in the sense of the word now because I create things

Speaker 18 from inspiration, you know, alchemy. I create from the mind.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. But I'm not what you would consider an activist.
I'm not a politician.

Speaker 18 But like, I'm always in the middle of something that's happening. Yeah.
And that's how I've always been. And I have a passion for the youth of urban community, especially black youth.

Speaker 18 I have a passion for black men, especially black men that are either trying to escape the reality of street life or black men that are being re-entered into society from prison.

Speaker 18 I have a passion for the rebuilding of the black community. Yeah.
So my whole life, that's pretty much been my thing.

Speaker 18 No matter what space I've landed in, it's always been my thing when it comes to community. And so

Speaker 18 that's it, man. Like, I'm wearing the shirt.
It's actually Flight 100 from my mentoring

Speaker 18 program. I mentor inner city youth ages 10 to 17.

Speaker 18 yeah uh not just setting up something to mentor them but creating the rights of passage like creating a pathway intentional pathway like i think a lot of time with inner city youth well i ain't even gonna say inner city youth especially with fatherless yes young men whether wherever they're in the world

Speaker 18 whether it's the suburban neighborhood or the inner city or rural or third world country, with fatherless young men, they

Speaker 18 tend to lack some of us a passageway of, oh, this is who you can become. This is what you need to do to become it because there's no one earth to really guide them.

Speaker 18 So with our mentoring program, that's my goal. Not just to mentor young men and send them home and try to keep them out of trouble, but help them identify who they are.

Speaker 18 and who they were born to be and help them get to that place. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And you still got that group home joint, right? Yeah. So the group home, it's funny.
We're doing the interview now. I just stepped down from a Friday.
Okay. But it was a good thing.

Speaker 18 It wasn't a negative. So

Speaker 18 I ran it for like a year and a half,

Speaker 18 helped rebuild the program, brought it up to the modern age. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Staffed it, created new things for the boys, learned a lot myself in the process. And now I'm going full throttle into shaping out.
my Flight 100 program. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Because the end goal, like my, one of my end goals is to, is to build a school. Yeah.
Flight 100 Academy. All boys.
Keep the same boys from kindergarten to 12th grade. Wow.
That's my mission. Yeah.

Speaker 18 What I truly enjoyed about what you're doing is, at least with the group form and the mentoring thing is the trust factor in the sense that, you know, when you get involved, especially in the juvenile system, like they tell you that your record's sealed.

Speaker 18 They say that. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know what I'm saying? But like in practice, it's not the thing.

Speaker 18 So like, I think oftentimes if there's a step between getting into Juvie or into Central, you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 18 If there's an in-between step, if somebody could come in the middle of that and say, look, let Lil Homie stay with us. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 18 Or, you know, let's say you caught a case and then every once in a while. Like, obviously both of us can say this from like personal experience.

Speaker 18 Every once in a while, you might score a judge on a good day.

Speaker 18 You know, you score a judge on a good day and they say, I tell tell you what, I heard of this program over on the other side of town.

Speaker 18 You could either do this, you know what I'm saying, or you could go to Camp Rocky. You know, out here, that's what it was.
Like you, you can go to Rocky or you can go to this program.

Speaker 18 And like 10 out of 10, I'm going to be like, let's go to this program. But

Speaker 18 sometimes that program be just as bad. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 18 But if it's ran by somebody who has been through the system, who understands it and knows that like, here are the traps.

Speaker 18 Here's are the ways for which I know I was taken advantage of, I was abused, and this is what we're not going to do here. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 18 The goal is for you to never come back to this. You make a valid point.

Speaker 18 One of the reasons I believe you got to allow me to go back into the space with the group home was, bro, honestly, you would be surprised how I'm trying to word this in a good way, but I don't think it is one.

Speaker 71 You say however you want.

Speaker 18 You would be surprised how messed up

Speaker 18 the foster care care system is. Yeah.
Yeah. A lot of these kids get pulled out of their homes.

Speaker 18 So the group home that I was at, mostly all of our boys, they came from environments where they have been taken from their parents. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And so I was running the transitional living group home.

Speaker 18 So my objective, my daily task was to teach a group of young men how to transition into manhood, how to go out on their own, pay their bills, live on their own, all of this.

Speaker 18 You'll be surprised, though.

Speaker 18 These kids get pulled from their homes and their parents yeah and they're saying to them oh we're gonna send you somewhere better better yeah yeah yeah and the places that they send them to do more harm to them than their home yep like they're sending them with people that that are worse than their parents yeah and one they don't have a voice to advocate for them so here i am yeah right now it's it's crazy a few months back i was like i'm gonna talk about this every chance i get which is crazy they don't have nobody to advocate for them

Speaker 18 because I'm sure there are people that have been through the foster care system, but for some reason, people see that stigma.

Speaker 18 There are probably celebrities that have been through foster care, but they see it as a stigma. Yeah.
Like, oh, they want to talk about that part. Oh, my parent gave me up.

Speaker 18 I don't know who my parent is. I was in, you know, whatever the case is.
They don't have nobody to advocate. Yeah.

Speaker 18 These kids, a lot of these kids are treated so poorly

Speaker 18 in these places that the law should step in. People tend to not understand why they act the way they act.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 But you got to think, ultimately, you are walking into a child's home and you're kidnapping them. That's what you're doing, really.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 18 So if I come to your house at eight, nine o'clock at night, when I was 14, me, my cousins, my brother, a bunch of my siblings were taken from my mom and my aunt.

Speaker 18 Right.

Speaker 18 I watched it from across the street. Yeah.
Because I was over my friend's house.

Speaker 18 Police swooped up. Social workers swooped up.
It's nighttime. You go into somebody's house.
You take their child. They don't know where you're taking their child to.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 The child doesn't know where they're going.

Speaker 18 And then they get to the residential or the group home and they acting a fool. And you got a bunch of unqualified, untrained staff members there that don't know how to deal with them neither.

Speaker 18 That's just looking for a job. Yeah.
And when they get there, they talk about why they acting like this. Come on, fam.

Speaker 18 If somebody just came to your house and took you from your parent, you would be acting the same way. And if you weren't, you saw.
And basically, like, let's just be real. Yeah.
Yeah, you just saw.

Speaker 18 You're going to sit there and talk all night. These kids, they acting out because they've been abducted, basically, in their mind.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 And even Pat, way beyond that point, I know most people have seen

Speaker 18 if you haven't the movie Dope Sit, where they talk about the Shackler family and how they basically made dopamines out of the whole West Virginia with Oxycontin.

Speaker 18 You know, Oxycode, however you want to pronounce it. And they show in the movie how these doctors were getting these kickbacks for introducing the drugs to the patients in West Virginia.

Speaker 18 Bro, who better to practice

Speaker 18 with drugs than children

Speaker 18 who ain't got no parents that nobody cares about? Yeah. Bro, they take these kids and they put them into the system three, four, five years old

Speaker 18 and they start doping them from day one. Man.
High dose dope over and over and over. Switch them out, put them on something else.
Oh, let me see how this gonna work.

Speaker 18 Switch them out, put them on something else. By the time they got to me at 18 years old, they like, bro, fry.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Fried.

Speaker 18 And then you got caseworkers. They don't care about the kids.
They don't call. They don't come see them.
They don't pick them up. They don't do none of these things.

Speaker 18 And the kids sitting there feeling like they don't got nobody at nowhere. So my main space that I function in right now, especially for them, is to be an advocate.

Speaker 18 Every chance that I get, I'm going to talk talk about it so people can put eyes on it.

Speaker 18 But also, that's one of the reasons that I'm building the things that I'm building so that we can have a space where it's like, nah, you don't have to go to, because there are a lot of people out here that have the good ideas.

Speaker 18 They, they have, there are some good programs. Yeah.
Like there are good programs. Program that I was at.
It's been around for 168 years.

Speaker 18 It's a decent program. So there are, there are good programs that are out here, but the whole system as a whole, it needs to overhaul.

Speaker 18 So when I had the opportunity to peep behind the veil, I was like, you know, I, you know, me, I go and get the talking.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I think obviously you talk in that talk, but like, one of the things that, you know, in the humanitarian space that I like, I serve in, they have a saying that says, peace works at the speed of trust.

Speaker 18 Yeah. You know, so like, even with all these good programs, these different places, it's like, if these kids don't trust you, yeah.

Speaker 18 You brought up being removed from your family's house when you were real young. I love to talk a little bit about the origin story because obviously you wasn't always talking like this.

Speaker 18 You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I don't know. And I think that that like legitimacy,

Speaker 18 you know, or that realness, that I'm sure no matter how doped up or how painful them kids are, like, they can look behind your eyes and say, okay, but he knows. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 So give me a little bit of that. Get a little bit of the

Speaker 18 retired whooping, all that.

Speaker 18 Hey, it's funny. I got this video on my page that I posted.
I started off saying, ain't nobody coming to save you. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And at the end of it, I go through this story about being in the group home and all of that. And I say, have y'all ever seen the Marvel movies where they like, this your origin story?

Speaker 18 I'm like, that's my origin story. Yeah.
So for me, that part of the group home was significant in my life.

Speaker 18 Real, real significant. So before I went to the group home, I was already outside.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 Like, there are like, there are a lot of things that I've experienced in this world that when I look back, I just be like, man, that's crazy.

Speaker 18 Bro, when I was 14 years old, me and my girlfriend were living together. Crazy.
Yeah. Bro, no, I slept in the bed

Speaker 18 every night. Yeah.

Speaker 18 With my girlfriend at 14. Like we basically lived together.

Speaker 18 Me and her in a room, her mom in the next room.

Speaker 18 And so I was, because of my mom's issues, Like, I've been at this point, I've been my sole provider, you know.

Speaker 18 Yeah, minus a short period of time here and there, whether it's like I went to live with my daddy and he sent me back or with my grandma for a short period of time.

Speaker 18 My grandfather, all of those are short periods of time.

Speaker 18 But since I was like 12, I've been taking care of myself, so I was outside early, yeah, like hustling, making money, so I could provide for myself.

Speaker 18 Yeah, 14, like I said, I was living with my girlfriend. We were sleeping in the same bed.

Speaker 18 When I went to the group home, my mom, the caseworker, and the police came and got me from her house

Speaker 18 and put me in a car, drove me two hours out of St. Louis to a ranch little house out in the woods.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 Town full of white people. Like, I was a hoodie kid.
Like, when they got me, true story, I had on Dickie overalls, like the zip, the blonde boy. Yeah.
And some boots. Like, and a baby.

Speaker 75 Yeah, the St.

Speaker 18 Louis, like, a lot of y'all don't know, like, the the influence of like west coast culture yeah yeah it was very big out there so when he was like yo i'm zipped up with the beanie and the dickies it's like you would think he was in south central yeah yeah so i had on a beanie the zip up dickie boy like yeah boots on they took me out to the woods and man i got there and when i got there it was the first time in my life i think i felt that level of desperation yeah and hopelessness

Speaker 18 because i was supposed to stay there until i was 18 or 21 those were their words based off my behavior. I'm 14.
So I'm in my head, like, I'm going to be here six years. Like, yeah.

Speaker 18 So I'm meeting all these kids. They like, I've been here since I was this age and I've been in the system since I was this.
And they moved me here.

Speaker 18 And they, so I'm hearing all these different stories from different people. And I'm just like, dang, it's crazy, you know? Yeah.
And then one day, it was right after Christmas.

Speaker 18 I'm sitting in there at hindsight. I got a different perspective of it.
Now I'm this kid. I'll never forget him.
His name was Roger.

Speaker 18 When I first met him, the very first day that I came, he sat down beside me. He said, Man, if my granddaddy was here, he wouldn't want me talking to you.
And I was like, Why?

Speaker 18 He said, Because he don't like black people.

Speaker 18 So I turned right to him and said, Why did you feel the need to tell me that? Right. Why you tell me that? Yeah.
Like, I was like, You could have kept that to yourself.

Speaker 18 He's like, I don't got nothing against black people. I'm just saying, my grandfather don't like black people.
So I'm like, whatever. Okay, cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 It's like right after Christmas, Christmas Day, I was sitting in the group home. Nobody called.
Like, I'm watching all the other kids. They're getting gifts.
They opening their presents.

Speaker 18 And depending on their program, some of them, they get to go home. Like, so I'm sitting there.
Ain't nobody called me. I don't got no gifts.
I don't got nothing.

Speaker 18 And I'm just sitting in the church, like, just pissed all day, basically. Yeah.
And one of my workers came in later that day. I seen her.
She was talking to the lady.

Speaker 18 The other lady that was about to get off, they was behind me. And I heard her talking.
She said, he just sitting there all day. She was like, yeah.
And she's like, did anybody call him anything?

Speaker 18 She was like, nah. She's like, nobody.
So I'm, and it's crazy now that I've been back in that space more than once. Yeah.
I've experienced that with kids. Yeah.
CNN. In there.

Speaker 18 And I know what to do. Like, oh, I got you.
You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 72 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And so I'm sitting there at that point. She's like, no, you've been sitting there all day.
And so she went, came out. She's like, hey, what you doing? This lady played a significant role in my life.

Speaker 18 I wish I could remember her name, bro. Yeah.
Like, so she was like, what you doing? I'm like, nothing. She was like, you want to go to the store? I'm like, to do what?

Speaker 18 She's like, girl, I got something for you. So the state gave each kid a hundred dollar Walmart gift card.
Wow. So she like, you got a gift card to Walmart for $100, bro.

Speaker 18 I had never been to Walmart before. I didn't know what Walmart was.
So I'm like, all right, man, let's go. We go to Walmart.
I'm walking around. He ain't never been to Walmart.

Speaker 18 I ain't never been to Walmart, bro. I'm walking around.

Speaker 18 I'm looking around the store. I got this 100.
Boom. Guess what? I buy.
No lie. True story.
White t-shirt and some dickies. Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 18 White t-shirt and some dickies out of Walmart in the country. You heard me? I love it.
So

Speaker 18 I grab these dickies, white tea, go back to the group home. I'm still mad because ain't nobody called me.
Nobody came to see me. You know, none of that.

Speaker 18 And so the next few days, man, me and Dude, we always ended up in the living room at the same time. And

Speaker 18 I'm mad. Yeah.

Speaker 18 so 14 you gotta think when i was 14 bro i was like probably six

Speaker 18 six foot six one yeah like 180 200 pounds when i was 14.

Speaker 18 yeah and so while i'm there they had some little weights i had started lifting weights and things oh man you saw i'm programming i'm a big old kid yeah so dude gets to talking crazy to me we sit in the living room he like man what you doing boy so my conversation go back to the first time like

Speaker 18 he racist yeah, yeah. Now I know.
Now I know. I'm like, what you mean, boy? He's like, you heard me, boy.
I'm like, boy, as in kid or boy as a racist. Yeah.
He's like, boy, you heard me.

Speaker 18 Now we're fighting. I said, hey, bro, I'm going to tell you this one more time.
Don't call me a boy again. Yeah.
He said, what you gonna do, boy? Let that fool up. Yup.
Yup. I'm talking about

Speaker 18 the phone, MLA style, locked in, bing. Hey, night night.
Yup. Locked in on it.
You heard me. So

Speaker 18 by the time they come in, I got him by the back of the neck. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And I'm rubbing his face across the carpet. Yeah.
I'm like, what you call me again? He stayed the same, though. He's like, boy, you heard me, boy.

Speaker 18 So now hindsight, though, when I look back, I had to think and say, yeah,

Speaker 18 damn, me and him was sitting there at the same time.

Speaker 18 I thought back and said, oh, he ain't had no visitors on Christmas Neither. Yeah.
Oh, he mad like me. He just as hurt as you.
He was hurt. He didn't even know how to process.

Speaker 18 You the craziest storyteller ever.

Speaker 18 like because i'm like get to the point and i see it right there now i know like yeah he didn't know how to process so i ruffs him up whatever so when the people come in they see me you know they like grab me up because i'm six foot yeah yeah yeah it's only a kid from the city yeah you know everybody record and story that coming there so they know like he a gang member he this he that yeah yeah yeah so i'm the aggressor they snatched me up throw me in the in the road they put me in this room called an isolation room this room was like an eight by ten all the walls were metal yeah the door was like this thick wood with a little bitty window and a thing on it no way out unless they let you out thin carpet on the floor bro when they shut that door i just lost it yeah my brain said you finna die ain't hurt

Speaker 18 ain't no way out yeah and i got the kick in the door i got the yelling And I'm talking about, bro, I just was wilding in there. But they just, they paid me no mind.
They didn't even come to the door.

Speaker 18 It don't make no difference till you calm down they like he can't get out yeah and so this girl that i knew there she came and sat down by the bottom of the door and talked under the thing and she was like hey you gotta calm down she like come down here so i laid down on the floor i'm breathing through the crack like i'm breathing under the door

Speaker 18 she like you gotta calm down like they never gonna let you out of here they scourge she like i'm out here like you gotta So I'm just laying there regulating and I go to sleep. Wow.

Speaker 18 And I wake up in the middle of the night. I knock on the door.
They let me out to use the bathroom. The dude, like, it was a big white dude, used to be overnight.

Speaker 18 He was like, if I let you out, are you going to get the trip? And I said, nah, man, I just got to use the bathroom. I already done used it every once.
I'm like, I just want to go to the toilet.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like, all right, come on.
He let me out. I went back in.
He locked the door. When I went back in there, bro, I said to myself, this was my, one of my origins.

Speaker 18 I said to myself, I said, when they let me out of here, 14 years old, I said, I'm going to be different. Yeah.
I'm going to be in in control. I'm going to show the world who I am.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 When they let me out, I played the game after that ever since.

Speaker 18 And so I went to another group home. I stayed there.
I was supposed to be there for a while. And I got to that group home and I asked the people, I said, how do the program work?

Speaker 18 As soon as I got there. Yeah.
They said, well, if you do this, and then you go to level this and you go to this level and you go to that level. I said, how long do it take?

Speaker 18 They said, probably like 90 days. I said, I'm going to do it at 60.
I love it. They said, okay.
And sure enough. 60 days later, bro, less than 60, 60, I was done.
Yeah. They called my mama.

Speaker 18 My case had been dropped because my mama was doing what she's supposed to do. And they like, you can go home.
Yeah. So now I go home two days before I'm turning 15.
I get back home, though.

Speaker 18 My mama was on the same mission and I've been outside ever since. Beautiful, man.
And think one thing after another just shaped me into who I am. A hero.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 I was going to say that that authenticity of like even having the wherewithal to know that like, you know, at the end of the day, Lil Homie was scared, right? Yeah. He was hurt too.

Speaker 18 Like, he was just hurting. So, when you have that sort of like level of empathy and you know when you were outside, like the reasons for which you were outside, you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 18 And having those connections, it's so clear to me how that fuels the direction you're in.

Speaker 18 And it proves to me the cornerstone premise of my whole movement here, which is like, yo, if you understand the hood, you understand politics. You walked in there and said, what's the game?

Speaker 18 What's the play? Okay. What's the play? What's the play? How does this work?

Speaker 18 Okay, now I know how to work it. Here's a way to make it better.
I know how it, I know how I felt in it. So if somebody else has to be in there, this is the way it needs to be done.

Speaker 18 Cause I know I would have succeeded had this, this, and this happened.

Speaker 18 So let me, let me, let me push you forward to, to, to now and then to more like sort of the bigger like national conversation now.

Speaker 18 So like the national conversation, all of us, we lived through, you know, in the time that you were there and the time was going on at LA too, like just this hyper policing where, you know, for us, probably the same for y'all.

Speaker 18 The cops were just another gang to us. You know what I'm saying? Like y'all just as violent, as bad, and as dangerous as everybody else in these streets.
Like you ain't make no difference to us. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And sure, yeah. Like in the same way that.

Speaker 18 You know, if you were having a rodent infestation at your house, I mean, sure, you could bomb the house, right? And yes, the rodents are gone. Yeah.

Speaker 78 You understand what I'm saying?

Speaker 18 But you've killed everything. You know what I'm saying? But then you get to say, like, you know, as a metaphor, it's like, oh, look, we were tough on crime.
We ended crime. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 18 What's like, well, yeah, but that's because you locked us all up. Like, it didn't, this didn't really help us.
But,

Speaker 18 you know, we're seeing sort of across the country, despite all of these efforts and proof that like the streets are different. And it's not because of any invading forts.

Speaker 18 It's because of people like you, people like JB and OKC that are like truly from the city

Speaker 18 who really care and move at the speed of trust. Like I said, moving at the speed of trust and like, and are saying, look, it's one kid at a time.
It's one program at a time.

Speaker 18 It's, it's one advocate at a time that like says, incremental, slow, door knock, build trust, one kid. You know what I'm saying? That's like, it's not fun.
It's not a movie. Yeah.
It ain't sexy. Yeah.

Speaker 18 It ain't sexy, bro.

Speaker 18 You got gotta be outside you know yeah yeah i'm gonna breeze through when you caught one to the leg yeah but like even in the process of doing the good you were doing there was a moment where like i knew of like you're like you were in neighborhoods like you know doing backpack drives and back to school things you know i'm saying but these are like in

Speaker 18 these are in active areas like you you know everybody can't just walk in yeah to this park and be like, I'm going to do a fundraiser. It's like,

Speaker 18 no, we robbing all of you. You know what I'm saying? So like, after years of doing this, you know, one little YN didn't know who he was dealing with, you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 18 Caught you slipping. You know what I'm saying? You had to rebuild.
And I've seen even

Speaker 18 health journey from that moment sort of change

Speaker 18 to bring you into the position you're in, sort of now, which is like, obviously, it's somebody we can deeply admire.

Speaker 18 Can you talk a little bit about, obviously, without getting personal, without sharing anybody's like personal information, but some of the sort of like things that you've seen with some of the young homies who've been able to maybe like calm some stuff down?

Speaker 18 You know what I'm saying? Like maybe actually like this working. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 So I think

Speaker 18 you nailed it as a whole. It takes a person that people trust to bring a level of calm.

Speaker 18 So even when I got shot, when I got shot, bro, I had dudes in my inbox. Where you at? Yeah.
That'd be outside. Ready to slide.

Speaker 18 They ready to slide. Yeah.
Yeah. That's like, hey.
Who got you? You know him? Let's go. Yeah.
And I'm like, nah, I'm cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, and so sometimes when things like that happen.

Speaker 18 People take things into their own hands

Speaker 18 that you don't know nothing about. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And so after that, they were like, do you want to do this news interview? I was still broke up. I couldn't get out the bed.
I'm like, yeah.

Speaker 18 But my reasoning for doing the news interview was so people could hear my heart. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And you have a fizzle in every neighborhood around America.

Speaker 18 So here's the thing about police. Police are reactive.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 By the time police are aware of things, a crime has happened.

Speaker 18 The murder has already taken place yeah the shooting has already happened the robbery has already happened the person that's stopping the crime is miss kathy yeah that lives on the block yes that say hey come here yeah

Speaker 18 where are you going i could tell you frustrated uh-huh we had this lady in our neighborhood her name was miss a miss alexander

Speaker 18 how many times as a kid i would be walking past her house on my way to do something stupid yeah and she'll say come here yep and you go sit there the porch with her and talk for like 15 minutes.

Speaker 18 Respect. You have to respect her.
Yeah. And you done.
Or the dude that used to be in the street, it's a dude here in St. Louis.

Speaker 18 I don't really know him like personally, personally, but his name, he go by the name Yo Banger.

Speaker 18 You know what I'm saying? Yeah. X-Street dude.
Everybody love him. You heard me? Yeah.
Yeah. Bro be outside like politicking.
Yeah. Running programs, you know, doing stuff like that.

Speaker 18 So those are the people that cause change in every community. Let me tell you a place on why we on this subject where I think we fail it, especially with organizations.

Speaker 18 Organizations that typically come into our neighborhood, they come for agenda

Speaker 18 and politics. And what they don't understand is what you saying.
If you understand the hood, you understand politics.

Speaker 18 So when they pull up on us in the hood and they got this big organization with all this money and they like, this is what we want to do no this you you're telling me that because you're trying to build an army of people to fight for your cause yeah and what they do is they come into our spaces and they don't empower those people right there yeah i've said this to people a hundred times if you really really really want to see impact and see change you need to go to the community and see the people that are already leading it there you go the people that you're talking about yeah the reason i'm able to go in the park in that neighborhood is because i'm a leader over there at one point i was one of the leaders actively yeah so people there know me they respect me they understand my journey and my transition and that rapport is what get the work done police are reactive bro by the time the police come somebody dead it's already done yeah yeah it's it's people like me on the phone when bro call like man bro i'm about to snap it's like nah bro where you at yeah yep like you know what we doing and so i think those people need to be empowered more.

Speaker 18 See for any organization that's listening or that possibly here this, we don't need you to come to our community and build a hub.

Speaker 18 We don't need you to put an office there and I'm just going to be candid and bring a whole lot of white people

Speaker 18 and gentrify a program. We don't need that.

Speaker 18 What is needed is if you have resources, you have money, you have things, you could bring structure, you could bring system, but bring it to empower the person that's already in that space.

Speaker 18 It's going to take you 30 years to get the kind of respect that person get over there already. James.
And you know why they can't be fully involved? Because they still got to work.

Speaker 18 They still got to do things. You still yes.
You still yes. Yeah.
Man.

Speaker 18 So if you want to really empower the community, take that 40, 50, 60, 70,000, 100,000 that you about to run on this Smurk campaign against whoever else you don't like. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And take some of that money.

Speaker 18 Take about 75K of that and give it to somebody like yo banger yo banger miss a yeah for us it was alex carrasco yeah give it to people like that yup because we lived in the mexican hood you know he had his threspuntos like we already knew he was like what he was

Speaker 18 like that give it to him you know what i'm saying he look that man took me camping for the first time with with alex carrasco you know what i'm saying like and believe it or not believe it or not part of the reason That you turned out the way you did is because of seeds that people like him planted.

Speaker 18 Yep. No, facts.
It was the difference between you and the other dudes on the block that didn't go. That's exactly like exposure, bro, is key.

Speaker 18 What you're exposed to right now, one of my missions I'm working on over the next couple of years, where I'm going to take the group of kids from the hood to Africa. They have to see it, bro.

Speaker 18 That's one of my missions. They have to.
Yes. Yeah.
I'm going to take a bunch of kids from the hood to Africa. Like, so they can get over there and see what it really looked like.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 But also just taking them other places. They could also go to like Denver.
Like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 18 i took a group of kids to kaa a few years back uh-huh like inner city kids yeah and they were blown away yeah like like you said going camping you get to see water and boats when i used to teach i taught in a city called pomona it's in the inland empire it's kids from la have never seen the beach yeah they have like you've never seen the ocean and you're from los angeles you know what i'm saying so like yeah that exposure changes everything.

Speaker 18 Have you set up some sort of like fundraising thing so we can see if we can get our listeners to maybe like fund this Africa trip?

Speaker 18 So, if you go to my page, just flight100foundation.org, flight100foundation.org. Okay, yeah, it's a donation tab.
It'll go to the uh give butter page. Okay, we will link to that.

Speaker 18 Yes, see, that's all I needed. Yeah, listen, bro.
I want to thank you for your time, man. Some of y'all know, like, I've known this man for a long time.

Speaker 18 We've, we've ran, ran into many a cities and many a shows.

Speaker 18 And, and, uh, always appreciated you too yes sir man i think there was a little bit of like we've been sitting in green rooms that both of us know good and well that we just why are we here like we have no reason to be in this room yeah but we are and it just has very much a very much like a real recognized reel with somebody like this man and like you said bro like there's this in every city man and and i appreciate the fact that like and that's part of what makes you what you are is that like it's the things that happen that when there's no cameras on yeah that for us that we're mostly proud of it's not the stuff that like everybody sees it's what's happened like you said it's when it's the phone calls you have to have yeah you know the meetings you have to set up you know what i'm saying and like the like those things are are are the things that really keep a city safe i want to say this before we go we talked about something before you start recording okay yeah yeah yeah and uh i want to point it out because i think it's important too.

Speaker 18 Yeah. We were talking about how resources prevent violence.
Yeah. So everybody know where there's no hope, there's violence.
There is desperate, right? Yes. So

Speaker 18 right now in St. Louis, we have been informed that the senator

Speaker 18 who's a Republican senator,

Speaker 18 he's linked up with DJT. Okay, okay.
And they are, they're building the FDI baser

Speaker 18 and they're bringing in more FDI agents to divert violence. Yeah.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 18 One, again,

Speaker 18 law enforcement is a reaction to crime. Yeah.
They don't prevent it. Yeah.
Here's the reality that everybody that has a brain to think should be aware of.

Speaker 18 I don't care how many FBI you bring, how many police you hire, there are not enough. law enforcement to govern the earth.
Yes, yes, period. It's too many.
Yeah. There's not.

Speaker 18 there's too many of us, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't govern the earth, yeah.
Like, that's that's a that's a no-go, right?

Speaker 18 Yeah, most cases when I see people make these arguments about this, I'm a person I like to use facts, I get straight to the facts, like we get the points. So, in St.

Speaker 18 Louis, right, from 2020 to 2024, the murder rate in St. Louis has dropped by 113.

Speaker 18 Come on, fam. Yeah, 113, bro.

Speaker 72 That's a lot of lives.

Speaker 18 Yeah. So in 2020, the number of homicides at St.
Louis was 263.

Speaker 18 The number in 2024 were 150. See, there are certain things that I'm not going to say they are the exclusive reason, but there are certain things that I know have contributed to that.

Speaker 18 And it's not law enforcement because our police force is short right now. They don't.
They don't do too much of nothing. Yeah.
There are a few things I know that have contributed to that.

Speaker 18 The main thing is resources

Speaker 18 and compassion.

Speaker 18 But they are few to a certain few things that I want to shout out. One of them is an organization called FCC,

Speaker 18 Freedom Center, St. Louis.
My homie Mike Mildon.

Speaker 18 The other one is Action St. Louis.

Speaker 18 The other one is Mission St. Louis.
The other one is We Power St. Louis.
We Power STL. They fund early childhood development.
Word. Word.
Like crucially important for our community. Wow.

Speaker 18 You got MCC, Axis St. Louis, Mrs.
St. Louis, Black Men Bill, We Power STL, just to name a few, people like Yo Banger.

Speaker 18 These are the people that have been actively in the community for the past four years. The past mayor to Shara Jones.

Speaker 18 She probably got a lot of things wrong in people's eyes, but she was directing certain things and empowering people in a certain way.

Speaker 18 These organizations have thrived over the past four years, and as a result,

Speaker 18 you see the number of homicides in the city decrease. So, why do we need to bring more FBI agents? What is that for?

Speaker 14 Show.

Speaker 18 Shouldn't we be throwing more money into these organizations? If they are out here deterring crime, they got the FCC has data. Yeah.

Speaker 18 They have data of reconciliation. I'm talking about my boy, Mike Milton.
He's stepping into roles with one case in particular. A young man was driving in the car with another young man.
He was drunk.

Speaker 18 The young man died. He reconciled him with the mother.
The mother in return went to the judge and was like, he don't need to go to jail. He needs to go to treatment.
Wow.

Speaker 18 Like, why is he going to prison? Wow. Damn, man.
And then when they get, when they get released.

Speaker 18 Restorative justice yeah restorative justice when they get released from prison they go to fcc and they spend time with them and they they learn restorative justice they take accountability wow wow so if we go if we need anything in st louis in dc

Speaker 18 in Chicago, if we need anything in these cities, what we need are people to be realistic about what's happening.

Speaker 18 And if you want to do something, send some of that funds you're going to use to hire more law enforcement into these places where you know people are already doing things.

Speaker 18 Because let me tell you something else. It's 2026 almost.
It's 2025. Ain't nobody scared of the police like they used to be.
This ain't 1962, bro. Sir.

Speaker 18 Don't nobody see the police and be like, oh my gosh, you'll go to police. These dudes is grown men, just like another grown man.
Ain't nobody scared of police no more. That ain't a thing.

Speaker 18 Bleed like the rest of us. That's not a thing.
Yeah, you bleed like the rest of us. Yeah, mum will square up with the police, bro.
They dangerous. Like right now, straight square up.

Speaker 18 That's what I'm trying to say, bro.

Speaker 18 Look,

Speaker 18 we can talk about this, bro, because that's the way we are with these ice agents. It's like, you think I'm scared of you, bro?

Speaker 1 You think I'm scared of you, homie?

Speaker 18 Yeah. Anyway,

Speaker 18 thank you, this. Thank you for like bringing it back to the data and shining the light on like people actually doing the work.
You can follow you on Instagram. It's I am Thizzle, right?

Speaker 18 It's T-H-I-S-L. This.
Yeah. T-H-I-S-L.
L. Flight100Foundation.org

Speaker 18 is the website. Social media, you can find all that stuff there.

Speaker 73 You'll find all that.

Speaker 18 All right.

Speaker 18 It can happen here. Coolzone Media.
We appreciate y'all. Appreciate you, Brock.

Speaker 72 Yes, sir.

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Speaker 75 I'm not Robert Evans. I'm not going to start this episode with a horrible noise.

Speaker 75 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart.

Speaker 75 With me today, Mia Wong, James Stout. I'm Garrison Davis.
We have never,

Speaker 75 as a society, been this years of lead paint as we are now.

Speaker 18 Oh my God.

Speaker 18 Yeah, it's not great.

Speaker 75 Speaking of things falling apart, the lead paint in my room is crumbling and it's probably doing things to my brain. Wonderful.
Love this. Love this.

Speaker 18 So, okay,

Speaker 75 a lot of this episode is going to be about the Charlie Kirk assassination and everyone's reaction to it and everyone sort of losing their minds.

Speaker 75 But I think that the place that we want to start is with a little bit about the concept of the years of lead paint, which was developed by a friend of the show, Vicki Osterwald, to explain something I feel like almost everyone's forgotten about, which was right after Trump got elected, there was that car bomb outside of a Trump hotel that was like a Tesla that was a right-winger who was trying to get everyone to like do the purge.

Speaker 74 Yeah, the cyber truck, uh, former Green Beret guy, Yeah.

Speaker 75 And this is the kind of thing that you would have seen during the original years of lead.

Speaker 75 So for people who don't know what the original years of lead was, because this is becoming a thing that people are using to understand what's going on now.

Speaker 75 And I think there are problems with that that we'll get to.

Speaker 75 But the original years of lead are this period from, I mean, that there's, you know, you can start it in a couple different places, but like roughly sort of like the 60s through the 80s, like early mid 80s in italy that are this period of really it really intensifies in the 70s this really really intense period of political violence in italy it is largely a right-wing reaction to this massive series of uprisings in italy i mean the whole the whole 60s in italy are

Speaker 75 a time of incredible sort of turmoil and left-wing uprising.

Speaker 75 There's, I mean, I think there's first factory occupation are like 65, but there's the fact, there's the massive factory occupations in 1968, which are sort of a global phenomena.

Speaker 75 But then also the next year, there is an event called, and I, I, this is literally the term for it, the hot autumn of 69, which

Speaker 75 I'm not even gonna.

Speaker 18 Ready? I uh

Speaker 74 nice. Great.

Speaker 75 Yeah, which, which was this massive, like a second series of like, you know, workers taking over factories and starting like factory councils.

Speaker 75 And like, there are so many communist factions that like the communist faction that's doing this stuff, they have mutated to a point where they're almost effectively anarchists.

Speaker 75 This is what's called the autonomists and this becomes like a major influence on like American anarchism later.

Speaker 75 And in response to the fact that these people very nearly, on multiple occasions, like very nearly take Italy, a combination of right-wing fascist groups and organizations inside of and sort of parallel to the Italian government developed this thing called the strategy of tension, which, and I think this will to some extent sound familiar in terms of what's what's happening right now, which is this strategy of using terrorist attacks and using political violence to sow this like fear and panic and chaos that would cause people to turn to the state for safety and cause people to turn specifically to like a stronger, like more fascist and then eventually just a straight-off fascist state that would permanently destroy the left and you know, like restore the power of the Nazis, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 75 Well, I mean, not Mussolini's people. Italian fascists.

Speaker 74 The OG fascists.

Speaker 75 Well, and also neo-fascists, too, because

Speaker 75 these people are very weird. Italians.

Speaker 74 Yeah, these people are Italians. Yeah.

Speaker 75 Yeah. Many such cases.
One of the big opening things is that the Piazza Fontana bombing, which is this massive bombing that kills 19 people, injures an unbelievable number of people.

Speaker 75 And it is immediately blamed on anarchists. There's an anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli, who he's among like 80 anarchists who are arrested almost immediately.

Speaker 75 He He like somehow falls out of a four-story window of a police building while he was being interrogated.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 The Italian state, which will go on to admit a lot of the shit that it did, maintains to this day that he just got tired and fell out the window himself.

Speaker 18 I'm going to let you draw your own conclusions about how you think this guy died.

Speaker 75 I mean,

Speaker 75 a lot of anarchists are lazy. I can see

Speaker 18 that happening. Yeah.

Speaker 74 There is a good

Speaker 74 play that I took part in during high school called Accidental Death of of an Anarchist by Dario Foe. Yeah.
Which you can enjoy.

Speaker 75 This is the most

Speaker 75 James backstory moment you've ever seen before.

Speaker 18 This is wild. Yeah.
Whoa.

Speaker 75 Someone update the ICHH

Speaker 75 wiki page.

Speaker 74 Yeah, stop.

Speaker 75 New James Backstory.

Speaker 1 This is great.

Speaker 74 Yeah, in my theater era.

Speaker 75 Who did you play?

Speaker 74 I can't remember. It was

Speaker 74 20 years ago.

Speaker 75 You should have remembered. remembered.

Speaker 18 Oh. I know.

Speaker 74 It was very fun. We had a good soundtrack.
It was very enjoyable for me and my friends. And I'm sure all eight people who watched it also had a wonderful time.

Speaker 75 So in less fun times, so this bombing was actually carried out by a group called Ordine Nuvo, which is, I mean, it's literally New Order. Fascist groups only have four names.

Speaker 75 And this is a group that was aided by a combination of Italian intelligence and this thing called Gladio, which was this American network, sort of stay-behind network in case of a Soviet invasion that had all of these weapons caches placed around the country.

Speaker 75 That's eventually sort of repurposed into these fascist terror cells. And they do a lot of these, right? They do a lot of bombings and they and they mostly blame the left for them.

Speaker 75 Probably the most famous one is the Bologna train bombing, which killed like 80 people, injured a huge number of other people, which was done by a kind of like,

Speaker 18 like another fascist group, right?

Speaker 75 This is also a period where like there is a real left-wing violence, right?

Speaker 75 The left is doing like, well, one of the things they do, they kidnap bosses and have like show trials of bosses all the time. They love doing this.
Yeah. Factory bosses.

Speaker 75 Just like in The Dark Knight Rises by Marxist historian Christopher Nolan.

Speaker 18 God.

Speaker 75 See, I thought you were going to say just like cancel culture, but

Speaker 75 just like

Speaker 75 just like what the right's doing right now for anyone who posts about Charlie Kirk. Yeah.

Speaker 75 But there was also stuff like, like, for for example, Lota Continua, which is a leftist group of staggering complexity.

Speaker 75 It like killed the police officer who was interrogating Giuseppe Pinelli.

Speaker 71 So, you know, like there are left-wing assassinations.

Speaker 75 A group called the Red Brigades kidnaps the former prime minister of Italy, Aldo Moro. See every other episode where I've yelled about this.

Speaker 75 They had been heavily infiltrated and were sort of being manipulated by a number of intelligence organizations that if I started listening them right now, you would think I was insane.

Speaker 75 But the important thing about this period, right? And this eventually works. It does destroy the left.

Speaker 75 But the important thing about the structure of this in the actual years of lead is that these are concrete groups, right? They are shifting, they are flowing, people move between them.

Speaker 75 But actual organized factions in a legitimate armed struggle.

Speaker 74 I mean, the Red Brigades are literally organized in a military fashion, right? With like units and command structure.

Speaker 75 But this is also true of like, this is also true of the fascists, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, very, very strong.

Speaker 75 and it's also true of group, I mean, you know, like, obviously, like, Autonomia and the sort of like anarchist-y communist factions are looser, but like, they're still, they still are like organized and they're rooted in a whole bunch of different kinds of struggles.

Speaker 75 And the strategy of tension is being deliberately managed by by Italian intelligence and by American intelligence and by a bunch of other sort of like state groups.

Speaker 75 And this is not at all what we're dealing with right now. Not even close.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 The Charlie Kirk assassination is neither a guy who was part of like some Marxist group, nor was it a guy who's like a CIA agent or something.

Speaker 74 It's just a guy. It's a guy who goes on Discord.

Speaker 75 Reddit gamer Discord political violence.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 These are decentralized acts being fueled by sort of radicalization, but they're not like active intelligence operations.

Speaker 75 I mean, some of them aren't even fueled by radical. Like even the word radicalization here is sometimes a misnomer.

Speaker 75 This one in particular is like not that really

Speaker 75 a degree, it seems like a degree of like personal motivation based on his relationship with his roommate, as well as this general, like, Gen Z sort of nihilism

Speaker 75 that allows you to do a pretty wild act like this.

Speaker 75 I think specifically in this case, you know, it's like existential violence manifesting in an incredibly political action from someone who otherwise isn't like overtly political. Yeah.

Speaker 75 This guy's not a leftist.

Speaker 75 He's definitely not a groiper, as I've been trying to argue for days now.

Speaker 75 Yeah.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 But I mean, what he did certainly is is political, even though he's not, you know, card-carrying, you know, communist or, you know, an anti-imperialist like the guy who assassinated the two Israeli embassy staffers was, right?

Speaker 75 Which is kind of the only arguably like left-wing assassin we've like seen in the past, I don't know, 10 years in the United States

Speaker 75 is the guy who killed the two Israeli embassy staffers.

Speaker 75 Every other assassin or attempted assassin would not accurately be described as left-wing in orientation, including someone like Luigi Mangioni, who is

Speaker 75 basically

Speaker 75 a teapot gray tribe libertarian.

Speaker 75 Yeah, and it's also worth noting that like from the state end,

Speaker 75 this is not something that was like deliberately unleashed by the state, except in the sense of like... Well, some people would argue otherwise.

Speaker 75 Right, yeah, but the victim they're wrong right they're wrong that's the issue you know and like like if like the last time we saw something that you could argue even sort of looked like that is like there is genuinely something kind of suspicious about the way that a whole bunch of the most famous black lives matter activists who weren't the ones in the ngo suddenly turned up dead that's the closest thing right and that's not even a like we know they did this that's a like there's and that was and that was over a decade ago yeah right that this is this is a long time ago and you know and and and i and i would argue it's important in that it's part part of the same series of uprisings that like all of this fascist stuff is a response to, right?

Speaker 75 In the sense that it's a response to Ferguson, its response to 2020.

Speaker 75 But like that structure, which is the structure that a lot of people are using to analyze this of just purely an American years of lead, doesn't really work

Speaker 75 because we're dealing with something way weirder

Speaker 75 and way less concrete. Which is why we're calling it something else.

Speaker 18 The years of lead paint. Because these people are just like...

Speaker 75 Because it is not the result of this large-scale, like deep state orchestration nor these legitimate organized fashions.

Speaker 75 Everyone is simply brain rotted. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 74 To contrast, right? In the 20th century, the prevailing concept of how the left would change the world was through the violent capture of state institutions. Or in the case of the anarchists, I guess

Speaker 18 less so.

Speaker 74 But, you know, if we look at like this communist ideal of revolution.

Speaker 75 Yeah, how's that anarchist revolution going, buddy?

Speaker 74 Well, I mean, these guys are 30 years after the Spanish Revolution, right? Like it's, some of them have seen anarchists hold whole cities and hold off the country's army. It's not out of the

Speaker 74 out of the realm of possibility for them. That concept of revolution, I mean, it does exist.
It exists with people with like anime Twitter avatars still.

Speaker 74 But like, for the most part, that concept of revolution is not that relevant in 21st century leftist political organizing and so like it cannot be the same because the the nature of the thing that the

Speaker 75 struggle it's not the same on the left there isn't even a legitimate left in the united states like in any meaningful sense yeah i mean there exists like

Speaker 74 and i guess it's like i don't want to call it incoherent but like a lot of the left exists

Speaker 74 the hard the people going hardest on the left are going hardest on the internet i guess is what i want to say like this is nothing like post-68 Italy.

Speaker 75 We've seen a nice, nice, like, resurgence of like union organizing, and that's like the most realistic manifestation of the left.

Speaker 74 But yeah, and mutual mutual aid organizing.

Speaker 75 I will also say we did have the span from 2011 to 2020 was like a really massive period of like really large-scale street movement in a way that really terrified these people.

Speaker 75 Like 20, like 2014, specifically Ferguson and 2020, like really, truly rattled the psychology of all of the people

Speaker 75 who are like currently running this country in that it demonstrated that like,

Speaker 75 oh, damn, there could be a world where like we're not automatically the superior race and we're not like treated like that because it's bullshit and people were willing to fight for that.

Speaker 75 But also like, yeah, no, like we don't have the kind of like organization or logistical capacity that like any of these things had.

Speaker 75 And it's not clear to me that you like, you won't get things that look like that anymore.

Speaker 74 Yeah, like, like, as much as the right-wing YouTube podcast sphere wants to make it the case,

Speaker 74 first of all, there is not like an organized revolutionary left in the US, not as not a serious one.

Speaker 74 And secondly, like, the organized revolutionary left that existed in the 20th century relied on a network that was international and and that that sometimes not always had its roots in Soviet, I guess, foreign policy.

Speaker 74 That also does not, like, as much as the YouTube world wishes it to be the case, China is not

Speaker 74 sending people little yellow hard hats to go out in Portland and get mad at the feds being there. Like, that's just not the case.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 74 Here's an advert for hard hats, which you have to buy on your own because China is not sending them to you.

Speaker 71 We're back talking lead paint.

Speaker 75 Speaking of lead paint, and in some ways the conspiratorial elements of the years of lead, there is no shortage of conspiratorial thought permeating across the entire spectrum of American politics in ways that I've never really seen at this scale before.

Speaker 75 Which isn't saying much, because, you know, I'm not however old James is, but I have been aware since

Speaker 18 fucking Christ

Speaker 18 me

Speaker 75 but I have been moderating streamless politics for

Speaker 18 15 minutes

Speaker 75 a decent section of time

Speaker 75 mainly the past like seven years the past like five or so years professionally we're gonna have to watch another video because of this whole section of the podcast garrison I hope you know I'm actually multiple months late for my workplace harassment training

Speaker 74 I can see why. Oh my God.

Speaker 75 But

Speaker 75 it's pretty bad. Just the total rejection of reality and the separation of truth and reality as coherent concepts.

Speaker 75 And we've seen this in some of people's responses across the political spectrum to the release of alleged text messages between the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk and their roommate, which was released in the indictment that dropped on Monday, which shows the alleged shooter explaining to their roommate what they did and like how they did it and

Speaker 18 in part why.

Speaker 75 And we'll talk more about this in executive disorder, these actual messages and like what they contain. But people's reaction to them, both on the left and right, have been pretty wild.

Speaker 75 Matt Walsh is arguing that these messages were scripted between the roommate and the shooter as a way to absolve the transgender roommate, referring to this strategy strategy as being influenced by Breaking Bad.

Speaker 18 What?

Speaker 75 It's a so Breaking Bad is a television show, an American television show released around 2008.

Speaker 75 I'm not going to explain Breaking Bad.

Speaker 74 Garrison, do you remember that?

Speaker 75 Oh my god, you were like

Speaker 75 Matt Walsh is Matt Walsh is comparing this to something that Walter White did during Breaking Bad,

Speaker 75 saying that this feels like a strategy that these two people cooked up by watching watching too much TV, which in fact just shows that it is Matt Walsh who watches too much TV by the fact that this is the first thing he thinks of.

Speaker 75 But it's not just Walsh.

Speaker 75 Communists, anti-imperialists, people on the left are spreading a completely unfounded assertion that this text exchange between the roommate and the alleged shooter was quote-unquote obviously written by an FBI agent.

Speaker 75 Posts like this are receiving tens of thousands of likes across platforms. Yeah.

Speaker 75 It's such a misunderstanding of how statecraft works and how like the legal system works that people, communists, really think that the state of Utah could orchestrate and convincingly,

Speaker 75 convincingly orchestrate completely faked text exchanges. Like that's just simply not how our legal system works.
And you have people like Hassan spreading this sort of stuff.

Speaker 75 Quote, half of the right thinks the messages are fake because it doesn't implicate the trans person. The other half thinks the shooter is a patsy because it was Israel that killed Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 75 I will say the text messages are too perfectly plugging holes for the investigators. Unnatural.

Speaker 18 Like, come on, man. Come on.

Speaker 75 Come on, guys. This is...

Speaker 71 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Like, I don't even know what to argue with. Like, there's no way to argue against people who...
believe in this in any kind of real way. Yeah, right.

Speaker 74 Like, how do you, someone who has rejected facts, like, how do you, how do you bring them back?

Speaker 75 They have to argue in court that the alleged shooter actually did the shooting, right? That's what they're trying to establish. This is the evidence that will be agreed upon as evidence.

Speaker 75 To introduce the text messages in court, the DA will have to prove their authenticity through chain of custody and metadata.

Speaker 75 The reason why they were released now is because they were included in the indictment laying out the charges against Tyler Robinson. Robinson might use some odd words, but he was raised Mormon.

Speaker 75 And all this just tracks at a face level to me. He's explaining his actions to the person that he loves and instructs them to delete the messages.

Speaker 75 He doesn't think that these are going to come back to hurt him. And this isn't just Patel's FBI saying this.
This is the work of local police and state of Utah police in the state of Utah court.

Speaker 75 And this rejection of evidence, not what the evidence argues, just the base evidence itself, follows a week of debate.

Speaker 75 regarding this shooter's political orientation, which me and Robert already discussed in an episode earlier this week.

Speaker 75 And I I understand people's intensity around this issue, especially framing it in this years of led concept, right, of the right using this to majorly crack down on trans people and on the left, which, yeah, they're going to try to do.

Speaker 75 But trying to argue at this point that he's a Groiper is just so faulty. And trying to argue that these text messages are faked somehow.

Speaker 75 similarly is just so faulty and is so detached from how this situation actually happened and how it fits in to the current dynamic of political violence in the United States.

Speaker 75 On that topic, a few days ago, Fox News's The Five was debating if they needed more information to definitively say that the shooter was on quote-unquote the left.

Speaker 75 Greg Gutfield went on about how high-profile liberal and left-wing figures aren't being assassinated by people on the right and wrote off the murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.

Speaker 12 We don't need more information. Really?

Speaker 18 Yes, we don't need it.

Speaker 90 What is interesting here is why is only this happening on the left and not the right?

Speaker 18 That's all we need to know.

Speaker 90 There's absolutely no cognition.

Speaker 8 What about Melissa Hortman?

Speaker 18 You want to talk about Melissa Hortman?

Speaker 90 Did you know her name before it happened? None of us did. None of us were spending every single day talking about Mrs.
Hortman. I never heard of her until after she died.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 90 Don't play that bullshit with me. You know about? What I'm saying is there was no demonization amplification about that woman before she died.

Speaker 90 It was a specific crime against her by somebody who knew her. The same, now, you could bring up Josh Shapiro, but then you will not bring up, for example, that that was a pro-Palestine person.

Speaker 90 So don't use your... What about this?

Speaker 90 The fact of the matter is the both sides argument not only doesn't fly, we don't care. We don't care about your both sides argument.
That shit is dead.

Speaker 90 For one thing, there is no cognitive dissonance on our side. On your side, your

Speaker 90 beliefs do not match reality. So you're coming up with these rationalizations like, what about this or what about that? We're not doing that because we saw it happen.

Speaker 90 We saw a young bright man assassinated and we know who did it.

Speaker 75 So if you look at like left-wing violence or violence targeting right-wing figures, even just like the past two years, right?

Speaker 75 There's the two attempted Trump assassinations, which the right frames as left-wing violence, though the first Trump shooter did not have left-wing politics.

Speaker 75 They had more of the psychological profile of a school shooter who was looking to do something to get into history books and came from a conservative upbringing. This person was not a leftist, right?

Speaker 75 But this is still targeting a right-wing figure, so it's framed in this same conversation. The United Healthcare assassination, similarly, right?

Speaker 75 This wasn't a left-wing person who did this, but targeting a CEO on a healthcare topic associates it with the left or with progressive stances around healthcare.

Speaker 75 This is the arson against Josh Shapiro's home. The guy who did this had a mixture of like a pro-Trump background, but with pro-Palestine motivations.

Speaker 75 The most clear example would be the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 74 With the healthcare stuff, like we should probably point out that Trump also ran on like medicine is too expensive, right? Like it costs too much to get the pills you need to stay alive.

Speaker 74 Like that has been a cornerstone of his platform, too.

Speaker 75 It can be framed as like a populist sentiment.

Speaker 74 It's a populist stance, yeah. It's not necessarily a leftist one.

Speaker 75 So that's the political background that these people on the right are like coming from, right? Like that's how they see,

Speaker 75 see this. That's like this spike in left-wing violence that they're seeing refers to this collection of acts.

Speaker 75 Now, Four Media has reported that a few days after Charlie Kirk's assassination, the Department of Justice removed from their website a National Institute of Justice research study showing white supremacists to end far-right violence far outweighs any other type of terrorism or domestic violent extremism.

Speaker 75 Quote: Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.

Speaker 75 In the same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.

Speaker 75 So this study has been scrubbed from the website to follow in line with Trump and the right's general talking points about this spike in left-wing violence.

Speaker 75 I think in part, the right would view explicit white supremacist, neo-Nazi linked violence as like separate from like, you know, conservative or even some like far-right violence.

Speaker 75 They don't understand the linkage from, you know, explicit white supremacist mass shootings and

Speaker 75 make America great again. That's something that they would reject as a legitimate coupling.

Speaker 74 In Congress today, Cash Patel claimed to have no idea who Dylan Roof was, for example.

Speaker 18 Correct.

Speaker 74 And what he was about.

Speaker 75 A lot of them just aren't aware of this stuff. And it's not just this National Institute of Justice study.
These findings are incredibly consistent across multiple studies.

Speaker 75 The notably not left-wing Cato Institute found very similar results in their analysis of 620 politically motivated murders since 1975, excluding 9-11, most political violence comes from the right.

Speaker 75 They counted 391 murders from the right and 65 from the left.

Speaker 75 You can link that below to get a better look at their actual methodology and what they count as right-wing and what they count as left-wing violence.

Speaker 75 But these stats simply don't matter to the right in a lot of cases. Many average writers will just reject these results altogether, say that the study is faked or had faulty methodology.

Speaker 75 But others might frame it as, even if this data is true, it doesn't match the current trend of escalating left-wing violence, specifically targeted left-wing violence, not just mass shootings.

Speaker 75 Here's another clip from Fox's The Five.

Speaker 90 I understand why people are saying, what about this? And what about this?

Speaker 90 Because if you have to face the underlying fact to this, your life is going to fall apart because you're going to realize you're not the good guys.

Speaker 90 If you sat around and you defended the mutilation of children, you're not the good guys. If you sat 600, 700 cases of harassment against Republicans and you said, but what about this? What about this?

Speaker 90 And then you see this murder after calling somebody a fascist, you fascist, you realize maybe I'm not the good guy. That is a hell of a realization to deal with.

Speaker 90 So therefore, therefore, you have to grasp at rationalizations. You don't have to do that, Jessica.
They do.

Speaker 90 I don't believe you're part of that group, but why the hell do you have to mimic and echo that crap to us? He was a patsy. That guy was a patsy.

Speaker 90 He was under the hypnotic spell of a direct-to-consumer nihilism, the trans cult. And you know that.

Speaker 90 If you can decide that biology is false, you can agree that murder is okay and that humanity is expendable. How you cannot see that

Speaker 90 alone and see that for what the evil it is without having to attach all of these other things is beyond me.

Speaker 74 His explicit claim that we should just like flag is that it's not, he's not necessarily talking about leftists as a whole.

Speaker 74 He's specifically talking about people who accept that trans people are people,

Speaker 74 being, and like that, that the existence of trans people leads to this nihilism, I guess.

Speaker 75 Well, yeah, I mean, they see the existence of trans people as like a result of this nihilist culture, right? Yeah.

Speaker 74 Well, he seemed to put the causal arrow the other way, though, in that, like, he's, he's, he seemed to suggest that the nihilism comes from accepting trans people.

Speaker 75 I guess I don't fully agree that that's how he's saying it. I think they view it as it's both causal, but also a symptom.

Speaker 75 I think they play it kind of both ways and showing how it's, it's more so just like the result of this like breakdown in like a moral fabric, right? Which is then

Speaker 75 breaking down

Speaker 75 this like notion of reality, which is why like, you know, transness is such an existential threat to the right-wing worldview in many senses. But that's another topic.

Speaker 75 I do find it interesting how quick these people are to completely discount right-wing mass shootings.

Speaker 75 And I think one key difference in talking about left-wing violence versus right-wing violence, it seems in almost all their examples here, they're talking about assassinations targeted against specific people.

Speaker 75 Most right-wing violence in these statistics from like Cato and the National Institute of Justice are mass shootings, right?

Speaker 75 The number of individual people might not be that different, but the kill count for right-wing and specifically like white supremacist attacks are so much higher.

Speaker 75 I don't think it's the actual numbers that matter to these people. It's their proximity to being the recipient of such violence that really freaks them out.

Speaker 75 For these commentators, the likelihood of them being in a black church when a white supremacist mass shooting happens is slimed enough, right? Like that's never going to happen to these people.

Speaker 75 But being the victim of targeted violence against a high-profile figure is, to them, it seems like an increasing possibility. And that really freaks them out.
Like, obviously,

Speaker 75 this type of attack directly affects their political class in a way that a far-right mass shooting does not.

Speaker 75 I think that is influencing the way that they're talking about this, you know, quote-unquote spike in left-wing violence. We're going to go on an ad break and then return to talk about J.E.D.

Speaker 75 Vance's temporary takeover of the Charlie Kirk show and how his rhetoric is affecting this general debate on political violence.

Speaker 75 Okay, we are back.

Speaker 75 On Monday, September 15th, Vice President J.E.D. Vance hosted the Charlie Kirk Show from his office in the White House complex.

Speaker 75 The vice president sitting down hosting a private citizens radio talk show. The show's intro has clips from Charlie's studio with signs that read, big gov sucks.

Speaker 75 Warning does not play well with liberals. To introduce the show, J.D.

Speaker 75 Vance says that, quote, we have to talk about this incredibly destructive moment of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years.

Speaker 75 We're going to talk about how to dismantle that and how to bring real unity, unquote. His first guest was Stephen Miller.

Speaker 75 Vance said he wanted to talk to Miller about, quote, all the ways we're trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you can see from the far left becoming even more and more mainstream.

Speaker 91 You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance, they're going to go after constitutionally protected speech.

Speaker 91 We're going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.

Speaker 92 That's not okay.

Speaker 91 Violence is not okay in our system, and we want to make it less likely that that happens.

Speaker 91 Walk me through at a high level what you and I have been working on, what the whole administration has been working on to try to make sure that we don't reward and promote this craziness.

Speaker 92 Yes, so it's an excellent question. I said this before,

Speaker 92 but it bears repeating.

Speaker 75 The last message that Charlie sent me was,

Speaker 92 I think it was just the day before we lost him,

Speaker 92 which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.

Speaker 75 And

Speaker 92 I will write those words onto my heart and I will carry them out.

Speaker 75 The NGO network.

Speaker 74 Yep. Yeah,

Speaker 74 this has been a thing with them for a while. Yes.

Speaker 75 There was supposed to be a series of executive orders that were drafted earlier this year, specifically targeting Democrat funding platforms like Act Blue and environmental NGOs.

Speaker 75 that it was reported that Trump was about to sign and then they kind of disappeared.

Speaker 75 This was around like April April to May and this has been something that they obviously have been wanting to do but for one reason or another haven't followed through on yet but now are talking about this as an impending policy that the Trump administration is going to enact.

Speaker 74 I think some of their fascination with NGOs comes from the Trump administration's first term when NGOs were very successful in bringing suits that delayed or prevented some of the policies that the Miller faction of the Trump administration would have liked to implement.

Speaker 75 Yeah. And then I think the other angle of this is just the pure anti-Semitism angle that partly when they're saying NGOs, they mean NGOs, and partly when they're saying NGOs, they mean Jews.

Speaker 75 And it's great.

Speaker 18 It's.

Speaker 74 I mean, very often, the specific focus was on Hiyas, right, Hayas, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, who, I mean, we see this in the tree of life shooting, for instance, in 2018, right?

Speaker 74 This has been with us for some time on the right.

Speaker 75 I'm going to play another clip where they outline more strategies for clamping down on left-wing violence.

Speaker 92 And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.

Speaker 92 So let me explain a little bit what that means. So

Speaker 73 I've got 30 seconds, so be quick, Stephen.

Speaker 92 The organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging that's designed to trigger incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence, it is a vast domestic terror movement.

Speaker 92 And with the God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.

Speaker 92 It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.

Speaker 75 So in their discussion of taking down this big doxing network, they also inadvertently and ironically describe the doxing campaign that the right is currently doing at a far larger scale and with way more institutional backing than any NT for left-wing doxing has looked like, targeting people making posts in support of Charlie Kirk's assassination or people making jokes about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination.

Speaker 75 With a doxing website listing thousands of quote-unquote Charlie's murderers, which are actually just people who have made posts about the death of Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 75 And this is building off the canary mission strategy used against pro-Palestinian activists, which has been adopted by the State Department for immigration enforcement and judging visa applications.

Speaker 75 This is the actual like organized state-backed institutionally backed doxing campaign that exists right now in this country. It's not your average torch and Tifa chapter doing this at scale.

Speaker 75 Now it's the right with the mechanism of the state encouraging them, backing them, and tons of money being funneled into an organized operation to actually impact like state policy on who gets allowed in the country.

Speaker 75 On that note, Mark Rubio has talked about denying visa applications. for people who celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 93 We are not in the business of inviting people to visit our country who are going to be involved in negative and destructive behavior.

Speaker 93 So why should, if I invite someone, if we invite someone to visit the United States of America as a student, as a tourist, as whatever, then they have a different, the standard they should be held to is very high.

Speaker 93 We shouldn't be bringing people into this country.

Speaker 93 We should not be giving visas to people who are going to come to the United States and do things like celebrate the murder, the execution, the assassination of a political figure.

Speaker 93 We should not, and if they're already here, we should be revoking their visa.

Speaker 75 So now there's an organized campaign to not only try to deport and revoke visas or deny visas to people, quote unquote, celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, but also get citizens here fired from their jobs and disrupt their life.

Speaker 75 Just two years ago, Elon Musk tweeted, quote, if you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, Twitter, we will fund your legal bill. No limit.

Speaker 75 Please let us know.

Speaker 75 Unquote.

Speaker 75 What's different about the rights' use of these tactics is the merger of like the right-wing non-government organization like activist apparatus with the ruling conservative government.

Speaker 75 Like the Dems and the left have never done this before. There's never been this coordination between the actual Democratic establishment and like the far left.
That's never happened.

Speaker 75 Like Palestine crackdowns started under Biden. Biden's DOJ prosecuted many 2020 George Floyd uprising cases.

Speaker 75 Federal assistance in the domestic terrorism investigation into Cop City started under Biden.

Speaker 75 As for quote-unquote organized riots and street violence, right-wing street violence has been encouraged and coordinated with Trump and the Trump administration.

Speaker 75 Stand back and stand by, stop the steel protests leading to January 6th, which Trump played a large part in making happen. And then Trump pardoned all the participants.

Speaker 74 Yeah, like it's

Speaker 74 pretty clear.

Speaker 75 The mayor of Minneapolis taking a knee is not on the same level as Trump pardoning all the January 6th, quote-unquote, insurrectionists.

Speaker 75 At the end of Vance's two-hour long episode, he reiterated on the topic of doxing and harassment campaigns and political violence. Here's another clip.

Speaker 91 I read a story in the Nation magazine about my dear friend Charlie Kirk. Now, The Nation isn't a fringe blog.

Speaker 91 It's a well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War.

Speaker 91 George Soros' Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.

Speaker 91 The writer accuses Charlie of saying, and I quote, black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.

Speaker 91 But if you go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to, you realize he never said anything like that. He never uttered those words.
He made an argument against affirmative action as a policy.

Speaker 91 He criticized a specific Supreme Court justice as an individual. He never said anything about black women as a group.

Speaker 91 He made an argument for judging people of all races and backgrounds by their own individual merits.

Speaker 91 The very evidence she provides, this hack of a writer, shows that she lied about a dead man, and yet she wrote it. An esteemed magazine published it.
It made it through the editors.

Speaker 91 And of course, liberal billionaires rewarded that attack.

Speaker 91 Now, of course, even if Charlie had uttered those words, it wouldn't mean that he deserved his fate. But consider the level of propaganda at work.

Speaker 91 Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder. This is soulless and evil.

Speaker 91 But I was struck not just by the dishonesty of this smear, but by the glee over a young husband's and young father's death.

Speaker 91 Quote, she says, he was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist.

Speaker 91 The nation wrote, who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses.

Speaker 75 There's a lot to break down there.

Speaker 75 First of all, the president of the nation, not the country, the magazine, the nation magazine, has stated that they in fact do not receive money from George Soros or the Open Society Foundation.

Speaker 75 Vance's gesturing to left-wing billionaires carries three parentheses around that term.

Speaker 75 Second of all, let's play the actual clip of Charlie talking about brain processing power.

Speaker 94 Joy Reed and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Katanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks. We would have been called called the

Speaker 94 racist.

Speaker 94 But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us. They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action.
Yeah, we know

Speaker 94 you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

Speaker 75 So he just happens to be talking about three black women and state that they do not have the brain processing power to do their jobs and that they stole a white man's spot to get in the position they are in now.

Speaker 75 An opinion writer for the Washington Post was fired this week for sharing this quote on Twitter, which replaced the names of the three women he's talking about with just black women.

Speaker 74 Did she share it like in between quotation marks as if it was a direct quotation?

Speaker 75 She did share it as if it was a direct quotation.

Speaker 18 Okay. I see.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 75 I'm going to read this from the email that they sent to this writer firing her. This writer is a black woman.

Speaker 75 Among other requirements, the company-wide social media policy mandates that all employees' social media postings be respectful and prohibits postings that disparage people based on their race, gender, or other protected characteristics.

Speaker 75 The policy also reminds employees that everything they post is reflective of the company and should not affect the integrity of the post journalism.

Speaker 75 Your postings on Blue Sky, which identify you as a post columnist, about white men in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk do not comply with our policy.

Speaker 75 For example, you posted, refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face and performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is not the same thing as violence.

Speaker 75 And part of what keeps America violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness, and absolution for white men who espoused hatred and violence.

Speaker 75 So this is explicitly a they think that reverse racism is real. And that saying that and talking about white people as a class of people in the U.S.
that are responsible for things is in fact racism.

Speaker 75 That is the argument that

Speaker 75 the Washington Post is making in the email where they fire her, which is like that reverse racism shit, even like three years ago, was like a pretty fringe right-wing, like, like, that was a not, it was originally like a Nazi thing, right?

Speaker 75 And this is now being used by, like, the Washington Post to fire their own writers for writing really incredibly reasonable things about Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 75 To close Charlie Kirk's episode, and to close our episode, J.D. Vance talked about before we can have any national unity, we must, like Charlie, tell the truth.

Speaker 88 Unity,

Speaker 91 real unity, can be found only after climbing the mountain of truth. And there are difficult truths we must confront in our country.

Speaker 91 One truth is that 24% of self-described, quote, very liberals, believe it is acceptable to be happy about the death of a political opponent, while only 3% of self-described very conservatives agree.

Speaker 91 3% is too many, of course.

Speaker 91 Another truth is that 26% of young liberals believe political violence is sometimes justified. And only 7% of young conservatives say the same.
Again, too high a number.

Speaker 91 In a country of 330 million people, you can, of course, find one person of a given political persuasion justifying this or that or almost anything. But the data is clear.

Speaker 91 People on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence. This is not a both sides problem.

Speaker 91 If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth we must be told.

Speaker 75 So, these stats are from a recent YouGov survey where 24% of very liberals say it's okay to be happy with the murder of a political opponent and 26% of young liberals say sometimes political violence is justified compared to 7% of young conservatives.

Speaker 75 This study also found that Democrats and Republicans are more likely to say that political violence is a big problem after attacks on members of their own party.

Speaker 75 Of course, this polling is going to be heavily influenced by whatever recent events just happened. That's going to change people's stated opinion on these questions.
Yeah.

Speaker 75 After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, 67% of Republicans said that political violence is a very big problem. 58% of Democrats agreed.

Speaker 75 After the assassination of Melissa Hortman, 56% of Democrats said it's a very big problem.

Speaker 75 Only 44% of Republicans agreed. After the assassination attempt on Josh Shapiro, 44% of Democrats, 37% of Republicans.

Speaker 74 Wait, Josh Shapiro wasn't assassinated, right? They tried to ban his house.

Speaker 75 Yeah, they're counting that as an attempted assassination.

Speaker 18 Oh, okay, I see.

Speaker 75 After the attempted assassination on Donald Trump, 51% of Republicans said political violence is a very big problem, 46% of Democrats.

Speaker 75 And after the attacks on Paul Pelosi, 53% of Democrats said political violence is a very big problem compared to 31% of Republicans.

Speaker 75 These stats are very fluid and absolutely changed depending on whatever current events were current at the time, whatever just happened.

Speaker 75 We're going to talk about this more in a bit, but I think the way that we frame cheering on political violence also massively varies based on what you count as political violence.

Speaker 75 Does a police killing count as political violence? If so, that's going to majorly affect the way we think about this question.

Speaker 75 Here's Vance again talking about Trump's assassination and the pyramid that supports political violence.

Speaker 91 Now, any political movement, violent or not violent, is a collection of forces. It's like a pyramid that stacks on top, one support on top of the other.

Speaker 91 That pyramid's got a foundation of donors, of activists, of journalists, now of social media influencers, and of course of politicians. Not every member of that pyramid would commit a murder.

Speaker 91 In fact, over 99% I'm sure would not.

Speaker 91 But by celebrating that murder, apologizing for it, and emphasizing not Charlie's innocence, but the fact that he said things some didn't like, even to the point of lying about what he actually said, many of these people are creating an environment where things like this are inevitably going to happen.

Speaker 75 Benson goes on to talk about how people yelled at him and his family when he visited Disneyland and discusses how after Charlie's death, one of his friends and a senior White House staffer, had left-leaning operatives in his neighborhood passing out leaflets telling people what he looked like and where he lived, and quote, encouraging neighbors to harass him, or God forbid, do worse.

Speaker 75 While he was mourning his dead friend, he and his wife had to worry about the political terrorists drawing a big target on his home he shares with his own children. Are these people violent?

Speaker 75 I hope not. But are they guilty of encouraging violence? You damn well better believe it.

Speaker 75 We can thank God that most Democrats don't share these attitudes, and I do, while acknowledging that something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe, a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left.

Speaker 75 Vance goes on to state that he seeks no unity with the far left.

Speaker 91 There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics. There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder.

Speaker 91 There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend. There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination.

Speaker 91 And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.

Speaker 91 Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment?

Speaker 91 They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer. And how do they reward us? By setting fire to the house built by the American family over 250 years.

Speaker 75 On September 13th,

Speaker 75 Fox News morning host Brian Kilmead endorsed euthanizing homeless people. with, quote, involuntary lethal injection or something, just kill them.

Speaker 95 Billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population. A lot of them don't want to take the programs.
A lot of them don't want to get the help that is necessary.

Speaker 95 You can't give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going to give you,

Speaker 95 or you decide that you're going to be locked up in jail.

Speaker 18 That's the way it has to be now. Or involuntary lethal injection or something.

Speaker 90 Just kill them.

Speaker 1 Brian, why did it have to get to this point?

Speaker 18 Right. I would say this.
We're not voting for the right people. In North Carolina, wake up.

Speaker 75 Just kill them. Jesus.
A Fox News host advocating the killing of homeless people. And he didn't get fired from this.
He apologized a few days later. But he's not getting fired from his job for this.

Speaker 75 Open, openly advocating the death of homeless people. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Murder.

Speaker 75 And I think it's worth noting, whenever we're having a discussion about political violence, that two days after Charlie Kirk was shot, ICE

Speaker 18 just...

Speaker 75 killed a guy in Chicago who was driving away from their attempt to detain him. He was driving away pretty slowly and there's video of it now.
They pulled out their guns and they killed him.

Speaker 75 And, you know, all of these people who are the people who ordered ICE into this city, right, who are directly responsible for

Speaker 75 the deaths of this man who was also a single father.

Speaker 18 Actually, well, no, Kirk was not a single father,

Speaker 75 but this guy was. and was just murdered in cold blood by ICE, right?

Speaker 75 This is not considered political violence by sort of either liberals or conservatives, right? Because they don't think that political violence can be done by the state.

Speaker 75 And this is also part of how you get to the situation now where you can be like, well, the state should just murder homeless people.

Speaker 75 And that's not considered political violence because it's the state doing it and because they don't think homeless people are people.

Speaker 74 Yeah. I mean, to broaden that statement slightly or take a different angle on it, right?

Speaker 74 Like there is a complete bipartisan consensus that we should kill hundreds of people a year crossing our southern border because that supposedly serves as a deterrent from other people coming, which it doesn't.

Speaker 74 But that is not seen as political violence.

Speaker 75 No, they just murdered three more people on a boat, like leaving Venezuela a few days ago.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 75 As Vance ended the Charlie Kirk show episode, he advocated that listeners find and call the employers of people celebrating Charlie Kirk's death to join a TIPA USA chapter or to run for office.

Speaker 91 But I promise you that we will explore every option to bring real unity to our country and stop those who would kill their fellow Americans because they don't like what they say.

Speaker 18 But you have a role too.

Speaker 91 Civil society, Charlie understood this well, is not just something that flows from the government. It flows from each and every one of us.
It flows from all of us.

Speaker 91 So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell.

Speaker 18 Call their employer.

Speaker 91 We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility. And there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.

Speaker 74 The idea of the fusion of the state with civil society is really notable there. Like, that's not what civil society is, right?

Speaker 74 But that is a concept that is inherently totalitarian, that civil society should flow downstream from the state and the movement.

Speaker 75 It's this fusion between the two that the right has deployed so successfully, which has increased their ability to actually rule.

Speaker 74 Yeah, I mean, that's what fascism does, right? Like that, that's

Speaker 74 Franco, that's Hitler, like, like, that is textbook.

Speaker 75 That's like the point of the brown shirts.

Speaker 74 Yeah, or like the women's movement in Spain, right? To give a more civil society example,

Speaker 74 they're not like a state police agency. They're a civil society organization explicitly run by the state for its agenda.

Speaker 75 So to return to the years of lead paint idea that opened this episode, what I'm observing right now across the political ocean is this flattening of tactics.

Speaker 75 As I've discussed on the show before in the Blue Non episodes, the right Trojan-horsed political conspiracism into acceptable political discourse, which the left is now embracing, liberals and the left.

Speaker 75 And you can see this with people's reactions to the Charlie Cook assassination and theories about the alleged shooter. So the left is embracing conspiracy theories.

Speaker 75 Meanwhile, the right is adopting and accelerating political cancel culture culture style doxing.

Speaker 75 The key difference here is on the right, these actions have state backing and coordination or serve to maintain state power.

Speaker 75 For example, there's types of political violence that get cheered on by the right, such as deportations and the cheering on of police after officer-involved shootings.

Speaker 75 Back the Blue keeps alignment with state power. Same thing with cheering on or encouraging violence against BLM protesters.
That supports the state structure.

Speaker 75 And advocating or celebrating the deaths of protesters gets viewed very differently than the targeted assassinations that have happened the past year.

Speaker 75 And now, the past few days, Trump has discussed, once again, designating Antifa and other groups as domestic terror organizations and bringing RICO charges against code pink activists who screamed at him at a restaurant in D.C.

Speaker 75 a few weeks ago.

Speaker 18 Do you plan on designating Antifa from a domestic terror organization?

Speaker 2 Well, it's something I would do.

Speaker 96 Yeah, if I have support from the people back here, I think it would start with Pam, I think.

Speaker 97 But I would, if you give me,

Speaker 96 I would do that 100%.

Speaker 97 And others also, by the way. But Antifa is terrible.

Speaker 18 Are there other groups that you can make?

Speaker 96 There are other groups. Yeah, there are other groups.
We have some pretty radical groups, and they got away with murder.

Speaker 96 And also, I've been speaking to the Attorney General about bringing RICO against some of the people that you've you've been reading about that have been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation.

Speaker 96 These aren't protests. These are crimes, what they're doing, where they're throwing bricks at cars

Speaker 96 of ICE and Border Patrol.

Speaker 75 I want to close by, you know, we've seen the sort of repercussions that people have had, not even for like celebrating Charlie Kirk's death, but for like being like, wait, this guy fucking sucks.

Speaker 75 And this whole, you know, this whole argument about civility and,

Speaker 75 I mean, that, I mean, the vice president of the United States is making, right? right um I want to read this quote from Matt Walsh as we're recording this this is this is from Tuesday September 16th

Speaker 75 this was left-wing LGBT terrorism there was never much doubt now there is none at all all left-wing terror networks must be crushed all of the terrorists and their helpers and funders must be arrested prosecuted and put to death So, and there have been absolutely zero consequences for, again, Matt Walsh calling for this whole network of people that he imagines exists

Speaker 75 being executed. That's their end game, right? It is to destroy the concept of free speech in order to preserve quote-unquote free speech, right?

Speaker 75 In order to sort of quote unquote end political violence. They want to carry out, you know, mass political killings of their opponents.
Coordinated at a state level with state resources.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 75 And the state involvement makes it okay. That makes it a moral action, not the...
actions of some like unhinged terrorist. Yeah.

Speaker 75 And this is a really significant problem for the way that we think about political violence because this is something that's true for both liberals and conservatives, that they think that the state is the appropriate arbiter for this kind of political violence, which is how Obama can do a drone strike on a 16-year-old American citizen and kill him in cold blood because Obama had political disagreements with his father.

Speaker 75 Right.

Speaker 75 And how this is treated as something that's fine by a huge portion of liberals.

Speaker 75 And this is one of the things that's going to allow, if these people are successful, and I don't know that they will be, but if they can be, that's going to be why.

Speaker 75 Well, that is how we at the show understand the years of lead paint or the current 2025 September era of the years of lead paint.

Speaker 75 There's phantoms everywhere, there's conspiracies everywhere and nowhere, and the specter of political violence is around every corner.

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Speaker 75 This is It Could Happen Here Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis.

Speaker 75 Today I'm joined by James Tout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans. Yep.
This episode, we're covering the week of September 11 to September 18th.

Speaker 74 Normally a week in history when very little happens.

Speaker 75 The most normal week of American politics.

Speaker 72 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 71 Traditionally, nothing around the first third of September's days has ever mattered in American history.

Speaker 75 We should schedule our calendar just to block out this whole section of the of the year each time.

Speaker 98 I already have it written down in my calendar as the week to forget.

Speaker 98 So

Speaker 98 I just spend it drinking.

Speaker 75 Robert, do you want to introduce our first topic?

Speaker 98 Yes.

Speaker 98 I mean, our first topic, as we talked about last week, is the fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk, particularly its impact on free speech and the the pretext it's being used for to justify a crackdown on the quote-unquote left, different NGOs and other organizations that are being accused of being part of a vast and

Speaker 98 let's say unlikely conspiracy to commit terrorism that has nothing to do with what's actually been discovered about Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk's killer. But nonetheless, it's being used that way.

Speaker 98 And kind of the first thing to probably talk about is what's come out about Tyler Tyler Robinson's motivations in the time since we recorded our last episode.

Speaker 98 Honestly, I was kind of surprised, Gary, when we recorded on Friday, I had expected us to need to do an update before Monday in order to like catch up to it.

Speaker 98 And really, there wasn't much that came out.

Speaker 75 No, I did a brief update confirming that he was living with a trans person, but that was really all we knew at the time that could be confirmed.

Speaker 75 That was pretty evergreen, as we suspected it it might be. And I will say, frankly, the motive still remains not entirely clear, but we do have some more concrete details about his online background.

Speaker 75 Yeah. And a few others like ancillary pieces, which is included in the charging document, as well as reporting on his Discord logs.

Speaker 98 Yeah, so I think we should talk first about the whole trans roommate thing of it all. Because obviously, first off,

Speaker 98 this is one of the most massive reaches I've seen. Like, they're always desperate to have a trans connection anytime there's a shooting.

Speaker 75 They were trying to establish this literally like seconds after it happened.

Speaker 98 And that's been the case with like the last year and a half or two worth of mass shootings,

Speaker 98 or at least a sizable number of them. Yeah.

Speaker 74 That was a meme, right, for wives, like a 4chan thing to suggest that any mass shooter was trans and now it's just become reality.

Speaker 98 Yeah. And in this case, the allegation started coming out from the police that his roommate was transgender.
This was before the the Discord logs had leaked. So I want you to talk a little bit, Gary.

Speaker 98 You found the Reddit profile of Tyler Robinson's roommate. Yeah.
So first question is, do we know if they actually were trans? And do we know if they actually were in some sort of a relationship?

Speaker 98 What is the actual evidence that exists to suggest that based on what we have so far?

Speaker 75 They did post about their transition on multiple subreddits and public-facing posts, and they referred to having a boyfriend, BF, that was helping them cope with the results of the 2024 election.

Speaker 75 But that's really all we can tell from this, at the time, the public Reddit profile for the roommate of Tyler Robinson, who had, again, some sort of romantic relationship with the like nitty-gritty, you know, arc of their whole relationship is like not explicitly clear, but certainly have had a romantic relationship.

Speaker 98 Yeah. And I want to make it clear, which should be obvious to anyone who has like a third of a brain cell to rub together against the inside of their skull.

Speaker 98 There's not any evidence that this roommate was tied in any way to Tyler Robinson's crimes. And in fact, the exit evidence.

Speaker 75 The state is arguing this, that the roommate had no prior knowledge and has been fully cooperative. The roommate is not involved.

Speaker 18 Not only is fully cooperative, but turned Tyler in.

Speaker 75 In part, or produced evidence that was now used in the charging document.

Speaker 75 Tyler turned himself in with his father, like officially, but there was certainly conversations happening.

Speaker 71 Yeah, and it's one of those things. You can come down morally on that however you want.

Speaker 71 It's just a matter of there's absolutely no evidence, as people like Matt Walsh are saying, that this is part of some grand LGBT conspiracy.

Speaker 71 Their roommates seemed horrified to have been and, you know, understandably terrified to have been potentially implicated in a massive act, like massively famous act of murder, right? Like that's a

Speaker 71 scary thing to come to like get a Discord message realizing, oh, fuck, now I'm potentially implicated in this. So I do have some understanding for what a shocking moment that is.

Speaker 71 Like it's hard to imagine dealing with that in any way, shape, or form. That's just a wild thing to have happen in the middle of your fucking day.

Speaker 71 Presumably while you're at work or some shit, this would have been around noon. So I'm guessing they were on the job when they got these messages.

Speaker 18 Just a horrible, horrible thing to deal with.

Speaker 98 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Let's go over some of the text exchanges included in the charging document. It's technically not an indictment because they did not charge via a grand jury.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 It's a placeholder for that, but it's referred to as like a charging information document. Yeah.

Speaker 75 That they included some text messages because it was the clearest evidence to lay out to charge them with the crime, though not the only evidence, as we will soon discuss. And these text logs are...

Speaker 75 core to like people like Walsh's current argument that that the trans roommate must have actually been involved because they think that the messages that I'm going to read here were like scripted between the roommate and the shooter specifically to exonerate the roommate.

Speaker 75 And that's the conspiracy that people like Walsh are spreading. Let's go over this section of this document.

Speaker 75 Quote, the police interviewed Robinson's roommate, a biological male, who was involved in a romantic relationship with Robinson.

Speaker 75 The roommate told police that the roommate received messages from Robinson about the shooting and provided those messages to police.

Speaker 75 On September 10th, 2025, the roommate received a text message from Robinson, which said, Drop what you are doing. Look under my keyboard.

Speaker 75 The roommate looked under the keyboard and found a note that stated, I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it.

Speaker 18 Unquote.

Speaker 75 Police found a photograph of this note. The following text exchange then took place.
After reading the note, the roommate responded, What? With many question marks. You're joking, right?

Speaker 75 Robinson. I am still okay, my love, but I am stuck in Orm for a little while longer yet.
Shouldn't be long until I can come home, but I gotta grab my rifle still.

Speaker 75 To be honest, I'd hope to keep this secret till I died of old age. I'm sorry to involve you.
Roommate. You weren't the one who did it, right? Many question marks.
Robinson. I am.

Speaker 18 Sorry. Roommate.

Speaker 75 I thought they caught the person. Robinson.
No, they grabbed some crazy old dude that interrogated someone in similar clothing.

Speaker 75 I had planned to grab my rifle from my drop point shortly after, but most of that side of town got locked down. It's quiet, almost enough to get out.
There's one vehicle lingering.

Speaker 71 Roommate, why?

Speaker 75 Robinson. Why did I do it?

Speaker 18 Roommate. Yeah.
Robinson.

Speaker 75 I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out.
If I'm able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence. Going to attempt to retrieve it again.
Hopefully, they have moved on.

Speaker 75 I haven't seen anything about them finding it. Roommate.
How long have you been planning this? Robinson. A bit over a week, I believe.

Speaker 75 I can get close to it, but there's a squad car parked right by it. I think they already swept that spot, but I don't want to chance it.

Speaker 18 Robinson.

Speaker 75 I'm wishing I'd circled back and grabbed it as soon as I got to my vehicle. I'm worried what my old man would do if I didn't bring back Grandpa's rifle.

Speaker 75 I don't know if it had a serial number, but it wouldn't trace to me. I worry about Prince I had to leave it in a bush where I changed outfits.
I didn't have the ability or time to bring it with.

Speaker 75 I might have to abandon it and hope they don't find Prince. How the fuck will I explain losing it to my old man? Only thing I left was the rifle wrapped in a towel.

Speaker 75 Remember how I was engraving bullets? The fucking messages are mostly a big meme. If I see notices bulge ooh woo on Fox News, I might have a stroke.

Speaker 72 God.

Speaker 75 All right, I'm gonna have to leave it. That really fucking sucks.
Judging from today, I'd say grandpa's gun does just fine. I-D-K.

Speaker 75 I think that was a $2,000 scope. Robinson, delete this exchange.
Robinson. My dad wants photos of the rifle.
He says grandpa wants to know who has what.

Speaker 75 The feds released a photo of the rifle, and it is very unique. He's calling me RN.
Not answering. Robinson.
Since Trump got into office, my dad has been pretty die-hard mega.

Speaker 75 I'm going to turn myself in willingly. One of my neighbors here is a deputy for the sheriff.
You are all I worry about, love.

Speaker 75 Roommate. I'm much more worried about you.
Robinson, don't talk to the media, please. Don't take any interviews or make any comments.
If police ask you questions, ask for a lawyer and stay silent.

Speaker 75 That's the end of the exchange.

Speaker 98 Yep.

Speaker 74 It seems like this person fairly wisely stopped engaging with.

Speaker 98 Yeah, there's not a good response to give to that.

Speaker 73 No, there's not. Yeah.

Speaker 98 And Discord, again, one of the one thing I would hope this would bust is the, this has to have been a professional hitman assassin of some sort, which is a job that, I mean, it technically exists.

Speaker 98 Like, there are guys who are for the fucking Crips of the Bloods, or you could call them professional hitmen and that they kill people for money, but they're not like the people you see in movies.

Speaker 98 Like, they're guys who will walk up with a 38 and gut shoot somebody and run the fuck off. Like, they're, they're not.
We're not talking about like smooth operators.

Speaker 98 Those people almost don't exist as a profession and certainly not as a standard thing in the United States. And that, that, like, the fact that he was having this kind of conversation on Discord.

Speaker 75 This is, I believe, regular text.

Speaker 98 Oh, these are regular, sorry, regular text. This is straight up, yeah, SMS, right?

Speaker 98 Like, yeah, he's messaging this shit through unencrypted lines and left a note under his keyboard and dropped the rifle in the woods.

Speaker 98 Like, this is all about what you'd expect from a 22-year-old kid who's a reasonably good shot with a rifle and had no real other skills. Like, it's what it looked like.
Yes.

Speaker 74 This doesn't even seem like someone who spent a great deal of time planning, right? Like, like, or learning about that.

Speaker 75 They said they'd been planning about it for about a week.

Speaker 74 Yeah. This lines up with what they said, right? Like, like, yeah.

Speaker 98 And they seem almost surprised. Yeah.

Speaker 71 I got this weird feeling reading it. Like, Tyler almost is shocked that they did it.
Like, there's this almost sense of being pulled by history.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Seemingly confused by his own actions and assessments.

Speaker 74 Yeah, like watching himself almost.

Speaker 71 Yes.

Speaker 71 And like I, I inscribe, like, one of the things it sounds like, and this is a little unclear, but it sounds like in terms of those memes winding up, he, he was doing that before, maybe even before he'd ever planned to shoot Kirk.

Speaker 71 That's just like a thing he did for shit.

Speaker 18 For shits and giggles.

Speaker 75 People have pointed to that as being like, oh, well, obviously the roommate knew something was up.

Speaker 75 If the roommate was aware that Robinson was carving bullets, that's, first of all, that's not a crime. No.
People just do weird shit sometimes, especially if someone goes to the range often.

Speaker 75 Maybe they're going to fucking scribble on a bullet. Like, that's not indication of anything that's legitimately concerning, frankly.
Yeah.

Speaker 71 It's indication, again, that this guy was very online and a gamer.

Speaker 18 Right.

Speaker 89 But that's it.

Speaker 75 So it's not just people like Walsh who are. casting doubt on the authenticity of these messages.

Speaker 75 Plenty of liberals and people on the left have taken to suspecting that these could have been written by an quote-unquote FBI agent or law enforcement as fake evidence to frame the shooter.

Speaker 75 And people have pointed towards some weird verbiage like calling his dad his old man

Speaker 75 and referring to quote-unquote like law enforcement type language like interrogate. And

Speaker 75 to me, this is not very confusing. He talks like this because he's raised Mormon and plays a lot of tactical video games.
Thousands of hours.

Speaker 75 I have his Steam profile. Huge, huge gamer.
And he might talk a little odd because he just did a fucking crazy thing.

Speaker 18 I don't even think it's that odd.

Speaker 18 No, it's not.

Speaker 71 People call someone they're in love with by love. That's a thing that happens in the world.

Speaker 18 Like, that's not like very normal.

Speaker 18 What are we doing here? Yeah.

Speaker 71 Why are we questioning this part of the story?

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 But, and again, like, these texts were handed over to local police by Robinson's roommate.

Speaker 75 Why fake evidence that would jeopardize the case when the police already have a lot of other evidence, DNA, ballistic evidence, the friend group Discord chat where he also admitted to the crime right before he turned himself in?

Speaker 75 Like these text logs don't even like make him out to be a crazy leftist. He talks like very vaguely about Kirk spreading hatred.

Speaker 98 Yeah. He says nothing about politics.

Speaker 98 And again, as we'll talk about, because there's some evidence here suggesting that both Tyler and the roommate, like their politics were mixed from what little we can glean about them, right?

Speaker 75 Or a very minor part of their lives in a sense.

Speaker 71 Yeah, they're not talking about redistribution of wealth. They're not talking about overthrowing the government.

Speaker 75 No, no, they're not talking about politics in that way. This seems more like personal to him.

Speaker 71 Yes, he's in love with a trans person and he didn't like what Charlie Kirk said about trans people. Yeah.

Speaker 75 And like, if the government's going to fake messages, why would they do so in a way that exonerates the trans roommate, the real ideological target here?

Speaker 71 Especially, look at what the government is doing right now, right? They're going after quote-unquote antiva. They're going after the Open Society Foundation, George Soros, all of these left-wing NGOs.

Speaker 71 If they were faking this, would he not have referenced one of those organizations? Yeah. Would there not be a fucking black and red flag somewhere in there?

Speaker 74 Yeah, like, it would be so easy. If you're going to implicate someone, you could implicate them in text messages real easily.

Speaker 74 Like, it's ridiculous ridiculous to suggest that, yeah, the state did this. Yeah.

Speaker 75 Why would you fake that? Why would you fake it that way?

Speaker 18 Baffling.

Speaker 75 Incomprehensible. These texts are not load-bearing to this case.

Speaker 75 There's plenty of other evidence. And this isn't the same thing as like cops planting evidence or like a district attorney making subjective claims about intent.

Speaker 75 Like you don't need to overestimate state intelligence here.

Speaker 71 No, we don't even need per what we have.

Speaker 71 There was no need for them to have done anything at all because Robinson specifically notes that as soon as pictures of the rifle were posted online by police, his dad fucking called his family knew because it is a unique gun.

Speaker 71 Yeah, it is, it is an antique Mauser that was sporterized and rebarreled, presumably personally, by his grandfather.

Speaker 71 Both his grandpa and his dad seemed to have recognized it immediately. There was no getting away with it once the rifle was found.

Speaker 75 This is totally different from like the MS-13 tattoo thing, where the Trump administration argued for an interpretation of tattoos and then printed out a picture with like very clearly photoshopped letters to draw a parallel between what they think the tattoos meant and what their interpretation of it as letters and numbers, which Trump, in all of his genius, mistook for being actual tattoos and then they just ran with it because no one has the capacity to tell the president you're wrong.

Speaker 75 This is completely different than faking all these text messages. There's metadata.
There's cell phone records. It's probably still on the roommate's own phone.
Like physical, a physical evidence.

Speaker 75 And like subjectively saying that you don't know any Gen Z that talks like this, that's not valid evidence. 22 year olds know how to use punctuation.

Speaker 74 Yeah, like I let me tell you, as someone who grades hundreds of papers every year from people who are largely, but not all between 18 and 25, yeah, young people can use punctuation.

Speaker 74 This is not like some kind of forensic fucking literary analysis required.

Speaker 75 And the information obtained in these chat logs and through interviews with his parents, match reporting by Ken Klippenstein, who got leaked messages from the shooter on Discord. Very, very similar.

Speaker 75 Lots of libs and people on the left are saying this is fake because they want the shooter to be conservative. And they think that these texts damage the narrative that they have chosen.

Speaker 75 I think that's why we're seeing people react so strongly to this. It's not about actually evaluating the evidence on like a base level, right? Like this guy grew up in a conservative Mormon family.

Speaker 75 His dad's pretty mega. Robinson figured out he was bisexual and started to move a little bit to the left on like gender and sexuality issues.

Speaker 75 And even like a lot of Gen Z straight guys kind of have this political profile, right?

Speaker 75 They're like pro-gun, but their life revolves around like gaming, Discord, and Reddit more than like the political.

Speaker 98 And they're probably often pro-capitalist.

Speaker 71 They're just not bigoted against queer people.

Speaker 18 Yeah, because that's not as common anymore.

Speaker 75 These aren't political partisans. They're not even on our slash bread tube.
Like,

Speaker 75 that's not what's happening.

Speaker 75 He played furry sex games on Steam. When he was younger, one of his Steam names was Donald Trump because, yeah, he's 22 years old.
Trump was inaugurated when he was like 13 or whatever.

Speaker 98 God. Yeah, crazy.

Speaker 71 We fucked the kids up so bad.

Speaker 75 It's, it's a largely, it's largely apolitical.

Speaker 75 And like this, what he did is is existential violence manifesting a political action from someone who isn't otherwise overtly political right because shooting charlie kirk incredibly political action even if that's not the way that that the shooter maybe conceived it yeah like this person happens or it happened across a queer person who who they are very fond of, right?

Speaker 74 They have queer people in their lives.

Speaker 74 That is not indicative of any politics other than they have a queer person in their life.

Speaker 71 If this person stayed the Soviet Union, we would fucking know about it.

Speaker 18 Oh, yeah, because

Speaker 75 they would be running with that.

Speaker 74 They'd have found a Mosin to go.

Speaker 18 They would have used a Mosin for one thing, so they would have missed. Just gonna say, yeah, they would still be alive, right?

Speaker 71 A little bit of Mosin slander for you today to break up the horrors. Yeah.

Speaker 71 Speaking of crackdowns, crack down on your wallet by buying these

Speaker 75 products and services.

Speaker 74 Beautiful. Lovely.

Speaker 71 And we're back.

Speaker 71 Yeah, First Amendment crackdown, massive rhetoric coming out of Stephen Miller and from Pam Bondi, and basically every mouthpiece of the administration about going after the left,

Speaker 71 about dismantling, particularly organizations like the Open Society Foundation, going after George Soros and his son.

Speaker 71 There's talk about prosecuting people criminally and using the death penalty even on folks who are quote-unquote funding terrorism, a term which has been so broadly described by mouthpieces of the administration as to include potentially just about anybody.

Speaker 75 This could be like bail funds, environmental NGOs,

Speaker 75 legal support NGOs.

Speaker 75 It's really unclear the exact form that this is going to take, but this is stuff that the administration has. pined about doing for a while.

Speaker 98 Yeah. And it's unclear.

Speaker 98 You know, it's one of the big pieces of news that's happened within 24 24 hours of us recording this episode, which we recorded on Thursday the 18th, is that Trump has designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.

Speaker 98 Kind of. That's not, he said that what I'm saying is he said that he's

Speaker 13 very important.

Speaker 98 Those are words that he has said.

Speaker 75 Words that he has said before, including in 2020.

Speaker 98 Per the letter of the law, for one thing,

Speaker 98 there's a wild difference between what you can do legally to an international, a foreign terrorist organization and a domestic terrorist organization. Yeah.
Because of the First Amendment.

Speaker 71 You can't just declare legally, in terms of what is written law, the president can't just declare a group of people to be a domestic terrorist organization.

Speaker 75 It's usually an enhancement charge.

Speaker 71 Yes. And then just go after people who have spoken out or donated money to legal charities that are randomly declared to be in support of that.
That's not legal, which doesn't mean it won't happen.

Speaker 71 Let me be really clear.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 71 But that's not what the law is about.

Speaker 75 And they've tried to do that in Atlanta with Stop Cop City and the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and going after the bail fund and people who had donated money to like the Forest Defense Fund. Right.

Speaker 75 And this, Trump is similarly actually to Atlanta, is also talking about using RICO charges to get people in trouble who are funding these quote-unquote domestic terror organizations. And on

Speaker 75 September 17th, Trump truthed. I am pleased to inform our many USA patriots that I'm designating Antifa, a sick, dangerous, radical left disaster, as a major terrorist organization.

Speaker 75 I will also be strongly recommending that those funding Antifa be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Speaker 74 Yeah, I mean, if he used the word major, right? Which doesn't necessarily, like, there's a domestic terrorism is a concept that's nebulous.

Speaker 74 FTO, foreign terrorist organization, is an extremely clear legal definition.

Speaker 74 He didn't use either of those. This is, yeah, this is a thing that like Ted Cruz, and I think he enjoyed it.

Speaker 75 I'm sure there were other other people involved but ted cruise in before 2020 2019 tried to introduce a resolution in the senate condemning antifa like this has been a thing marjorie taylor green introduced legislation which went nowhere or talked about introducing legislation i don't even know if she actually introduced it like this year about designating antifa a terrorist organization it's been yeah it's been something like andy no has been advocating for for years it's a really important point that they have attempted and failed to do this numerous times because the law doesn't let them and this is something that if you have been in the

Speaker 71 reporting on public shootings business as long as I am,

Speaker 71 one thing I can tell you is that in the wake of something like this, it was the same with Christchurch, in the immediate wake of Christchurch, there was this really shocking moment where a bunch of conservative, I talked to these people because I published

Speaker 71 the defining article on that shooting.

Speaker 71 A shitload of conservative organizations came out and said, you know what, maybe we've been wrong about demonizing Muslim immigrants. Maybe like that was really fucked up.

Speaker 71 and we should like those people were talking about that. People who you would not expect.
Now, they didn't keep talking that way.

Speaker 18 They got over it pretty quick.

Speaker 71 But what you have in a moment like this is there's a limited period of time where people's shock and horror and surprise at what has happened creates spaces of possibility for folks who have an agenda and who have a clear plan for what to push to push the Overton envelope in their direction, right?

Speaker 71 This is not a period of time that lasts forever.

Speaker 71 And the folks who are largely orchestrating the conservative response to Charlie Kirk's murder are aware of this, and they are making the best use of this period of time that they can get.

Speaker 71 Now, that doesn't mean the fact that this is a limited period of time doesn't mean there aren't long-term consequences.

Speaker 71 It doesn't mean that they can't make significant progress on their plan to stifle free speech. It doesn't mean we're not in massive danger because we are in danger, folks.

Speaker 71 I'm not telling you we're not.

Speaker 18 100%.

Speaker 71 I'm telling you, these spaces of possibility don't last forever, in part because the public moves on, and in part because there is always a backlash to the backlash.

Speaker 71 And you're seeing pieces of that already.

Speaker 75 We are seeing pieces of that.

Speaker 18 Fucking Karl Rove,

Speaker 71 of all motherfucking people, wrote an article about how the administration is unfairly blaming liberals and leftists for the actions of an individual shooter.

Speaker 71 Tucker Carlson came out and made a statement that, like, if the government is able to go after you for this, they'll come after conservatives at some point.

Speaker 73 He's not wrong.

Speaker 71 I don't credit him doing that because of a serious moral thing. I credit him to be a relatively intelligent guy who is like, no, no, no.

Speaker 71 If they're able to do this to whatever milquetoast liberals, eventually it'll happen to me.

Speaker 18 Right.

Speaker 75 And specifically, like Pam Bondi, the attorney general, made some statements a few days ago about them going after quote-unquote hate speech,

Speaker 75 which spawned a whole bunch of conservative commentators, Stephen Crowder, Tucker Carlson, as well as Matt Walsh. And under no circumstances do you have to hand it to Matt Walsh.

Speaker 75 But this prompted them to be like,

Speaker 75 no, actually, we don't believe in hate speech as a legitimate legal category.

Speaker 75 There should be social consequences for people who celebrate the murder of an innocent man, but there should not be legal consequences for hate speech.

Speaker 75 We're fine with the government helping us dox you and get you fired from your job.

Speaker 75 But prosecuting hate speech as a category is something that we do not agree with and neither did charlie kirk so there's there's been like that small reaction which then prompted pambondi to be like no when i say hate speech what i really mean is like threats and incitement to violence and like yeah okay fighting words i think it's a legal term right like incitements to violence yeah and

Speaker 71 you know there's some stuff that's always been illegal and never been punished for example when conservatives i i've been i've been dealing with this for years threaten to kill and rape activists and show up outside of their houses and harass them as a general rule the police don't do anything yeah uh if those activists are on the left right even though that crosses the boundary into fighting words however they have they legally could they choose not to right

Speaker 71 but if someone is out there saying in the wake of the charlie kirk shooting i want to incite people to kill this person that is illegal you're not allowed to say i want to incite people to murder this person that is a crime if you're posting and saying that you have broken the law yeah they won't go after a conservative for doing that but they'll go after you, right?

Speaker 71 Like that is how things work, you know? Yeah. However, we have seen people who have been attacked for speech that absolutely is not crossing the line into fighting words, right?

Speaker 71 One of the better examples for this happened at Texas Tech.

Speaker 71 You've had variants of this happen at a couple of colleges all around the country.

Speaker 71 They're specifically at Texas Tech, which is, you know, one of Texas's kind of premier state schools.

Speaker 71 There was a video of an incident on the day that Charlie Kirk was killed where a student was seen jumping up and down, yelling profanity at a vigil in a free speech zone outside of a student union building on the campus, saying, y'all homie dead, making fun of people who were mourning Kirk's death.

Speaker 71 At one point, she touched a guy's hat. The video of her went viral.
Governor Greg Abbott called for her to be arrested and expelled. She was expelled immediately.

Speaker 71 She was arrested and charged with assault shortly thereafter. Her family has not made a statement very wisely.
There's really nothing they could say that would be great at this point.

Speaker 71 There has been some pushback from student organizations in the state because this is blatantly illegal. Calling what she did assault is nonsense, in my opinion, from watching the video.

Speaker 71 She was at a free speech zone. Laughing y'all homie dead when someone is killed is not fighting words.

Speaker 71 That is not illegal. You are allowed to say stuff like that under the the letter of the law.
Does this mean this person won't get convicted of a crime? It's Texas, and she's a black woman. She might.

Speaker 71 And this is very chilling. This is deeply concerning, right? This is not the only case.

Speaker 71 There's a universe, a smaller university outside of Austin where, again, a student was videotaped celebrating at a vigil for Kirk's death. That person was expelled as well.

Speaker 71 There have been a number of teachers fired. Obviously, stuff like this has been happening all over the country, right? And this is deeply worrying.

Speaker 71 And even if even if the space of possibility closes on these people faster than they're expecting, if the crackdown on the Open Society Foundation doesn't happen, if this Antifa stuff doesn't go any further than the last time they've talked about going after Antifa, stuff like this is going to continue to happen.

Speaker 71 And it will only accelerate over the next couple of years, right?

Speaker 73 And that is a massive problem.

Speaker 75 Part of this.

Speaker 75 culture shift can be seen in what some people are probably not very smartly calling the biggest attack on free speech they've ever seen in their life, which is on Wednesday evening, ABC put Jimmy Kimmel's show on hold, quote unquote, indefinitely, following pressure from the FCC and affiliate stations owned by Nexstar.

Speaker 75 Before ABC's announcement, Nexstar released a statement: quote, Nexstar's owned and partner television stations affiliated with the NBC Television Network will preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live for the foreseeable future, beginning with tonight's show.

Speaker 75 Next are strongly objects to the recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.
Unquote.

Speaker 75 Sinclair Broadcasting also stated it would not air Kimmel's show and called on Kimmel to apologize to the Kirk family and donate to the Kirk family as well as TPUSA.

Speaker 75 Earlier that Wednesday, FCC chairman Brendan Carr advocated on the conservative podcaster Benny Johnson's show, quote, It's really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast Disney and say, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out.

Speaker 75 And we, the licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion. Unquote.

Speaker 75 Carr then made vague threats towards like direct FCC involvement. Quote, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.

Speaker 75 These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead, unquote.

Speaker 75 The FCC controls broadcast licenses for local TV channels, and Nexstar is planning a merger with Tegna, which requires FCC approval. And this is obviously a coerced attack on free speech.

Speaker 71 And we've seen a lot of people,

Speaker 71 shows and whatnot getting polled and people speaking out getting in trouble because their companies are trying to do a merger, right?

Speaker 18 That's not new.

Speaker 75 Yes, this has happened with ABC already. This happened with CBS and Paramount.

Speaker 75 I think think some people, including people on the right, are misunderstanding some of the circumstances of the firing or the being put on hold, as well as what Kimmel said.

Speaker 75 Kimmel wasn't joking about or celebrating Kirk's death. What he did do is possibly like falsely insinuate that the shooter was MAGA when evidence at the time pointed otherwise.

Speaker 75 Kimmel said, quote, we hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

Speaker 75 ⁇

Speaker 75 He then went on to tell a joke about how Trump did not seem very sad in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, comparing the death to a goldfish in Trump's mind. That was the way the joke was framed.

Speaker 75 So that's what Kimmel actually said.

Speaker 75 You can interpret that either way, whether he's just saying that megas are desperately trying to make it look like he's not one of them and scoring political points, or you can interpret it as Kimmel kind of insinuating that the shooter probably is mega.

Speaker 75 I don't know Kimmel's mind. I'm not sure what he exactly meant by that.

Speaker 75 But the Rolling Stone reported that sources told them, quote, senior executives at ABC, its owner Disney, and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how to minimize the damage.

Speaker 75 Multiple execs felt Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line, but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.

Speaker 18 Unquote.

Speaker 98 Yeah. And

Speaker 98 this is, again, this is chilling.

Speaker 75 Absolutely chilling speech.

Speaker 98 The things he said were not in line with the best available evidence at the time that he said them. No, they weren't hate speech.
They were not incitement to violence.

Speaker 98 There was nothing illegal about them. And again, you had a fucking right-wing figure on television urging for homeless people to be executed.

Speaker 75 Involuntary lethal ejection to solve the homeless crisis, quote, just kill them. He's not getting fired.

Speaker 98 No, he had to make a half-assed apology, but that's it. Yeah.

Speaker 74 Like he had to pretend to be sorry.

Speaker 75 If I had a nickel for every time someone on Fox News said that like any mass shooter at all was linked to a trans person, like none of my trans friends would ever be homeless again.

Speaker 75 Like they say this shit all the time and nothing happens, even though it is, I mean, literally just, it is straight up defamatory.

Speaker 72 Yep.

Speaker 75 And they say that shit constantly and nothing happens. And this is just.

Speaker 75 a really pure

Speaker 75 i mean example of just blatant political suppression of speech. And also this sort of,

Speaker 75 like we talked about this with the mergers, the structural problem with the way that like the American quote-unquote free press is supposed to be structured, which is that they're all for-profit companies.

Speaker 75 And because of that, all you need to do is just buy out or threaten their profit enough and they'll just fall in line.

Speaker 75 And that's what we've been watching with news outlet after news outlet after news outlet, like firing anyone who said anything mean about Kirk. Yep.

Speaker 75 I think with that, that concludes our Charlie Kirk assassination aftermath discussion for now. But there is in fact other news this week happening.

Speaker 75 James, do you have stuff?

Speaker 74 Yeah, unfortunately.

Speaker 75 I'm like bracing myself because I know that James's news is never that good either.

Speaker 74 Yeah.

Speaker 98 So is good news these days?

Speaker 18 Not really.

Speaker 75 The passport thing was killed, right?

Speaker 75 The Marco Rubio.

Speaker 98 Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is some good news, actually.

Speaker 98 There was a Senate bill, a writer on a bill that was introduced that would have given Marco Rubio the power to revoke passports for citizens for effectively political speech in the guise of speech protecting, you know, quote-unquote terrorists.

Speaker 98 That failed. Like, that was pulled by the sponsor, which is good.
There was a backlash to it. And again, when there's backlashes,

Speaker 98 that's good.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 74 Yeah.

Speaker 98 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's so annoying to have to like, we all know that like pointing out the hypocrisy doesn't work as like a real strategy.

Speaker 75 But, like, uh, yeah, there's if there's a way besides that to like actually channel resistance to these authoritarian and like speech-chilling measures, besides just smugly going, like, ha ha ha, the party of free speech strikes again,

Speaker 75 like I understand how that's emotionally compelling, but no one cares, it's not gonna stop them from taking away your free speech. No, yeah, speaking of free speech, here's some free ads.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 73 We are back.

Speaker 74 Don't worry, folks. It is all downhill from here, I'm afraid, because things have not been good outside of the coverage and repercussions of the Charlie Kirk shooting.

Speaker 74 And to start with, I want us to talk about Ghana. This is one of those stories that unfortunately has been kind of eclipsed this week, but it shouldn't be, so we're going to talk about it.

Speaker 74 So, So the United States has begun using Ghana as a pass-through to send people back to other countries in West Africa.

Speaker 74 In international law, when somebody has protection from being sent to a place and you send them back via another place, that is called chain refoulement, right?

Speaker 74 One could probably also pronounce that as if it were a French word, but I have decided not to.

Speaker 74 In this instance, they're sending people to Ghana when their home country has either been deemed to be too dangerous by a United States court or they are unable to send them back to that country for some other reason, right?

Speaker 74 People in this part of the world don't need visas to travel. So they can send them to neighboring countries without requiring, like,

Speaker 74 Ghana can just bust them back, right? It doesn't require a great deal of paperwork.

Speaker 74 So a court has ordered the United States that there was an attempt, right, to secure protections for these people via them into a temporary restraining order to prevent them either being sent away.

Speaker 74 Some of them were in Ghana at the time the case was filed, right? So to prevent them being sent from Ghana to places where they may face, as we are about to hear, torture, death,

Speaker 74 pretty much the worst shit that can happen to people. So the court did order the United States to produce a document which details the exact nature of its agreement with Ghana.

Speaker 74 At the time I'm writing, the United States has not produced that. Ghanaian sources have repeatedly suggested that one exists, right?

Speaker 74 In Ghanaian government press conferences and internal Ghanaian news reporting.

Speaker 18 The case was bought

Speaker 74 by both Gambian and Nigerian citizens, right? So people who don't want to be returned to those countries in their attempt to obtain a restraining order.

Speaker 74 In one instance, one of the people who bought the case fled after torture by the police and military and was explicitly told that if he came back, they would kill him. And what the U.S.

Speaker 74 is doing here is using Ghana as a pass-through to send him back, right?

Speaker 74 Yeah, some of them also detailed in the case their transport. They said they were in straitjackets for 16 hours on the flight.

Speaker 74 The US, right, the government, the United States government in this instance, has once again claimed that these people are out of its hands and it has no way of stopping the government of Ghana from sending them back to these other countries, right?

Speaker 74 This is an argument that is attempted to make in several other instances.

Speaker 74 And I do just want to flag that, like, this use of third-party countries for deportation has much increased under the Trump administration, but it was the Biden administration who began funding Panamanian deportations, right?

Speaker 74 Way before Donald Trump was even elected.

Speaker 74 And I have documented that extensively in my series on the Darien Gap.

Speaker 74 The court determined in this case that it didn't have the jurisdiction to grant the plaintiffs relief, right? So that means that they're not able to get a restraining order.

Speaker 74 One of the people had actually already been returned to the place where they had a convention against torture protection from and was in hiding at the time of the court case, right?

Speaker 74 The judge said that the government's actions were part of a, quoting here, pattern and widespread effort to evade the government's legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.

Speaker 74 We are recording this on the 18th of September. It's a Thursday and about 15 minutes ago, another United States flight.
just landed in Ghana. So this practice appears to be ongoing.

Speaker 74 Secondly, what I want to talk about is sadly another shooting, the killing of Silverio Viegas Gonzalez in Chicago.

Speaker 74 Viegas Gonzalez was a 38-year-old father, a Mexican national, and he was shot by either one or two ICE agents while driving away from them.

Speaker 74 An ICE statement claimed that he drove towards them and ended up dragging an agent a significant distance.

Speaker 74 Surveillance camera footage at the scene shows one agent talking to Viegas Gonzalez in his vehicle.

Speaker 74 We then see the vehicle reverse away from them and then move around them to the left when it sees a gap in traffic.

Speaker 74 The ICE agents have placed their vehicle, which is an SUV, in front of his vehicle, sort of cramping it into the curb, right?

Speaker 74 So he has to reverse backwards and then move forward and to the left in order to try and drive away, which is what he's trying to do.

Speaker 74 We can only see one of the officers in the footage. We see the other officer later in other footage.
The officer in the footage does not appear to be dragged.

Speaker 18 He appears to draw his weapon.

Speaker 74 In bystander footage, we then see two officers pull Viegas Gonzalez from the vehicle and they begin administering first aid.

Speaker 74 We're just re-watching the footage now and you can see the other agent on the other side of the vehicle.

Speaker 75 This sounds very similar to the time that ICE shot at the car driving away just a few weeks ago.

Speaker 74 Sure. And Sam Bernardino.
Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 74 Generally, I've no idea of what rules ICE are operating under.

Speaker 74 It's not considered best practice to open fire at a vehicle that is moving away from you unless it is actively endangering someone else's life, right?

Speaker 71 In part because even if it's endangering someone else's life, a handgun will not stop a car. Yeah.

Speaker 71 Maybe you hit the driver, but the odds are just as good, if not much better, that it goes through a window and remains lethal. going past the car and endangering people's lives.
Yeah.

Speaker 75 And also, it's worth mentioning on the other side of the car from the officer who we see draw his gun is the other agent.

Speaker 18 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 75 So if you're shooting at the car, you're shooting at your other agents.

Speaker 71 Guns don't stop cars generally, unless you've got like a 50 caliber anti-materiel rifle. Guns don't stop cars.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 74 They do stop people.

Speaker 71 But they keep bullets keep going when they miss. It's just bad.
It's a bad thing to do. It's irresponsible.
It's normal cop shit.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 74 So what we see is at least two shots fired. And then we begin to see that then they leave the

Speaker 74 screen of the surveillance camera. So we don't see exactly like we're unable to see, I guess, where those bullets impact.

Speaker 74 The bystander footage then shows his vehicle crashed into the undercarriage of a large lorry, like a truck.

Speaker 18 Right.

Speaker 74 And he's hit that vehicle in a way that could also have been fatal, right? Like the

Speaker 74 way that he's hit that vehicle, like the engine block of the car goes underneath. So it would be the driver who would take the main impact because

Speaker 74 the trailer is higher off the ground, right?

Speaker 74 Hopefully that's making sense to people.

Speaker 73 Totally.

Speaker 74 He's traveled about 100 feet in this time period. Unraveled Press have a pretty good account of this.
They've cobbled together, I think, most of the open source video and also the surveillance video.

Speaker 74 There don't appear in those videos to be any other agents present.

Speaker 74 And when we see the agents rendering aid, none of them appears to be in the state someone would be had they been dragged by a fast-moving car.

Speaker 74 Also, again, like with reference to shooting at a moving vehicle, if the moving vehicle is dragging your colleague,

Speaker 74 you're shooting also at your colleague if you shoot at the vehicle. So unfortunately, none of this changes the fact that this

Speaker 74 guy is now dead, right? The Mexican consulate has confirmed his age. They said he was working as a cook as his profession and that he was from Michupan.

Speaker 74 The consulate has been in touch with his family. Generally, I'm not familiar with this instance and what will happen.

Speaker 74 Generally, the Mexican consulate will help with returning the remains of Mexican nationals to their families in Mexico. That's most of what I have on his death.

Speaker 74 It seems to have moved like very quickly through the news cycle, which is unfortunate because obviously you have children who have lost a father here. Like this, this is a tragedy too.
Yeah.

Speaker 75 No, this is tragic. Yeah.

Speaker 74 Yeah.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 75 You know, and I'm sitting here haunted by the fact that they killed this guy two days after the Charlie Kirk shooting.

Speaker 75 I think most of the people who are listening to the show right now don't know this happened.

Speaker 74 Yeah.

Speaker 75 These agents aren't going to get prosecuted into court of law for this the same way that

Speaker 75 the Charlie Kirk assassin will.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 74 Generally, like local d there have been some cases, but I'm not really aware of any filed against Border Patrol agents. Generally, DHS has an agency which investigates

Speaker 74 use of force incidents, right?

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 74 it is, I will say it is extremely. There have been times when agents have been charged.

Speaker 74 They are rare.

Speaker 75 I mean, and Stephen Miller's DHS, that seems very unlikely.

Speaker 74 Yeah, like I'm aware of some charges, for instance, in San Diego for agents who have allowed drugs to cross the border, right?

Speaker 72 Sure.

Speaker 74 It is pretty rare.

Speaker 75 Yeah. So let's talk about what ICE's occupation of Chicago has been like.

Speaker 72 Yeah.

Speaker 75 I kind of want to start with

Speaker 75 something that's been very frustrating, which is a lot of the way that Chicago has been discussed in the wake of Trump

Speaker 75 not deploying the National Guard there has been about,

Speaker 75 oh, if you resist Trump,

Speaker 75 you can defeat him. And that's true, but also...
ICE and border patrol are on the ground in Chicago as you are listening to this right now, drag people from their homes.

Speaker 75 The raids have gone to a significant extent the way that we expected them to.

Speaker 75 They have been largely very, very fast lightning raids.

Speaker 75 A lot of them have been in the outlying parts of Chicagoland, which has been making it difficult to both track them and determine numbers because a lot of these parts of these massive Chicago suburbs, we're going to talk about one later called Elgin that has 100,000 people in it, but also doesn't have the kind of, I mean, they have like local journalists, but they don't have like the kind of press corps that the like the city of Chicago proper has.

Speaker 75 And so documentation of it has been much harder, which is part of why they've been striking out there. It's largely been ICE, but Border Patrol has shown up.

Speaker 75 And part of the Border Patrol appearing has been that this has also been a giant PR blitz.

Speaker 75 for Trump administration officials, as the people at Unraveled have pointed out, and we'll be talking to them more next week about what things have been like on the ground.

Speaker 75 A senior Border Patrol official, Gregory Bovino, has claimed to, we don't actually have like photograph evidence of there, but he was posting on X that he was, he went to Franklin Park, which is where ICE shot that guy a couple of days after the shooting.

Speaker 75 Okay.

Speaker 75 He has been releasing an entire stream of TikTok and X posts to sort of like advertise his presence in the city and doing this whole, we did this in LA, we're doing this here now thing.

Speaker 75 James, do you want to talk a little bit about who he is?

Speaker 74 Yeah, I do. So Bavino was, at least until recently,

Speaker 74 he appears to be, as you say, working in Chicago now. His Twitter now reads, Commander Op at Large, CA, Gregory K.
Bavino. He was a chief patrol agent in the El Centro sector.

Speaker 74 When we saw Operation Return to Sender, right, Operation Return December was December of 2024. This happened under the Biden administration.

Speaker 18 This was the first of these Border Patrol roving stops way north of the border, right?

Speaker 74 Up in the Central Valley, stopping people in home depots, stopping

Speaker 74 people who appeared to be Latino, Latino, Latine on the street.

Speaker 74 I would say that Cal Matters has had a really good coverage of that, and I can link it in the show notes. We also saw the deployment of Border Patrol to LA, right? That was the El Centro section.

Speaker 74 So people aren't familiar with El Centro, east of San Diego, along the border, right? It's sort of most of the way to Arizona, if you're driving from San Diego.

Speaker 74 He is really, like, I would say, a man of the moment in terms of Trump's Border Patrol, right? Like, Border Patrol is an agency that's changed a lot over the years.

Speaker 74 There was a time when Border Patrol recruited from the Peace Corps. Now is not that time.
One thing that Bovino has been very

Speaker 74 good at in the sense of like doing what the administration wants from a Border Patrol agent right now is his use of social media.

Speaker 74 My understanding is that they have a whole team dedicated to this in the El Centro sector, right? That they have videographers and photographers and such to make social media for the Border Patrol.

Speaker 74 And Bovino really seems to have been stepping up in importance. Like he has this sort of, he also cuts a very distinctive figure with this kind of cropped side haircut.

Speaker 74 You can find a picture of his haircut online. I don't know how to describe it.

Speaker 74 His Twitter picture shows him holding an AR with a low-powered variable octet. Like he is this new, like, like tactical, aggressive, very aggressive social media presence border patrol officer, right?

Speaker 74 And we've seen El Centro Border Patrol Station specifically be at the forefront of a lot of these operations, as I said, even going back to the Biden era.

Speaker 74 If you're wondering, border patrol sectors are not just around the cities that they're named for, right? They can go a long way north. So it's the San Diego sector, the El Centro sector.

Speaker 74 These are not necessarily defined by places that you would recognize as being close to San Diego or El Centro, which is why you would have seen them operating as far north as Los Angeles.

Speaker 74 I'm not as familiar with northern border sectors, haven't spent as much time there, but I would imagine that there is a border patrol sector that pertains to the area that Chicago is in.

Speaker 74 So perhaps Buffino is now doing some kind of operational command for these urban things rather than working in that sector. I'm not entirely sure.
But yeah, that's who he is.

Speaker 75 Yeah, and he's been, you know, he's been making an enormous deal of

Speaker 75 showing up in Chicago. And this has been something that's increasingly, this is part of what it means for ICE and Border Patrol to show up in a city is you get these fucking

Speaker 75 just absolutely hideous PR ops.

Speaker 75 On Tuesday, Kirsty Noam, last seen shooting a dog, joined a raid in Elgin, which is a pretty far-flung suburb of Chicago with about 100,000 people in it.

Speaker 75 And she showed up to do basically a PR junket at this raid at five in the morning in Elgin, where ICE arrived with helicopters. They blew up someone's door and they grabbed a bunch of people.

Speaker 75 And then they were forced to release two of the seven people they grabbed because they immediately turned out to be U.S. citizens.
Kirst

Speaker 75 has denied that they detained them and said that, oh no, actually we just

Speaker 75 separated them for their protection while we did the operation. And like

Speaker 75 that doesn't seem to be true from everything that we've heard from witnesses at the scene but yeah this is you know these are

Speaker 75 the the the the way that these enforcement operations the way that these raids have gone is that the beginning of a major operation cycle has turned into these press circuits for people like kirsty gnome yeah gnome's been on a few raids like this has been a consistent thing right that these raids are a content creation exercise as much as a law enforcement one yes and an excuse to dress up all that good stuff yeah and you know it's it's it's this it's this like reveling both in

Speaker 75 this sort of like constructed, like, I'm holding an AR-15, look how tough I am, image, and also just in the cruelty and the suffering in the same way that the Alligator Alcatraz stuff was.

Speaker 75 But it's worth noting that most of the raids have not looked like this. Like this, this was a raid where like, you know, people

Speaker 75 were woken up in this...

Speaker 75 basically this random suburb at five in the morning because like they heard an explosion and ice had blocked off all of their streets and their armored vehicles and helicopters most of what they've been are not like that they've been following the pattern established in la of very very rapid raids to avoid rapid response networks uh targeting a combination of houses job sites and you know places like home depot and you know when we talked about this beginning a couple of weeks ago we talked about how these people are being deployed largely from this naval base that is hours out from the city, right?

Speaker 75 And that's part of why these, a lot of these raids, although they have been going to the south side, which is significantly far away, but a lot of these raids have been in places like Elgin that are further north and are more outlying because they are closer to this naval base than the core of the city of Chicago.

Speaker 75 And it's easier to do there because there's less resistance. There's been a bunch of raids in Elgin.
They took a student from a community college.

Speaker 75 They've just been dragging people from their homes and workplaces.

Speaker 75 There a very, very well-publicized raid in Naperville, which is another sort of outlying suburb where they grabbed people who were like fixing someone's roof.

Speaker 74 Was that the one where people remained on the roof? Yeah. For some time? Yeah.

Speaker 98 Okay. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 75 Really horrible scene. People are extremely pissed off.
There's another story that has gotten very, very little coverage that was horrifying in Displains, which is a suburb just north of O'Hare,

Speaker 75 where ICE agents in masks did a very, very standard thing.

Speaker 75 They've been, you know, this is, I mean, a kind of standard ICE tactic where they wait for people to get back into a truck and then they block the truck off with their trucks to prevent it from leaving.

Speaker 75 And I'm going to read a CBS report of what happened next because I think it's important to understand what it's actually like for these people.

Speaker 75 Edgar, who's one of the people who was in the car,

Speaker 75 said that when the agent originally came to the passenger door, he tried holding the door closed, preventing him from opening it.

Speaker 75 He said at the time that he and his family had no idea who was at the vehicle and everyone was scared. When the agent tried opening the door, Edgar said he was tased in the face.

Speaker 75 That's when he told everyone in the truck to run for their lives. Despite being a U.S.
citizen, they ran out of fear.

Speaker 75 So what's happening here is there's these two brothers and their dad, who is undocumented. The two brothers were born in Chicago and they block off this car.
They show up in masks.

Speaker 75 The people in the car have absolutely no idea who they are. And when they try to not get their car broken into, they tase this guy who is an American citizen in the face.

Speaker 75 He has to go to the hospital because they tased him in the face.

Speaker 76 Right.

Speaker 98 Yeah.

Speaker 75 And this, there are stories like this. This is a particularly bad one, but there are stories like the rest of the raids that we've been talking about every single day.

Speaker 75 in Chicago that do not break containment at all in a country that is literally entirely just talking about Charlie Kirk. There are people being dragged from their homes.

Speaker 75 There are people being dragged from their fucking places of work. They're being dragged from their schools.

Speaker 75 And, you know, this is, this is just what the U.S. is right now.

Speaker 75 Now, as fucking unbelievably bleak as this is, right? And people are terrified, but they're also angry and people are also organizing.

Speaker 75 And as we saw in LA, people are forming rapid response networks and they're showing up in places that I never would have thought.

Speaker 75 I mean, maybe there'd be NGO networks, but they're doing things in places I just wouldn't have thought possible.

Speaker 75 I want to close this by there was a report on Thursday by Sean Mulke,

Speaker 75 who's the news editor at The Reader, which is a good independent outlet in Chicago. So ICE tried the same tactic of blockading someone's truck and grabbing them in a suburb called Wheaton, Illinois.

Speaker 75 And a bunch of people, when they tried to do the smash and grab of this person's truck, a whole bunch of people showed up and confronted them and screamed at them and recorded them.

Speaker 75 And this caused the ICE people to take off and run away without detaining the person. And this is a stunning development.

Speaker 75 If you know anything about either Chicagoland or evangelicalism, Wheaton is the home of Wheaton College, which is like, it's one of like the three big right-wing like Christian universities alongside like Brigham Young and Liberty.

Speaker 75 This is wild. This is this was one of the home bases of power of the Bush-era moral majority, right? Like Wheaton College is a school where dancing was illegal until 2003.

Speaker 75 Like they banned dancing for 143 years.

Speaker 75 And if people in Wheaton are showing up to do direct actions against ICE, these people, they're cooked, right? They will be able to do a significant amount of damage.

Speaker 75 They have been doing significant amounts of damage. We've just been talking about the amount of damage they've been doing.

Speaker 75 But if this is what is happening in places that used to be moral majority strongholds, right?

Speaker 75 Like places that produce some of the most famous like Christian right-wingers who shaped an entire half century of American politics.

Speaker 75 If people there are showing up and doing interaction actions against ICE and winning, things are fucking changing. People are radicalizing very quickly.

Speaker 75 And despite everything that's been happening, despite all of the Kirkstuff Trump's polling keeps getting worse and worse.

Speaker 75 And I think this is a good reminder that like these people, part of the reason they're moving so fast and so hard right now is because they know they are staggeringly unpopular and they have to get their crack down and they have to build the political and legal power right now before it gets even worse for them.

Speaker 75 And they're terrified that, you know, if there are a thousand weepings,

Speaker 75 if enough people resist them, they don't have the capacity to stop them because everybody. fucking hates these people and they hate what they're doing.

Speaker 75 Nobody actually likes, you know, shock troopers showing up in the neighborhoods and dragging the people they love away from them. And it's going to be a really, really long and hard battle.

Speaker 75 But the fact that people are fighting in places where that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago

Speaker 75 is, I think, at least a small sign of hope in the darkness.

Speaker 98 Yeah. And that's probably.

Speaker 98 Where we ought to end is a small sign of hope in the darkness.

Speaker 74 If you would like to contact us, you can do so by using our ProtonMail email address, coolzone tips at proton.me. It's encrypted if you use an encrypted email address to send.

Speaker 75 We reported the news.

Speaker 71 We reported the news.

Speaker 71 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 99 It could happen here is a production of CoolZone Media.

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Speaker 99 You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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