It Could Happen Here Weekly 203

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

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

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

Welcome to It Happen Here, a podcast where the it is the authoritarian takeover of the city of Chicago.

I am your host, Mia Wong, and today is an episode that was significantly delayed by the fact that our guest got shot in the face by riot munitions while attempting to cover an anti-ice protest in an ICE facility, and then her co-worker was fucking grabbed by the feds the next day, which she was also still out at for reasons that are semi-incomprehensible to me because, again, she was just shot in the face.

But this is

Raven, a journalist with the Independent Outlet Unraveled, which

really truly is doing a lot of incredible work on the incredible proliferation of ICE raids around Chicago.

Raven, welcome to the show.

Oh boy.

Oh, oh, boy, is

right.

Thanks for that intro.

Yeah,

we're in the shit right now.

We're in it.

Yeah.

I guess I want to immediately start this with, you are mostly, you're basically okay, from my understanding, from getting shot in the face with a riot munition like a week ago.

I am, I am basically okay.

I have

like some swelling still in my jaw.

I'm going to the doctor.

We'll see like if there's any soft tissue, like lingering effects later on down the line, but nothing's broken.

Yeah, which thank God.

holy shit, thank God

can really fuck you up permanently.

Like, yeah, I mean, it's been several weeks now of the feds just pummeling people with these stupid little pepper ball rounds.

Yep.

And like the core of it is like metal, you know, it's like this little bullet thing with like the pepper powder on the outside.

So if you shoot someone in the face with those, I mean, like, we've seen horrific injuries these last few weeks among protesters and also like people getting concussions from like you know tear gas canisters exploding right by their heads and other things broken bones

from these really violent arrests and

yeah it's just been awful not gonna lie yeah i was shot at like literally i was like taking a photo of a fed like in a press gaggle we were all hiding behind this van while we're just like

being shot at and uh this guy i mean he stared right at me and like right down the barrel of my lens like he knew what he was doing jesus christ

yeah another reporter it was like a similar situation where these guys like fucking ambushed them like it was just two reporters like hiding behind a van and these guys came up along the side of the fence and just started like shooting them in the face with these rounds yeah so And this has been at the protests at the ICE facility in Broadview.

Yeah, Broadview is like just a tiny little little suburb, like just outside of Chicago.

It's still in Cook County.

Majority Black suburb, actually Black working class.

The mayor is a Black woman.

And now this ICE facility has been there for a while, obviously.

Yeah.

People were protesting there weekly for like over a decade, but nothing like what we've seen these last few weeks.

Yeah.

Okay, let's.

go back in time a little bit because in between the last time we spoke to you and now

there has been so much unbelievably horrible stuff in chicago i guess let's go back a couple of weeks and talk about the guy they murdered yeah so shortly after this latest ice surge began they killed a man at a traffic stop yeah two ice agents who were seemingly operating completely alone didn't seem to have any backup with them.

It was just these two guys in this car who jumped down on the sky and yeah it feels it feels like forever ago but of course it was only a few weeks ago yeah

and you know that's that's an example of just like a police killing that we may never learn more about because it you know it involves the feds right yeah you know there's no timeline under which they have to release any information or like tell us anything about their their own investigation into it.

Yeah.

So that is, of course, really horrifying and horrifying to know there's kind of these, these missing few seconds of video, right?

Where we don't see the actual shot fired.

Yep.

Or shots, excuse me.

We can sort of piece together what happened, but you know, this happened in a working class Latino suburb, a heavily Latino suburb,

not very far down the road from the actual ICE facility.

Like, as you were saying, the part of what's really frustrating about this is we can't tell you why they stopped this person.

Right.

Because they won't tell us.

Right.

We know very little about this other than they stopped a guy.

He tried to drive away and they shot him.

That's like, that's all we know, effectively.

Right.

I mean, they, they claim he had some traffic violations, which is true, but I mean, like, who doesn't?

Yeah, like, I don't know if we're shooting people for traffic violations, this country is going to have like 10 people in it by the end of it.

Like, yeah, he wasn't, he wasn't suspected of any like crime.

No, i believe that it was just opportunistic yeah that that they were just looking for an easy target um and these guys were acting like cowboys i mean like just doing this jump out by themselves and and and also to be clear i mean like when they say he drove away from them i mean some of the video that we do have it it shows him slowly reversing backwards away from them.

It's not like he just drove over the agents.

No, no, no, no, yeah.

Which is, of course, their initial narrative that he he like hit one of them with his car and all this stuff that, of course, turned out to be false.

Yeah.

And it's also frustrating, too, because, you know, in the app, well, I would say in the absence of better information, but it's the media, they will just straight up print, you know, no matter no matter just how unbelievably absurd the lies are, they will just straight up print Department of Homeland Security press releases as if they have anything to do with reality whatsoever, even as it becomes increasingly clear, even more than it's ever been, that you simply cannot rely on police press reports to understand what happened in a situation.

People will just keep printing that.

And so, that's the first, that's the version of the story that goes out first, which is what everyone sees.

Yep.

And they don't see the video where it's very clearly not what happened.

Yep.

It is a maddening situation.

So, yeah, I mean, like that happened.

And then almost immediately and like concurrently, of course, all all of this other ICE activity started ramping up.

Yeah.

And then around

a week and a half ago, Bovino showed up and Border Patrol showed up.

And now it's amped up even further because they're even worse than our regular ICE guys.

Bovino and the Border Patrol people, those are the people who seem to have been pulled out of Los Angeles and deployed to Chicago?

Yeah, Bovino moved this sort of larger Border Patrol operation here to Chicago.

So there are border patrol units here from you know arizona from california like different places and they've been doing sort of a combination of like just strictly corny ass propaganda ops you know like driving around on their boats for photos combined with like actual terrors like a few nights ago, hundreds of feds raiding an entire apartment building of people in the middle of the night.

Yeah.

And I think we'll get to that rate rate in a second because it was unbelievably sort of gruesome and horrible.

But yeah, I wanted to talk to you just about sort of what the general sort of ICE operations and then the border patrol operations have looked like in the city and what it's been like being in a place where there's just guys in masks dragging people off the street.

It kind of feels like screaming underwater and no one can hear you.

Yeah.

Just sort of witnessing this every day.

And it is still highly dispersed, right?

Like Chicago and the metro area and the suburban counties where this is happening.

It's a huge, huge area.

So like we talked about last time, it's a real challenge to focus people's attention on because it can appear like the waters are calm like where you live.

You know, like they're doing it in these very fast strike teams in this very dispersed way.

So by the time you even hear about it, they're already gone.

So many cars abandoned on the side of the road with like windows smashed out.

Jesus Christ.

Like landscapers, work vans and stuff.

You know, like people are just,

rapid responders are just getting to sites where someone's reported something happening and all they find is like a busted out car.

God.

And then they have to piece together like potentially what happened.

Yeah.

And

additionally, the broad view, so like this, this ICE facility where people are protesting regularly, you know, it's not set up to be a permanent detention center.

It's just supposed to be like a temporary stopping point because Illinois doesn't have overnight immigration detention.

So additionally, there are like so many extra people crammed into this facility that wasn't designed to hold them.

Yeah.

And of course the conditions are horrible, you know, like they don't have privacy.

They don't have enough bathrooms.

They're not getting fed.

They're not getting medication.

You know, like after the kidnappings, after the disappearances, then there's this pipeline of detention horrors that people are enduring.

So, this is this is why people are protesting.

You know, I mean, this is why people are out there yelling at the fence, because

the people who are who are brave enough to go out there and yell at the fence or to take the pepper balls or what have you, they they are in agony.

They're aware of what's happening.

They're witnessing all of this and feeling like this needs to stop.

And there are a lot of people hiding in their homes.

Yeah.

You know, like, like, it's, it's true.

Like, I don't always want to make like Holocaust comparisons because I feel like that, that's what we always go to.

But I mean, like, that's the most apt comparison that comes to most people's mind.

You know, they think of like Anne Frank hiding in her attic, like those kinds of things.

And it's like, that is literally where we are at right now.

People are literally in hiding because they are worried that if they go to Sam's Club, they will be kidnapped by secret police.

Yeah.

I think the behavior that they've been exhibiting against the protesters, too, has been very, very similar to what they've been doing to the people that they're grabbing off the street.

I want to talk to you a bit about like what it's been like

dealing with the way that the feds have been attacking the protesters constantly.

Yeah, well, these guys are fucking monsters.

Yeah.

I'm trying to thread this needle needle for people of like, all, all policing is bad, right?

Like, all policing is violent.

All cops are violent, but

there is something different happening here as a result of the fact that there is literally zero accountability.

And I'm not suggesting that like police accountability isn't a sham, because in general, it kind of is.

But I think like, you know, when you take away every single guardrail, these guys don't have to identify themselves and they don't have to answer to anyone.

Yeah.

Their bosses aren't going to write them up.

You know, it's, it's kind of like with any other job, right?

You know, take a city cop here in Chicago.

Of course, it's rare that any of them ever actually get fired for the horrible shit they do.

Yeah.

But, you know, there's this sort of base level of knowing like, well, I got to show up to work every day with my name on my vest.

Yeah.

And I also have like all these other bosses and all these other people who are going to like, you know, maybe make my day harder if i like really something up right yeah and so when we're talking about the feds there's just nothing there's just nothing there they can literally do whatever they want on top of like just not having the same level of like quote law enforcement training i mean we've been watching these guys for weeks like fucking hurt themselves with their pepper ball guns.

Like they literally are like dropping shit as they're like running around the protest.

Like watching,

people have made like Call of Duty comparisons or like Proud Boy comparisons.

And like, it is kind of like that.

It's like, if you just gave a bunch of chuds a bunch of like military and police gear and were like, all right, go out and like pretend to be a cop.

And that's like literally what it feels like.

And so I'm trying to thread this needle for people of like, yeah, all cops suck, but like what's going on with this is like so much worse.

Like they're just out there like shooting at people randomly like and you know for no reason like it is just one of the craziest things i've ever seen in my life yeah and i also i want to put this into perspective like you have also covered a lot of protests in this city yeah i've covered a lot of cop violence i've been to a lot of protests i mean hundreds and hundreds and hundreds at this point right yeah And there's just certain like things that you're used to seeing and certain, there's a certain predictability sometimes to like a lot of their movement.

Yeah.

And what's interesting too is like in some ways they are actually more militarized just in terms of like their riot formations and like how tightly coordinated their units are because they practice and they train for like crowd control stuff all the time.

And then you have these just like ice shuds running around with like way more gear and they look way scarier, but they're like way less organized and way more chaotic.

Yeah.

And there's not enough of them, right?

So like they're not even like doing a good job of like backing each other up, you know, know, like in the field.

Like, I'm just watching them, like, leave their own backs unwatched and, you know, like doing, doing things that are like dangerous.

Yeah.

For, for them, like, they want to act like a military unit, but they're like, definitely not.

Yeah.

It's, uh, I mean, people have made the comparison of like proud boys, which I think, um, I don't know, it kind of works in a sense, like street fighters.

Yeah.

Like is what they're acting like.

You know, yeah, it's just, it's just been super violent, super awful.

Chicago does not have really any experience with like these, just feds in general, like to this level.

I know that out in Portland for years now, like there have been various protests outside of the ICE or something.

Like there's just, there's been like a lot more, a lot more Fed presence out in Portland, Seattle.

Yeah.

Throughout the past few years of protests, I've seen.

you know, people interact with them.

And we just, we've had nothing like that here.

So this is also like

very unprecedented like for this region.

Yeah.

Cause usually CPD is like

brutal enough that they don't, you don't end up with like

federal deployments.

And now it's like, oh, boy.

Yeah.

Well, and also keep in mind, this is all happening in broad view.

So like they don't even have, I mean, there's been, there's been tensions and arguments and discussions around what's happening.

with their local police department and just sort of the interface here too, because it's like this tiny little police department is now having to sort of manage what's going on with this ICE facility, and they're not directly like assisting ICE with crowd control, but they are like basically setting up a perimeter around the area, right?

And so, then, like, their guys are getting tear gassed and like complaining about it.

Yeah, what's was it Brogney, the police chief, who like finally was like, oh, holy shit, I've never been treated this racistly by a police officer before.

And I was like, oh my fucking God.

Like, you know, you're just now realizing that you're the baddie, like, when it finally

happens to you.

Like, come on.

Oh,

yeah.

He, he went on on like ABC or whatever and was just did this whole interview about like, well, ICE is disrespecting me as the police chief.

And it's just like, what?

Like, what did you expect?

Yeah, man.

You signed up for the racism organization.

And you were like, ah, but I'm in charge of my local, my local chapter of the racist association.

So it'll never happen to me.

And it is like, oh, shit.

You mean there's other people who are higher up in the racism police?

Like,

oh,

God.

Yeah.

So that's been, that's just been like a weird side story to this of kind of like the mayor and the police chief and the fire chief are not thrilled about what's going on.

And they're like looking into the legality quote of the fence that ISIS put up just like across this street that goes past their facility, which is in this kind of like tucked away sort of industrial park thing, but there are homes like right on the other side.

And, you know, they've just blocked off this entire street.

And there is like a business on the other side.

You know, it's like obviously a huge fire hazard to just like block a whole road like that.

They didn't ask permission to like put this up.

Yep.

Not to mention a hazard for the people in the detention center, which is now boarded up.

and has this huge fence across the street.

It's like, oh my God, if there was a fire or like an emergency and they needed to evacuate the people inside, yeah, I mean, like, obviously, people would die.

It's this incredible mix of both blatant disregard for the safety of anyone involved and also just wanting to hurt people.

And it's this incredible fusion of they are both incompetent and malicious, which is, yeah,

right, which is not a great combination.

No,

Let's talk about this raid in South Shore.

Yeah, well, you know,

we don't have a ton of details on the true extent of this because it happened at one in the morning.

So, two nights ago, hundreds and hundreds of federal agents showed up to an apartment building in the South Shore neighborhood, which is a predominantly black neighborhood where a number of newly arrived migrants settled because there's cheap housing there.

So, when Governor Abbott started bussing people here a few years ago, that is one place where, you know, a number of people found housing.

And unfortunately, also, too, there's like a lot of slum wards down that way.

Yeah.

Cheap housing means shit in Chicago.

Yeah.

Of course.

Yeah, I can see tenants organizing that city.

I have seen shit that, like, I have seen people's sewage like running out of their bathtubs.

I have seen, I have seen places with no electricity, like literally no electricity, no lights, no running water, like actually literally like frozen solid in the winter and no one can contact a landlord.

And those were in parts of the city that were like

not even that badly off.

The apartment that I had there almost fucking killed me from dust inhalation.

And like, that's like, that's like a, like a normal cheap apartment.

It gets

so much fucking worse.

The pictures from like inside of the apartment, not even just the parts where like, yeah, the doors are blown off.

It's like these apartments fucking suck because they're run by, they're run by fucking slum lords.

And

yeah, like the housing situation in Chicago, so much of it is so shit.

It's never going to get repaired because these landlords don't give a shit because they can just keep extracting money from it because no one can go anywhere else.

And yeah.

Yeah, I mean, these people were living in really bad conditions.

I've heard that like a lot of people were like tripled, quadrupled up in units.

You know, I don't, I don't know what it looked like before it was rated.

Yeah.

But it's like virtually empty now.

I mean, like there, there were some and to be, to be clear, like what happened to back up a little bit, you know, they hundreds and hundreds of feds showed up at this building in the middle of the night and reportedly detained everyone in the building.

So there were like, yeah, you know, people in the building who aren't immigrants, like black people who live in the neighborhood.

You know, there was one woman being interviewed on broadcast who's like an older black woman, you know, who was just like, yeah, I was like detained by the FBI, you know, like in the middle of the night, like asking me if I'm a citizen, you know, like it's just absolutely fucking wild that this happened.

Also, as of today, granted, this might change by the time your podcast is out.

Importantly, so we're recording this the night of Wednesday, October 1st.

Who fucking knows what we'll have learned about this or what will happen in between this and and when it comes out probably Monday.

Probably there will be new horrors.

If you've heard about like the horrors in Chicago and it's not in this episode, it's probably because it happened after we recorded.

Things are happening at a terrible rate.

Yeah.

So as of today, Wednesday, October 1st, I could not find a story on the Sun-Times or the Tribune website about this raid.

And I think,

of course, a lot of people want to indict mainstream media for not covering things, which like is fair sometimes.

Don't get me wrong they've been trying

things are happening so fast now and there are so many horrible things happening every day that like no newsroom can keep up wait red alert red alert they did finally get a story up five minutes ago so mid-recording i checked the book they got one up they got one up is it the tribune or the sun times uh sun times sun times okay okay well it only took them two days okay sure i haven't read it yet maybe maybe it's a good story i don't know maybe they went really in depth it's not terrible.

Yeah, it does actually seem, I mean, it's pretty long.

I mean,

I'm going to read one quote from it to get people and understand.

And this is like, I actually think is pretty representative of like the independent media coverage that I've read of it.

Armed federal agents and military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women, and children from their apartments.

Some naked, residents and witnesses said, that is the thing I've seen in every report about this, is that a bunch of the people just literally didn't have clothes on because they were dragged out of their bed.

There were like fucking naked children, like naked, like people holding naked babies being pulled out of their fucking apartments.

Like, Jesus fucking Christ.

God.

And this was like such a huge number of beds that like the buses were rerouted around the scene.

I mean, like, there's questions, there's questions right now over like the level of CPD involvement in like protecting the scene.

And this was not just ICE.

There were a ton of FBI and a ton of ATF.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which, you know, it's like, okay, what, what, what, what is the FBI doing right now?

They are fucking dragging naked children out of their fucking homes, like out of their fucking apartment at one in the fucking morning.

Yeah.

And they were, they were in fucking moving vans like Patriot Front.

Like, yeah, fucking horrible.

I mean, like, God, I remember seeing a statement where it was like they were denying that they had loaded any immigrants into moving vans.

Yeah.

Which, like,

maybe that's true.

I don't know.

Maybe only the FBI

calls.

Like, I don't know.

Yeah.

I was just like haunted by like one of the reports that I saw where they were talking about like they separated all of the black people into like one van and all of the non-black people into another one.

And it was just like, oh, God.

Like, these people.

There's another

thing.

I think this is in the story that you wrote about this, where they literally, like, a Fed literally said, fuck them kids.

Oh, my God.

I don't, I definitely didn't write that, but I believe that someone said it.

Yeah, it was.

oh my God.

I believe it.

I'm, I'm, I mean, I'm glad to hear that five minutes ago, the Sun Signs covered it, you know.

Yeah, they finally got around to it.

Yeah.

Good for them.

To, to be clear, like, they probably interviewed a lot more people than we had capacity to.

You know, it's been obviously a huge challenge to even cover all this stuff, like as this.

tiny random weirdo ass news outlet like yeah and we're still figuring it out as we go but yeah i mean this this i am still it has been two days and i am like still trying to wrap my head around this raid this specific raid because it it's just yeah so horrific that this happened and of course like the timing like they knew what they were doing by timing it in the middle of the night of course yeah i'm going to fucking reframe the subtitles article because i've just been reading it while you were doing it like watson is someone who lives across the street said she saw agents dragging residents including kids, out of the building without any clothes and into U-Haul vans.

Kids were separated from their mothers.

It was heartbreaking to watch, said Watson, even if you're not a mother, seeing kids come out buck naked and taking from their mothers.

It was horrible.

They're literally ripping kids from their fucking mothers at one in the morning and throwing, apparently, allegedly throwing them into U-Haul vans.

Yeah, I mean, this is like psycho shit.

The last three weeks, four weeks has just been a gradual progression of like the most evil shit you've ever seen in your life.

I don't even know what to say about it anymore, honestly, because it feels like, yeah, feels like our only way of grappling with things like this is by making comparisons to other things.

Yeah.

And I don't know that that is really helping anybody right now, but you know, it's, it's, it's ethnic cleansing.

It's genocide.

It's like literally.

Yeah.

I was just saying earlier today, when like when you drill down to it, like they're disappearing like vast majority Latino men, there are, there are some women.

It's not only men, but like they are definitely targeting like mostly Latino men.

And like, these are people who are migrating here from Central America who are like, if you look at their lineage, mostly like indigenous to this fucking continent, unlike white people, you know, it's just an extension of like the American project, like of the white nationalist, like extermination of the people indigenous to the Americas.

Like that is literally what's happening happening like right now.

So it, yeah, it does not feel like, I don't know, like

enough people get it to the level that they should.

Yeah.

Well, and that's, I think, like one other thing I wanted to talk to you about was like the way the press bubble has

worked around this, where,

again, the fact that federal agents dragged naked children from their homes at one in the morning in the third largest city in in the United States.

That is a story that is hitting the mainstream Chicago press today, two days later.

And I think the only national coverage of it that I've seen are from people who are basically like repeating.

the scoop that was given to this like unhinged UFO outlet what who were the people that got the exclusive oh have you not ready to this yet oh god no idea what hold on hold on on.

Let me, let me, God, fuck.

Okay, I'm very excited to tell you about this.

This is so unhinged.

I saw like the propaganda video that they made about it.

Yeah, so the group that got like the exclusive like press release thing from the feds, which is basically being like reprinted by Newsweek, who are just a joke at this point, like their description of it is like, ah, federal agents repelled from black hop helicopters in the rooftops of Chicago residential buildings, targeting trend to Agua gang members,

according to News Nation.

And I was like, what the fuck is NewsNation?

Like, I have a pretty good grasp on all of the weird right-wing news outlets.

I'd never heard of this one.

I looked them up, and the first big thing that I saw about them was that, well, A, they're the people, they're the person that Chris Cuomo went to after he was like publicly disgraced as a journalist.

And the second thing I saw about them was that their big thing is that they quote unquote take UFOs seriously.

And these are the people who were given like the exclusive scoop on this is like the UFO outlet.

That is so funny that is what i watched the propaganda video that we were watching about it yeah it was news nation i just thought it was like i don't know some right-wing outlet like any other that's what i thought too when i looked at it and like the wikipedia article was like she just went there's a section titled ufos and i was like what the

great great i didn't know about the ufo connection i mean i saw them I saw their reporters like actually at the protests, like interviewing like the one guy in a MAGA hat who showed up to counter protest like of course that's who they interview yeah of course of course so that's good to know that they are uh ufo weirdos regime approved a regime approved media outlet the ufo guys

oh i mean the the the official like like dhs line on this entire thing is that trend dearragua was this like this entire apartment building was a trend dearagua hideout

like no it wasn't like like it's literally just the same thing that israel does about hamas right when they're like oh yeah this hospital that we're bombing yeah it's a hamas hospital there's hamas tunnels underneath i mean it's like the exact same

yeah the the connection you made earlier to

this functioning as an extension of like the genocide that founded this country.

I think it might have been Hannah Arendt.

Okay, I want to attribute this to Hannah Arendt, which is like it's kind of a mess because of her.

Don't do not ever look up Hannah Arendt's stuff on segregation, or actually, maybe do if you want to see the worst argument you've ever seen in your life where, like, famed intellectual Hannah Arendt says that segregation is like a defining quality of like a free society.

Oh, no, awful.

I was not, I'm

not like a super expert on Hannah Arendt, but I definitely did not know that.

So, oh, yeah, no, that people, people don't.

I'll say this: white people, do not be bringing that shit up.

Everyone else is like, oh God, holy shit, you were like a major segregation, like

intellectual who got brought out to be like segregation is actually good.

No.

Because it's free association, but I think it might have been her.

It might have been someone else.

I've been trying to look for who had this idea, and I haven't been able to find who it was.

And I vaguely remember it being her rent, but fuck her.

This has all been a very long windup of saying, like, there's, there's an idea that I ran into back when I was in my sort of like days in the academy about the way that societies reflect their founding violence.

And, you know, the sort of, like, the founding violence of the United States is the genocide of indigenous people and slavery.

And you look at what they're doing right now, you're just watching sort of...

in miniature

that violence just being replicated over and over again where like you're tearing fucking mothers from their children in the dead of night, and it's the same people,

right?

Like, this is an apartment building where almost everyone is black, and the people who aren't black are immigrants, yeah, right?

And obviously, like, some of them are both, but like, you know, but like, you're just like watching the founding violence of this country just being played out over and over and over again every night.

And it's this thing where, like, I don't think on a fundamental level that this thing that we've built, this sort of like this conception of what democracy is, like this conception of what the state is, this conception of like what this country is,

is going to survive this moment.

Either it's going to change completely or the part of it that was nominally a democracy is going to be consumed by the part of it that's just doing this genocide over and over again.

I don't know.

I quote this song a lot.

Song of Choice by Peggy Seeger.

That's about the rise of fascism that I think about a lot.

That has like one of one of the lines: Today the soldiers took away one, tomorrow they may take away two.

One April, they took away Greece, but surely they will never take you.

And

yeah, they're just fucking taking people away in the night right now.

Like, that's, that's the stage of this where we're at.

And either something fundamentally changes or,

you know, like the end of that song is either like they take you or at the end, they don't take you because they know you didn't care, right?

And

I mean, look, I've been

covering civil conflict and violence, you know, like more or less for the last five years, right?

I was at January 6th, like literally in the middle of the mob.

I've seen a lot of shit.

Reporting on it.

I'm very make this very clear.

Reporting on it.

It's not trying to get it.

To clarify, I was there as a reporter.

I was not part of the gap.

Although my fashion

stalkers might insist that I was part of like an intiva conspiracy to

camp, right?

But,

you know, I've seen a lot of shit the last five years, obviously.

And I think this particular moment feels like,

yeah, like we're kind of.

you know, like we're a marble at the top of like a spiral.

And it's like, either we're going to keep rolling down or or somebody like jams it or takes the marble off.

You know, like, there's just this is a this is a spiral.

Like, there are so many factors that are going to contribute to this getting worse if we do not significantly alter course.

And I think, you know, this feeling that we have locally of like we're screaming underwater and nobody can hear us, I'm sure is share, a sentiment that is shared in LA, that is shared in DC, that is shared in all of these cities all over where ICE is doing similar shit.

It can make us really angry.

I mean, I've been really angry at times in the last month about the lack of like attention, whatever.

But then I think about how everyone is overwhelmed because there's so much horrible shit happening every day in so many places.

Like we just can't keep up anymore.

Like none of us can keep up.

Yeah, like, I mean, like, I'm in Portland right now.

And like, it's my job to keep track of this.

And I can't tell you at this exact second whether a federal deployment to Portland is on or off.

I think it's currently off, but also by the time you're listening to this, who the fuck knows?

And, like,

yeah, like, right.

I don't know.

There's an Andor line about how it's easier to hide a thousand atrocities than it is to hide one because you can just keep ramping the tempo up.

Exactly.

I don't know.

I'm not a historian.

I'm just a journalist.

So maybe, maybe you would know better than me, but I feel like we are literally already in a civil war.

We just don't know it yet.

Or like we're waiting for some specific thing to like prove it.

You know, like, I don't, I don't know.

Yeah.

I think generally nobody knows until it's like already

you're you're already in it.

To me, it feels like we're in it.

Yeah.

And, but I, but I also wonder if that's just the cognitive effect of like us being here literally in it because so much is going on and and then thinking like well if the ice surge subsides two months from now is it gonna still feel this way i don't know i mean

to me it feels like we've got several more years of of the trump regime at least yeah if we look at this in the sense of like well they're escalating and then also this is going to keep going for several more years yeah that's a terrifying concept.

Yeah.

And where do we go from here if it's just going to like get even worse?

Yeah.

And I don't know.

I think I've been there a lot recently.

I don't know.

It's the thing I've been telling listeners of this show is that like

the upside of all of this is that everyone hates them.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Like their provider ratings are so bad.

Everyone fucking hates them.

And all of this stuff is hideously unpopular and the giant economic collapse that is very obviously going to happen when the giant AI bubble that is like a, that is like a third of the US's GDP pops when it inevitably does because it doesn't make any money.

They're doing all of this in a situation where the economy still appears to be functioning.

And when that shit implodes on them, shit is going to be even worse for them than it is now.

But also,

like on the other hand, unless people do things about it, then it doesn't really matter how popular or not they are

as long as no one is willing to like stop them.

And I guess that's like the last thing I kind of want to close on is about, like, can you talk a little bit about like what you've seen organizing wise that you can talk about that have been effective?

Well, I think people here are still figuring it out.

These protests outside of the ICE facility, you know, there has been a lot of autonomous organizing.

Chicago does not have the same entrenched autonomous organizing culture that you see in like Portland or Seattle for like a ton of reasons,

which are like beyond the scope of this episode and the minutes that we have left.

I've got to like a 15-foot series of the history of the history of organizing in Chicago and like how we're in this specific moment.

You know, it's important to remember like this is a city where like the FBI murdered Fred Hampton, right?

It is bad.

Yep, yep, yep.

So there's a lot of tension between different organizing factions about how they want things done.

And a lot of it is fear-driven.

Yeah.

For a good reason, because people are terrified.

Yeah.

And yeah, they're still figuring stuff out.

I mean, I think, for lack of a better term, last Saturday, people got their shit rocked by Border Patrol.

You know, they were so violent.

They were so aggressive.

They were just so out of hand, just like immediately, too.

I mean, it was just like zero to 60 instantly.

Like, there was just Saturday, we saw them just immediately tear gas and shoot at people over nothing.

Like nobody was doing anything.

And they just assaulted the crowd with like the most tear gas I've ever seen in my life.

So I think folks were definitely underprepared for that, but that doesn't mean that it's like insurmountable to resist something like that.

I think there are questions surrounding the best way to protest this specific building because of the location.

And it's tough because it's not in Chicago.

It's hard to get to for some people.

Yep.

Yep.

But I don't want to, I don't want to write anybody off.

I mean, I think people are just still figuring things out.

Like it's, it's ICE is adapting, border patrol is adapting.

And so then organizers also have to adapt.

Like it's like this tennis match, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so, you know, we are, we are also very much here.

Our activists are not used to like a huge, and our press also by extension are not used to like a huge amount of chemical weapons.

Chicago doesn't use tear gas like historically, like they just beat people

or like shoot them with riot munitions.

Like they don't tear gas.

The thing I was literally always told, like growing up in the city as an activist, was like, if they start using tear gas, they are one step away from shooting you.

Right.

And they finally did it in 2020, which is the first time anyone had seen it in like decades.

Right.

And the fact that like they're just doing it all the time now, like, Jesus Christ.

Well, the feds, I mean, we saw this in LA

at the beginning of this summer where like Border Patrol specifically

just has this enormous amount of chemical weapons that they, like, I don't know, maybe, maybe they're going to expire soon and they have to use them all.

Like, like, I don't know, I don't know what the rationale there is other than just being evil.

Yeah.

But it's like literally their first choice of like, they're just, I mean, they're fucking enjoying it.

They're fucking enjoying it.

They're enjoying

shooting at people, tear gassing them, playing G.I.

Joe.

Like, yeah, I mean, I will say it does also raise the question, like, how much of this stuff do they actually have?

Because, like, 2020, they went through decades of stockpiles, right?

Right.

And, like, this is a thing that, like, I don't know, someone who has a lot of time and is an investigative journalist should try to go track down how much of the like country's tear gas supplies they've been able to replenish because they used a lot of it on us in 2020.

And

like, I mean, this is, well, I don't know if it is famous.

I guess in my circles, it's kind of a famous story that

one of the South Korean military dictatorships was taken down by a student

protest movement that calculated exactly how much tear gas the police had and did this thing where they would do these marches where they would a whole bunch of people would show up and the police start criterizing them and they would just slowly keep retreating and keep retreating until they ran the state out of tear gas.

I mean,

I hope to see that level of strategy in America at some point.

In Shala.

Yeah.

In Shala.

Like, you know, like

nothing, nothing, nothing is impossible with the power of really, really pissed off students.

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I don't know what the

I'm not familiar with the manufacturing process for these chemicals.

Like, how long does it take to like replenish and where do they source it from?

Yep.

This is 100%

a, hey, I know a bunch of journalists listen to this podcast.

If one of you wants to go do this, you would be doing a great service to everyone in this country.

Like, right.

I'm like assuming that it's not made in the United States and they're like importing these things.

A lot of it is.

A huge, huge amount of it.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Because

American tear gas ends up like all over the world because we're like one of the big suppliers of it.

Okay.

Well, then I was mistaken.

The popperball gun dispenser company apparently is based in Lake Forest.

So it's actually local.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's in Chicago.

Ooh, wow.

Oof.

It's just like a glorified paintball gun, basically.

Yeah.

The thing I've been getting from listening to you talk about this and from talking to other people is that like both part of what's making this so horrible and also maybe where they fail is that these people don't know what they're doing.

They just like violence.

Right.

And liking violence and being willing to hurt people is a very effective short-term strategy for causing violence.

Right.

But it remains to be seen whether it's an effective long-term strategy for like holding power and accomplishing their goals.

Yeah, I would agree with that for sure.

It feels like, it feels like their, their operation is brittle.

Like it wouldn't take a lot to like impede it, but because they are so violent and so out of hand at just like the slightest resistance.

it's still really challenging to figure out.

I mean, and to your point earlier about everybody hating them, I mean, that is palpable.

I have heard the anger and the rage pouring out of people at these guys, you know, like,

of course, it's palpable how much people hate them, how much what's going on.

Of course, they're struggling to hire.

Of course, they're all wearing masks because they're fucking terrified they're going to be docs, you know, like,

they know that they're hated.

Yeah.

But that's also a double-edged sword because I think knowing that everybody hates you anyway, well, that's just also sometimes going to make you even more violent because you don't care anymore.

Yeah.

And I mean, I think the traditional social movement gambit has been like

the more people can see how violent they are, the more people will go out to resist them.

And I think right now we're in this scenario where because of the sort of media blackout and like the media bubble that's been put around this, it just hasn't been getting out.

the things that they've been doing and i think that is also a thing that you random listener, can do things about in terms of like,

hey, tell people you know that like, yeah, there's like a

federal occupation of a city and they're like dragging naked children screaming from their homes, like tearing them away from their parents.

Like that's a thing that you can like,

that's a thing you could directly do that is a very, very low lift.

Yeah, and also countering this like National Guard misdirection thing that is just like constantly going on where it's like every fucking two days, Trump and Pritzker are arguing about, you know, 100 troops coming to town who are essentially just infrastructure for ICE.

They might block some roads, but like they're not the main threat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you have anything else that you want to tell people?

And then also where can people find and support your work as you go hopefully not get shot again?

Well,

I've resigned myself to the fact that I also got shot again.

But they can find us at Unraveled on all the social platforms, you know, unraveledpress.com.

And I think the only other thing I want to say is, you know, as bleak as this episode sounded, we do have to keep the fighting spirit alive and not just like

resign ourselves to total doomerism.

We have the moral high ground here.

Like we are doing the right thing and they are not.

Yeah.

And we can win this.

I want to close on the story that came to mind when you said that, which was the story of the liberation of Turin in World War II, where Turin was like, you know, like one of the great industrial cities of Italy.

And it's directly under the occupation of the Nazis by the end of the war.

And ahead of the Allied advance, the city plans an uprising.

And the SS commander who is running the city

explicitly tells them, if you if you do this, we will turn this into another Warsaw.

And they do it anyways, and they beat them.

All of these factory workers who had like had guns smuggled in successfully do an uprising and defeat like an SS Panzer division and just kick the shit out of them and liberate Turin.

And, you know, those were people facing odds that were so much worse.

than the ones they were facing today.

They were facing a straight up military occupation by the SS.

And they beat them and they freed themselves.

And, you know, history is replete with dictators who thought that their occupations would last forever until one day the Americans were withdrawing from Iraq.

And the only thing that's eternal is their fear of the uprising that will one day destroy them.

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Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.

On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.

32 lost nuclear weapons.

You're like, wait, stop?

What?

Yes.

Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Who still wore knee pads.

Yes.

It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.

The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.

I'm like, oh, wow.

Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.

So

let's see how it goes.

Listen to season four of Snaf Foo with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome to a very special episode of It Could Happen Here, reporting live from the sunny beaches of Riyadh.

I'm Garrison Davis.

This episode, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and presenting our special report, Robert Evans.

I am so happy to talk about our favorite time of the year, which is, of course, the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which occurs from September 26th to October 9th.

It's the highlight of my year each year.

Happy to say all of CoolZone will be there performing in Riyadh, immediately getting arrested.

It's going to be really good.

Very much excited.

Like all of your comedy favorites, Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Aziz Ansari, we will be getting paid hundreds of thousands or over a million dollars to pretend that the Saudi regime does not execute dissidents, reporters, civil rights activists, whoever, and doesn't run a torture prison.

Yeah, so that's what's happening this week.

There's been a big backlash against a bunch of very prominent comedians, Louis C.K.

It's like a mix of guys.

Louis C.K.

is calling

his first radio.

Okay, not surprised.

David Chappelle.

I'm surprised that old David Chappelle would do this, but I'm not surprised that current David Chappelle would do this.

Bill Burr is disappointing.

Bill Burr is disappointing.

That one hurts.

Mo Amer, who is a Palestinian-American comedian who lives in Houston, has also agreed to go to Riyadh and perform.

Not great.

Comrade Shane Gillis declined the offer.

Yeah.

Shane Gillis said yes and then said no.

Let's be real fucking clear on what Shane Gillis did, okay?

I believe he's the one that said yes and then said no.

You get a variety of responses from people who were invited to this fucking thing.

And I'll make it clear kind of where my moral line stands.

I don't actually believe it's inherently wrong to perform inside the bounds of any country.

It kind of depends on what you're doing and how you do it.

And this is the wrong way to do it because these are not just people.

If someone had just shown up at a nightclub in Saudi Arabia to do a stand-up set, I don't particularly care about that, even though there are lesma jest laws.

Like I wouldn't care if someone did a stand-up comedy set that couldn't make fun of the king of Thailand, right?

Which is a crime in Thailand.

Yeah.

You know, people perform in parts of the world that have different or bad laws.

The U.S.

has bad laws.

We do bad things.

I don't think it's inherently evil to just perform at a random club there, which is not what the people who are performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival are doing.

This whole convention is being put on by a guy named Turkey Al-Sheikh.

Turkey is the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority, which is a Saudi government department.

He grew up with Mohammed bin Salman playing League of Legends.

And he's kind of like key to bin Salman's plan to like make Saudi Arabia cool, to like bring it into the global entertainment and like social network without modernizing its laws or allowing people to, you know, make fun of Muhammad bin Salman or his friends.

For an idea of the kind of dude who hired Bil Burr and all of these other guys and paid them so much money, there is an entire wing of the Al-Hayir prison called the Tutu wing, which references Al-Sheikh's nickname, Tutu, where prisoners that he specifically pointed out, often people who made fun of him or made jokes that he did not appreciate, are put and tortured.

This guy has an entire torture prison named after him.

That is who's writing checks to fucking Pete Davidson, whose dad died in 9-11.

It's fucking shocking.

The fact that Pete Davidson is at this thing and he's been like questioned about it.

And his answer basically, I'll say this for Pete, was basically like, yeah, but there's a lot of money, right?

And I'm separating in my head to a degree.

I think it's bad to take money from the Saudi government to do something like this that is being used to like whitewash their human rights record to make them look like a cool part of global society.

Yeah.

Even as they this week executed another journalist.

I think that's bad.

I think it's worse if you're someone who stood for something.

This doesn't change my opinion about Theo Vaughan, who sucks.

And it's like, yeah, he'll take money from Saudi Arabia.

He's a huge asshole.

I'm just, I'm not surprised.

Right.

And there's some other guys in this that I'm not necessarily like shocked about.

Did you see Theovon's beef with ice this week?

Oh, does Theovon have beef with ice this week?

Yeah, they used video of him without his consent in one of their marketing videos.

Yeah, great.

So Jim Jeffries.

on August went on Theovon's podcast to talk about agreeing to do this show.

And he said, one reporter was killed by the government.

Unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I'm going to die on.

Jesus.

And argued that freedom of speech machines like himself would do good by like, you know, making jokes in Saudi Arabia and

keying them in on the freedom of speech thing.

Basically, it'll be a net positive for freedom if I go speak at this thing.

And in the funniest possible follow-up, he was removed from the festival lineup because he acknowledged that they killed a reporter.

And that's not moving off to Saudi Arabia.

You can't even do that on your own fucking podcast or fucking Theo Vaughn's goddamn podcast.

I want to play a video clip of Tim Dylan because Tim Dylan is another guy who agreed to show up and perform at this fucking nightmare event.

And Dylan is why we know kind of how much money is on the table at this thing because he has said that he was paid $375,000.

Oh my God.

He was offered $375,000 for one performance to be there.

He said that kind of the lowest number people were being offered was about $150,000.

And the most like highly paid people were being offered up to

$1.6 million.

So, I mean, it's possible some people were getting more than that, but I'm guessing that's closer to like where the Bill Burrs and the Dave Chappelles are getting, right?

Like in the 1.6 million.

So these guys were offered an insane amount of money.

And Tim Dylan went on and like talked about this on a podcast, talked about like why he agreed to do it and defended.

And it's very funny.

He like brought up.

like slavery in Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia has slaves as a way to like

to segue into a defense of why it's fine for him to do this.

And this is just one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

Well, they have slaves, then they kill every hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

Get over it.

Get over it.

So what?

So what?

They have slaves.

So what?

My friend, I, not a friend, somebody I don't even know.

I bumped into them in Becca.

And he goes, I would never do that because I don't want to interact with slaves.

I'm like, well, why not?

They'd be deferential,

right?

I mean,

I imagine the slaves in those countries are good at what they do.

Okay, so that's the clip I just wanted to have.

That's one of the most off-putting things I've ever seen.

Yeah, I know.

And it got him fired from the show.

He's good.

He's bending them.

He's He's being like, slavery's not so bad.

And he still got fired.

Now that's the level of insane shit.

That's like,

it's nuts.

Oh, my God.

Like, it's really bad.

To cleanse our minds of whatever that was, here's an ad break.

Okay, we're back.

Robert, the degree to which everyone involved in this has just just nuked whatever credibility they had is shocking.

I want to read you a quote from Bill Burr in January of 2010.

Also, make me sad.

This is from a set he did at the time.

This is him talking about Beyoncé.

She's out there singing about girl power, telling you to put a ring on it, all that crap.

And then what she do, she takes a million bucks to go sing at some private party for Gaddafi's kid.

MoMar Gaddafi, you know, the guy who's been blowing stuff up and running a dictatorship forever?

Like, what the hell?

You're going to jet off to St.

Bart, shake your ass for some terrorist dictator's family, pocket a million, and then go back to preaching about empowerment?

Come on, man.

That's the hypocrisy of this whole thing.

These celebrities, they'll take any gig if the check's big enough.

It's like, oh, I'm all about the people until some crazy dictator waves a stack of cash, and then it's, where's my private jet?

It's ridiculous.

This sucks.

Yes, Bill.

It is.

This sucks to be a Bill Bar defender for you.

I know this is truly the first.

I'd love to hear that.

The first actual stain on Bill Bear's legacy, which I'm sure someone is a very good comedian.

Quite a remarkable fucking stain.

All comedians are evil.

It's just, it's that easy.

He addressed it's, you know, part of it is that, and if all, and unfortunately, I kind of think the response of some of the scumbags in comedy has been fair where they're just like, man, it was too much money.

It was just a shitload of money.

Like, I'll do fucked up shit for a crazy amount of money.

And it's like, that's bad, but at least you're honest.

Yeah, yeah.

Bill's response to this was like, it was great to experience that part of the world and to be part of the first comedy festival over there in Saudi Arabia.

The Royals loved the show.

Everyone was happy.

The people that were doing the festival were thrilled.

The comedians that I've been talking to are saying, dude, you can feel that the audience wanted it.

They wanted to see real stand-up comedy.

It was a mind-blowing experience.

Definitely top three experiences I've had.

I think it's going to lead to a lot of positive things.

Now,

he did talk a little bit about like the rules that they had to abide by and said that, like, when they were first handing around contracts, he pushed back and was like, or people pushed back or like comedians did and were like, you can't have all these restrictions.

And that they whittled them down to just a couple of things, which Bill sums up as don't make fun of royals and religion.

right?

Now, as pointed out by the fact that Tim Dylan got canceled for talking positively about slavery in the kingdom, there were more restrictions than that.

I do want to read from a Hollywood Reporter article talking about like Bill's response to this, because it gets even worse than what I've read already.

Bill first described going to the island country of Bahrain, which is more socially liberal than Saudi Arabia, where a customs agent immediately clocked his anxiety about doing stand-up in the region and gave him grief about it.

When I was landing in Bahrain, like, I'm fucking nervous, right?

And then the agent says, you tell jokes about the Middle East.

You think you're going going to come over here and get beheaded, right?

After a successful show in Bahrain, Burr was at a bar where he was watching interactions among locals and decided, I'm like, they're just like us.

I don't speak the language, but I get it.

When he flew to Saudi Arabia, Burr's nervousness crept back, but he was struck by the amount of local Western influence.

You think everyone's going to be screaming death to America and they're going to have fucking machetes and want to chop my head off, right?

Because this is what I've been fed about that part of the world.

I thought this place was going to be really intense.

And I'm thinking, like, is that a Starbucks next to a pizza hut, next to a Burger King, next to a McDonald's?

They've got a fucking chili zone.

And yes, man, they have stores in the Middle East.

You can buy the world as restaurants.

That specific combination of countries, like the Saudis, the reason the current government of Bahrain is in power is because the Saudis rolled tanks across the border to crush the uprisings there in 2011.

Like hideous.

There's so much that's fucked up just being like, well, to prepare for abiding by the laws of the fucking royal family of Saudi Arabia, I went to Bahrain.

Like, no, like, they're not the same place.

No.

Like, Yeah, I went to check out some brown Muslim people.

Turns out they're people.

Like, that seems to be the gist of what he's saying here.

And they're like pizza too.

Fuck me.

You could go to, again, like Iraq and perform in fucking

people.

Yeah, you could go to Abil, and it's nice.

And it's nice.

And you're not going to be performing at the behest of the fucked up government, right?

You'll just be performing in a country with the fucked up government.

And there is a difference, right?

I'm not angry at the idea that some Rando might like perform at a nightclub in Saudi Arabia.

The problem is that you're performing at the behest of the Saudi government, at the behest of the regime.

Yeah, that's a different thing.

I do think there's an argument for like, well, people in countries with fucked up governments deserve to laugh.

That doesn't mean you have to take the money from their fucked up government and say nice things about their fucked up government, like Kevin Hart just did, because Kevin Hart was also a part of this show and he posted a video on TikTok talking about how fucking awesome Saudi Royal Turkey Al Sheikh is.

And Turkey Al Sheikh has now been sharing that video on all of his social media accounts.

Like

you're holding water for people for a guy who was a wing in a torture prison named after him.

That crosses a line for me.

You know, when we're talking about entertainment, we're talking about being ad support, all this stuff, there's compromises that everyone makes in this business.

There's compromises in what company you fucking work with, right?

Like if you're talking about, you know, make it a TV show for Amazon's TV division, you're Disney's, you know, fucking streaming division right well there's there's a degree of moral compromise there and i think depending on what you're doing and whatnot can be justified by the fact that number one like that's just the way television works there's no working with anyone completely clean in a company that has the ability to fund you know a production like that But taking money directly from the hands of the guy with the torture prison, I think that crosses a line.

I think that crosses the line for a free speech activist.

It should have crossed a line for Pete Davidson, whose dad died in 9-11, but apparently not.

That is a wild one.

That's the craziest one to me.

That Pete Davidson went over to Saudi Arabia.

Oh, man.

You got to wonder, is his mom still on the scene?

Oh, man, she's probably getting a lot of money if she is.

So it's fine.

Fuck me.

It's fine.

I don't know.

Like,

how much?

And it is one of those things.

I get the people who are like, okay, but, you know, the US is fucked up too.

And it is.

And so if somebody is is getting paid directly by the Trump regime to perform at the White House, I'd say pretty fucked up.

But, like, that doesn't mean it's immoral to perform at like a nightclub in fucking Chicago, you know?

Yeah, and none of us are going to Guantanamo Bay to like

entertain the fucking prison guards, right?

Like, yeah.

Well, hopefully, none of us will be going to Guantanamo Bay for any reason, as long as we keep playing these ads.

We're back.

I want to talk about this from the Saudi perspective because they have been doing really for the last half a decade a fallout PR blitz, right?

We've seen this in WWE, we've seen this with a whole bunch of professional sports stuff.

Like most of the esports is run out of the esports World Cup in Saudi Arabia now.

Like the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund just helped Jared Kushner buy EA,

right?

Just one of the largest video game companies in the world, right?

They've been, you know, they've been doing this sort of whole sports washing strategy of using these things to sort of normalize the regime.

And I think the actual genius of this, right, was not that you can buy legitimacy with like sports and with comedians.

The genius of it was that they were able to control the backlash because they ensured the backlash to it would be done by sports journalists and entertainment journalists who don't know anything about the Saudis and thus assumed that the Saudis were attempting to whitewash their, you know, horrific domestic human rights record.

And they were to some extent, but even focusing on the Saudis' domestic human rights record is a victory for the Saudis because it means that nobody's talking about the stuff people were talking about last decade when they talked about the Saudis, which was things like, for example, the Sudanese child soldiers that they were deploying in their war in Yemen.

And these Sudanese child soldiers were drawn from their connections bolstered by the UAE to the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, a group that is almost entirely composed of the militias who did the genocide in Darfur.

So these are the ground troops that they're deploying in Yemen are Sudanese child soldiers drawn from the people who did the genocide in Darfur in 2018, which was not that long ago.

Like I remember 2018.

So do you statistically, if you're listening to this show, they carried out an airstrike on a school bus that killed 26 children.

Right.

No one is talking about the airstrikes on funerals that they absolutely love to do.

Like, for example, there was a huge one in 2016 where they killed 140 people in one airstrike, after which the area was described by a rescue worker as a, quote, lake of blood.

And this has been the really successful thing about the Saudi specifically targeting sports and specifically targeting entertainment, is that the people covering this do not know anything about Saudi Arabia, right?

And this is also partially what was going on with Bill Burr because they're just racists, or they're attempting to do a backlash and they're trying to do a backlash with things like, okay, they killed a journalist, which is really bad, right?

But like, Jamal Khashoggi

was one guy out of thousands and thousands and thousands of people that they were killing and are continuing to kill to this day in Yemen, right?

And this is one of the reasons people have been able to get away with this, right?

Is that no one has been walking up to them and going, what do you think about the Sudanese child soldiers?

Because nobody knows about any of that.

And this is one of the thing that I want to just say at the end of this, which is I know for a fact that journalists and editors listen to this show.

And please, for the love of God, find someone who knows literally anything about the Saudis' war in Yemen and have them write this piece on sportswashing for you.

Literally anyone.

This is what makes me insane about all this coverage is that like, if you even a little bit paid attention to what they were doing in the 2010s and what they're continuing to do now in Yemen, you know about so many wars.

I'm not even talking about the starvation genocide here.

There are so many things that they did.

You know, and like one of the common defenses is like, oh, like, you know, like we live in the us it's a fucked up country right like who cares about authoritarianism and it's like i don't know it's harder to make that argument when it's about sudanese child soldiers well it's just again we're not pissed because some guy performed at a nightclub in riyadh it's it's that you're taking money from the government to whitewash the government.

No, it's because they took money from the government.

All of these things, all of these, all of like WWE, like all of these sports events, these are funded directly by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is the wealth fund of the Saudi government, the people who were dropping bombs on school buses and sending child soldiers to fight their war in Yemen.

Yeah, there has been some good reporting on sportswashing, I will say.

Like Ian Trello has done some excellent stuff.

The Guardian has a good article on this where they really collate some of like the very worst responses written by Seth Simons.

So I liked that.

This does seem to be blowing up.

Hollywood Reporter's piece was pretty good, too.

Hollywood Reporter, my friend was editor of that publication for years, and they have consistently done some stuff that you wouldn't expect looking at the title of the publication.

Yeah, I'm not going to be silly enough to be like, I think this is going to cost any of these people their career because I don't think it is, but it does seem to be causing them some embarrassment.

So I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I hope they get called out on it and shamed.

Like,

it's a pretty shameful thing to do.

It's a shameful thing to do.

It's a bummer.

I wish people had not made these choices because, man, it's depressing.

Yeah.

Well, luckily, I have some news to lift our moods after this depressing episode.

I am pleased to report that CoolZone Media will be headlining at Victor Orban's new comedy festival, Hungary for Laughs, next year, 2026.

Mark it in your calendar.

Coolzone Media presents with Victor Orban, Hungary for Laughs.

That's all for us today, Ed.

It could happen here.

See you next year in Hungary.

Goodbye, everybody.

This is It Could Happen Here.

I'm Garrison Davis.

On the morning of Sunday, September 28th, a 40-year-old man drove a pickup truck into a Grand Blanc, Michigan church.

The man started shooting people inside and then set the church on fire, burning the building down.

Four churchgoers died, eight others were injured, but have survived, and police killed the shooter on the scene.

The president, the vice president, and the rest of the right were quick to call this yet, quote, another targeted attack on Christians in the United States, to quote Trump on Truth Social.

White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt went on Fox and Friends the day after the shooting and said this.

It's unfathomable.

And as the president rightfully put in his Truth Social yesterday, this appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians.

As the church was still burning, right-wing podcaster Betty Johnson, who recently rode with Ice in Chicago, posted on X The Everything app, quote, church is on fire.

Christianity is under attack.

Pray, unquote.

What Betty Johnson neglected to mention, this was a Mormon church, and pretty soon it became clear the attacker was not some transgender leftist Antifa, but a Christian Trump supporter who thought Mormons were quote-unquote the Antichrist, according to Burton City Council candidate Chris Johns, who claims to have spoken with the shooter just days prior while canvassing.

One of the shooter's friends told the New York Times that the shooter believed that the Mormons, quote, are going to take over the world, unquote.

This guy obsessively talked about his dislike of Mormons stemming from a breakup with a Mormon girlfriend over a decade ago.

After the background of this shooter and his apparent motive became more clear, the Trump admin quite quickly stopped talking about this specific attack, save for vague references to attacks on Christianity.

But this attack was more deadly than any recent school shooting or any instance of targeted violence, which the administration has then framed as political violence happening this year.

After the shooter was identified, rather than talk about his apparent motive, people online argued about his political orientation.

A picture spread online of him wearing a Trump 2020 camo shirt that read, Make Liberals Cry Again.

The right-wing outlet The Daily Caller attacked Democrat Representative Eric Swalwell for posting a photo of that shirt, claiming that the Trump graphic was photoshopped, with the Daily Caller sharing a version of the shirt that they alleged to be the original unedited photo without the Trump graphic.

Except that version without the Trump graphic is, in fact, the doctored photo.

The Trump one is the authentic version.

Right-wing users on X the Everything app spread a list of political donations to progressive organizations that they attributed to the shooter, as well as a screenshot of a Twitter account with a bio that read, Politically Active Democratic Socialist.

Except that account and those donations were from a completely different person, just with a similar name.

Now, just because it's pretty clear that this shooter supported Trump, doesn't mean that we should frame this as partisan political violence.

This was a classic American shooting.

A Marine veteran who moved to Utah after getting back from Iraq, got involved with a Mormon woman, had negative experiences with the Mormon church, moved to Michigan, but continued to have very strong anti-Mormon sentiments, which he held until he acted on those sentiments, leading to his death and the deaths of four other people.

An extremely tragic, yet extremely American sequence of events.

But the conversation and coverage surrounding this Mormon church shooting is such an open display of this game of picking and choosing shootings to care about and then which can be weaponized against political enemies.

Former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker went on Fox News to discuss this shooting, where he laid blame on politicians' rhetoric calling people Nazis.

So, you know, this is a situation of you find a manufactured grievance, if you will, and then a whole lot of stimulus from people either on the internet or even politicians, irresponsible politicians.

We all know who they are.

You know, they're talking about Nazis and anarchists and existential threats.

You know, they need to crawl back into their dark places.

These people are out there.

That has to be taken into account when you start firing off your mouth.

That simply has nothing to do with this specific attack.

But both politicians and the media have this obsession.

with only talking about shooters insofar as they can try to identify a shooter's orientation towards a political party and then weaponize that suspected orientation against political opponents by trying to frame every deranged shooter as emblematic of the oppositional political project.

Following Charlie Kirk's assassination and the media blitz around it, fellow far-right commentator Stephen Crowder has revived his long-dormant college debate series, Change My Mind, now with the prompt, the left is violent.

Propagandists collapse political violence into a simple binary, which is just a very limited way in trying to actually understand public acts of violence.

The idea that things can only happen because of ideologies, not downstream of personal experiences, material conditions, or class.

This year, there's been one other targeted attack that ties the Mormon church shooting for the highest fatalities and attacks this year, and that was the Midtown Manhattan mass shooting in July, where the gunmen attempted to shoot up the NFL offices, motivated by getting CTE from playing football in high school.

No clear ideological motivations here.

Lots of shooters aren't typically ideological in like the ordinary political sense.

The only recent shooter that could be accurately categorized as quote-unquote leftist is the former PSL member who assassinated two Israeli embassy staffers in May of 2025.

Now, under no circumstances do you have to hand it to Bill Maher,

but this exchange between him and Ben Shapiro just two days after the Charlie Kirk assassination demonstrates this point about how media and politicians only understand and weaponize public acts of violence through ideology long before we have any actual clear indication on what motivated a shooter to commit an attack.

That is just not.

We don't know what this kid is.

We do know this kid was of the left.

We do know that.

We do know what?

That this kid was of the political left.

That is according to contemporaneous reporting from The Guardian as well as Tablet magazine today.

It's two days out.

We don't know shit.

We don't know shit.

They never do.

The internet is undefeated in getting it wrong to begin with.

It's not about the Internet.

That's

about the actual reporting by mainstream acceptance.

The Guardian is not a right-wing.

Here's what we heard.

Here's what I was told so far, and I'll tell you what was wrong.

First, I heard he's a registered Republican.

Not true.

Not true.

Okay.

Then he was a donor to Trump.

Not true.

His father works in the sheriff's office.

Not true.

There was a picture of him wearing a pro-Trump shirt.

Not true.

Member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Not true.

We don't know what he is.

Well, how are you so sure he's of the left?

Now, I agree when you write on a bullet.

What did he write on the bullet for the first time?

Catch his fascist, which is also a gamer thing.

Okay, but now I'm hearing he may have been part of that group for whom Charlie Kirk was not right-wing enough.

I mean, the Groipers, yes.

I mean, so that would be.

That you're sure he's not that.

I'm not sure that he's not that left.

A minute ago, you were sure he was.

Hold on, Bill.

Hold on.

Okay, because I've been.

You were.

Another thing that can be tricky to understand is just because the target of violence is a political figure does not mean that it's political violence.

The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan is a key example of this.

And for the Kirk assassination, available evidence points towards more of a personal motivation based on romantic attraction a la dog day afternoon over any larger partisan political motivation.

It doesn't even make sense to view the first attempted Trump assassination as political violence.

Thomas Crooks searched online for a variety of events to commit a shooting at.

In the month prior to the shooting, he did more than 60 internet searches related to Biden, Trump, and information about the upcoming DNC and RNC conventions.

Donald Trump's campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania just happened to fall into the right place at the right time.

The mass killer obsessed school shooter from last August, who shot two kids at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, which the right branded as a trans terrorist, originally planned to do the shooting at a small LGBTQ music venue, but feared that trans girls attending the concert would be armed for self-defense.

As I've previously reported on this show, This shooting bears similarity to TCC, or true crime community, not as in true crime podcasts, but an online community of usually young people obsessed with school shooters or mass shooters akin to neo-columbiners who encourage each other online to then commit their own acts of violence inspired by or replicating those of previous school shootings or mass shootings.

This pseudo-mass shooter fandom demonstrates the extent to which the role of quote-unquote the shooter can be its own motivating force beyond any culture war issues or ordinary partisan politics that might get sprinkled on top as seasoning.

On Wednesday, September 24th, a 29-year-old opened fire with a bolt-action rifle targeting an ICE field office in Dallas, Texas.

This attack claimed the lives of three immigrants who were detained by ICE.

In a copycat style following the Kirk assassination and the United Healthcare CEO assassination, this shooter allegedly wrote anti-ICE on unfired bullet casings.

In the immediate wake of this attack, the right attributed this shooting to the radical left and blamed Democrat politicians for spreading anti-ICE rhetoric.

At a North Carolina event, J.D.

Vance said, quote, here's what happens when Democrats like Gavin Newsom say these people are part of an authoritarian government.

When the left-wing media lies about what they're doing, when they lie about about who they're arresting, when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement, what they are doing is encouraging crazy people to go and commit violence.

Here's a brief Fox News report.

We have a problem, America.

We are living through a scourge of left-wing political violence that three weeks into this month has made it bloody September.

Today, another attack on ICE.

As is not uncommon with mass shooters, this guy was a registered independent, and the shooter's brother told NBC News that he wasn't really interested in politics.

I find it highly unlikely that this millennial and other Gen Z shooters are regularly watching liberal news, getting their opinions from politicians and news anchors on MSNBC or CNN.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein spoke with friends of this shooter, who described him as a libertarian-leaning 4chan edgelord who hated both political parties and most mainstream politicians.

Friends believed that the bullet inscriptions could have been written as a joke intended to rile people up.

They told Kleppenstein the shooter became more isolated in recent years as friends drifted away due to his continuous anti-social edgelord behavior in regular day-to-day interactions.

Nancy Larson, the acting U.S.

attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said the shooter left behind a writing where he referred to ICE operations as human trafficking.

Larson says the shooter did not mention any government agency besides ICE, but left a note for police reading, quote, good luck with the digital footprint.

This shooter killed himself after the attack.

These public acts of violence usually have a suicidal component, a drive for self-annihilation, while simultaneously gaining some final sense of meaning or purpose by crudely emblazoning yourself in history through a violent act.

What causes someone to do this can be a mix of many factors, including access to guns, individual motivations, social alienation, self-annihilation.

Insofar as there's an overtly political element, it's often the result of a political alienation.

Usually the type of person who commits a bloody act of violence lacks a recognizably coherent political philosophy that can be easily grafted onto our Democrat-Republican binary, with there sometimes being a mix of political beliefs across the left-right spectrum.

Mass shootings, which are accompanied by express political motivations, usually stem from anti-Muslim or great replacement rhetoric.

The idea that white people in Western culture will slowly be replaced by brown immigrants.

But throughout the next three years under Trump's federal government and the right-wing anti-woke backlash currently flexing dominance over our culture, nihilistic self-destructive acts against American society may take a form which could be characterized as quote-unquote left-wing violence, despite most of these shooters being far from your average DNC acolyte or bread tube watching leftist.

Considering the Mormon church shooting, the Kirk assassination, the ICE detainee shooting, and the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting, in the year of our brain rot 2025, I think it's pretty clear that the current U.S.

state apparatus does not need to stage false flags.

The state just tries to take advantage of naturally emergent events, twisting them to fit narratives in an ad hoc manipulation of consensus reality.

No crude fabrication of physical reality is needed.

They are more than happy to simply pick and choose and magnify and obscure various events to fit their preferred version of reality.

The night before the shooting at the Mormon Church, another Iraq war veteran did a mass shooting in North Carolina, which did not result in nearly as many national headlines.

The shooter targeted a waterfront bar, killing three people, injuring six others.

The suspect rowed a boat up to the bar, fired with an AR mounted with a scope and silencer before speeding off on water.

Police have also deemed this a targeted attack, but without a tangential link to culture war issues, this event will be quickly forgotten.

As I'm recording this episode, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he's launching undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot, quote, leftist terror cells in Texas.

Leftist political terrorism is a clear and present danger.

There can be no compromise with those who want us dead, unquote.

This mirrors President Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum No.

7, which targets quote-unquote domestic terrorism indicators like anti-Christianity, anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism, extremism on race, gender, immigration, and hostility towards traditional American values.

All this partisan rhetoric on targeted violence and political violence is in service of authoritarian crackdowns and enhanced surveillance against their political opposition.

Meanwhile, this past Saturday morning, the home of a South Carolina Circuit Court judge was burned down, hospitalizing her husband, a former state senator, and their son.

The judge was out of the house at the time.

Last month, the judge temporarily blocked a voter suppression executive order order signed by President Trump.

In the weeks leading up to the fire, the judge had received death threats.

This has been It Could Happen Here.

See you on the other side.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast beset by horrors of such magnitude that sometimes you have to go back to a thing that you just talked about because there were more horrors in it that you didn't have time to cover the first time you went through the horror.

Sorry, the first two times you went through the horrors.

And with me to talk about the horrors is Dr.

Cave Hoda, who is a doctor, I guess, as you probably could have guessed from the title.

You know,

I scripted this out very poorly.

No, this is great.

You're doing great.

Keep going.

I say say scripted this out.

Literally, the only part of this introduction that was in my notes was Cave Hoda, doctor and host of House of Pod and friend of the show, which was not in my notes either.

But that's right.

Friend.

The energy is chaotic today.

Friend, most importantly.

Yeah, it has to be.

That is the normal response to what is happening in this world.

If we don't embrace a little chaos, then we will lose our mind.

So I am loving how this is going so far.

I am so glad because there is so much chaos.

And one of the chaos things that we have been tracking and that you spend a hideous amount of time tracking

on your show.

Far too much.

Yes, it's not good.

It's very bad.

Please stop doing this stuff so we can all go back to doing normal things in our lives.

I would love to just do more fart jokes and episodes on poop,

but people in power keep saying and doing terrible things,

crazy, terrible things that make me feel like I'm losing my mind.

So I have to keep doing this for multiple reasons.

One, because someone's got to talk about it.

Two, it's sort of therapy for me.

Like if I just internalize this, I'm going to, I'm going to be a miserable person.

So thanks.

Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about, well, okay.

See, this literally every single time I do an episode, it's like, I'm really excited to talk to you.

And also, Jesus Christ, I wish we didn't have to talk about this.

That's how everyone feels.

That's how I

feel.

That's how my relationships feel when they see me.

It's terrible.

God,

really, truly, we got to stop meeting like this.

One day we'll do a fun episode.

One day.

I swear to God.

Okay.

But the thing that I've been talking about that we've both been covering is basically the annihilation of the entire U.S.

medical establishment.

At the federal level, it is being systematically dismantled.

And one of the ways that it's being systematically dismantled is that a bunch of people have been put in charge of it who are,

I mean,

two years ago were fringe anti-vaccine cranks and are now running like the most sophisticated like public health institutions that have ever existed.

Yeah.

As

producer extraordinaire Sophie Lichterman once said, you can't put a hater in charge of the thing that they hate the most.

And that is what has happened completely and fully almost at every step of this government.

Yeah.

They find the person that hates it the most and they put that person in.

Yeah.

And, you know, one of the big sort of, I don't know if turning points is the right word, but one of the major events we've been covering from this was

the announcement by RFK Jr.

and Trump that they had found what causes autism

and also ADHD too, which got very little coverage.

I think I said this last time I talked about this.

It was very baffling, but there's just, there was so much in that whole thing that

I think a lot of the stuff kind of fell through the cracks inside of like.

But there was a lot.

There was a lot to digest.

There's so much.

There's so much.

And so I guess I wanted, we wanted to talk about mostly the hepatitis B thing, but also just sort of the broader anti-vax stuff that was in this.

Yeah.

Before we get into,

I don't know, like the weirder, more boutique anti-vax stuff, which is like the anti-hepatitis B vaccine stuff, a thing that I didn't realize people were against.

Yeah.

Like children getting until like now.

And like I follow these things decently closely.

Yeah.

Let's let's start a little bit with like, let's let's ease the audience into this by going back to the classics, the greatest hits.

They really only have one hit, the one hit of the anti-vaccine movement, which was Trump's stuff about separating the MMR vaccine.

Yeah.

So, yeah, recently during that press conference where he really threw Tylenol under the bus, he also

really, it was weird because there's no new evidence.

I want to make that clear.

There was no new evidence that they presented about vaccines.

But Trump actually really harped on vaccines and his thoughts, his medical opinion, and his advice on how to manage vaccines.

It's truly bizarre.

Never seen a president say or do those sorts of things.

But one of the things he mentioned was the MMR vaccine, the measles, mumps, rubella.

And he said that it should be split into three separate shots.

Again, medically unfounded.

It really, as you have alluded to, echoes these long-debunked claims, these Wakefield-like claims from starting from back in 1998.

Again, Wakefield was the disgraced author of that vaccine study that tied it to autism, lost his medical license for that, but that has persisted and carried on.

And the seeds of that are still growing terrible, terrible plants and trees today.

And one of them was this fruit of Trump saying we should break up the MMR vaccine.

So just I'll just say it up front.

One, there's no reason to do that.

There's no reason that shows improved safety.

There's no credible evidence to suggest that at least.

And more importantly, the more you split these things up, the more likely you're going to end up missing doses.

That is like a known fact.

If you delay vaccines, if you split them up more than they need to be, there is a much greater chance you will miss that.

And in case this is not clear, measles is bad.

It is one of the most contagious viruses out there.

And lower vaccination rates quickly lead to outbreaks, as we're already starting to see.

And when there's already some hesitancy in the community, pushing it like this is a terrible thing.

So even though that was a throwaway statement from the president of the United States, it could have serious repercussions.

And it's very concerning.

And I've also, I have committed myself every single time this comes up.

The Wakefield study, which is where this whole separate the OOR thing

came up, A,

it's not even a conclusion that even if you take his completely fake premise that he made up,

it doesn't actually follow that you should split the vaccines up.

It's baffling.

But the second thing is, the reason he wanted to split the vaccines up was that he was trying to sell his own vaccine.

Correct.

It was like,

he was just trying to sell his own vaccine.

It makes me insane every single time this is talked about because this whole thing is a medical, it's literally an industrial complex.

It's like the anti-vaccine industrial complex.

They're all trying to sell you something.

That's the whole thing.

I was watching Trump give this talk, this press conference, and

I think I said

on another show here on this channel.

I started to disassociate.

I'm like, yeah, this can't be real life.

Am I dreaming?

Is this it felt like I was having an out-of-body experience?

It did not feel real to me.

To be fully transparent, I did not make it through that press conference watching it on video about like four minutes in.

I was like, fuck this.

I'm going to read the transcript.

So I'm just working off the transcript because I was like, I can't.

It was tough.

I can't do this.

So on my podcast, The House of Pod, you should all listen to it.

I played a clip from Trump talking about Tylenol and another clip of him talking about hepatitis B.

And when you listen to it, when I listened back to it as I was editing it, it sounded like I edited his clips to make him sound crazy.

I did not.

I just took straight from what he says.

And it just, the way he was talking, it's hard to listen to.

I mean, it's hard to read to, but the way he talks, it's so disjointed.

He just goes from one thought to the next.

He does this weave thing that he thinks is so clever, but it's just lost.

The threads are never brought back together.

It's just an unraveled, terrible rug of lies.

And that is, that is why it's so hard to like listen to him.

I totally understand.

Yeah.

Well, but and this has also been, you know, one of the things that most of the media has done is that, you know, in order to be able to like play a listenable clip on air, right?

And it also in sort of in service of power, they edit the clips to make him sound like a normal human being.

Right.

So, the version of it that people are seeing is not the version where he's just sort of completely ranting incoherently, and like, right, you know, you just see these clips, but then also because they're because they're editing it down progressively more and more, like, just more

stuff, like more just like information content gets lost every time, which is a problem because there's just like so much

stuff

in this of nonsense.

Yeah,

title of my first album, Fire Hose of Nonsense.

Incredible.

Incredible.

Oh, God.

Okay.

So, you know what?

All right, we're going to a second fire hose of nonsense.

This is slightly early to be doing this, but fuck it.

It's chaos week.

We're doing it.

Do you know what else is the fire hose of nonsense?

Oh, well, I wouldn't say it's nonsense.

I would say it's very important and pays bills.

So it's very, very important.

I believe in.

I don't.

I'm just kidding.

I'm assuming ads and services.

Yeah.

This is the proxy services that support this podcast.

We are back.

So amidst the torrent of, you know, the MMR stuff, which also I do want to say very briefly is sort of a baffling thing to be talking about in a thing where you're not blaming the vaccines for autism.

You're blaming Tylenol, but then you're still also mad at the vaccine.

It's very weird.

Yeah.

I had thoughts about that.

You know, I felt like what Trump was doing with that by bringing up the vaccine stuff was I felt he was trying to console RFK Jr.

in a way.

I felt like he was like, okay, hey, we're moving away from the vaccine stuff to focus on this Tylenol stuff, but I know how much you love the vaccine stuff, RFK.

So let's talk about that.

And so I felt like he was just throwing that out there to placate RFK Jr.

That was my guess, but I don't know how to read sociopaths very well.

So I could be wrong.

This could also just be like what comes into his mind when he thinks about medicine.

Right.

So, you know.

Yeah.

Again, weird to me that this president was giving medical advice.

I mean, he was making statements.

Yeah.

Do not take Tommy.

He said that multiple times.

He talked about breaking up the hepatitis B vaccine, changing the hepatitis B vaccine that the times of it, which I think we're going to talk about because that is very important to to me.

And things that doctors would have a little pause to say so strongly.

And even the people whose paper he's citing would say, oh, slow down a little bit with that.

You know, it's very important.

I think it's super impactful.

And you're right, it's slipping under the radar.

So I would love to talk about the hepatitis B stuff.

Yeah, let's do this.

So I'll give a little background for your listeners who don't know me.

I am a gastroenterologist and hepatologist.

That's liver, not herpetologist, which is study of snakes, which sometimes people think online.

I am a doctor that looks at the liver, and hepatitis B has an important place in my heart.

It's a disease that can be incredibly devastating.

It's incredibly common.

It has so many complications.

It has such long-term ramifications on someone's life if they have it.

So many things they have to consider, do, follow up, so many possible things that can happen with it.

And the thing about it is we have a vaccine for it that is very safe and super efficacious and works really well and when we use it it works amazing and trump during this conference threw that a couple of passing shots as he was doing this this whole rant about tylenol etc and those passing shots can have a huge impact on uptake yeah in this country i think it really needs to be discussed so i'll stop there i'll let you see what what what questions you have for me me about hepatitis B because I could talk about hepatitis B for a long time.

Yeah, okay,

let's go back to like the very basic.

How would you explain hepatitis B to our dear listener who knows many things, but what hepatitis B is is not one of them?

Yes.

So hepatitis just means inflammation of the liver.

Anything with itis means inflammation.

And there are different ways of getting hepatitis or inflammation of the liver.

They range from alcohol, medications, autoimmune problems problems, to viral things.

And there are viral things that can cause bad hepatitis, affect the liver primarily.

Hepatitis A, B, C, you've heard of some of these hepatitis.

And hepatitis B is a very common one in the world.

It's about 2 billion people in the world have either had it or presently have it.

880,000 people in the U.S.

alone have chronic hepatitis B.

But if you actually look at studies that include more immigrant populations, that number can go up to about 2.2 million.

Jeez, yeah.

It is something that can, when you get it at an early age, when you're young and you're a baby or an infant, you're young, and your immune system is not super robust yet.

It's very likely, about 90% or more, that if you are exposed to it, you'll get chronic infection.

from it.

If you get it when you're older, it's a little different.

You can have a pretty strong reaction to it.

You'll get really sick potentially, sometimes to the point where the liver fails.

Oh, jeez.

But most people are, when they're older, able to clear it.

They're going to eventually get rid of the virus to a point where their liver is fine and it manages, but it lives in the liver indefinitely.

Once you get the hepatitis B, there's a very good chance you will have it forever.

Whether or not it's causing you problems is another thing.

A lot of people can live with it, not have any problems, but a lot of people will get it and they will be very very sick in the beginning.

And when you get it as an infant, you have a very good chance of having it for the rest of your life.

And that can be a major problem because like all viruses that go into the liver like this, all these viral hepatitis, what can happen is it can cause scarring, which you might have heard of when it's really bad called cirrhosis.

When that happens, the liver can stop working.

You can get cancer of the liver.

You can get big blood vessels in your esophagus called esophageal varices and vomit up blood.

You can get a lot of bad things that happen.

Now, what makes hepatitis B particularly insidious, it makes it a little bit, even my opinion, more dangerous than a lot of other viral hepatitis, is that you...

don't always have to go through these phases to get to the really bad part.

Like when you have hepatitis C, for example, you get bad scarring over a long time, and that can cause that cirrhosis, and that cirrhosis can lead to cancer.

But since hepatitis B is a DNA virus, that DNA can get into the DNA of your liver cells, and it can cause cancer without even having to go through those steps of cirrhosis.

That's obviously terrible.

And that can happen to young people, and I've seen it, and it's awful.

So I'm saying all these terrible things about hepatitis B

because it's one of these things that does not need to be.

I didn't mean to say that like that.

No,

I didn't mean to make a play on words there, but it doesn't need to happen because we have this great vaccine that can manage this.

And when we use this vaccine, it works.

In fact, in the U.S., they looked at it between 1990, it was introduced in this country, like for infants in 1991.

And when they looked from 1990 to 2004, they saw a 94%

decrease in kids and adolescents who have hepatitis B.

That's amazing, right?

That's really good.

Like, this is a great success story.

And part of the reason people like Trump don't recognize that this is an issue is because it's done well, because this vaccine works and it does a good job.

Now,

the other thing to discuss is how it is transmitted, because that's a big part of what Trump was saying during this press conference.

Yeah.

And he said, it's sexually transmitted, which is true.

That is one of the ways that you get it.

But you also get it from the mother.

The mother,

when you're having a pregnancy and a delivery, it's a messy, bloody process.

And that is a huge risk factor for the infant getting hepatitis B from the mother.

There's also household things that can happen.

You know, people share razors, that's a risk factor.

Toothbrushes, small things, bites at daycare centers.

All these things are small risks.

They're not as common as sex or the childbirth ways of transmission, but there are other modes of transmission for getting hepatitis B, not just sex, like Trump was saying.

So I think that's super important to

be clear that I think that is one of the major things he said that was wrong.

He said a lot of things are wrong, but that's probably the biggest, easiest one to point out.

Yeah, and I think it also was interesting because that was one of the things that got followed up on by reporters, but the reporter was like, well, you can also get it from like reusing needles, which like, yeah, but like not.

Not mentioning the whole, you can get it from being born, a thing that everyone has to do statistically.

And this is true.

The statistics bear that out.

That is true.

8% rate of being born in order to exist.

That's exactly, that's exactly right.

You know why I realized why Trump says this?

This is the realization I came to.

He doesn't even think about this as a possible mode of transmission.

If you've ever seen a delivery, I don't know if you have, Mia, but if you've ever seen someone give birth, whether it's natural, vaginal, or cesarean or whatever, whatever method, there is a lot of fluids, blood, mucus, there's a lot of fluids happening during this time, exchange between mother and baby.

And if you saw that, I think you'd be like, oh, well, yeah,

that makes sense.

You would get it that way.

If you could get it through sex, why couldn't you get it through that?

You know, if you could get it by putting a penis into a vagina, for example, why couldn't you get it from being birthed from one?

So

you would see that and it would make sense to you inherently and automatically.

My guess is that Trump has not seen any of his kids delivered.

That would not surprise me.

I mean, if he was in a nearby room, I would be impressed.

I don't want to cast aspersions on our president.

I don't know.

Maybe he was there cutting the umbilical corridor.

I don't know.

But I get the sense he was not.

And I feel like that's why, in his mind, he doesn't even register it.

And then the other thing that makes that's weird about this is he's like, oh, it's just me.

I see that they get the shot at the age of 12 because it's sexually transmitted.

And that makes me wonder, and I'm surprised no one's brought this up.

Why does he think that's okay then?

Does he think that kids are having sex at the age of 12 and that's okay?

Why did 12 become the number for him?

It's so weird.

And I don't know.

i that's truly one of the

there is something

just deeply evil going on in his mind but i have no idea what it is and i can't follow the path of logic because i'm not

like a billionaire who was born in like the 50s or whatever

I don't know.

That guy has seen.

That guy has gotten brainwared from things that like don't exist anymore.

No, he was born in the 40s.

Sorry.

My apologies for thinking he was born a full decade later than he actually was.

Good lord.

Yeah, I mean,

I think the results are still the same.

Yeah, but it's like, you know, there's just like there's prejudices and weird stuff that he picked up rattling around there that like, who knows where they came from.

And I think also, you know, one of the other angles about this that's sort of really distressing is this, like, what feels like the sort of stigmatizing aspect of it of just being like, oh, well, there's something you can only get like sexually transmitted.

So like, why are we giving this to kids?

And it's like, well, yeah, but like, there's just like a bunch of other ways that you can get it.

And like only talking about that one and then having it as an excuse to like raise the vaccination age for no reason.

And that.

you know, again, goes back to the MMR thing.

Because, you know, when we talk about giving these doses, the WHO, the CDC, they recommend the birth vaccine within 24 hours or the first at least then.

The current schedule is you get at birth and follow-ups at one to two months and then again at six to 15 months.

And part of the thing of stretching that out, pushing that out further, again, same thing as the MMR, which is the more likely you are to not do it at all and to have decreased uptake.

Yeah.

So this is the real reason why that's a concern.

Yeah.

And it's this sort of decreased uptake is their goal.

Right.

Like that's what they want.

Like that's why RFK Jr., for example, is making it increasingly difficult to get like the COVID vaccine and the flu vaccine and stuff like that.

And it's, you know, they're doing this sort of like double-pronged approach of both establishing it from the top down through the medical bureaucracy if they can control of and also just like spreading it among their supporters and among people who are like, oh, the president wouldn't just like lie to me about medical stuff.

Right.

That's unreasonable.

And I mean, if you didn't know, if you didn't know that there was another means of transmission, what he said is reasonable,

you know, why would you give an infant a vaccine for something they could only get through

sex?

I mean, yeah, you'd be like, sure, that makes sense, but it's just wrong.

Yeah.

It's kind of pointless to ask the question, does he know he's lying on this one?

But

I don't think he is.

I honestly don't think he understands.

I think he probably did hear that there are some other modes of transmission.

In his mind, it requires some sort of blood contact or some sort of mucosal contact in his mind.

And that's how he interpreted it.

And I think he just doesn't equate that with childbirth.

I think he assumes it like because the child he sees comes out like perfectly wrapped and cleaned and you know looks like a little baby in like a blanket when he sees it.

Yeah.

So I think, I think that's the thing.

So I think he believes this.

I don't think he's lying on purpose on this one.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

And I think, I don't know, I think an interesting aspect of this is that this is like, was kind of just a Trump thing.

Right.

Like, this is like one of the parts of it that like RFK Jr.

and Martin McCarry didn't really talk about.

It was just Trump kind of just like started talking about it for reasons that are deeply unclear.

Yeah, I mean, Martin McCarry is an interesting guy.

And I think he did some good things in the past and done some not so great things.

Some bad things.

Yeah, would not be surprising this administration.

This may shock you, Mia, but Trump picks somebody for a high-level position.

That might be a little problematic.

Well, especially this version of the administration, too, where it's like, in Trump one, it was possible for them for him to appoint someone random and it kind of be like Department of Energy, right?

Right.

They put Rick Perry, who famously would call to well, forgot that it was the thing that he wanted to abolish, but then he got in charge of it and the Department of Energy people like explained to him this is this is where the nuke stuff is and then he was like sure whatever fucking go run this.

I'll just stay out of everyone's way and that kind of worked fine.

That is not happening this administration You are you are not getting you are not getting Rick Perry going to like a

make work job letting the bureaucrats run the actual stuff How wild it is that we long for the days of Rick Perry yeah like

oh

the days when someone could explain to you, hey, this is the department that does the nukes and they'd be and they would change their opinion about it.

Staggering.

Incredible.

So let me tell you a little bit more about this Macari character.

Yeah, yeah.

So he is a surgeon.

I don't think he practices as a surgeon anymore, but he's sort of a health policy expert, at least self-fashioned as one.

And he's the person that was tapped by Donald Trump to lead the FDA.

You've seen him on Fox News a lot, and he's been very outspoken about pandemic policies in the past.

He was noted as one of the greatest perpetrators of COVID misinformation during those times.

People fact-checked him again and again, found that he was wrong.

But the thing about him that you may or may not know, how I first learned of him and how he popped up on my radar a while back, was he is the person that's responsible for this claim that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Sometimes that's cited as second.

Yes, that's him.

He's the person.

Oh, boy.

Right, right.

Which there's a lot of issues with this claim.

It is at best controversial.

It's based on extrapolated data.

There was no formal methodology that went into him doing this.

It totally misrepresents the complexity of healthcare and healthcare outcomes.

But it's like the herpes of medical misinformation because it always comes back no matter how many times it gets disproven or people talk about it it always comes back and it's always used as this it's a it's an inherent part of the belief structure of these anti-vaxxers it is is taken as gospel now but back in 2016 basically he wrote this bmj paper that estimated something like 250 000 deaths per year in u.s hospitals were due to medical errors but again was not a formal study it presented no new data and it didn't have any sort of real rigorous statistical method behind it.

It kind of averaged figures from different sources.

It doesn't actually even work because death certificates don't capture medical error.

So it's hard to really study that, even if you wanted to.

But anyways, long story short, no matter how many times people disprove this or make arguments that work against it, it never goes away.

So that's him.

That's Makari.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

And he's not running the FDA, which is

which is great.

Oh, we put the worst people in charge of quite possibly the most important part

of our country.

Yeah, I mean, just the health and human services run by RFK Jr.

is just

when he first took office, my line on it was millions will die.

And we are so incredibly on track

for millions to die

from just this guy guy

and his people being put in charge.

Yeah, I mean, I should say one more thing about Makari before we move on from him.

That claim, you know, I wouldn't say that medical error isn't an issue.

I think it is a very serious issue.

Even if it's one or two cases in the whole country, it's a serious issue and that should be addressed.

But what he's doing is, I think, harmful.

I don't think that is helping in any way.

I think it's only made things worse by contributing to where we're at today with our anti-vax stance, our whole anti-intellectual approach to medicine.

And that's a thing that they do.

This is a thing.

They take a little kernel of truth.

If there is any lack of knowledge, that there's any slight vacuum in understanding, it gets filled with these bad actors, these people.

And he is, in my opinion, one of them.

But still somehow not the worst.

You know,

not the worst is one of those bars in the Trump administration where it's not even the bar is so low, it's on the ground.

The bar is so low that, like, you have to go digging to get under the bar.

And it's not like a little bit of digging, it's a lot of digging because the

bar truly is below hell.

There's like a second hell down there

to find this bar for where these people are.

Oh, God.

It's second hell.

Every time I look into any of these people, just yeah.

No, no,

you're never going to be surprised.

Has gonna hit a marine with an axe.

Like, what?

Like, this guy's just the secretary of defense now.

He's like, he's the guy going in yelling at the generals.

He's the guy who was on Fox News and he threw just throwing an axe and he threw it over the target and it hit a bunch of marines.

Like, wait, what are we doing here?

Well, whom amongst us hasn't done that?

Maybe he is the real Antifa.

Oh,

yeah, that's true.

That's true.

I have never hit a Marine with an axe.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah, well, there you go.

tragic

comment do you have anything else that you want to tell our our dear listeners about

this whole debacle get your vaccines yeah you know get your vaccines get vaccinated now's the time to start doing it for flu and COVID if you can.

Talk to your doctor if you're having difficulty getting your vaccine from your local places, your regular places talk to your doctor about getting it uh you should still be able to in most cases so do it while you can and if you want to hear more about this stuff make sure to check out my podcast the house of pod we're going to talk about the stuff a lot more we'll also talk about other stuff too but but you'll hear more on this along the way as well and uh you know i i like that people are questioning some of these things i i don't think it's unreasonable some of these topics are not unreasonable to have.

You know, we, as I discussed earlier on another podcast on this channel, I don't know, channel is that what you say?

On this network, I should say.

The Tylenol autism question is not like a totally wacky, crazy one.

It was a decent question to ask.

There was some correlation.

the evidence when you look at it shows that it is very likely not a causal relationship when you look at the evidence.

And I think it's okay to have some of these conversations.

And sometimes it takes a little nuance when you look at them.

But I encourage people to continue to do so and to keep reading and to find trusted sources and look at those and learn about them yourself.

I think if nothing else good comes from all this, it's that people are starting to have an understanding of antibodies and the science behind vaccines.

And I think that's not a bad thing.

So I mean, things are terrible.

Things are terrible.

There's so many bad things in the world.

But I will say this.

I see bright spots constantly.

I see more and more people who care about science.

I see more and more people than I ever have before care about important topics across the world that are not scientific, like Gaza, for example.

I've seen more people care about things

that I've ever seen before in my long life.

And

I feel like that's a good thing.

There are bright spots out there, and that's what I cling to.

And I see more people interested in this i people want to to talk to me about hepatitis b and what it is and how to avoid it and i think that's great so there is some good coming from this yeah and you know and this is i think the fundamental thing that both the media apparatus and the regime are trying to conceal which is that there are more of us than there are of them

there always have been and especially right now

there are way more of us and yeah you know their ability to shape the world is disastrous but their ability to shape the world as as fundamentally a minoritarian force in this country, right?

With like 30 to 40 percent of the population, is always going to be limited and always is always going to be in danger of simply being reversed.

Yeah.

And we can be that reversal one person at a time.

Yeah.

I love that.

Well, Kami, thank you for being on the show and go listen to House of Hod.

It's great.

It, oh, thank you.

Yeah.

We're okay.

You could do worse.

You know, quite frankly, if you ever do anything on accident that leads to a police officer falling over, even if you had nothing to do with them falling over.

It's time to leave.

It's time to go.

Even if all you did was make a joke.

This is it could happen here.

Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world and what it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis.

Today I'm joined by James Dow, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans.

This episode, we're covering the week of October 1st to October 8th.

That's right, baby.

Prime Big Deal Day, as October 7th, 8th are known in history.

The first week of October, you know?

Glocktober.

Glocktober.

I mean, who doesn't love a good Glock?

Not in California.

California doesn't love a good Glock.

Gavin Newsome in the California legislature.

Gavin Newsome doesn't love a good Glock.

I mean, honestly.

Band him.

Beretta fans don't love Glocks.

Still sore about that.

SIG guys, the surviving SIG guys.

Oh, boy, it's rough being a SIG guy out there these days.

It's got to be tough.

Yeah.

That's why we're selling armored boxer shorts for

you to enjoy the SIG Sauer P320.

As long as you get our new hard class four body armor boxer shorts, you can appendix carry a SIG Sauer without blowing your junk off.

I've quickly put on my ceramic boxer briefer so that I can carry

a fucking M18.

M18, thank you.

Yeah, yeah.

Stay hard by CoolZone dropping next week.

You can find them by tagging Robert on social media at

YSophieY.

We're finishing our 20-part series.

People have asked for episodes on how to be a gun owner.

And so we're putting together a 20-part series on how not to shoot your own penis off.

So law enforcement officers in the audience, you'll want to check that one out.

I just got a notification that Sophie had canceled ED, which I think is probably a response to what we're doing right now.

Let's start because there's a lot of news this week by talking about, frankly, the most important news story in the whole nation right now.

On Thursday, October 2nd, right-wing influencer Nick Sorter, along with two other people, saw us.

I know.

I know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's stupid.

It's really stupid.

Along with two other people, were arrested by the Portland Police Bureau in connection with a fight outside of the ICE building during a protest.

Sorter was provoking reactions from protesters when he was then chased down the street by a woman in a bird costume.

A bird costume?

Quote, swinging a large stick covered with feathers.

Big sorter assaulted by Big bird.

According to court documents, the three people were arrested and all charged with disorderly conduct, though Sorter's charges have since been dropped.

Sorter's arrest ignited a right-wing firestorm, the likes of which I have not seen since Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

I'm glad people are finally waking up to the Antifa police department that rules Portland with an iron fist.

For a long time, Tim Poole posted on X the Everything app, I'm calling on the Trump administration to launch a legal challenge against Oregon following the arrest of Nick Sorter, and if necessary, deploy National Guard.

Oregon's failed to uphold federal and state law, and we should not tolerate it.

And like,

yeah, there was like a fight, and they detained people, and then the DA didn't press charges against Sorter.

And it's just, it couldn't be more of a nothing burger as an actual story.

Nothing burger.

Nothing burger.

Yeah.

Oh, boy.

But not according to the AG's office, who quickly responded on it to Tim Poole's request.

And by Friday morning, the White House, the Attorney General, and the Justice Department announced a quote-unquote full investigation into the arrest and the conduct of the Portland Police Bureau.

Finally.

Conservative influencer Benny Johnson, who's been in bed with ICE this past week, posted on X the Everything app, quote, important news.

I spoke with DHS Secretary Christy Noam.

She's been briefed on the attack and arrest of journalist Nick Sorter.

Secretary Noam tells me DHS will surge ICE resources in Portland.

Quote, Antifa is a terrorist group and will not control our streets, unquote.

Thank you, Secretary Noam.

Benny Johnson later shared a video captioned, breaking.

DHS Secretary Christy Noam has announced the Department of War will deploy to Portland and Chicago within 24 hours to crush left-wing violence.

Unquote.

And here is the video with Christy Noam talking about the quote-unquote Antifa-affiliated anti-ICE protests.

targeted violence that want to tear down America and will apparently attack anyone, even journalists that are just trying to report the truth of what's happening on the streets.

So we're not just going to be rolling out of Chicago here, but we're sending in the Department of War at the request that I made to Secretary Hagsett.

They're going going to be rolling in here within the next 24 hours.

They'll be coming to Chicago, too.

I put a request in today for them to come to Chicago.

And we're going to not only have our officers that are out there with HSI and ICE, but we're also going to have backup from our military because everybody deserves that.

And so what we saw happen to that journalist last night will not happen again.

Okay.

Yeah, Benny Johnson's showing a very professional journalism there by just saying wow a lot.

It's pretty terrific.

It's a pretty wild scene scene having troops walk behind Christy Noome as this podcaster

grills her on sending the military to cities.

Yeah, in front of a bearcat.

The reactions from the right after Nick Sorter's arrest were pretty wild, with journalists going on Fox News claiming that the Portland police are affiliated with Antifa

and popular right-wing influencers on X, like Amuse, saying, quote, the Portland police are now colluding with Antifa to prosecute federal officers protecting the ICE facility.

When has that happened?

Each time federal officers engage with Antifa, Portland police liaisons collect statements and videos from Antifa to facilitate state criminal charges against DHS.

So somehow, in the year of Our Lord 2025, the Portland Police Bureau is now Antifa, which is a truly miraculous state of affairs.

After his release Friday morning, Nick Sorter posted on X: quote, you've proved what we've all been saying for years.

You're corrupt and controlled by violent Antifa thugs who terrorize the streets, referring to the Portland police.

I have been in direct contact with top officials at DHS.

What's coming in Portland is unprecedented, all thanks to Portland police exposing themselves by arresting journalists.

Great work, Portland, unquote.

A day later, On October 4th, a Trump-appointed federal judge granted the state of Oregon and the city of Portland a temporary restraining order blocking Trump and Hague's SES federalization and deployment of 200 Oregon National Guard against the wishes of Oregon Governor Tina Kotek.

The judge found that existing local and federal law enforcement were sufficient to police protests, that the Trump admin had mischaracterized the reality of the current protests outside of the ICE facility, and that violence against ICE in other parts of the country is not sufficient justification for a local military deployment.

It's worth noting this judge, Judge Immergut.

Number one, not a woke judge.

Was literally, if you go back and you watch the Monica Lewinsky hearings, or the, I mean, this is the Clinton sex scandal hearings, but this is the part of it in which Lewinsky was being grilled.

Immergut was the female lawyer that they brought out to be incredibly cruel to Monica Lewinsky because it wouldn't look as off putting.

And it wound up, she wound up.

Part of why Monica Lewinsky became so is she immergate looked fucking nuts.

And Immergut is the person who is looking at it, who is going through all of the claims made by the administration and going, there's literally not only is there no justification for the deployment of troops in Portland, but everyone calling the shots at FPS and ICE is like, everything's under control.

We have no need for additional people.

Yeah.

There's no real danger here.

Like,

this is not a leftist judge.

This is not a judge with a political axe to grind.

This is a judge that 30 years ago, you would have called a far-right extremist.

Yeah.

I will quote a little bit from her ruling here.

Quote, to accept the defendants' arguments, that's the federal government, would be to render meaningless the extraordinary requirements of 10 U.S.C.

12406 by allowing the President to federalize one state's National Guard based on the events in a different state, or mere speculation about future events.

In other words, violence elsewhere cannot support troop deployments here, and concern about hypothetical future conduct does not demonstrate a present inability to execute the laws using non-military federal law enforcement.

Unquote.

On the Trump admins argument that the president's authorized to federalize state National Guard in the case of rebellion or invasion, the judge concluded that the legal definition of rebellion requires, quote, first, a rebellion must not only be violent, but also armed.

Second, a rebellion must be organized.

Third, a rebellion must be open and avowed.

Fourth, a rebellion must be against the government as a whole, whole, often with the aim of overthrowing the government, rather than in opposition to a single law or issue.

Here, the protests in Portland were not a rebellion and did not pose a danger of rebellion, especially in the days leading up to the federalization.

Unquote.

The judge found that the president's federalization of the Oregon National Guard without proper statutory authority under 10 U.S.C.

12406 exceeded the president's constitutional authority, undermined Oregon's sovereignty, and violated the 10th Amendment by infringing on Oregon's constitutional power to control its own National Guard, writing that the Trump admin, quote, interfered with the constitutional balance of power between the federal and state governments, unquote.

Yeah, is that the one where she said their argument was untethered from the facts?

Yeah, yeah, I think that was a pretty good

summary of what's going on here.

Later that day, Stephen Miller went on NewsNation to talk about the quote-unquote insurrectionists, interesting word, in Portland and the new national security presidential memorandum to investigate and dismantle so-called left-wing terrorist networks.

The president issued a national security presidential memorandum at NSPM, making clear that it is the national security priority of United States law enforcement to dismantle, disrupt, defeat, and destroy these domestic terror networks.

And that is exactly what is taking place.

It is what we are doing.

It is what will happen.

His use of the word insurrection there is important.

A day later, President Trump also used the term insurrectionists to describe protests in Portland and complained about the federal judge who blocked the deployment of National Guard, saying, quote, Portland is burning to the ground.

You have agitators, insurrectionists.

All you got to do is look at the television.

It's burning to the ground.

The governor, the mayor, the politicians are petrified for their lives.

That judge ought to be ashamed.

Again, nothing's been burnt down.

Nothing was burnt down in 2020.

Most of the big nights at ICE lately have been maybe 200 people.

You know, you've had some more on a few occasions, but like, it's usually a lot less.

it's probably just unnecessary for me to correct all this but i i guess i can't fight the urge to be like none of this is accurate to what's happening yeah yeah the simulation is more important than the reality yeah yeah mill has done this before right like he kind of likes to use these words that exist in legislation and sort of uh it point to the direction he wants things to go i guess yeah like he did this by calling anti-for an enterprise uh we saw this to an extent with title 42 and his his reference to migrants with a public health threat i think this is kind of a trademark move for him almost.

Now, hours after the federal judge blocked the federalization of Oregon National Guard, Secretary of War Pete Hagseth ordered 300 California National Guard to be deployed to Portland.

And the next day, Texas Governor Greg Abbott authorized 400 Texas National Guard to be sent to Oregon and Illinois in coordination with the Department of War.

On Sunday night, the federal judge that previously blocked the Oregon National Guard federalization made another ruling blocking the deployment of troops from California and Texas, finding that it was, quote, in direct contravention of her earlier TRO.

This secondary TRO halted any federalization, relocation, or deployment of any Guard members to Oregon from any state.

The Trump administration has appealed these rulings, and oral arguments will be heard on Thursday, October 9th.

in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Stephen Miller called this ruling, quote, one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen, and is yet the latest example of unceasing efforts to nullify the 2024 election by fiat, unquote.

By Monday, Miller told reporters, without going into specifics, that the president, quote, has a very broad range and set of authorities when it comes to deploying federal assets, unquote.

And that same day, Monday, Trump discussed the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act in a White House press conference.

Well, I'd do it if it was necessary.

So far, it hasn't been necessary, but we have an Insurrection Act for a reason.

If I had to enact it, I'd do that.

If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I'd do that.

I mean, I want to make sure that people aren't killed.

We have to make sure that our cities are safe.

And it's turning out, and we started with D.C.

It's been so successful.

You look at what's happened with Portland over the years.

It's a burning hellhole.

And then you have

a judge that lost her way that tries to pretend that, like, there's no problem.

Actually, she's not even saying that.

There's a huge problem in Portland.

I'll tell you what the problem is.

Crime.

Okay, crime.

There's a huge problem in Chicago.

It's called crime.

And we want to put out the crime.

And they want to inflame the crime.

Oh, boy.

Sure.

That's the clearest statement we've gotten from the president on the conditions in which he would invoke the Insurrection Act, I think, specifically pointing towards governors, mayors, or courts that prevent ICE from completing immigration actions in those cities and counties.

Yeah, and that's the thing that we've gotten from that's the most specific indication of things that are happening right now that could cause him to do it.

We still don't have a direct, I'm going to do it, but I think it's pretty clear from this that he wants to.

These people in these circles have been talking about wanting to do it for a long time.

And I think this is in some ways the closest we've gotten to it.

Yeah.

And that's why you have people like Miller and Trump himself using the word insurrection when describing what's happening to establish a pretext to actually follow through on that and declare the Insurrection Act when it suits them.

Yeah, I think it's worth noting Miller's doing.

Miller is often the originator of many of these kind of legal theories.

This one has made its way to Trump.

I'm going to declare an ad break, and then we will return to finish our reporting on War Ravage Portland.

Okay, we are back.

DHS Secretary Kristy Noam has made some

pretty fantastic claims about the nature of these protests and the threats facing ICE agents both in Chicago and Portland.

And I'm just going to play her clip from Fox News here talking about the threats to ICE.

Our intelligence indicates that these people are organized.

They're getting more and more people on their team as far as attacking officers, and they're making plans to ambush them and to kill them.

We have specific officers and agents that have bounties that have been put out on their heads.

It's been $2,000 to kidnap them, $10,000 to kill them.

They've released their pictures.

They've sent them between their networks and it's an extremely dangerous situation and unprecedented.

So we've put protective detail around those individuals, changed some of our operations to keep our officers safe.

But make no mistake, this isn't just about protesting free speech or that they don't like that people out here are upholding the law of our country.

They're actually going out there and saying, kill these people and we'll give you this much money to do it.

It's quite a specific claim, isn't it?

What she's doing there is conflating alleged cartel bounties on ICE agents with protests happening outside of ICE facilities, making it sound like the protesters are putting $10,000 kill bounties on ICE officers.

Man, let me tell you, nobody who's out at ICE right now has collectively 10 grand to put towards a bounty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What are we doing here?

On Tuesday, October 7th, Christy Gnome arrived in Portland, Oregon, along with her conservative podcaster sidekick, Benny Johnson, who has been live streaming ICE operations in Chicago with Gnome.

Benny posted on X the Everything app.

Breaking DHS Secretary Christy Noam stares down Army of Antifa and a guy in a chicken suit from the rooftop of the ICE facility here in Portland.

Finally, someone took that chicken guy down to size.

I want to play the video that I think one of us should set the stage for what we're seeing.

Secretary, do you have a message to the protesters, especially the man in the chicken outfit?

The man in the chicken outfit, I just see him now.

Goodness sakes.

We could do better.

Our goal is that people would peacefully protest, but that we would still be allowed to enforce the law in this country.

So

it's too bad they're uneducated and ill-informed

if you look at this uh protest there's about what 20 people on the street corner adjacent to the ice facility nearly uh nearly as many uh journalists and photographers as there are protesters and this is what benny johnson is describing as an army of antifa is these 20 people holding signs across from like a police line on the edge of the ice facility at a later point benny zooms into another street corner, which similarly has about a dozen people over one block away from the ice facility.

This is the Army of Antifa

that Benny Johnson is referring to as he, along with Nick Sorter, stand with Christy Noam on the roof of the ice facility surveying the area, which is just a fantastical sequence of events.

We time traveled and told me that five years ago, that Christy Noam and Benny Johnson are going to be on the roof of the ice facility calling a man in a chicken outfit an army of Antifa.

I guess I could believe you, but

I guess it would still be upsetting.

I wouldn't be happy, but

I wouldn't like argue with you.

I'd be like, yeah, I mean, that sounds like a natural extension of where things are at this point in time.

On Tuesday night, Noam went on Fox News to talk about a meeting she had with local law enforcement and the mayor.

where she threatened to send four times as many federal forces into Portland, Oregon.

Sure, man.

I told them what we wanted.

We wanted more security here at the building, a bigger buffer zone to keep our officers safe.

We wanted to have their streets opened up again and not let the anarchists run this city anymore.

That we would ask them to continue to back us up like we've been asking for instead of what they've been doing the last several months, which is just leaving our officers hang out to dry.

The chief asked if I wanted to meet with the mayor, and I said, absolutely.

Came back and just met with the mayor, and I'm so extremely disappointed.

He's continuing to play politics.

I did not commit to any of those promises and said that he'd give me an answer by tomorrow.

And I'm hopeful that he will.

What I told him is that if he did not follow through on some of these security measures for our officers, we were going to cover him up with more federal resources and that we were going to send four times the amount of federal officers here so that the people of Portland could have some safety.

Again, almost no one's even

there.

Like,

I can't exaggerate the degree to which this is not a major factor in 99% of people's day-to-day.

Because, number one, where the ICE facility is is cordoned off from the rest of the city.

Like, pretty isolated chunk.

It's isolated, you might say.

And number two, just like most people that I know who were out in 2020 don't really have a clear idea of what they should be doing right now or what the most useful thing to do is right now, and have spent a lot of time in front of federal riot lines and aren't right now.

And like it's this complete disconnect between what's actually going on in the city and like what's what's being reported, which doesn't matter really.

Like it doesn't impact anything that everything they're saying is a lie

because their people believe it.

It's just kind of frustrating.

No, and this information is all in the TRO document that blocked the deployment of National Guard.

Quote, plaintiffs provided all of the PPB call logs in the month of September, which showed that Portland Police Bureau worked in close coordination with federal protective service supervisors and regularly checked the status of the ICE facility.

As detailed above, they also show that protest activity in September generally did not involve violence against federal property or personnel.

Unquote.

Portland Police Bureau have been working in coordination to manage the protests outside the ICE building.

They've not abandoned ICE officers.

That's not actually what's happening.

A federal judge has deemed that local law enforcement are more than sufficient to handle the protests outside of the ICE facility.

The Trump government just really wants to send the military into cities, as they've already done with D.C., as they were wanting to do with Memphis, Chicago, Portland, eventually like New Orleans.

This is just something that they really want to do.

On Tuesday, October 7th, Texas National Guard arrived in Illinois and are currently stationed at an Army Reserve Center in a suburb south of Chicago.

Sunday night, Governor Pritzker made a statement reading, quote, this evening, President President Trump is ordering 400 members of the Texas National Guard for deployments to Illinois, Oregon, and other locations within the United States.

We must now start calling this what it is, Trump's invasion.

It started with federal agents, will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state's military troops.

There is no reason a president should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation.

Unquote.

The state of Illinois announced that they would be seeking their own TRO against Trump's military deployment.

The Illinois Attorney General said in a statement, quote, the American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly for the reason that their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president's favor, unquote.

And on Monday, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order establishing city property and unwilling private businesses as ice-free zones and discussed the deployment of troops from out of state by warning, quote, the right wing in this country wants a rematch of the civil war, unquote.

Yeah, and so we have it, we have a kind of breaking news update, which is, so this is being recorded on Wednesday, October 8th.

It's possible this will, again, change by the time this comes out.

The most recent information we have is, and this is reported by CBS, per a statement from U.S.

Northern Command, which is part of the Defense Department.

War Department, but yes.

They're sending 500 troops.

I'm just going to read a direct quote.

Illinois, approximately 200 soldiers from various units of the Texas National Guard and approximately 300 soldiers from various units of the Illinois National Guard were activated into a Title 10 status and have arrived in the greater Chicago area.

The National Guard were mobilized for an initial period of 60 days will be under the command and control of the commander of U.S.

Northern Command.

Yeah.

So that's where we are right now.

Yeah.

There is out-of-state guard deployed into Illinois.

Yeah.

Like they are, they are in the borders of the state right now.

Yeah.

When Hague says try to deploy the the California National Guard to Oregon, it's unclear how many of them actually arrived in Oregon, but we do have confirmation and photos of Texas Guard in the borders of Illinois.

This morning, Donald Trump truthed on Truth Social that, quote, Chicago mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE officers, Governor Pritzker, also, unquote.

This is the President of the United States calling for the jailing of a mayor and governor.

Yeah, he's also more recently calling calling for the jailing of everyone who burns American flags and a minimum of a year in prison.

Again, the legality here is deeply unclear.

There's not a legal underpinning for that other than he's instructed the DOJ to start going after those folks.

But

yeah, this is just words that he's saying.

But I think the words that he's saying are sometimes, not always, but sometimes important.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I want to turn from here to the other occupation of Chicago, the one that has been doing significant damage already in the city, as we have been covering, which is the ICE and

Border Patrol deployment in Chicago.

There's been more escalations that we are going to spend a small amount of time talking about.

ICE has begun detaining unhoused people.

We have reports of 11 total people they've detained so far.

Most of them have been released.

But the most prominent, and this is something that Brandon Johnson specifically mentioned in his speech, was four people who were taken in a Chicago neighborhood called Broadview, who were outside a shelter, according to the Chicago Reader.

We don't know where they are.

Jesus.

As of Wednesday, they're just gone.

No one has been able to trace them down.

Yeah, and this, and this seems to be part of a broader trend of ICE agents taking action against people who, I mean, appear to be U.S.

citizens.

We saw this a couple, like last week with, and this is another thing that Brandon Johnson specifically mentioned with him, with ICE agents just choking a black man out on the street.

The major story is that there has been a second shooting by ICE in Chicago.

On what we, what we know for sure about this shooting is that on Saturday morning, an ICE agent shot a woman

named Maramar Martinez, who appeared to have been part of a group that was following ICE vehicles around the city.

Martinez was shot and drove herself to a nearby auto repair shop where medics and police showed up.

I'm going to read the Sun-Times' account from the shop managers who they spoke to

of what happened when she got to the body shop.

Quote, the shop manager spoke with a 911 operator and said, send somebody quickly because this lady is bleeding profusely.

I mean, it was instant puddles.

Police and paramedics showed up a few minutes later.

He said, as paramedics place a turn kit on Martinez's leg and arm, a bullet fell out of her arm and onto the shop floor, the manager said.

Martinez, thankfully, does not seem to have been really, really severely injured.

She is like, she is in stable medical condition.

Now, DHS put out a press release almost immediately, claiming that their agents were, quote, ambushed by domestic terrorists that ran federal agents with their vehicles and that, quote, Martinez, the woman they shot, was, quote, armed with a semi-automatic weapon and has a history of doxing federal agents.

Now, it is worth noting that best practice when looking at Department of Homeland Security statements, especially under the Trump administration, is to simply assume that they are not telling the truth until any details they have mentioned are corroborated.

What the exact situation was before

the shooting is very unclear.

Both Department of Homeland Security and federal prosecutors have claimed that a group of cars basically boxed in an ICE vehicle, and there have been repeated claims that they were ramming the ICE vehicle, and that that's why the ICE agent opened fire.

That's the DHS's claims, yeah.

Yeah, this is this is the DHS's claims, and these are the claims that are made in court documents.

I want to read from the Sun-Times also Martinez's lawyer's description of what's going on, because it is significantly different from the government's account.

And it's also worth mentioning that there's already been some deviation between the court documents and the DHS statement.

For example,

the DHS statement mentions a semi-automatic weapon, and there's just simply no mention of that in

any of the sort of charging documents.

The deadly weapon that she's being accused of doing an assault with, which is what she's being charged with, is the car.

Yeah, so here's from the Sun-Times.

So Parenti, who is her attorney.

Parenti also offered to play an agent's body cam video that shows the shooting, noting prosecutors did not show the video that he claims disputes the government's version of the shooting.

Parenti said the video shows an agent turning a federal vehicle left into Martinez's vehicle, after which the agent says, quote, do something, bitch.

The agent then exits the vehicle and shoots Martinez.

The attorney said Martinez had, quote, seven holes in her from the shooting and that agents were in such a hurry to take her into custody at the hospital that they had to return later when Martinez began bleeding from her wounds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is a significantly different portrayal of the shooting.

We do not have access to this body cam footage yet.

It has not been released to the public.

There is a video that we do have that does not show the shooting, that shows some of the stuff leading up to the shooting

from that sort of auto repair shop that she went to.

It is still very unclear what exactly happened here other than the fact that I shot this woman.

That's the only thing that we 100% know.

She does have a concealed carry license and had a handgun in the car with her.

Yeah.

The lawyers have claimed she never brandished the weapon and it was in the passenger seat.

And there's no evidence that she did brandish the weapon.

No.

No, no.

Nor is ICE even claiming that.

Like ICE isn't even claiming that she brandished weapon.

ICE isn't claiming that she fired a weapon.

No, the ICE's specific claim is that when she was arrested later, she had the weapon on her, which could refer to the vehicle or whatever.

Yeah.

Well, and

I will say, so the initial Department of Homeland Security press statement said that she was armed with a semiotic weapon.

I think a lot of people took that to mean, you know, because DHS was implying stuff by saying that she was armed with, even though she was not.

Yeah, they're inhabiting the ambiguity of that verb, right?

Like, yeah, right.

They also said that they fired defensively, which makes you infer that this person may have fired at ICE, even though DHS has never actually claimed that.

They are trying to selectively use words to make people infer things that they're not even actually explicitly claiming.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

we're going to have to get more details and we're going to have to wait to see exactly what happened.

But what the evidence supports right now is that ICE shot someone who was doing rapid response work.

And it is frankly a miracle that she wasn't severely injured or killed.

And this is, again, the second time they have done this since ICE's deployment in the city, the first time they did just straight-up kill a man.

So we'll be following the story as it develops.

We'll be following the continued actions of ICE in Chicago and other places.

Yeah.

And

we will continue to talk about stuff after these ads.

All right, and we are back.

Mia was talking about rapid responders there, and I want to talk a little bit about one of the tools that they were using, which was called People Over Papers.

There are many of these apps that have sprung up since

January of this year, right?

Since we saw much more visible immigration enforcement on the streets, Padlet, which was the, I guess, bulletin board type service that was people over papers relied on, has removed people over papers right had say it violated their terms of service the removal comes just a few days after a laura luma tweet which tagged the ceo claimed that people over papers was violating the terms of service by quote harassment stalking privacy violations inciting violence and other unlawful activity luma there is noting things in the terms of service that she perceives people to be doing with people over papers right yeah this has happened after the another of these apps, Ice Block, was removed from app stores last week.

It also involved some Luma posting.

Notably, Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, has claimed, and this is in contravention of what's widely held to be court precedent and the law.

She has claimed that videotaping ICE agents is doxing them.

And separately, Christy Noam has claimed that doxing is an act of violence.

We can join the two dots there.

The videotaping ICE agents is an act of violence.

It seems to be what's being suggested here.

We can see the consequences of this argument in the deportation of Atlanta area reporter Mario Wuevara.

Mario was held for more than 100 days in detention.

He was arrested on No Kings Day protests, if you can remember, back when people were doing those things.

But the charges against him were dropped.

However, since then, the government has argued that his filming of law enforcement constitutes a threat threat to public safety.

Murray has now been deported back to El Salvador.

He's an Atlanta area reporter.

And like, I guess to editorialize, it would be really nice to see a fraction of the advocacy we saw for Jimmy Kimmel for someone who's actually doing reporting, right?

Not just trying to be funny.

He's not as big as Jimmy Kimmel.

doesn't have as many followers yeah yeah uh but but he's he's also uh been sent to el salvador where whereas jimmy kimmel like was sent back to his mansion in hollywood ex Yeah, exactly.

For like less than a week.

So

I'm going to link in the show notes both to an advocacy campaign and the Freedom of the Press Foundation piece about Mario.

And you guys can check that out if you'd like to.

Second character for this week is Tom Homan.

You guys will remember Tom Homan, Border Czar.

a guy who famously,

well, relatively recently, has become famous for seemingly accepting a bag with $50,000 of cash in it in an FBI sting operation.

Let's play this clip of Pam Bondi, who is answering questions in front of Congress here about what happened to the literal bag of cash.

What became of the

$50,000

in cash that the FBI paid to Mr.

Homan in a paper paper bag, evidently.

Oh my god, Tom and Jerry ass shit.

She's looking through her notes right now.

She's selected a page.

Senator, as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, recently stated, the investigation of Mr.

Homan was subjected to a full review by the FBI, agents, and DOJ prosecutors.

They found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.

And that was not my question.

My My question was, what became of the $50,000 in cash that the FBI delivered, evidently in a paper bag, to Mr.

Holman?

Senator, I'd look at your facts.

Are you saying that they did not deliver $50,000 in cash to Mr.

Homan?

Senator, as recently stated, the investigation of Mr.

Holman was subjected to a full review

by the FBI agents,

by Department of Justice prosecutors, they found no evidence of wrongdoing.

That's a different question.

What became of the $50,000?

Did the FBI get it back?

Mr.

Whitehouse, excuse me, Senator Whitehouse, you're welcome to talk to the FBI.

The report to you, can't you answer this question?

First of all, this guy's name is Mr.

Whitehouse.

Yeah, Senator Simmons.

This guy's name is Senator Whitehouse Garrison.

That surely is a little confusing.

Yeah.

Maybe he gets some emails for the wrong person.

Sheldon Whitehouse apparently is his first name.

Theoretically, if he got a job for the administration, his email would be whitehouse at whitehouse.gov.

Yes.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's going to happen given the line of questioning that he pursued here.

But yeah,

you can hear Rich.

She seems to be unwilling to

answer where the

paper bag of cash money of $50,000

has gone.

Incredible stuff.

Look, it's easier to lose that than you'd think.

One would assume that the FBI would have some kind of tracking capability when giving someone $50,000 in a paper bag, but here we are.

Maybe it's a no-country-for-old mint kind of situation.

Whoever found it was smart enough to dump the transponder first.

We will probably never know.

If they're smart, yeah.

Well, building on that,

what ProPublica is now reporting is that Homan went into business with a Pennsylvania consultant named Charles Sowell, and that Sowell has been offering consults on how to obtain contracts at the Department of Homeland Security.

So Homan consulted for Sowell's firm during the Biden administration.

And during that same period, Sowell became the chair of Homan's Border 911 Foundation, according to their reporting.

ProPublica has called into question the extent to which Homan has actually recused himself from contracts, saying that he participated in meetings with executives about government contracting plans.

So, normally, a government official would be bound to steer clear of their former business associates for at least a year when they enter office, right?

I can't like consult for Garrison Inc.

and then become procurement for DHS and immediately buy a thousand

of whatever Garrison Inc.

is selling.

You can tag Garrison on Blue Sky where they will read what you think they're selling.

If this will result in me getting $50,000 in a paper bag, then, you know, maybe.

Yeah, well, in this instance, I would be the one getting the $50,000 from Garrison Inc.

in return for buying whatever it is that you're selling.

Orbs, maybe.

Yeah, that's not a great deal.

Yeah, yeah, well, it seems like it was a great deal in this instance.

For Tom Holman, yeah.

Well, their reporting suggests that Homan went from a relatively modest income in 2017 to being a multi-millionaire by the time he filed his 2025 disclosure documents.

When you assume federal office, you have to file these disclosure disclosure documents, disclose your assets.

I guess the famous one is Jimmy Carter's Peanut Farm.

But it seems that during that time, his personal net worth increased significantly, right?

He did a lot of consulting.

He became like a talking head on Fox News in the Biden administration.

It's difficult to summarize the intricacies of this story.

I'd encourage you to read it.

For instance, there's a third person called Mark Hall, who appears to be doing some work on behalf of Homan, but also retaining a relationship with Seoul's clients.

It looks a lot like what's happening is that the people who Homan had been doing consulting with are now trying to make money saying that they have special access to DHF based off that consulting.

This kind of builds on some of the stuff that we'd already seen and spoken about last week, right?

Finally, on the immigration beat, I want to talk about a case where the petitioner's attorney has stated that the petitioner, I'm not going to name the person, I don't think it's necessary, was taken to hospital by CBP after they severely injured his leg on a raid in a car wash in Carson, California.

He was booked into the hospital under a pseudonym and kept there under armed guard from August the 27th until October 4th.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

So this person, they weren't coming up at the detainee locator, right?

They hadn't apparently been allocated an A number, which is what you would normally use to look someone up on the ICE detainee locator.

And I guess the argument there was that they weren't booked in until they left the hospital.

So this person basically disappeared for more than a month.

The judges granted that petitioner an attentive restraining order in that instance.

Right.

But

I think this, I have been receiving a lot of messages about a Chicago older person who was detained by ICE at a hospital.

And I have seen a number of reports that suggest that that's because ICE were detaining people in the hospital.

To my knowledge, the only person they detained in the hospital was the older person.

They were not detaining patients at the hospital.

They were there because they had bought somebody to the hospital in order for that person to be a patient because that person was in their detention, in their care, and needed medical assistance.

I have seen outlets.

I don't...

Should I name them?

Like Democracy Now got this wrong and said that they were arresting people.

So like Democracy Now is one example, right?

I have seen outlets reporting this as ICE were in the hospital detaining people.

Nothing I have seen leads me to believe that.

And lots of things I have seen lead me not to believe that.

It doesn't mean it's great for the people who are brought into hospital by ICE.

Yeah.

I'm sure it fucking sucks.

I'm sure it has a chilling effect on other people going to hospital to know that they are there.

But so does reporting that suggests that you can be picked up in the hospital if you're an inpatient or if you're in the emergency room.

That stops people accessing medical care.

That actively puts people in danger.

We need to be really, really fucking careful when sharing this shit.

Yeah.

That includes people who are journalists or claiming to be journalists.

People are so upset, rightly, so with what ICE is doing, that there can be this attitude, and I've encountered it before, of like, well, by under-cautioning people, that's the biggest risk.

And it's like, not when we're talking about whether or not people go to the hospital for lifestyle care.

Like, not, I'm sorry, it's just not.

Like, these are not equivalent risks.

More people are going to be in a position where they would be scared off from going to the hospital and not in any danger from from ICE going to it, then might possibly be in danger going to the hospital.

Like you were just endangering people by trying to get them to believe it is not safe for them to go receive life-saving emergency medical care at this stage.

Now, is it possible that's going to change?

Good God, I'm certainly not going to say no, right?

I'm certainly not going to say no.

100%.

But that's not where we are right now.

Just over cautioning people is not a net good in this instance.

Yeah, absolutely.

Sometimes it is, but not here, because again, if people don't go to the hospital on time, they die.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm aware of cases where people with genuinely life-threatening medical emergencies have been had to be persuaded to go to the hospital by people, right?

Because they had seen this.

Because these rumors don't just spread via social media, but also by WhatsApp groups and things.

And it can be very scary for people.

Well, and people largely construct their beliefs on reality by like what the weight of the people that they know directly or follow are saying is true.

And when you see 50 people, some of whom you kind of know, some of whom you've at least followed to an extent online, all say, this is unsafe, then there's a tendency to get really angry when people are like, well, I don't know, maybe it isn't actually.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, like, I care about the safety of migrants in this country.

I think anyone who looked at a totality of my work would

believe that, right?

Like, it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise.

That means I want them to go to hospital when they're fucking sick.

And that means that people who are saying things that are not true.

I understand why, right?

It lines up with the other things that we know to be true.

ICE is doing terrible shit.

Shit is terrible.

But it is still an area where we need to exercise extreme caution when reporting on things until we know

that it is true.

The ICE are coming into hospital and taking people out of the beds, which again, not a thing that I think is happening.

Let's pivot a little bit to public lands.

Something that I think about a lot, that we don't always report on here, but that I think is very important.

I want to to talk about the roadless rule today.

So September saw the end of the comment period.

It was a very short comment period on the Trump administration's proposal to rescind the roadless rule.

The roadless rule, if you're not familiar, protects over 58.8 million acres of national forest land from road building, logging, and other industrial activity.

According to the Center for Western Priorities, 99% of the comments submitted, of which there were more than 180,000, were opposed to rescinding the rule.

The Redness Rule has previously had broad bipartisan support.

It was not a particularly controversial thing.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rawlins announced a proposal early in the summer saying it would increase logging and decrease wildfire risk.

Research suggests that the opposite is true.

Cutting roads into forests provides more ignition opportunities, right?

By allowing people to go into those forests, you allow those people to do things which lead to fires happening.

Right.

Their cars overheat, they smoke cigarettes, they fucking shoot steel targets in the middle of the summer.

I mean, we just had a guy brought in for the Palisade fires, and he was like a 29-year-old Uber driver who had was having clearly a bad mental health day, called in after he set a fire, but kind of made weird denials about it and like fled to Florida.

And it kind of just looks like he was listening to a song where there were people lighting fires and decided to light a fire and it got way out of control way too quickly.

Yeah.

And it wasn't even the same night.

Like it took like a week because like they put out the initial fire, but it kept burning through thick underbrush, which eventually got re-caught.

That's my understanding based on the articles that I've read.

But like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, I mean, in that case, it's just a guy who's not super well.

Yeah, sure.

And like.

The other thing that cutting roads will do is it will change the foliage, right?

You'll cut down the big trees and you'll have smaller shrubs and those are easier to burn, the big trees, right?

The Wilderness Society has some data on this.

I think they found that forests with roads were four times more likely to have fires.

I will link to that Wilderness Society data.

The road disrupt was passed under the Clinton admin and it's being rescinded as part of a March executive order which sought to increase U.S.

timber production.

I want to note that there will not be guys with chainsaws rolling into your favorite national forest like next week or next month, right?

Like building these roads would have to be financed by the United States Forest Service, which is, of course, currently.

Well, if you go on the Forest website, Forest Service website, it'll tell you that radical left Democrats have shut down the federal government right now and in a pop-up.

We did it, guys.

Yeah, so the Forest Service finally coming out against the woke left.

But yeah, the Forest Service would have to finance these and it's currently understaffed because of the voluntary and Doge-based layoffs.

It's not particularly well funded.

I don't see the Forest Service going in for a lot of road construction.

But I might be wrong, right?

Trump clearly seems to see not importing timber as a major issue.

I'm not quite sure why.

Like, I guess

this

was an issue in Britain when they had to respond to the Spanish Armada.

Cut down a lot of trees back then.

Not familiar with other.

Very, very similar stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

National security issue.

I think we can agree, right?

The Spanish.

I mean, I'm just excited that now I can finally drive my ATV through these

environmentally protected areas.

God damn right, Garrison.

Yeah.

Without getting harassed by the park service.

Yeah, they're the woke woke left.

I'm going to be the drunkest guy on an ATV and Joshua tree.

I'm going to drive straight for the biggest tree I can find.

Anything over a thousand years old is fair game for my bumper, baby.

Sitting close to home, man.

I'm sorry, James.

James is seething right now.

James is going to fucking cut me.

If I see anyone stealing or destroying a Joshua tree, I will instantly.

I would never harm a Joshua tree.

I would never harm a Joshua tree.

There's one kind of tree I will harm indiscriminately, and it's a tree of paradise, but that's good for the environment.

Fuck those trees, kill them wherever you find them.

I think the only Joshua tree it's okay to hate is the album by you two.

Yeah, that's also burn every copy of the album Joshua Tree that you find.

Yeah, I'm okay with destroy it, erase it from the earth.

Run over those with an ATV.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind if that became extinct.

Why not?

Yeah.

Mir, do you want to talk about tariffs?

We're talking about timber, and of course, there has been recently a tariff on Canadian lumber, woke trees coming in from our neighbors to the north.

So

perhaps that's why we need to destroy our national forests.

I mean, Canada kind of is destroying theirs, and they still have trees to export.

Yeah, I do.

I guess one thing I haven't said about public land that you should always say when you're talking about public land is that it's all native land, actually.

And the framing of public land as a place for white folks to recreate is not the correct framing.

It's not how we win this fight.

And you should also, if you care about not just the damage that fires do, but conservation in general, and you ever get the opportunity to go through, like up here in the Pacific Northwest, you can go through chunks of the forest that are managed by the state and that are managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

And then you can go through chunks of forests that are managed by the indigenous communities.

And the way in which forests are managed is very different.

Yeah.

And different in a way that one is the right way to do it and the other two aren't.

Yeah, yeah.

The other two.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is land that was all stolen from its indigenous stewards by means of genocide and we should give it back.

And it's not just a matter of that's

the right thing to say, but also that is the right way to preserve those lands.

Yeah.

The people who have been in stewardship of those lands so much longer than America has been a country.

Anyway, watch the, I think, 1991 movie Clear Cut, which is set in Canada, but a fucking banger.

Real good movie.

Check it out.

I don't know if those two things are compatible.

What?

Canada and a banger.

Yeah.

Hey, come on.

It's good.

Okay.

I'll watch it.

It's about an Indigenous activist and a white lawyer.

Okay.

You don't like Cronin with a white gay?

What's wrong with him

to be?

Because he's fighting this Canadian

movies.

It's really good.

It's about this

liberal white lawyer who's fighting a logging company and this Indigenous activist who

takes him and kidnaps the head of the logging company and takes them into the forest.

And that's all I'll tell you about the movie.

It is a fucking banger.

I don't go on this podcast and make fun of your home country, Jake.

Garrison Davis, that is nutty.

You will all, by the way, like Clearcut.

Watch that fucking movie.

It wish

Tariff Talk.

Yeah.

Jesus.

Well, movie tariff.

Look at that for a fucking segue.

Yeah.

Okay, f ⁇ ing lightning round.

We have We have two pivot points here.

We're going to go for the timber pivot instead of the movie pivot.

Okay.

So lightning round, Trump is imposing a 10% tariff on softwood lumber, a 25% tariff on upholstered furniture,

and 25% tariff on kitchen cabinets and vanities.

IKEA is the thing.

IKEA is over.

The entire Shazlong industry is collapsing in Canada as we speak.

Yeah.

So

this is going to be in effect October 14th.

Get them now.

And then also these tariffs are scheduled to increase at the beginning of next year.

The upholstered furniture tariffs are increasing to 30%, and the kitchen cabinet and vanity tariffs are increasing to 50% at the beginning of next year.

Oh, yeah.

The idea that there's a vanity tariff is very funny to me, like not as a noun, but just like

as a concept.

Yeah.

These are nominally lumber industry tariffs.

I think there's some kind of housing development brain inside of Trump's head rattling around as to why there's suddenly tariffs on vanities and upholstered furniture.

Who knows?

Baffling.

The Canadian government has been attempting to lift the tariffs.

It has not worked.

Negotiations once again failed today, which is October 8th.

Okay, bouncing from that to something that's also very important, well, actually, wait, significantly more important.

So one of the issues with the current government shutdown is the threat to the special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children, which is normally called WIC.

WIC funding is extraordinarily important because it feeds several million people.

And okay, this story is very, very weird because we haven't gotten any direct thing about how this would work outside of just the press secretary saying it, but the press secretary is saying that Trump is going to fund this program with the money from one of the tariff programs.

Yeah.

Now, it is worth noting that this is just very unconstitutional, exceptionally unconstitutional.

Is a violation of the part of the separation of powers where they say that Congress is the thing that levies taxes and decides where the money goes.

But it's also, it's not clear if this is even happening or how it could even remotely happen, but it is being reported.

The WIC has been a program that Trump has been using to push his narrative about the government shut down yeah I think 40% of children are on wick right now like this is an extremely important program it's one of those things where like again there was complete bipartisan support apart aside from complete lunatics until very like you would never have heard like a fuck wick statement um it's done a done a lot of good for a lot of people who need a lot of help i did see a statement from the wick council that basically asserted that like, look, we'd be excited if you would keep us, keep WIC funded, but using tariff money is not a sustainable or like reliable approach to do this.

Just fund it by playing for government programs in the youthful way.

Yeah.

So

the other major tariff news that we have is

basically for the last couple of weeks, Trump has been threatening to impose 100% tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

This was originally supposed to go into effect on October 1st, and then Trump started cutting a bunch of deals with drug manufacturers to exchange sort of lower price agreements.

And also, and this is the major significant element, as we've seen, with the whole bunch of companies that have made deals with Trump, pledges of large-scale investments in U.S.

manufacturing and production.

These tariffs have sort of been staved off.

And the administration is now saying that they won't do it because they don't need to, because they have reached agreements with drug companies.

Pfizer was the first major company to sign a deal.

This has been part of an initiative called Trump RX,

which is supposedly coming in 2026.

Man.

Yeah.

And the plan is to have direct-to-consumer drug sales by forcing these companies to give the U.S.

most favored nation status.

which like basically the the the thrust of this is giving specifically this Trump RX thing the prices that these drug companies charge to undeveloped countries.

However, comma, and this is extremely important and not being reported very much, Trump RX, assuming this program comes into being, you can't use insurance on it.

You can only buy drugs off there.

You would only be able to buy drugs off there without insurance.

So it probably doesn't lower your drug costs at all if you have really any kind of insurance.

Certainly it lowers the cost your insurance company has to pay, right?

Like if you're insured badly.

Yeah, right.

You know, and so the actual good that this could even potentially do, I think is very, very limited.

Yeah.

But that's, that's sort of what's going on.

This is the part of the initiative, if you see people talking about how he's lowering drug prices, it's specifically for this weird Trump RX thing, which again, you can't use insurance to use.

So there's been a few other tariffs that he's talked about.

And I kind of want to set a spectrum of how real a tariff is because

there's a whole bunch of different kinds of tariffs that Trump announces and then nothing happens on.

So for example, you can have a kind of tariff where he announces it on social media, but there's no date, right?

So, the 100% tariff on foreign-made movies, this is the second time he's talked about it.

There's never been a date attached to it.

It seems to be something that he tweets about and then forgets about.

It never happens.

On the more real end, there are tariffs like the one that is currently being proposed, 25% tariff on heavy trucks.

That's supposed to go into effect on November 1st, but there is no executive order.

So, that one we can't treat as real as, for example, the lumber tariffs, which have an executive order.

Although also, again, you have to wait for these to actually go into effect, which would be category sort of three and four are, is there an executive order?

And has the date of the executive order doing the thing passed?

So we have a couple of floating tariffs from there.

We have those 25% tariffs on heavy trucks, which is supposed to go into effect November 1st, assuming there's an executive order.

We have this film tariff.

Which is the scariest tariff by far.

100% tariffs on foreign-made films.

What are they tariffing that?

Time to hoist the black flag again, my friend.

No one has any idea what that is.

We have no claims.

Absolutely not.

We have no clue how this is going to be.

No details.

Baffled.

Okay.

He just said 100% on foreign films.

Okay.

Sick.

Good.

I'm glad that everyone's equally clear on that.

Get back to torrenting, people.

I think the final thing we should talk about is so on November 5th, the Supreme Court is going to start hearing the case against a bunch of the tariffs that Trump has been doing.

We've talked about this before.

The Trump administration has also stated that even if these tariffs are found unconstitutional, they are going to continue to apply tariffs themselves using other laws.

That's good.

Even if they lose the Supreme Court case, that doesn't mean that all the tariffs are suddenly just not going to happen anymore.

He will probably try to re-impose a whole bunch of them under different tariff authority and we'll go through this whole process again.

But yeah,

this has been tariff talk.

Great.

Okay, so I have a fundraiser for you.

We're doing Bhuket again.

Bhuket Tan is an Alevi Kurdish woman because

of her beliefs and her ethnicity.

She found it very hard to live in Turkey.

We've documented Turkey and Kurdish people's relations quite a lot on this podcast.

She is now living in Southern California and she needs to raise money to pay her lawyer for her asylum case.

And the website for that is gofundme.com/slash f slash urgent hyphen help hyphen for hyphen bouquet b u k e t s hyphen asylum hyphen case or you can just click it in the show notes.

If you would like to contact us with a news tip, you can do so by emailing coolzone tips at proton.me.

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So if that is something that is a concern for you, that is how you can reach out.

We reported someone's news.

We reported the news.

Yeah,

we reported the news.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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