It Could Happen Here Weekly 175

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From the producers who brought you Princess of South Beach comes a new podcast, The Setup. The Setup follows a lonely museum curator, but when the perfect man walks into his life...
Well, I guess I'm saying I like you. You like me? He actually is too good to be true.
This is a con. I'm conning you to get the Dalala painting.
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Call Zone Media. 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. Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the world falling apart.
And it was mostly just about that at the minute. But we do sometimes talk about how to put it back together as well.
Joining me today is Garrison Davis. Hi, Garrison.
Hello. Hi.
And we're on the falling apart theme since we've been on that one quite a lot the last few weeks. But today we are specifically talking about what I'm going to call the rendition of non-US nationals by the Trump administration over the last week.
The reason I'm calling it, I guess, rendition and not deportation is because these people aren't being sent back to the countries they're from they're being sent to el salvador specifically they're being sent to a place called secot so the trump administration has attempted to send 300 people who it accuses of being members of a foreign terrorist organization we're going to get to how they get there under the Alien Enemies Act to a prison in El Salvador, where they will be detained for a year at the expense of the United States. And we're going to break down exactly how we got there over the course of this episode.
So the Trump administration has accused these people of being members of two different gangs. The majority of them, there's 238 people, are accused of being members of Tren de Aragua.
Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration recently declared a foreign terrorist organization. Another 23 it's accusing of being members of MS-13, which is a Salvadorian gang.

The Trump administration used something called the Alien Enemies Act to remove these people.

The Alien Enemies Act, we actually spoke about it in November of last year when we were looking at

provisions of US law that the Trump administration could use for its mass deportation agenda. This is one we spoke about.
The Trump administration in the past has been quite good at finding obscure provisions of the United States law to exclude migrants. You can hear my whole series about Title 42 on that.
That's kind of the paramount example, right? The Alien Enemies Act is a 226-year-old piece of legislation. the last time it was used was to inter japanese people during the second world war right so that's a pretty shameful part of united states history uh and it's great that we're going back there so who are the enemies in this case right it's generally like i should probably point out the alien enemies act is intended for like the people you are at war with.
So if the United States is at war with, let's say, Canada, and there are Canadian citizens in the United States, or people who have dual citizenship with Canada, and those people are individuals within that group are suspected to be spies, or are suspected to be serving the interests of Canada, not the United States, then they can be excluded or detained under the Alien Enemies Act or sent out of the country, as is the case here. And as we saw in this instance, there is very little recourse to appeal, right? This isn't like a deportation hearing or an asylum hearing where you have a lawyer representing you, where you have even a hearing.
These people were rounded up and booted out of the country in very short order. Yeah, and with or without due process, we should not be blackbaking people and sending them to the El Salvador labor prison.
This is like just doing this at all, even with due process, would already be horrifying yeah the fact that they're just doing it like without even any like court process entirely and like trying to like bypass that just adds like another level to an already like horrifying and you know evil and shameful action yeah it's terrible i want to define some of the categories here I want to start with Tren de Aragua. Spanish understanders will notice the word tren, meaning train.
That's because they came out of construction unions who are building trains as part of a Venezuelan infrastructure project in Aragua, which is part of Venezuela. There are other Venezuelan gangs.
Tren del Llano is the other one that springs to mind, which has come from the same place and does have similar names, but just people should understand that they're different organizations. They also have a strong presence of Venezuelan prisons.
They have in the past been accused of doing violence on behalf of the Venezuelan state, but in 2024, Maduro blamed them for the protests after his election. People remember that that election was widely seen as fraudulent, and I covered that in my series on the Darien Gap, if people want to learn more about Venezuelan politics and migration to the United States.
In 2024, Biden named Tren d'Aragua a transnational criminal organization, and then Trump named them a foreign terrorist organization. He labeled several cartels as FTOs as well.

At the time, there's a lot of speculation about why was it to allow for drone strikes or operations. I think we're now seeing that this was part of this larger ploy of deportation.
Yeah, because like, quote unquote, terrorists have even less, quote unquote, rights than, quote unquote, criminals yes right like it's it's like yeah like the it like the triangle of like which which deplorable class has the least amount of rights terrorists are always like the ones with the least yeah and we've been doing that for 20 odd years now with guantanamo bay and renditions to egypt and syria and other places in this case people are being sent to secot which is this prison in el salvador it's sometimes can you spell that yeah c-e-c-o-t uh central secot yeah secot uh i guess uh it stands for terrorism confinement terrorism detention center it is largely referred to as a super prison right it was built in el salvador by bukele It's part of his iron fist would be the way you translate it. It's iron fist policy against gangs and against crime.
And it has been widely condemned for human rights abuses. People are crammed into cells with more than 100 people, but there are fewer bunks than there are prisoners, right? So they can't even all lie down at the same time.
The bunks don't have bedding. They're just flat, like metal sheets.
They're four high, so you have to climb over other people to sleep. For more than 100 prisoners, there are two open toilets.
That's the only access to a bathroom that you have. They might be allowed out for half an hour each day.
They're not allowed to communicate with their families or the outside world.

They're forced to shave their heads, and they all wear white.

The lights are left on all day.

As I said, they're provided with no bedding, no contact with the outside world,

very little access to anything other than standing in that cell.

There's two Bibles in each cell.

It's the only sort of entertainment they're allowed. It just sounds like a torture camp.

Yeah, this is completely inhumane right it's horrific and for a couple of years now bukele has been doing like these media tours of the of sekot like like using it to generate content it's very much designed to generate this image of like this is what will happen to quote unquote what will happen to you if you're quote unquote in a gang. It's sort of been used to promote his image of someone who's taking an iron fist to gangs.
And as we saw when these people were sent to El Salvador, this tendency to use, I don't know what you would call it, incarceration as a way of making content was very much the case here, right? Yeah. I'm going to break for ads.
When we come back, we will be consuming content. That is, people being stripped of their human rights.
And we are back. Garrison, do you want to go ahead and play this? So the tweet in question, the zeet in question, it's by Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, right? Should I read it out? Yeah, I think you should.
I think it's worth noting that this style of propaganda closely mirrors a lot of what DHS and the Trump administration is doing on their official accounts. A lot of the meme-ified content creation format and aesthetics being used to just display torture and deportations and human rights abuses is very common among government accounts in the States right now.
It's pretty horrifying to look at, and this kind of follows suit and is possibly even more bleak yeah but yeah we should read read this whole this whole message and then and then we'll probably skip around on the video and and talk about what we're seeing yeah so i'll just read it obviously you don't understand i'm quoting here directly from him today the first 238 members of the venezuelan criminal organization tren de Aragua arrived in our country. They were immediately transferred to SECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, for a period of one year, parentheses, renewable.
The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us. Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program will help make our prison system self-sustainable.
As of today, it costs $200 million per year. On this occasion, the US has sent us 23 MS-13 members wanted by Salvadorian Justice, including two ringleaders.
One of them is a member of the criminal organization's highest structure. This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS-13, including its former and new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors.
As always, we continue advancing in the fight against organized crime, but this time we are also helping our allies, making our prison system self-sustainable and obtaining vital intelligence to make our country an even safer place, all in a single action. May God bless El Salvador and may God bless the United States.
I should probably just add that the US sent $3 million to pay for these, $6 million, I'm sorry, to pay for the 300 prisoners it intended to send. The zero idleness program is like one of the most sinister things i've like read recently yeah i mean you could pull out of a george orwell or like a old suxley or something right and it wouldn't sound out of place it's even even like you know it's almost cliche now to point like german work camps but like come on yeah i mean come on yeah yeah we're doing it again so yeah we'll probably play a clip of the music and then i'm going to skip around on the video we can just talk about what we're seeing here it's first we have a shot of an airport with three different planes and people getting rounded up and pushed on in single file.
It has this action movie type music, lines of soldiers. So as the people getting loaded on the plane, they're getting forced down.
There's people with guns, police, military, manhandling people,

pushing their heads down,

physically removing clothing.

They're showing their tattoos there, right?

That's when they're pulling up his shirt.

But even the way that they just walk around with these people,

forcing their heads almost like

their concrete as they make them shuffle

along the ground.

Just basic dehumanization. Yeah.
Shows them getting transported onto buses. So this said they're arriving at Sekot now.
Sort of bright white, very sterile facility. Now they're being forced onto their knees, yeah, and shaved.
Getting their beards shaved, heads shaved, getting shackled, all while being forced onto their knees on the ground. Then the cops doing this are all wearing, I guess, balaclavas, I would describe them as, face masks and hats.
Yeah, all of the military and police officials are trying to hide their identity as they publicly display the actions that they're doing when they're shaving and holding people's heads up for the camera. Yeah.
So it's a lot of that kind of stuff. You see them pushing people all in matching white clothes in single file into cells yeah this is the cell so we spoke about before we'll include this link in the uh in the sources it's basically just three minutes of torture porn like that's like that's what that's what they're doing yeah it's it's it's pretty bleak honestly like i don't know what else to say about it besides like it's it's just it's just like channeling pure evil like i like it's it's i there's nothing else to say yeah there's i mean that's i don't know how anyone can watch that and think good so we should talk about how they're identifying these people and we should talk about the process by which they were sent there ice policy says a person can be deemed a gang member if they offer some notes to quote gang membership identification criteria um one of the criteria that they seem to be using in this instance is their tattoos so there are some gangs that have a process of tattooing to enter the gang right ms 13 mara salvas rucha it's what the ms stands for being one of.
These like Mara Central American gangs have tended to use that in the past. This isn't really something that happens with Tren de Aragua, as far as I'm aware of.
Some people, they've pointed to tattoos of trains. In a document that Gare found from the Texas Department of Public Safety, they're pointing to stars as evidence that people were part of Trin de Agua.

As far as I'm aware, Tren de Aragua does not have a policy of tattooing people, specifically because this is a thing that has been used by law enforcement to identify members, right? Like it would be silly to keep doing that once it's become so clear that the state uses that. So the one sort of case that I've seen legal documents on of these people, the one name we have, one of these people who's been sent, is a man named Hersey Reyes Barrios.
He was a footballer, professional footballer in Venezuela, who protested against the Maduro regime, was tortured and detained as a result. I've spoken to probably, I would imagine, thousands of Venezuelan migrants, right? Again, I would like you to listen to my series on the Dallian Gap.
If you haven't, I put a lot into it. All of these people have stories of watching people be shot, the brutal repression of protests, state violence, economic collapse, persecution for supporting the opposition in the country, right? And this is one of those stories.
The criteria that they used to identify him were a tattoo which had a football with a crown over the top and then the word Dios, God in English, underneath. Reyes Barrios' lawyer says that this is an homage to the logo of Real Madrid, his favorite football club.
They have claimed that it's evidence of gang membership. That's what the government is claiming here.
The other criteria that they used is a picture of him throwing up the horns, I guess, which I believe it means I love you in sign language. I'm not sure if that's like an urban legend or if that's the case.
And there are obviously different sign languages. But this is a hand gesture that's especially common in the spanish-speaking world if you're not familiar i have my little finger and my index finger extended and my two other fingers curled up as

if i was making a fist almost like a almost like a spider-man hand symbol i guess sure i'm not

familiar but if you say so to visually reference for people if you were making a little cow like

a bulk with your hands sure you would be doing a a shadow puppeting. It's very common.
Yes, it's a very typical hand symbol. It's a thing that people do when they're taking photos.
I've even seen it when, you know, if I'm working with a photographer and they're snapping photos of large groups of people, people just do it, just like people do the peace sign, you know, it's a thing to do with your hands. Those are two criteria they use.
So I should point out that none of people people just do it like just like people do the peace sign you know it's a thing to do with your hands those are two criteria they use so i should point out that none of these people have been accused or convicted of a crime either in the united states or in el salvador right even if they had been accused of a crime even convicted of a crime the united states is very unclear what legal basis there would be to then detain them in el salvador right like the united states doesn't have a system whereby we can send people to penal colonies at the time of writing this has of course been challenged in court right a district court judge attempted to block the district court judge did block these removals now he actually blocked them before the people had arrived in El Salvador. However, despite this, the planes didn't turn around.
And I'm just going to quote directly from what the judge said here. Quote, any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.
Then it's a little another quote later. This is something you need to make sure is complied with immediately.
This didn't right the planes went from the u.s to honduras honduras to el salvador they didn't stop even when the judge had given this order for them to stop now normally in a legal proceeding such as this right the government or one of the parties may not agree with the findings of the judge and they may choose to appeal it right that's very normal you still comply with the order then appeal it right you don't just keep doing whatever you feel like doing because you don't think the judge was right like that's in theory not how this works now in practice what means does a judge have to force the executive to listen to him i don't know. We're not seeing any of them on display at the minute.
The government has cited various reasons for ignoring the ruling. One of them, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt, claimed that there was, quote, no lawful basis for the ruling.
I'll go back to my previous statement about how you're supposed to appeal things. They also claimed in court that a verbal order is not the same as a written one.
That's not something that's generally understood to be the case. And that because the flights were over international water, the order did not apply.
This was then part of the foreign policy powers reserved to the president. That last one is particularly worrying.
You effectively don't have your rights in in international waters or like humans don't have rights in international waters yeah it's just allowing the u.s government uh or the u.s government trying to say that it's allowed to do whatever it wants uh if the action's being taken or not like immediately on u.s soil or other foreign soil. Yeah.
So we're going to take another break. And when we come back, we will talk about their response to this judge's ruling.
All right. And we are back.
so Tramp's response to this Judge Bosberg's ruling was I'm just going to read this is a uh a true social post aka a truth quote this radical left lunatic of a judge a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama was not elected president m dash-dash. I'm not going to say when it's capitalized, just understand that it's sporadically capitalized in the fashion that Trump likes to do.
He didn't win the popular vote, parentheses by a lot, exclamation mark, comma. He didn't win all seven swing states.
He didn't win 2,750 to 525 counties. He didn't win anything.

I won for many reasons in an overwhelming mandate,

but fighting illegal immigration may have been the number one reason for this historic victory.

I'm just doing what the voters wanted me to do.

This judge, like many of the crooked judges I'm forced to appear before, should be impeached.

We don't want vicious, violent and demented criminals.

Many of them deranged murderers in our country. Make America great again.
Tom Homan, the border czar, also told Fox News, quote, I don't care what the judges think. We made a promise to American people.
The President Trump has made a promise to American people. We're going to make this country safe again.
I wake up every morning loving my job because I work for the greatest president in the history of my life, and we're going to make this

country safe again. I'm proud to be a part of this administration.
We're not stopping. I don't care

what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks.
We're coming. I just love seeing you going

through these protesters just crunching on the apple as their liberal tears just flood the hallway. Tom holman thanks so much for joining the program you got it this is open defiance of the courts right like i don't really know it's it's what we've been talking about the past month on executive disorder how we are just continually like ramping up this clash between the executive branch and the judicial branch the congressional branch branch has already basically given up all of their power.
And yeah, this is like an actual constitutional crisis. Very few people are taking this as seriously as what it should be.
And even the courts seem a little bit tepid to like actually enforce their own power or like try to. Yeah.
I mean, Bozberg mentioned contempt once from what I can find can find on pacer but like obviously these judges i think are somewhat concerned that if they you know they find the government in contempt of court then what happens because if you like yeah if you play your trump card and no one cares and you have no cards left to play it's it's kind of odd how the judges themselves are seemingly afraid of like pushing this constitutional crisis into like explicit territory right to be like what if we do the thing that then makes it clear to everyone else like what's happening we have no power like like we actually have like like it is just authoritarianism via the executive branch yeah it's almost like they're trying to like backpedal from this like very obvious accelerationist push of like no we need to actually test test this out yeah because we need to know where we're at like and they're scared to because they're scared what if what if that testing causes like the trump side to win yeah but they're already winning in the in the absence of the testing exactly and the the problem is, is that in absence of that, you are just giving up and letting Trump win.

After Trump called to impeach the quote-unquote radical leftist lunatic of a judge who tried to temporarily halt the deportation of these 300 Venezuelan immigrants, Chief Justice John Roberts made a rare public statement rebuking calls to impeach judges for rulings that don't align with political agendas. And that's as far as they're going right now.
They're making rare public statements saying you probably shouldn't call to impeach a judge. Meanwhile, Musk complains on Twitter.com about a quote-unquote judicial coup, and mistakenly calls for 60 senators to impeach leftist judges now of course the senate does not do impeachments the house does and the senate requires 67 votes to convict it and remove someone from office once impeached so ha ha we got you we got you you made a mistake we win notes uh yeah it's where we're at right now with this case we're recording this on thursday bosberg gave them a 24-hour extension to provide details about the flights the government has suggested that it might claim that these are state secrets despite the fact that it has widely publicized these flights including in the video that we discussed yeah they're turning these into fucking like tiktok instagram real hype videos they're not state secrets you're publicly just you're publicly displaying these to show that these people are not human yeah like you're trying to scare everyone into saying we decide if you are a person or not and if you're not a person this is what we can do we can do whatever we want to you yeah it be noted as well there is actually a process in u.s law through the alien terrorist removal court for the expedited removal of terrorist suspects without revealing classified information publicly in fact bosberg was chief judge on that court for five years jesus christ but we are not using that process we're using the alien enemies act instead yeah, this is a new exciting territory.
On Monday, so that's the day that you're hearing this,

a panel of judges from the district court in DC

will hear an appeal by the United States government

against Bozberg's tentative restraining order,

the one that it didn't obey anyway.

So we will have more on this and we will keep updating you on this and suffice it to say that i guess again this is a constitutional crisis like this is what it looks like i don't i don't know if people expect like fireworks to go off or like some confetti to drop and it to be like separation of powers is gone but if the government can ignore the courts and that is what is happening so i guess we will see in the meantime these people uh many of whom one of them was a musician one of them was a football player right like i've interviewed hundreds if not thousands of venousuelan migrants and most of them it will you to hear, are just people who don't want to live with the boot of the state on their neck. People who want to make a decent living for their families.
For what it's worth, none of the Venezuelan migrants I met in the Dallian Gap are in the United States or have come to the United States for my knowledge. Just for people who are wondering how those stories kind of resolve.
They resolve with people currently stuck in Mexico in pretty terrible conditions, either working for very little or unable to work at all and trying to work out what to do. It's pretty bleak for them.
It's pretty bleak for us too, if this is the direction that things are going. I don't know if I have much more to say.
No, i don't know what else there is to say about them just bypassing the courts to do a complete authoritarian over grab so that they can send hundreds of people to essentially like a labor camp black site in a different country for an unknown period of time without any legal process like it's and to be clear not all of these people even entered the united states between ports of entry which has been charged as a misdemeanor that generally isn't charged uh some of them came with the cbp1 the fucking app the thing you're supposed to do these are not proven criminals like these these these are just people some of whom who immigrated legally and have been detained by ice and know, shipped off to a like torture labor prison in a different country where they're going to stay for at least a year in parenthesis, renewable. So like indefinitely, like it's like, they can be forced to labor for the rest of their lives.
A thing that has happened before in human history. like if you're like history understanders should look at what's happening be like oh we're doing that again huh and the only way that this ends is with people getting angry enough to start doing something about it and i feel like we are we're so like everyone's become so complacent that it's even hard to get people to like care or like hear about this sort of thing from happening yeah and you don't have to be like i want to phrase this in radical terms but you don't have to be like anywhere on the left to understand that like this is an assault on basic human rights it's assault on the foundational principles of the united states government and everyone should be concerned about this you shouldn't be a left right issue this should be like a right wrong issue and so hopefully you can all have some talks with your family this week i don't know like um i think it's really important to push back on the idea that these people have done any crimes because they have not that they have been convicted or found using any reasonable degree of evidence to be members of gangs like Tren de Aragua.
And even if they have been convicted, they should not be sent to the El Salvador torture labor camp. But the fact that they're not even convicted, these are just random, in some cases like random Venezuelan men who have been rounded up for the crime of having tattoos for the most part.
Fucking horrifying. It is petrifying.
Yeah. It's happening.
Like I happening like it is happening here every day we're getting closer to the cool zone as more and more people start taking this situation seriously yeah um so yeah take it seriously uh you know advocate for these people best of luck and uh if you want to email us you can do at it at coolzonetipsatproton.me.

That's an encrypted email address,

but it's only encrypted end-to-end.

If you also send from an encrypted email address,

do your due diligence,

and yeah, send us tips if you have tips,

ideas if you have ideas,

and we will be back tomorrow

with more things that are happening here.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about bad things. Usually, I don't know, this is mostly a bad things episode.
I am your host Mia Wong and one of the kind of things we've emphasized on the show a lot is that a lot of the structure of the kind of open fascism that we're seeing now is stuff that was put in place under liberal administrations and its practices that are carried out by democrats and one of the biggest ones of those and this is something that i think you can trace the violence here and you can trace the politics that inspired directly to how we got to trump being in power is the just continuous crisis in the u.s of governments doing sweeps of encampments of unhoused people and to talk about really one of the most horrifying things that happens regularly in a country of just unhinged and hideous horror is emma who does advocacy work for unhoused and disabled people in alameda county and sat, who does support drink sweeps in Oakland when yeah, this fucking unhinged shit happens. So both of you two, welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having us. Yeah.
Thank you. Appreciate the chance to talk with you.
Yeah. I always want to say that I'm excited and like, it is true.
However, I wish I ran a podcast that was about like good things so that I could talk to people. It wasn't like, it wasn't me being like, yeah, I'm excited to talk about like the worst thing that's being happened.
So I, I, I think a place to start on this is when we talk about what a sweep actually is on a physical level of what happens, because I think people really don't have a sense of that yeah yeah I think Safia maybe you want to take this one yeah I'm happy to take this one yeah thank you I feel like first of all before I even go into it yes I think a lot of people who have never experienced a sweep or don't have loved ones who have been swept I think a lot of people have no idea what a sweep actually consists of, even if in a general sense they feel that it's a bad thing or a wrong thing. And I think part of that is deliberate.
Sweeps usually happen during business hours, during nine to five hours, because at least in Oakland, they're conducted by the Department of Public Works, they're city employees, they work nine to 5. So except in cases where they work overtime or when the city uses loopholes to get around posting notice and ends up doing a sweep on the weekend, they're usually happening when a lot of middle-class housed folks are at work and not out and about seeing what's going on.
So, a sweep, and I'm primarily talking in the context of Oakland, California, but I think it's safe to assume that these operate in similar ways around the country. Generally, what'll happen is you, let's say you're living in an encampment, a sweep has been posted in Oakland.
There is policy that states that you're supposed to have received at least a week's notice. However, a lot of people don't receive this notice, so you might not even know that it's happening.
You might wake up at around 9am to a bunch of heavy machinery, pulling up, dump truck, small bulldozers, other types of sort of like heavy equipment. And then you'll have somebody from the city administration, like a city administrator's assistant, going around announcing that the city of Oakland is there, you know, making noise at your tent or your car or wherever you're staying, saying, hey, this encampment is being closed down, you have to be out of here.
they're usually our representatives of the city's contracted outreach organization called Operation

Dignity. They're supposed to be there.
Very rarely do they actually have a referral for

somewhere to go. They'll basically just be like, hey, do you want services? They won't usually specify what the services are.
They'll just show up and be like, hey, do you want services? If you say yes or have questions about what services are available, they may give you a sort of very vague rundown of whatever might be available that day because they don't usually even find out what openings are available until 10 a.m on any given day. So at the time that they roll up, they usually don't even know what's available yet.
So it kind of progresses from there. I mean, every sweep is a little different, but the commonality between all of them is that what the city is there to do is essentially to erase all signs that anybody ever lived there.
So either you are able to pack as much stuff as you can and get it out of the eviction zone before the city decides that it's your turn to be targeted, or all of your stuff ends up in the back of a dump truck. There are other sort of specific pieces of policy and operational things that can vary from time to time.
Like, for example, they're supposed to follow a bag and tag policy, which means that they're expected to store up to a cubic yard of somebody's belongings for 90 days at a storage location in East Oakland. They rarely do this unless hounded to do so.
And most of the time time the actual process of going back and reclaiming your belongings from that location has enough barriers that almost nobody ever manages to do it yeah so so to just make this clear the thing that they're doing is they show up and they fucking destroy all your property yep like the thing that it most closely resembles is like we're doing our own miniature ethnic cleansings like

that's just like what that is yep yes and every suite there are at least several police you know depending on the size of the suite they can be even more and so there is a very real threat of police violence, like underlying every single encampment suite.

And so there is a very real threat of police violence, like underlying every single encampment suite. And so the suite that Oakland, the suite practices that Oakland has set up are like very kind of odd.
And they are associated with different like lawsuits that have occurred in the past couple of actually since the 70s but so there are certain requirements that the city of oakland is obligated to follow and like certain provisions and offers that like homeless people are technically supposed to be receiving and for a bunch of complicated reasons like rarely ever are so for instance like the bag and tag policy that uh satya was just discussing like dave recently somebody did a pra request to see whether or not to sit he was actually following faithfully following that policy and i think in like over a year there were i believe eight bagging tags that were registered in the city system and that was in that same period there were like well over a hundred sweeps you know i don't have the exact number on me but um or yeah actually 537 uh closure two instances of storing property so you know that's people's their whole lives all their possessions like um like precious items that they they're able to hang on to are just yeah destroyed and they never see them again and i would also add to um the piece around like the quote like offer of services like that's also something written into their policy that they're supposed to be connecting people to housing ahead of sweeps and that's what they use to continually justify the way that they operate is that in for example city council meetings and homelessness commission meetings where city admin is questioned on their procedures because they get complaints like the homeless commission gets complaints constantly of people being mistreated losing all their belongings never getting referred to housing and so forth and the justification that's constantly used is like, we're offering people services every time and they just refuse them. And I think that that is pretty much the number one mythology that is continuing to spur a lot of the pro-sweep discourse in Oakland specifically, and I'm sure in other parts of the country as well.
And people are not, to be clear, most most of the time people are not actually being offered services it's just not happening yeah yeah this is a national discourse you hear this all the time you know i think a lot of it kind of is concentrated in in the most unhinged like tech sectors in the bay but like you hear like officially elon musk has talked about like oh there's like there's like a homeless industrial complex and like all of these people are just like they want to live on the street and like they're like turning down houses all the time and it's just like it's so it's so completely unmoored from reality but what's funny is i've actually used the term homeless industrial complex myself i didn't know that was hilarious there is a homeless. It's just that the people making money off of it are the people who are perpetrating the sweeps.
The reason that they're not actually putting forth real solutions that will get people into safe shelter and housing is because they're the ones benefiting from the perpetuation of these economic conditions. Yeah, there's so many things that I want to pick up on.
But I guess, just on that point, specifically, there was an audit into California's spending on homelessness. I believe it was over a period of seven years, and it showed that there was $24 billion spent on grants to nonprofits or cities to provide people with different services that are kind of designed around homelessness and providing housing or legal services.
Like there's a whole range of things that's out there. But a lot of the time, these are the only options that are available to people and they tend to produce less than stellar results.
So out of the $24 billion that was allocated to help homeless people in that same period of time, homelessness in California just skyrocketed. So rates of homelessness increased while this money was getting pumped into the pockets of the bank accounts of landlords and developers.
It is an issue that people on every side of the political compass, like they like to use this point to their own ends, right? So Elon Musk talks about it, and people on the left will talk about it. But I think the experience that people on the street have is very different than any of these narratives that you tend to hear

in the media.

Yes, unfortunately, we need to take an ad break.

I don't have a good transition here. I don't know.
We'll move from one set of horrors to a slightly different set of horrors and come back to the first set of horrors. all of this money is being like dedicated to these programs and homelessness is only rising i think like one thing that i've heard before that's a kind of useful way to think about this kind of government spending is if homeless people would be better off if you just gave them the money directly, you know, then that kind of way, it's really hard to justify these programs when that can't be said of them, you know? And I think the thing that you pointed out, Emma, about the fact that we have huge amounts of money allegedly being spent on homelessness abatement or homeless services at the same time that homelessness is skyrocketing is really not an accident because what that money is really being spent on is to fuel exactly what is it like the homeless industrial complex.
There's a reason that most of that money is going into the pockets of landlords and developers and then sort of like these sort of large like nonprofit-profit almost like conglomerates of like service providers and it's because the primary point of homelessness services as it exists in this country is not to get homeless people into housing it's to line the pockets of the people that are making the most money off of the real estate market anyway. And so because of that, it is not an accident that you see homeless spending and homelessness escalating at the same time.
It's because this is the feedback loop. The way that our economic priorities in this country are structured are such that those two things are going to feed into each other because that money doesn't actually exist to like serve the populations that they say that they're using it to serve what they do get to do is by claiming that that money is going into homelessness abatement when clearly it isn't they then get to spin a narrative where they say oh we've spent all this money but the problem is just worse.
That must mean that it is the fault of unhoused people and that they're choosing this because clearly the services must exist to get them off the street. In reality, that's not the case at all.
Yeah, I think also it's super important for people to understand that these programs, housing programs, shelter programs, they are out there, but they are decoupled from the sweep operations that are occurring, right? So the city of Oakland, they are contracted with a nonprofit, Safia mentioned earlier, called Operation Dignity. And they are required to check in with like encampments that are scheduled to be closed at least a week before the sweep and the purpose of that is to like notify people that it's happening there the city of oakland is required per the terms of this lawsuit back in, I believe, 2019, the Morales lawsuit.
And there was a settlement that resulted in the city being required to provide clear notices whenever they're going to close a site. So yeah, this nonprofit provider is supposed to notify people and try to get them connected with services.
However, the services, for the most part, like housing for people who are unhoused, is largely funded through the federal government and through this very complex and inaccessible system called coordinated entry. The coordinated entry system is not something that the city of Oakland or Operation Dignity, like that is not something that they're providing people with during a suite.
So when the city of Oakland, like for for instance, in one of the commission on homelessness meetings, the city administrator, Harold Duffy, he presented actually in response to a question about somebody's wheelchair being destroyed by public works. Yeah.
He gave this really like roundabout deflecting like answer where he said basically that everyone who is at an encampment at the time of a sweep has like expressly refused services like shelter or housing or whatever. And that like kind of presumes that the city actually has opportunities that they can provide people with, which is just not the case.
The coordinated entry system, it is a program that is first of all, like only people who are disabled can get what's called permanent supportive housing through the program. But also it is in such high demand and is so inadequate to the needs that Alameda County is currently like the situation that we're in.
that the wait list is like thousands of people long and it can take well over a year before someone can get housing through that system so it's just like it's not true they do offer people what are called community cabins which are tough sheds they're not even offering people that they're full they're full yeah that's what they say they offer sorry i didn't mean to cut you off i feel strongly about this so i think it's also worth saying like in terms of uh i feel like that's a really a really useful layout emma in terms of like the way that the system is actually structured for people not to be able to access services i feel like it's also worth pointing out that um just day-to-day on the ground i feel like i feel like i get to see a lot of sort of like minute details and changes in the way that they're operating in response to what their like internal systems actually look like and what we have seen over the last six months to a year is not only this pattern that Emma was talking about of like they're like people are consistently not getting connected with services and then being accused of refusing services just due to the conditions that they're living under but also everything that Oakland has and that approaches like livable transitional housing which is kind of laughable in this case because we can also go into the conditions of the transitional housing programs and shelters in Oakland, which are abysmal. But everything that they have that approaches livable transitional housing is full.
I very rarely, every few weeks maybe, I see one or two people get referred to one of those programs. And far more often, I'll be in a situation, for example, I was at a sweep over near 23rd and Northgate a couple weeks ago.
And I was there when Operation Dignity rolled up. And I heard what they were saying when they were talking to people.
And this one dude was going around talking to folks. And he wasn't even approaching talking about services.
He was approaching being like, hey, I'm just here to let you know that this area is going to be closed down like there's a sweep that's going to be happening so you guys have to be out of here so that was what they led with and then i prompted him because i was there chatting with one of the guys that he was talking to so i prompted him i was like do you have any services to offer and then he was like oh you can go over to saint vincent de paul which is a congregate shelter in in West Oakland with about 40 beds. Big room.
And nobody is guaranteed a spot it's just a room full of cots a lot of people refuse to go there because the conditions are so terrible and they don't feel comfortable or safe sleeping in a room full of a bunch of strangers with no kind of security no guarantee of being able to hold on to their stuff people are only allowed to bring in like a backpack's worth of stuff, I'm pretty sure. And you also have to, it's first come first serve, so you have to line up outside every single day and you are not guaranteed an indoor place to sleep even if you line up outside.
So what we have is a situation where the availability of services varies from day to day. I cannot think of a single sleep in the last year that I have been to and i'm at usually multiple sweeps a week where there were enough guaranteed spots available for every person being swept so the implicit assumption at every single sweep and the operation dignity people know this too like they know this the implicit assumption when they roll up and the assumption that colors even the tenor of all of their conversations that they're having with people is that the majority of people are just going to have to figure out how to pack their shit up and find another place to camp it's the assumption and it's gotten to the point where like od employees will roll up and like i said they won't even necessarily lead with an offer of services they'll lead almost in the hopes that the majority of people already have a place to relocate they'll, do you have a place to go before they offer services or ask if people are interested in services? They'll ask, do you have another spot to move this stuff first? Because what they're hoping to do is eliminate as many people as possible from their list of people that they feel obligated to offer services to because they know they don't fucking have anything.
Yeah, I think it's super important to just emphasize that point. The city is telling the media, they're telling like businesses, anyone that comes to them with problems related to like homelessness or concerns, they're telling them that everyone is being offered shelter and housing.
And it's just not true. And that is reflective in the city's own publicly available data.
So they actually publish a list of all of the encampment suites that they do throughout the year. And the Commission on Homelessness meetings report back to the commission about like service enrollments that they've done through a certain period of time and like from may to september they had enrolled i believe it was 60 people into services like non-specified services and during that period there was approximately 80 sweeps and if you assume there's at least five to ten people at every encampment when they do a sweep and usually it's more that is like nine percent%, 4.5% of people getting enrolled into services.
And of those, maybe a smaller fraction getting into shelter. And when they get into shelter, they just languish there, right? They aren't connected with caseworkers who help them

get through this really convoluted coordinated entry process and like lengthy coordinated

entry process. And so within a few months, they're just right back on the street, you know?

It's just ridiculous. And unfortunately unfortunately because homeless people have very little like i guess you could call it social capital you know the city can get away with a lot of this stuff they do like blatantly illegal things that are against even their own policies and nothing happens.
And I guess maybe we should back up a little bit.

And this... are against even their own policies and nothing happens.

And I guess like,

maybe we should back up a little bit and discuss the city's policy.

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I don't know.

Buy the question mark we are back yeah so yeah let's talk about I think what the city's policies are supposed to be versus like what they're actually doing on the ground yeah I mean their policy is their cover your ass technique right their policy is what they refer back to whenever they want to sort of like like emma said if they're interfacing with businesses or house people you know and we have a whole range of house people calling free one one which is basically their tip line for like go you see a homeless person that you don't want to be seeing but there's's a whole range of people. There's people that are actively malicious and violent, and there's literally people going out doing vigilante shit and like destroying homeless people's stuff on their own.
And then you also have people that are well-intentioned and really think the city is offering services. So you have this whole umbrella and the narrative that the city sells to everybody is bolstered by their policy.
The purpose their policy serves is not to inform their actions, but to inform their PR. So I think it would be helpful.
Emma, how do you feel about if you want to kind of give a breakdown of the city's policy, and then I can kind of give a breakdown into what that translates into on the ground? Yeah. So this is like, it's kind of a complicated situation, but the city has what they call their encampment management policy.

And it was initially passed in, I believe, 2020, but it's gone through, like, several evolutions over the past 10 years or so. And it is related to different Supreme Court cases and the settlement that I mentioned earlier.

So this policy, it provides certain very limited protections for people who are homeless in the city limits. The city is required by this policy to offer shelter.
I believe it's a week for any person who's like subject to one of their encampment closures. And also we mentioned the bag and tag policy.
So if somebody, you know, they are evicted and they move somewhere outside with a tent, they bring all of their possessions with them. They are provided with a, I believe, three foot by three foot, like, storage space in this facility that is super inaccessible and kind of like like I don't even know if it's actually real to be honest because it's just like nobody ever I've never heard of anybody actually like getting their stuff stored and getting back but technically that is a possibility however the city will only hold on to it for so long before they throw it away.
And then the last protection or provision is the city was, until recently, supposed to provide people with shelter.

So a few different Supreme Court cases are behind that provision specifically.

And I think a lot of cities kind of had a similar policy framework that they were following until the grants passed ruling and I guess like maybe we don't need to get into that too much but basically the the whole idea of that policy was like if somebody is outside living outside and the city sweetseps them they have to provide them with some kind of alternative accommodation because according to like the ninth district court it was considered like cruel and unusual punishment to uh penalize somebody for being homeless um without you know offering them some kind of temporary accommodations. And so that was more or less the city's nominal framework for several years basically.
And the degree to which they actually followed these policies, they really didn't, except for in certain situations where there are, for instance, legal advocates who will file injunctions to stop the city from doing a sweep on the basis of failure failure to provide an alternative accommodation and typically those arise when there is a very large encampment clearing operation that is scheduled and a contentious issue you know a lot of the time for instance there'll be people staying on city or like california state land and the city will like force them to move because of some development project that they're planning to do and so in those situations when the media has kind of narrowed their their focus and begun like discussing some of this stuff in the local press then like something like that became possible but after the grants passed ruling this past year the city was no longer like obligated under federal law to follow those policies and in September of last year, the late mayor,

Shang Tao, she issued an executive order that more or less just totally rendered that policy framework irrelevant. So she put forth a new framework that allows the city to sweep encampments under a tiered system of what are called emergency suites.
So if, for instance, the encampment is blocking a roadway or a sidewalk, then it is a hazard to the public, quote unquote. Or if somebody has a tent that is up against a building of some sort, it's a fire hazard.
And so in this tiered system, there's different levels of safety hazards hazards that they're doing now. And basically what that looks like is like a fire marshal and the city administrator will convene after somebody calls in a complaint about somebody that's staying outside by their business.
And with the fire hazard one, I believe that they can just sweep without any prior notice whereas the other two there is some like level of notice that they're technically required to provide but yeah so the shelter provisions and the notice and storage like it they're technically still supposed to follow that by their own city resolution. But there is this provision that, like, if, for instance, they issue somebody, like, a no or a one-hour notice to leave because of, like, a fire hazard and, like, advocates can't make it there because they don't really know, nobody knows it's happening, then the city can just do that and not offer people anything, right? So these policies have the effect of disempowering our ability to respond to like a scheduled operation, then the city can really just do whatever they want because nobody's watching what they're doing.
I guess we can, I think we can take this here towards something I think would probably be good to start closing on, which is like, what can people actually do about this? First of all, I think listening to all of this, it can be really easy to feel disempowered and to feel like, you know, the walls are closing in and there's nothing that we can do.

And that remains not the case. You know, I think people should feel empowered to be able to physically intervene because the most effective way of physically intervening with this kind of violence is to commit to relationship building.
something that I've talked about a lot with sort of like fellow advocates and folks that are kind

of involved in like Sweep's response and crisis response in Oakland is that the one thing that the city cannot take away from us that we have an advantage over them in is relationship building. Part of the reason that, for example, the Operation Dignity employees are so inefficient and so, you know, seemingly bad at their jobs is not just the fact that they don't have anything to offer, but also because everybody on the street knows they're full of shit, because they never show up with anything real.
And addressing housed people in particular, right? Like, one of the things to get out of is sort of like the savior mentality or the guilt mentality of like, oh, like, I don't have any housing to offer. Therefore, I can't do anything.
Like, I can't fix the problem. I can't fix the route.
So I can't do anything. In reality, all you really need to do is to learn to set that mentality aside and show up and like start meeting folks where they're at, start meeting your neighbors where they're at, start building relationships.
You need to know, like, if you live in a particular neighborhood, think to to yourself i need to know that if any unhoused person within a mile radius of my home was disappeared i would need to i would need to know you know what i mean like i would want to know if that happened so if you go out with that understanding that you're starting to build lifelong relationships with the folks that are living outside in your neighborhood ideally a lot of other of other people in your neighborhood too, you know what I mean? But like, what they're banking on is right now, while they're still trying to use a PR cover for what they're doing, what they're banking on is people not talking to each other, people not finding out about the abuses, people not finding out about the violations, people not being there, and people not having relationships that will remain strong even as they try to physically scatter people's communities. And what you can do to start is start investing in those relationships.
Make sure you know what people's names are. Make sure you would know if somebody's routine was suddenly disrupted.
Hey, that guy used to be on that corner, you know, every couple days out of the week, and now I never see him anymore, what happened to him? And I think you can start there, and there's much more that you can concretely do. I mean, one of the ways that I'm accustomed to showing up at this point is direct on-the-ground sweeps response.
So we're still able to keep track currently of what their schedule is on a weekly basis, more or less. Like, there's definitely operations we don't find out about until after the fact, but the majority of their weekday operations we do still know about ahead of time.
And so we'll show up, we'll make sure we get there before the city does. So like by 8am, ideally, right? Like we show up, talk to people, be like, what do you need? Do you need physical help moving your belongings out of the eviction zone? Do you need to borrow somebody's phone so that you can call somebody who said they were going to come help you? Do you need help pushing or pulling your vehicle? Any number of things really, but just like being willing to show up and ask questions without necessarily knowing what answers you're going to get and being down to follow up and like do aftercare with people and check in on folks and like keep building those relationships.
I think that those are the building blocks of the organizing that we're going to need to be doing in the future. Because, you know, what the city is counting on is that they're going to be able to successfully create a scapegoat, right? They want to create like a faceless, nameless mass of people that they can pin all their problems on and then incarcerate.
And the best thing that we can do is make sure that they can't successfully do that, because we all have relationships to each other. Yeah really appreciate those sentiments yeah and i think like the oakland like advocates doing like eviction defense for people who are living outside it's grown in size and like capacity quite a bit in the past year and And like the city has noticed that.
So they've actually like, they've passed various resolutions and honestly, a lot of their practices and their policies, like their encampment management team, they seem to be like responding to the increasing effectiveness of this response just like network of community defense and and so i think that like all of those things are are so important especially as the trump regime uh starts to eliminate the very like modest social uh safety net that there was. And before we end this conversation, I just want to emphasize that in Oakland, a majority of the people who are homeless and are subject to state violence, They are non-white, mostly black, and are homeless in neighborhoods where they used to be housed.
And so the gentrification that has happened, particularly in West Oakland, and the influxux of high income tech workers that displaced them and moved into their like family homes they are the same people who are calling 3-1-1 to like push the city to displace them again but from a tent or a car this time. And I think it's just so, so important that particularly housed people try to tap into the networks of community defense that exist in their areas.
I'm sure that most cities probably have something comparable to Oakland, but with the measures that we're seeing cities begin to take, such as in Fremont, which is about 30 minutes south of Oakland, where they basically banned or criminalized mutual aid with unhoused people. So you can get $1,000 fine or up to six months in jail for dating and abetting a homeless person.
And that's an extremely vague law. So like giving someone a blanket could fall under this.
So you could be fined or put in jail for giving an unhoused person a blanket in Fremont currently. So it's very important that people try to be aware of their city government, how they're maybe passing anti-homeless measures in their cities and trying to mobilize against that from happening.
I also have one more thing to add to that i'm so sorry just specifically for anybody for anybody thinking about getting involved or organizing strategically around community defense uh sweep defense um whatever that looks like in your particular area i would say first of all especially if you're a house person in this case, like, invest valuable time into getting to know people on an interpersonal level and getting to know people's needs first, instead of falling into the trap of sort of imposing what you might have learned through like other sort of direct action organizing, because this is not that, you know, like, I think, yeah, first of all, just making sure that you're being, you're organizing as being led by the needs of, you know, homeless residents that are expressing what they need to you. But also on top of that, when it comes to this particular draconian waves of legislation that are being passed around like anti-homeless laws and stuff, don't preemptively obey.
you know what I mean? Like, if you live in Fremont, don't preemptively say, ah, fuck, I better stop passing out blankets. Because what we've seen in Oakland with the particular

iterations of anti-homeless legislation that they've passed here is that just because they've passed legislation doesn't mean that they feel confident enforcing it yet. And what you need to do really is step up real hard and show them you can't enforce this the way that you want to.
And they're going to push back. There's going to be this back and forth interplay that we've seen you know for example in oakland with the safe works on ordinance which we can probably get into another time because it's way too much to get into right now i think at this point in the episode but it's a two-way street it's this fight that you have to play to show them just because you've passed this legislation doesn't mean you can enforce it in a particular way you have to give them something to fight against you know what i mean so that's just the other piece yeah yeah and and like and the rest of their policy is absolutely 100 evidence that if if the state doesn't want to follow the law it isn't real but that also means that like if they can't enforce a law like it also effectively ceases to exist that's just the sort of balance of forces here yeah Yeah.
Yeah there is a lawsuit currently against that and it sounds like you know the the city of fremont is probably going to be removing that aiding and abetting clause from the the resolution but because that specific provision is actually like in the city's municipal code as a general provision. So, you know, even if they do remove it, charges could still be brought against somebody.
So like really the entire ordinance needs to be eliminated altogether. Yeah.
I guess, do you have anything else that you want to make sure that you get in before we close this out?

I don't think so.

Nothing that comes to mind.

But yeah, again, I super appreciate you having us on to talk about this. Yeah, shit is rough right now.
I think for me personally, it's been really helpful to direct my energy towards things in my social network in a way that's like constructive and helpful to others so I would definitely like suggest if you're feeling like any despair or like worried about becoming like blackpilled or whatever like yeah just try to tap in and focus on things that are happening in your community. It's good for you and it's good for the people in your community.
Yeah, just seconding that, I think being able to tap in specifically with the types of unhoused organizing and underground economies that exist wherever unhoused people exist and like being able to like tap into that and like you know again like speaking from the perspective of a housed person like really humble yourself and learn from that like you're gonna learn a whole lot more relevant life skills just hanging out in social settings with people in the street than you are in any other area of your life so just go balls to the wall just start hanging out just like spend all your time loitering like just that's that's where we need to be right now is loitering in the street that's where the organizing is happening so yes reclaim the space oh yeah this has been nicked happen here go loiter on street corners and make the state's life miserable until it cannot do the things it is doing right now.

oh welcome to it could happen here a podcast about how it's happened here and it continues to happen here sorry about that but we're not changing the name of the podcast you know because we're not anyway i got james stout with me i got garrison davis with me Woot woot. Huzzah.
So, the past few weeks, myself, as well as probably everyone else on this call, has been getting a lot of questions from listeners via the various social media apps that we damage ourselves by logging into on a much more than needed frequent basis. But one question that's been kind of on a lot of people's minds and something that we've been discussing as like a group is the idea of should you flee the country? Is the party over? Do we need to use the time we have now to get out? The Trump administration is cracking down on a whole bunch of groups of already marginalized people, people with fewer resources, immigrants, people who are here for asylum, trans people, queer people in general.
It's getting pretty scary out there. And the thought crosses your mind, maybe there's somewhere else that's better and this has always been a tough question for us to kind of think about because we don't want to like inspire panic that's not the purpose of what we do here you should try to spread calm when times are bad if you can but the situation politically in the country and in many parts of the world right now is extremely fraught and it does feel closer towards like the bad nightmare scenario than kind of i've ever thought it has before so it's so it's a really tough question yeah and i think what we're going to be doing this episode is just kind of talking about this question and our thoughts around, you know, various responses to this line of thought.
And I guess Robert kind of has a baseline, like kind of quasi answer that I think we can use as a jumping off point. you know if you're someone who is being you know, or in a community of people who are being targeted, you know, you're a naturalized citizen, you're here on a green card, you're trans, you're any kind, any of the many different groups of people that are being targeted right now, and you have the opportunity to leave, and you think that that's the right thing for you,

then you should do it.

You shouldn't feel bad about it.

You know, if you've got a job

that is in demand in other countries

and you know the process

and can start the process

to like get residency somewhere else

and work somewhere else

and, you know, make your life work that way,

then I don't think you should feel bad about doing that

if that's what you decide is the right thing for you. That said, it's not, it's just simply not going to be a realistic possibility for most people.
What is more realistic for a lot of people is, for example, moving from states where the risk is higher to states where maybe the risk is lower. Hard to say how long the risk will be lower, you know, but I, you know, I certainly, that's more achievable for a lot of people than getting set up in a foreign country, as James will talk about.
If your hope is just, I'm going to try to go somewhere else like Europe or whatever as an asylum seeker, as again, James will go into more detail on life ain't easy for asylum seekers. And that's not really, again, it may not be nearly as much of an option as you think that it is right now.
I, you know, had to go through kind of my own process after the election of like, well, am I going to like, you know, get my finances in order and move to another country and basically try to like pay my way into getting a visa somewhere like in Spain, which is an option for someone like me. And I came came to the conclusion that like nah you know if the worst case thing happens i'd rather like die here or or whatever it's just not worth it you know to try to get out so i'm committing to trying to like hold the line here with everybody basically that i love in the world because like what else are you gonna do you like I will just say that, you know, I probably have met more asylum seekers than most people you know.
And it is one of the more miserable fates available to a human. It will, if large numbers of people start leaving the US, only get worse.
If you're someone who's a US citizen, you have probably not experienced much in the way of like strict immigration enforcement if you have traveled around the world right you have one of the more high value passports in the world you can you can go almost anywhere with a visa or in many cases without a visa seeking asylum is an extremely different process if you think you're just going to get on a flight and leave and stay somewhere like understand that many countries will probably begin to require reciprocal visas with the united states soon if we continue our current sort of pathway with a more isolationist immigration policy and you'll have to get that visa and then you know if you overstay you will be subject to enforcement the sense of permanence that you enjoy here might never be something you enjoy again. And that's just if you're able to fly somewhere and say you try and overstay a visa or you try and apply for asylum.
I have people I've met in every facet of my life. I know guys who I met as a bike racer who have applied for asylum guys i met

on a bike race who are staying on that barge in the uk um it is it is a miserable fate and i think that i'm not saying don't do it i'm saying that you need to understand that it is highly unpleasant and it strips you of all dignity and in some places it strips people of like their lives right people die migrating it's also like incredibly expensive to do the things that migrants do because that everyone is trying to make a buck off them right i was just talking on another podcast about how the the journey that people took up through the dictatorian gap who tried to come to the united states it would have cost them way less just to fly but they couldn't because they couldn't get the visas right that doesn't mean like if you you know if you have a historical right to citizenship through various uh you know certain people have rights to spanish citizenship or german citizenship or irish irish is one that many people have access to then yeah yeah why not why not you know if you have the financial resources why not try and see where that will go why not begin pursuing that Totally. Yeah, sure.
I think becoming a dual citizen if you have the financial resources absolutely why not try and see where that will go why not begin pursuing that totally yeah sure i think becoming a dual citizen if you have the capability to is a fantastic idea that i will like never dissuade someone from no i would go so far as to say even if you plan to stay here if you have the ability to get dual citizenship you should be pursuing that right now absolutely like is it something that you should do it it's uh often not hideously expensive uh and it's something that that might be yeah you have options and options are good yeah i am very hesitant to like openly call for like now is the time to leave the country i do not feel comfortable saying that for a number of reasons like some of them are more political, as in I don't really subscribe to a politics of escape. Even the idea of fleeing states, I feel a little bit iffy about.
Now, there's certainly a lot of cases where families are trying to move outside states that have more restricted access to trans healthcare for minors towards more friendly states, which I totally understand. But I have greatly enjoyed getting to know a whole bunch of trans people in the South, and a whole bunch of trans people here are not willing to leave their home.
This is their home, and it always will be, and they're going to stay and fight for it, even as things get harder. And I don't think you should write these people off.
I don't think you should write these places off. These places are still a terrain of battle.
And they're going to be places where trans people can still live and still live fulfilling lives in many cases. And that is worth acknowledging.
It's worth putting effort into. To the point that after the already considering maybe, you know, trying to travel around the country some more.
And after this last election, my line of thought was way more on the side of, I would actually like to spend as much time in Georgia as possible. I would actually want to stay in the South for as much as I can, because this is like not a place that I think people should be walking away from.
And in some ways that does come from like a slightly privileged point of view for multiple reasons. As someone who's white and holds a Canadian passport as well as an American passport, that is, you know, something that I like to have as a back pocket option.
But that's something I'm not like considering like at all. Like I do not want to move to Canada.
All my friends are here. My life is here.
There's certain scenarios where things

get much, much, much worse, even though things are already getting quite bad. But there are

certain scenarios where yes, that passport will come in handy. And that's why I do encourage,

like no matter what, you should see if you have any options to become a citizen in more than one

country. It is a great thing to be.
It's good to not be just tied down to one place. But the process of trying to, you know, immigrate somewhere where you do not have a citizenship is already quite challenging.
And we will probably discuss some more of this later. Because I think there's also a sort of like onion of threat of people when you're thinking about this question,

like which people will be or are currently being targeted the most

and how that kind of affects the options in terms of like relocation

to places viewed as like safer havens.

And I would like to jumpstart that onion of protection discussion

after these messages. We're back and we're talking about onions, which you need to wear around your neck to protect you from evil spirits.
Garrison, that's what you were getting at, right? Yes. Let's wrap this one up.
That's that's done move on to the next topic we're five different onions to drive away the various secret police forces trying to hunt down individuals yes speaking of i guess like the big thing i'm thinking about right now or one of some big things is there's different levels of of scrutiny being placed on individuals currently in the united states one you have like people who are completely undocumented right um you have people who are who are currently here on like valid asylum claims who are about to get those rights like stripped away i'm trying to think of like the the the list of refugees that were allowed under biden that are now like like imminently going to get their stuff stripped away from the Trump administration. I know Venezuelan immigrants are one.
Haitian immigrants are another. Afghan.
But groups that have been able to come here the past few years that are going to be now seen as like quote unquote illegal by the White House and Immigration Customs Enforcement. You then have student visa holders which are are already currently under threat getting visas taken away.
You have people on work visas. You have green card holders.
You even have naturalized citizens. And among just regular citizens, unnaturalists, I guess, people that were born here, you have other factors that could lead to potential hardship based on political affiliation or based on gender and sexuality.

And that's kind of like the bracket breakdown I'm working off of.

So as much as it's dangerous to be a trans-anarchist in the United States,

I think that is fairly different than a Haitian immigrant who's about to get literally hunted down by ICE.

And these people have wildly different realities, wildly different options for how they're gonna like handle this question and handle like the decision of you know preemptively choosing to relocate somewhere else james do you have any kind of thoughts on this like onion i guess yeah i mean i think you described it well right like i think a lot of folks are for the first time finding themselves in that onion at all right and certainly with respect to like immigration enforcement or potentially being forced to leave this country and i think it would be good maybe to to look at folks who have been there for a long time and look at how they've done right because there have been people whose existence was precarious in this country for decades right if maybe we go back to 1994 and operation gatekeeper maybe we go back further whatever i don't care maybe we go back to the operation whose name is also a slur in the 1930s and i'm not going to say i mean and indigenous people here have like for all of amer been... ...been people that, like, exist in a wildly different reality than, like, most U.S.
citizens, right? Yeah, where, yes, this country is predicated on the genocide of indigenous people. Well, and even in the ways that they, like, continue to live here, it's, like, a different world from...
Yeah, like, that genocide is ongoing. Like, it's not a thing that a thing that stopped yeah it's not a historical thing it's the thing that exists as long as this country exists i would look to those people right like you said garrison indigenous communities indigenous people continue to exist in this country despite the best efforts of this country to eradicate them undocumented communities right migrant communities of mixed status have continued to exist for a very long time and like the way that they have got through this is together and that's the way that we will get through this too when there have been threats to migrant communities migrant communities have shown up for each other right they're doing that right now you see groups like union del barrio in san diego right like going around announcing when when there are ice the presence of ice offices in the neighborhood the way that they have gone through it is through other people in positions of precarity showing up for one another and taking care of one another and if that is a new position for you if finding yourself like further along the intersectional matrix of oppression is new for you then like it's scary.
I do understand that that precarity is petrifying. But understand that communities and people have been here for a long time and look at how they've got through it.
I mean, queer communities too, to a degree, have been persecuted in this country for a very long time and have developed ways of not just like existing but also like continuing to center joy and experience joy and not just like live in fear because i think if you live in fear like you've kind of given up to a degree or you've let them win to agree i should say like i do understand that being new to this is petrifying for people and like i don't want to just say like oh you shouldn't be scared be scared or you should look at how migrant communities have taken care of one another. But like now is the time to begin establishing solidarity as well.
So like those communities, which have been precarious for some time, they're not closed spaces, right? Like you can be in solidarity with them and you can learn from them. And I think that now is the time to do that like now is the time to build stronger links if you're really worried about things being really bad in this country and you have good reason to be right like oh yeah shit's fucked up and bullshit yeah it's really fucking bad it's all really bad yeah like you know we're sending people to labor camps if you're scared panicking thinking got to get out of here, I get you.

yeah no i mean i think the thing that you should be doing regardless of who you are is you should

be giving yourself options yeah you should be increasing the amount of options that you have

and like that is something that is never a bad idea that is something that you could never do

too early it's something that you should have already been doing frankly like i've been

advocating for people to get passports include

Thank you. a bad idea.
That is something that you can never do too early. It's something that you should have already been doing, frankly.
I've been advocating for people to get passports, including an American passport, because that does make it easier to leave the country. You should be getting that.
And it's going to be harder, especially if you're trans now, to get a passport that matches what you look like, right? But this is still something I think is worth doing because it gives you an option and you should be increasing the amount of options you have yeah i think yeah it's never a bad thing and like that community structure is an option too right like people showing up for you and you showing up for them that is one of your options don't forget that and like that will also bring you joy and you will feel safer when you like, we're supposed to live in communities. And like, I, you know, I've, I've seen a lot of people in very difficult circumstances.
And one of the Kurdish guys once said to me in the, in the desert, he was like, whatever we do, we do together. And, uh, I thought that was very profound because they were at that time, like dancing around a fire in the midst of what was like an open air concentration camp you know but if you can find a community and you can find a way to continue to experience joy then i promise that things won't be as bad as they seem right now yep within the kurdish freedom movement there's a phrase that is commonly used a slogan you could say i guess um in kurdish you would say means is life.
And we should remember that for whole groups of people, many of whom we've featured here, if they had all just left, they would no longer exist in the way that they exist now. Kurdish people have been oppressed by various states for centuries, Turkish, Iraqi, Iranian, and Syrian.
They've been subject to genocidal violence and they've still remained there right and they've continued to fight against that state oppression and they've created something beautiful today as a result that we can see in Rojava the same is true of the Karen and Kareni people we've spoken to in Myanmar right they they decided to remain rather than leave. And in doing so, they created a culture that was based on resistance and that resisted the ability of the state to exercise a monopoly on violence and to determine their outcomes.
And I think we should look to those examples as we consider, like, what does it mean if the state becomes more hostile here something that like i think i think robert said in our work group chat which thankfully has not been turned into an atlantic article i did invite pete hegseth uh so we'll see if he if he hops in you know he's rejected that'll be good times yeah we've been trying to add the atlantic editor-in-chief for years he is not welcome he's absolutely not welcome fuck that guy we just need him to manufacture consent for bombing another country in the middle east on our podcast it's so funny because it is like that is like the dream of every journalist that you just get added to the entire government's war planning chat and he just uses it to dunk on the trump admin like not to not to get more info on like anything and then he like homers back into the hedge yeah it's it's it's fucking hysterical yeah they could have had four years or maybe not maybe it was only a one-off chat oh yeah no but they would have they would have accidentally invited a different journalist it was going to happen eventually but yeah but something robert said in our chat um is that, if you already had like plans or the ability to move to a different country of your choosing, then yeah, why not? Right? Like, if you already were thinking about moving to Germany, which is very funny to say now, right? But if you already had plans and you had the ability to do that, then sure, that's something that you should consider. If you do not already have pre-existing plans and means, maybe it's not something to put all of your effort into doing right now.
Because that is such a massive undertaking in general, and not everyone has that option, and there's going to be people stuck here. And part of my like my thinking on this is is like i'm in a relatively privileged position i would rather use the sort of benefits and stability that i have to help other people that are going to be living in this country so i'm going to stay here to do that and that's part of kind of my thought process on a personal level do i you know one know, one day maybe want to live off the continent? Yeah.
But that's like for personal reasons, not for political reasons. That's because I think Glasgow looks pretty.
And if you also think Glasgow is pretty and you want to move there, then that's fine. But I guess like the politics of escape, I do find a little bit troubling in some ways.
And I guess I would like to talk about that a little bit more after this ad break. All right, we're back.
Uh, James made a horrible face when I, when I complimented Scotland. What was up with that? It was when you said Glasgow.
Oh, okay. It's just brutal.
Also, Glasgow, not a city that's traditionally aesthetically prized, I guess. Okay, well, that's your opinion, I guess.
Edinburgh is where if I was going to go to Scotland, I'd probably aim at it. I'm not going to live in the Harry Potter town.
Are you kidding me? Oh, it existed before those books. Yeah, that is rude, Garrison.
Don't take that away from Edinburgh. Don't give her that.
All the coffee shops are like fucking wizard themed now. Absolutely not.
You haven't been to Edinburgh. Don't tell me that shit.
I've seen your travel pictures, Robert. They were mostly hard liquor themed.
Okay, that's fair. Edinburgh is a nice city.
Glasgow is a nice city. You can enjoy it.
Stop by Carlisle on your way down where my family are from. My favorite Glasgow fact is that there's a beverage called Buckfast that is 20% alcohol mineral wine made by monks that has as much coffee as a Red Bull.
And in Glasgow, Scotland, for a significant period of time, roughly 1% of all violent crimes were committed with the bottle. Yeah, Bucky is, it's a whole subculture.
Buckfast gets you fucked fast. That's right, folks.
So a term I've used for the past few years to discuss this question of, can you outrun American fascism? Is the politics of escape. And for a while, I really was vocally opposed to this sort of politics because it felt like the entire world was going through a global far-right power grab and no matter where you run you can't really get away from it and and now kind of curiously uh you know some of that some of this is still happening right you can look at the afd in germany but but some of what's happened with this trump administration has almost weakened a degree of like this global far-right power grab.
Like for a long time, it looked like the Conservative Party of Canada was about to just completely take control over the whole country due to like pent up frustration over Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party. And now due to the actions of the Trump administration, the liberals have retaken a significant portion of populist support and are probably going to do a big sweep in the general election that's going to happen, I'm guessing, next month with the new prime minister about to call one.
Which makes sense because he should call one at the peak of support for the Liberal Party after the Conservatives have taken like a 12 to 17 point dip, depending which poll you use. So for a while, I was like, it doesn't even really make sense to flee to Canada because Canada is right on the coattails of America.
Canadian politics are kind of historically about like 10 years delayed from American politics. And now now the new trump administration has kind of thrown a thrown a curveball in this um british politics are always really hard for me to diagnose because all of their parties there are pretty wacky uh in my mind oh yeah um like you know what the tories have been doing has been extremely worrying like the nhs like, like, trans stuff is pretty bad.
Now that the, you know, Labour Party is in, it's hard for me to figure out kind of where the country is going because this Labour Party is a pretty conservative Labour Party. But, like, this idea of, like, being able to outrun American fascism is still something I find, like, unconvincing, I guess.
Like, you can't fully run away from all of these problems and there may be certain people that that it still like makes sense to start making these moves just to start planning for that option right i'm i am i am pro options even if this idea of like total escape uh i still find troubling yeah i don't know is anyone else any kind of thoughts on this

on this uh yeah i mean like as goes to u.s goes the world right and i know but that is changing

but like maybe i think if it gets to the point where large numbers of people are fleeing the

u.s we might see some of that same anti-migrant rhetoric that we've seen in the u.s in even relatively liberal

Canada

the United Kingdom

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I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think some of that same anti-migrant rhetoric that we've seen in the US, in even relatively liberal Canada, the United Kingdom, other anglophone countries, right? Like it's already very hard to immigrate to Australia. It's not the easiest to immigrate to Canada, frankly.
Yeah, I'm not as familiar with the Canadian one. Especially as like an American, unless you have like a job that you need to do in Canada and you're the only one who can do that job or you get a canadian girlfriend and or and that's that makes it slightly easier but still not still not like completely uh easier frankly yeah that is a uh i guess that's the alternative yeah i think like i know like a lot of people who listen to this listen to this because they have a fairly radical politics right or left Or left politics.
Or you're a journalist or you're a federal worker. Yeah, you're looking to steal our stories.
Fuck off, if I may say so. But like, yeah, we've all grown up on the stories of people who stood up for what they believed in, right? And Margaret makes a whole podcast about it, and Robert does on Christmases.
Yep. And, like, there's a reason why they did that.
Like, you know, they... I know that the idea of running away and being safe could be tempting, but, like, if this country gets as bad as it needs to be for people to run away in large numbers, then, like, the world gets markedly less safe.
Oh, yeah. You're going to be running for the rest of your life.
Just look at how much food the U.S. produces, how much medicine.
70% of all of the blood used in every single country's medical system around the world is exported from the United States. Oh, wow.
Yep. That's crazy.
Yeah. And, like, particularly for, particularly for for like u.s citizens right looking looking to flee the people who are going to be able to pull it off are people with pretty pretty extraordinary means in in most cases i'm not i'm not saying all cases but like if if you have the capacity to move from from the united states to germany you're you're probably not poverty line, right? Like this is, this is, this takes a considerable financial investment.
So instead, part of what my opposition to this is that you're essentially abandoning a whole bunch of like the, like most at risk people. A part of this even extends out to like moving from state to state.
I'm obviously in support of free movement. I've traveled around.
I'm going to continue to travel around. I want to see as much of the country and the world as I can.
But another facet of this politics of escape is that something I hear very consistently from my friends in Atlanta, and this is something I can attest to personally, the most amount of vocal transphobia from people on the street that they have faced has not been in atlanta where they live it's been when they're visiting people in seattle or portland like you actually get a lot more like weird anti-queer harassment in seattle which is just just like on like the street level it's bizarre like cities all have different kind of like modes of operation people have different like informal like manners in terms of how how you like behave on the street and it's it is this is something i've definitely actually i've definitely experienced there's there's a lot more like open openness towards like certain types of of like anti-trans harassment in like these like liberal safe havens like quote unquote yeah i've been called slurs on the street way more in portland oregon than i have in atlanta georgia and this is this is another like interesting aspect which i'm not saying atlanta is a quote unquote safer city than seattle if you're trans i'm not saying the vice versa either but this is like just an aspect of like the politics of escape like especially in the in the. There is really no real escape.
There is no mythical safe haven where you can live your free life and frolic through the park and never have to face any kind of hardship or political disenfranchisement. If you still want to relocate somewhere, that's something that you should consider.
And again, create options. But I also do not want to like abandon my friends here, because I just, you know, have a more stable job.
Like I want to be here for them and help them and not in like a patronizing way, but in like a solidarity way. Like that's like really important to me.
And I think of people who are who are thinking about thinking about these same things and running these same questions of if they want to commit to staying in the United States, I think should also make those considerations of which one of your friends is not going to be able to make the same calculation. And frankly, I feel better as a person, and my mental health feels better knowing I'm going to be here with them rather than going to a Berlin nightclub, which does sound fun.
And I still might on vacation. Oh, you definitely need to go to Bergen, Ger.
Oh, yeah, I have. You need to spend three days that feel like about four hours in Bergen.
I am. I'm excited.
I am for the first time planning to leave the continent this year, which is a bit scary uh because re-entering the united states has is uh pretty tricky right now which should also play into your considerations yeah also the general safety of air travel at the moment safety air travel now that we don't have a gay man running the planes uh yeah it turns out he was actually all right at that woke woke was keeping those planes in the in the air you know what kudos kudos to him turns out he was actually alright at that. Woke was keeping those planes in the air.

You know what? Kudos to him.

Turns out he was okay at that job.

But yes, I don't know what I was saying,

but I'm sure it was really important and well thought through

about not abandoning people who maybe don't have the same resources that you do yeah to your point about like coming back to the u.s like understand that like one of the things that migrants deal with even if they get to a place they have some degree of permanence they feel safe there is that they will never be able to go back to where they're from in most cases right that means when someone in their family passes away they can't be there for the funeral that means that when they have a grandchild they have a niece or a nephew something happens in their community and they want to be there to help it's a natural disaster they are just stuck and that's not something to like to discount as something that's not important like that is really hard and if you have a community now especially for trans folks right like i just think that like there are so many places where like like you say garrison where bigotry against trans folks is being more and more normalized so like if you have a community where people where you're experiencing joy every day with the people you're around like leaving that should be something that you really think hard about because that can be hard to find yeah yeah especially in edinburgh because they're all they're all turfs with their in the cafes it's not true just to be clear yeah i mean this is kind of the discussion i wanted to have um i'm sure we all have more thoughts on this that this that we will express very eloquently as soon as we close this recording session. That's how we do it.
But I don't know. This is the type of stuff that we've been thinking about.
I know listeners have been too because you're asking us these questions. It's certainly annoying that we don't have a concise yes or no answer, but there isn't a concise yes or no answer.

I think the most concise one I have is that you should be giving yourself as many options as you can.

If that includes applying for Irish citizenship because your grandfather is Irish, then hey, why not?

Go for it, right?

Ireland's great. Nice country.
You'll like it.

But I am trepidatious, I guess you know public calls to flee the country at this point and kind of the underlying politics and ideology of that uh let alone the kind of the logistical aspects of of trying to relocate to a different country where you are not a citizen and frankly i think there'll be a lot of countries that are not super eager to take American immigrants. I think Canada is typically kind of low-key been one of these places, especially if we're going to go to war with Canada to make it the 51st state, then it might also create some tricky aspects.
Yeah, it could make it harder. But I don't know, if anyone else has any other thoughts, air them now or forever be beholden to angry Reddit comments.
Hmm. Yeah, I don't know.
Please don't burn each other down on Reddit. Like, now is the time to give people a little grace and be kind to other people.
Don't flee to Belgium. Stay away from Belgium at all costs.
I had a nice time in Belgium. What do you have against Belgium? I have a friend in Belgium.

As an Italian,

I think we need to go to war with them again.

You know?

It's what made Caesar great.

It could make us great again.

That's my stance on Belgium.

It's Italian territory.

I stand with the Belgian people. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast trying to figure out why some of the most powerful people in the world want everyone to think that they're gamers it is it is your host me along with me is garrison davis hi i've i've played a video game before i'm not very powerful but i i too have played many several video games see i i wouldn't i wouldn't say several i've played like a few i i many i have played too many, simply too many video games.
So, okay. This is

in some ways kind of a lighter episode because jesus fucking christ everything's really depressing is something going on out there it's all really bad and one of the people who's been making everything really really bad is elon musk who has somehow managed to like piss off the. The PayPal guy? The PayPal guy.

The owner of X.

I've been locked in my gamer cave for the past five months.

I've not left.

I'm just hearing about this now.

Yeah, you might know of him as the guy who paid another guy to play Path of Exile 2 for him.

We will get to that.

See, I don't play those games.

Those games are gay.

I only play Nintendo, Mecha mecha games and uh hell divers 2 like a loser that's that's reasonable that's reasonable those are those are those are fine games oh and sonic oh god okay pushing aside the subject of sonic so okay i want to take a look a bit about why this sort of matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers and i think the place to start here is with the fact that gaming is in 184.3 billion dollar industry todd harris who is an extremely annoying guy is also right, points out that this is more money than TV, movies, and music combined. So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value, right? Something like 3 billion people play video games.
It's mostly mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird

because the actual people who play

these games, again, it's

a lot of mobile games, and

it's also mostly

people who are women and non-white.

And yet, however, comma, when people think

about, like, the gamer TM,

you are not thinking

about that. Yeah, like, as a political

class. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, like, when people say the word gamer,

yeah, you're thinking of a bunch of

Thank you. you are not thinking about that yeah like as a political class yeah yeah you know like when people say the word gamer yeah you're thinking of a bunch of weird incel right-wing dipshits who are white and suck ass and this is in large part because gamergate was sort of the first like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity and obviously this is you know this is a fascist movement now part of the reason this works and we're gonna be getting more into why this sort of works later but part of the reason this works is that this is an extremely large group of people because it's new no one has sort of defined it as a political identity before and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a gamer because this is a relatively new medium which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like treated like movies or some shit or they want it to be sports because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money and then that are taken like quote-unquote more seriously yeah yeah and so the the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people and this is true actually really both on the left as much as it is on the right there are a lot of like sort of political figures i don't know you're sort of like online people who who come out of gaming like i mean h bomber guy i guess as an example like has like Hassan to some extent.
There's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then they sort of like become political. But on the other hand, gaming has always been like a, not always, but has traditionally been an extremely right-wing space.
Oh God, Garrison, I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is. Have I told you the story about Kebab the German? No.
Oh, boy. Okay, so back in the dawn of time, I played a lot of Hearthstone as a kid, and I was like, I wasn't, like, good.
Is that like a resource management type game for, like, gay autistic people? No, this is the World of Warcraft card game. Okay, that's even more embarrassing.
Yeah, really bad, really bad think i think i peaked at like 2k legend north america which like technically speaking is like top like half a percent of players in the world digital collectible card video game come on oh yeah yeah but 2k legend na is like fucking shitter ranks it's bad i was never like good good at it i was just like okay kind of but you know this is like fucking shitter ranks. It's bad.
I was never like good good at it. I was just like okay, kind of.
But you know, this was like a thing that I did growing up. And something I remember is like all of the fucking Hearthstone streamers, and these were like really big streamers, would play music from this guy they called Kebab the German.
And it turns out that his actual name was Remove Kebab because he was a fucking German neo-nazi well many such cases yeah uh for people who like are not aware of of like mid-2010s german fascism remove kebab is like a a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of turkish people in germany so great stuff great stuff this is this was just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in like the 2010s. Now, this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession.
These tech CEOs, like who want to be thought of as gamers. And so the two examples we're going to look at are Sam Bankman-Fried.
And this is really technically on both sides of the political spectrum, right? We're going to look at Sam Bank and so the two examples we're going to look at are sam bankman freed and this is this is really technically on both sides of the political spectrum right we're going to look at sam bank and freed and we're going to look at elon musk our new overlord i guess so we're going to start with sam bankman freed and you know as we go through what's happening here we're going to sort of unravel why it's so important to them to be seen as gamers and and i guess it is important to know like sam bakeman freed like is i guess like he is a gamer in the sense that like he's like addicted to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly yeah he looks the part two no offense yeah yeah before before he was put in prison for 25 years for fraud well probably not anymore he's probably going to get part god maybe we'll see we'll see i don't know crypto vote it's the most valuable voting block now all young americans are too poor to open bank accounts so they put all their money in crypto so now they're gonna vote for whoever makes line go up i'm gonna become the joker so okay the thing about sam making for people who have forgotten who sbf is he is the guy who was the founder of ftx which was like a crypto exchange that was actually effectively a giant scam where he took everyone's money and bet it on the stock market and lost it and you know robert did a did a behind the bastards on him and one of the things that happens constantly is that he's just like always fucking playing video games he's playing this really dog shit game called Storybrooke Parology Meetings he is a League of Legends addict which is like as any gamer will know a person who plays League of Legends all the time like one of the worst categories of people who's ever existed and one of the things that SBF did as a sort of PR thing right was let the author Michael Lewis of Michael Lewis, of The Big Short, we're going to get to Moneyball in a second, Blindside, other books. Reputable financial advice books is what I'm hearing.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
But, you know, a very, very powerful, influential and wealthy American journalist just let him sort of tag along. And Michael Lewis' sort of angle on understanding him, I mean, this is something that like SBF was like, you know, was like projecting, right? In order for this to be the image of him, was him as like the gamer.
And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis, right? Because he just like doesn't understand someone who just has ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't give a shit. So he plays games during meetings.
No one has ever been like this. I have no idea what you mean.
I actually don't play video games during meetings because it is too obvious. I play video games once a week.
That's kind of my limit. Oh god.
This is the one part about Sam Bakken Free that's relatable to me. I play so many video games it is my like anti-depression strategy basically like when i need to not think for a while there's just me of playing actually path of exile 2 one of the games that we're gonna be

fucking talking about today something that i play a lot of i i've done so much fucking gaming like

god i used to play this game called smite which is like a it's like a moba like league of legends

but like third person and i played so much smite that there were pros showing up my casual games

when the zoomer revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute me i'm going to be Thank you. It's like a MOBA, like League of Legends, but like third person.
And I played so much Smite that there were pros showing up my casual games.

When the Zuma revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute me, I'm going to be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable. Like, can't argue with that.
I'll inform the council. I'll get our next folks council meeting.
I'll bring it to the table. That's reasonable.
but you know so so what what what happens with this sort of thing is that is that michael lewis's image of spf becomes as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things his mind must be so unbelievably brilliant yeah totally because he's just like playing fucking video games all the time and and this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do this this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing. And like SPF is a gamer, right?

But like why they make us

part of their cultural image,

which is that a lot of

the traditional media people,

even though gaming is

an enormous industry,

it's extremely profitable

and is enormously

culturally powerful,

it doesn't have

the same kind of

critical culture around it

doesn't exist that you would see

for something like movies.

Or like respectability

in some way.

Yeah.

Except in like the reversed

I'm not going to be a good one. the same kind of critical culture around it doesn't exist that you would see for something like movies.
Or like respectability in some way. Yeah.
Except in like the reversed Sam Bakeman-Fried way where like the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an eccentric genius, right? Like that era of like Silicon Valley guy. Yeah.
That's like, he's so different, right? Like he's not like put together and this like shows how he's like a new and innovative thinker so it's kind of like it's kind of like a double-edged sword in like that specific way yeah well this this is all a feedback loop right because like part of it not being respectable is that someone like michael lewis right who was like as establishment of a journalist as there's ever been these people don't play video games they're one of the few groups of people who just like don't game are these like traditional mainstream sort of access journalists right and so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on and it's just really really easily just sort of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer like you know you like you show a gamer like a league of legends addict and they will instantly be able to just like read this person like a fucking book also by the way gaming addiction like is like kind of a fake thing I'm like mostly joking here but also like league of legends makes you a worse person it simply does you just get mad all the time I know too many league of legends players in my goddamn life holy shit terrible game yeah but arcane though right alright continue god okay we're gonna take an ad when I come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis. Well, I look forward to that.
I love hearing about unique incompetence. So, we are back.
Now, okay, obviously, part of the reason this works, too, know as i've been talking about right like these these really out of touch sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an enormous market right but lewis is in some sense kind of a special case because he is really truly an unbelievably gullible dumbass and to get an of this, I'm going to go into something that Lewis, in theory, understands a lot better, which is sports. So Lewis has written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right? He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're going to be talking about, which we'll get to in a second.
And he wrote The Blind Side, which is another book that they talk about on Behind the Bastards. You can go listen to that but i want to go in on money ball money ball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog othman athletics team invented like baseball metrics and they use sabermetrics to like like build this roster out of nothing that like went to the playoffs and did really well and and like i'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that oakland a's team like whatever i'm not gonna argue about baseball statistics what i will argue about is that one of the characters in in this fucking book right who's one of the sort of like underdog geniuses that like michael lewis loves to find right is this guy named paul podesta can he is he is like one of the main figures in this book he's like he's kind of like an assistant basically.
What baseball team is this? Oh, this is the Oakland Athletics, or now the Las Vegas Athletics or some shit. I don't know.
They moved to Vegas. I don't know what they're called now.
They're called the Athletics now? No, no. They were originally called the Athletics.
I don't know what they're called now. They've always been the...
Well, everyone just calls them the Oakland A's. Well, they've been the A's forever.
But yeah, they've also been stolen. Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team of Oakland.
Oh, see, I was thinking of the football team. Yeah, because I was like, wait a minute.
Didn't Las Vegas steal it? Didn't the Raiders go there too? Yes. Yes, they stole both of them.
That's what I was thinking. And I am more of a baseball head than a foo-tball head.
Yeah, so okay, unfortunately, we're going to be talking about football here. Bummer.
So this guy, right, Paul Podesta is like one of these sort of geniuses. He later goes on to be, it's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched football franchise, the Cleveland Browns.
Now, to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are, my opening statement for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta

is for the Browns over the course of two seasons

going 1-31,

which is a feat of

absolutely sucking shit

that is unrivaled in any other major

American sports. I think until the fucking

moon crashes into the earth,

no one is going to fucking go

1-31 in across two seasons of football again. So so again that is a one in 15 season followed by an owen 16 season it's the second owen 16 season ever unclear how responsible for for this he is but what he is responsible for is the sean watson trade okay it's like mia why the fuck are you talking about this part of this is also like these people are just evil.
Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists mostly, have accused him of sexual assault.
He is like one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which is a league of a lot of people who absolutely fucking suck shit. So that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson, is that he is just really fucking like morally reprehensible right he is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him for a season and Paul Podesta who again is the guy who Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting as like this genius analytics guy decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for Deshaun Watson who've been on the Texans.
And again, like, Garrison, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds. Mia, do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans? It is a team from Houston, Texas.
That's all you need to know about this. And they traded this guy.
Hey, at least it's not Austin.

No offense to our Austin listeners. They fucking traded this guy, right? And Paul Podesta orchestrates this trade.
That is three, it is the worst trade in the history of football. It is three first round picks, two third round picks, and a fourth round pick.
And they hand this guy, who again, I kind of emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right? They hand him 230 million guaranteed dollars, the largest guaranteed salary in the history of the NFL. So, okay, so how does Deshaun Watson, like, again, this guy who's being held up by the guy who, like, is now laundering being a gamer as, like, the great symbol of sort of, like, cultural, like, being a rogue outsider, right? How does Deshaun Watson, his, like, like greatest fucking project do on the field? So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately.
In his second season, in weeks one through five, out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2000, just to start weeks one through five, out of again, 759 quarterbacks, He ranks 753 out of 759 EPA per dropback. 753 out of 759.
They traded three first round picks for this guy. He has a mind boggling, an EPA of negative 0.3, which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get 0.3 less points than an average team would.

How did you trick me into being on a sports episode?

I only agreed to this because I thought it was video games.

Don't worry.

We're almost done with the sports part of it.

I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this,

which is the argument that sports and gaming actually serve very, very similar cultural roles for the right.

Yeah, of course.

Yes.

I understand that.

I can see that.

Yes.

Also, I've always wanted to fucking complain about this on air.

This is the best fucking chance I'm ever going to get.

So, Jesus fucking Christ.

Is this like what I talk about, like movies or something?

Is this?

Yes.

Yes.

This is what it feels like.

Is this what I sound like?

Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you sound like.

So these are the things that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius. And this all comes back to, again, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're picked on by the jock or whatever.
That's the fundamental base of their mythology, that they're oppressed by this. It's just the same masculinity bullshit all the way down, and you can watch the worst people fucking history just trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses by using by using both of these fucking affects so i i want to read something you know in looking at the way that this stuff functions the the way that gaming functions like specifically in in the culture and and you know why these people choose to use gaming as like you know as as the sort of affect they're trying to project into the world.
I want to read something by a friend of the show, Vicky Osterweil, in a piece called Game Boys. Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly administered life in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement.
Consumer choice is a form of control, and unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety. To structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that one wants master to live under current economic conditions, games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non-normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play that point towards a horizon outside of capital's clutches.

games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social

hierarchy they give white men aggrandizing power and vengeance fantasies that modulate their sense

of self-importance under conditions that disempower them, but they are also capable of giving everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism.

This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and fans have found space in and around games despite the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by cis men so i think the important thing here and this is something important to remember both for sandbape and freed and also for the construction of right-wing gaming movements in general and for like what we're going to talk about with elon musk is that gaming is contested ground right as much as we think of gamers as like right wingers right there are a lot of what you would call like traditionally sort of left-looming demographics that play video games and have made spaces here because as much as they are in some ways like this force of discipline that like is something that you learn the kinds of like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that that you know you use for fucking work they're also a a thing that people use to like escape the fucking hell world totally and like i mean i know this right like i am fucking like i am a chinese trans woman who better is better at video games and both the people i'm going to be fucking talking about in this story right like well i heard his Path of Exile character was actually quite advanced. Oh, we're going to talk about the Path of Exile character fucking next.
It's worth mentioning speedrunning, which is a very, very trans genre. Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games.
Yeah, it depends a lot on the genre. Yeah, like competitive fighting games, like, yeah, Melee.
I'm going to gonna briefly mention Sonic Fox who is a black non-binary furry who's like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time incredibly beloved the only person in history ever to beat someone 13 to 0 in a first to 11 absolute legend right but you know these are the people that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so

they can use gaming as a sort of cultural force.

And this functions both in gaming and also fucking in real life. Right now, these people are in power.
And you know who else is in we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics but there's there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming and you know the thing about gaming right is that it is to some extent a tool that people use to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the violence of the gender system, and, like, I am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy Nazi, like, gamer dipshit, right? Yeah, that's why I boot up FF7 remake to stare at Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm feeling sad. But, you know, the problem's happening here right is that like the right like that we're experiencing violence in sort of different ways but it's like the systemic violence from the gender system that is the same system but these people's solution to is to blame it on women right and this is you know i had a conversation with vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from and like i would compare it to like you know lots and lots of people deal with social isolation right and deal with this violence but like you know on the other hand most of us don't become mass shooters most most yeah i would say that's that's true yeah right and so and so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like fuck them like eat shit like i'm sorry you've become nazis like fuck off skill issue in some ways um among other environmental factors but yeah yeah but but also a lot of times these people aren't fucking like they're not dealing with shit at all mostly right i mean like yeah like okay like elon musk's weird insecurity is to some extent because of the gender system right but like also he's the richest man in the world's the most powerful man alive.
He's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived. And he still has the same sense of, like, aggrievement that powers all these people.
And this is, like, one of the key things of, like, the gamer mythos, right? Is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed by, like, jocks or whatever. And now it's been shifted into this.
Not anymore. Yeah, now they're that they're being oppressed by like fucking women and minorities right and and it's actually the people who are actually doing the oppression is now all of the doge nerds at the top of the system now it's it's but we have we've had we've had a we've had a full uno reverso but the thing is just people have always been at the top of the fucking system right and like but but it's this affect in many ways it's this it's this feeling they have of their of them being the ones who are oppressed that like you know made them into the shock troopers that we saw with gamergate um if you're gonna read one vicky oscar all thing and i'm citing her a lot because i think she's done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games which is a field that i feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with like i mean there's been a lot of stuff about working conditions in the games industry which are fucking terrible and it's good but like as a medium there hasn't been anywhere't done much critical shit with like, I mean, there's been a lot of stuff about working conditions in the games industry, which are fucking terrible and it's good.

But like as a medium, there hasn't been any way near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with like film or music. But if you're going to read one thing from her, read a piece called Goon Squad, which is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the really broken state of Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out.
and one of the arguments that she makes

is that these gamers are being

literally being used as scabs and Pinkertons

against people who make video games and you know and this expands out to like more broadly they're literally being used to silence anyone who sort of talks about the problems with like this game that like when cyberpunk 2077 came out it was literally giving people seizures because it was it had just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit in it that they didn't warn anyone about because it was a broken shitty game and you know they're also used for just like anti-queer and like anti-feminist rasping campaigns and that's that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life too and and that gives you an insight into why these people sort of like do this signaling right is that they're also like signaling to their base that like, I am one of you, et cetera, et cetera. Like you should fucking support me for this shit.
Now pivoting a little bit. So when I was first talking about this episode, I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman instead of Sam Bankman freed because like many, yeah, many such cases.
Yeah. Like the, the last, the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scam scammer named sam and it turns out though i looked up sam altman and he has also been doing this like gamers stick thing totally like specifically in interviews with elon musk yeah yeah it's fascinating they're both fucking doing it now and this brings us to the man who has spent the most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently which is elon musk elon musk is like not really a gamer i would say like he sort of plays video games he's a ketamine user he's a twitter power user he is the shadow president um yeah the richest man in the world richest man who's ever lived yeah also he is he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is like you know he's an elite video game player in like multiple games he's obsessed with this he's also uh i believe the term is a meme lord uh if i'm reading this right oh god one of his path of exile two characters i didn't put it in the script because it's actually not the one we're going to talk about but but one of his characters in that game was named Keckius Maximus.
So like this

is the level of mind. That is

one of his favorite names. In his

White House office, he has

a Keckius Maximus portrait

hanging behind his desk.

There's an AI generated image of like

Pepe the Frog and like

Roman Caesar attire.

I hate everything. So yeah,

this is the guy who runs the country now. Oops.
So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at video games. And the preface to everything we're going to get to is that he has actually, he's like for a long time been doing a like I'm a gamer thing.
So his kind of problems, and I think really the origin of the weird paying people to make him look like he's good at video games thing that we're going to get to in a second. This is something that that blue sky user gay dog reminded me of because I forgot he has so many gaming scandals.
I'd forgotten about this one, which is that he at one point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring, which is very difficult game. And he had two different shields equipped, which makes literally no no sense it's like over encumbered like it's okay like the the best explanation i've tried to i figured out for like how bad at this game he is is that posting this build on twitter is the video game equivalent of going like hey look at my fucking sports car and stepping into like the shittiest car you've ever seen and then like slamming the accelerator with the parking brake on.
Hey I love the Mazda Miata. Like that's like the gaming equivalent everyone who looked at it immediately was like this is the dumbest man who has ever lived this man has no idea what the fuck he is doing.
He is just like like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game like Like, just baffling, incomprehensible bullshit. And this was, like, kind of a scandal for him.
It wasn't, like, a huge one, but, like, especially, like, this is one that sort of broke onto the left a lot, and people were giving him shit about it. So, the next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games, he very clearly, like, paid someone else to, like, accomplish some stuff in this game called Diablo 4.
I'm not going to talk about Diablo stuff much, because I'm a Path of Exile player, not a Diablo player. Diablo and Path of Exile are, like, very much the same kind of game, basically.
Like, you click somewhere, and your character goes there, and you click other things, and it does attacks. But famously, like, this year, he pretended to be one of, like, the best Path of Exile 2 players in the world.
And he was doing this on his alt account, which has the handle, it's CyberGamer420, but all the E's are 3's. So it's C-Y-B-3-R-G-A-M-3-R-4-20.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again? It's at C-Y-B-3-R-G-A-M-3-R-420.
So, I think I found something. I think the 420 at the end is actually a reference to Hitler's birthday, April 20th.
God damn it.

So, okay, he claims to have one of the best characters in hardcore,

which is a mode of Path of Exile where if you die once, you get kicked out of it.

So it's very hard.

To prove that he actually did this,

he does a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile

on a Twitter live stream, and it is immediately that like he has no idea what he's doing like it's not just obvious people who play the game i hadn't played path of exile 2 at this point right i had only played the original one like a decade ago like a little bit of it and i took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like this guy has never played this game before like Like, has no idea what he's fucking doing. Like, it was so

unbelievably obvious. Like, he, like, walked past

one of the most valuable currencies in the game, just, like,

walked past it, didn't notice it.

It's, like, staggeringly obvious to anyone who plays

video games. This guy has no idea what the

fuck he's doing. And this actually

explodes on him. And eventually

he's forced to reveal that he paid

someone to level his Path of Exile

2 account, and that he claims that he never claimed

that it was his Path of Exile 2 account.

And this Thank you. he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level his Path of Exile 2 account and that he claims that he never claimed that it was his Path of Exile 2 account and this Jenny Winely has been a real problem for him because it pissed off like the entire gaming scene so you have videos with like millions of views from guys like Asmogold who was like he's a very famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass like is like a a turbo right-winger like spends his time screaming about how like black people in video games is dei and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry and fucking asthma gold is watching this video and being like this guy is a lying piece of shit what the fuck and like everyone fucking reacts like this it's it's it's genuinely wild i've never actually seen people like react to this to like to elon like this and like like again like this is his allies on the right taking one look at this and being like wait this guy's just like lying now what's interesting about about this to is that, like, again, his whole thing here is he's trying to, like, pretend that he's, like, a pro gamer or whatever, but his affect is still largely targeted towards non-gamers in the sense that, like, there's no way...
I mean, okay, I guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of Path of Exile player on a stream using someone else's account but like there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that and a lot of people he talks to about this stuff are people like joe rogan who aren't like gamer tm people right it's like a lot of it's a lot of people who aren't gamers and he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's really on the one hand yeah he is signaling to his sort of fascist base but on the other hand he's trying to use this sort of like cultural cachet of of gaming as like this sort of renegade right-wing phenomena to like launder his reputation except he fucked up because he he you know spent all of this time trying to like pretend to be a gamer but the thing about gamers is that like there is literally an entire genre of video like on youtube that is very very popular that is just like people exposing people who cheat in video games and cheated records of video games and elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap right and that means we got him folks mission accomplished wrap it up we beat elon mus We fucking got him. It's over.
He's been

cast out of civil society

for the high crime of

pretending to play a video game.

He's lost all

respect among

the farthest reaches of the right.

So, what's next?

We have one. He has

one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.

Is this about the one video game he hasn't played?

Which is the funniest Elon Musk gamer story, in my opinion.

Which one are you talking about?

The one that he had to publicly announce that he does not play GTA V.

Oh, that was funny.

I forgot about that.

Because he doesn't like, quote-unquote, doing crime.

And GTA V, quote, required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just couldn't do it.
Unquote. Oh, I completely forgot about that.
So that proves that at least he has some integrity. God.
Some gamers might be sick individuals acting out violence power fantasies, but least musk has some integrity to not harm police officers in gta 5 that really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this you know uh at times strange behavior yeah that's also like that's also him signaling to like a different like the weird christian part of the base that's like oh violence in video games is bad because he's trying to signal to all of his groups simultaneously and all of them are like this guy is a fucking loser who sucks ass and we hate him it is pretty embarrassing that doesn't bring me much joy because again he is the most powerful man in the world no but it is mildly amusing yeah but. Yeah, but there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that, like, the pushback he is getting here is, like, I think actually kind of is significant.
So the last thing I want to talk about is him pretending to have been, like, a Quake pro, which is a thing that he did. Quake pro.
And there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Carl Jopst, who is, like, people who fake to like fake things in video games, basically. And he is like not a leftist.
He's like like a center right guy, basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly how far right he is.
But he did a video about about Elon claiming to be a quick player. And what he found.
So Elon, like apparently did actually play in an early quake tournament, but none of good players were there and he he came his team came in second but they came in second because they had better wi-fi than everyone else and so they had less latency which made them invincible until they ran into a team that also had good wi-fi and then he got destroyed which i just i just think is funny right that's like a classic elon musk story which is he he has this thing claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until he ran into someone who had the same amount of money that he did and just got destroyed. But the reason I bring this up is that like at the end of this video, Jobs just like goes on this whole thing about how, and this is like a stronger statement against Elon Musk than I have seen from anything in the mainstream press, where he literally goes on thing where he says yeah every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie and because he is just obviously lying out of his ass about literally everything in a field that I know this means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know and this is a real shift right I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down musk is just clearly a liar about this and so you should not be able to trust anything else he fucking says this is a larger degree of pushback than anything else ever fucking seen outside of like the left about what elon musk is doing and like just the willingness to just be like this guy is a fucking just just a serial liar like everything he says is a lie he literally calls him a con like says his activity is like a con man he says the things that he's saying are like either lies or delusional there is a kind of like shift happening right now where people like really are turning on him there's a thing that happened literally today where ubisoft you know ubisoft is a famously like not a leftist company right like they've done a lot of horrible fucked up sexual assault stuff.
So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as a character in it. And literally, the official Assassin's Creed account replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing your Path of Exile 2 account told you? And replied to a thing about Hassan, we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right? This thing that had been a really, really consistent base of support for people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him.
It's sort of being polarized against him by just the fact that he's just so obviously cynically pandering to them and how unbelievably transparent it is. And, like, obviously, like, I don't think, like, the gamers are going to, like, fucking rise up or whatever.
But the actual serious point to all of this, other than, like, looking at the ways that fascism, like, why these people do this, like, gamers is, like, a demographic that's important to these people, is that, like, the way that you destroy a coalition by this isn't necessarily by flipping everyone over to your side, right? That doesn't happen that often. But one of the ways you can do this, and this is, you know, to take a really, really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution.
They got their opponents, allies, to stay home. And that was enough.
Enough people just staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks, came for currency's government was enough for them to take power and and i think like the actual like the actual serious point of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these people's coalition so that when the confrontation with these people comes there are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that they can they can be stopped so this is at mia wong publicly calling for the start of gamer gate 2 gamer gate 2 is already happening damn it this is gamer gate 3 this is an open call to to begin gamer gate 2.5 right now on behalf of Mia Wong. Make sure you at Mia.
Oh no. And then hopefully it'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik revolution after we get enough gamers to stay home.
Or even better, rise up, right? We can make some kind of graphic with like a fist holding a controller or

a keyboard if you're

a nerd about it. Gamers

are the Cossacks. We've got to get them to not

back the regime. That's actually the February

Revolution where they stood down. But you know, same

point, same point. Yeah, come on, Mia.
Jeez.

Fuck. Look, I am one of the

biggest things of like people need to remember

that Lenin did not overthrow the czar.

He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist-y guy who was from the provisional government in between the first okay we're done we're done here we're done here we're fucking out we're leaving what games are you playing what games am I playing Path of Exile 2 don't play Brotato it will consume your life okay play RoboQuest RoboQuest is great RoboQuest dares to ask the question, what if the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice, but also you're doing a roguelike with Doom's combat? That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that then. I do Helldivers 2 nearly every Monday, Armored Core 6.
Armored Core 6 rules. Love that game.
Sonic X Shadow Generations Final Fantasy 7 and I'm waiting for Mecha Break to come out for like their their official release now that the beta is closed unfortunately the character selection is very Gooner coded many many such cases so I made sure to make the smallest the smallest chest size available on my model.

But the gameplay is fun.

Oh,

this has been It Could Happen Here.

I, good lord.

They pay me for this.

I had to

watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson

and fucking clips of

Elon Musk

playing video games for this.

Oh. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by James Stout and Robert Evans.
Yeah, you are. This week, we are covering the week of March 20 to March 26.
Short week because we did a late recording last week. Yep.
We did. So it's minus one day if my math is correct.
It's been a hard week for many of us because we all really care about group chats and group chat security is super important. Oh, yeah.
To kind of anyone involved in politics. And whenever we see a breach of this magnitude, it's really a warning and like a threat to all of us.
So it has been a tough week. Yeah, like a threat to one is a threat to all.
So like the way I see it, any group chat that gets compromised. First they came for Huthy PC small group.
That's right. Next they're gonna

come. Could be any of us.
Could be any of us.

Jeffrey Goldberg could be lurking in

your small group that's

you and your girlfriend talking about what

kind of pizza to order. He could be there

reporting for the Atlantic. You wouldn't

know unless you like looked

at who was in there and saw his name.

Then you would know.

Which is true of all of the people in the Houthi PC small group. I guess it is actually pretty easy.
You don't know. Maybe Jeffrey Goldberg's signal name is like CIA super spy or something and everyone just assumed he belonged there.
I'm going to start at the beginning because I do assume that actually as impossible as it sounds to those of us who wake up and imbibe fucking social media in the morning like an addict takes their first hit of crack cocaine but in a way that's less healthy for both our hearts and our brains uh a decent number of people who listen to this podcast have just kind of like heard vaguely like some bits about this yeah they're wondering what the fuck we're talking about what are you doing what are you guys doing this yeah so we're this group chat. So first off, a couple of basics.
So Signal is an app that is end-to-end encrypted. That means that if you have Signal and your buddy has Signal and you're messaging each other, it's encrypted.
And it is very hard at this point, unless one of your phones is directly compromised by a non-state actor or an ex who's really good with computers, no one else can see what you're messaging each other. So if you and a friend are like planning what to order on fucking Grubhub tonight when you go play Super Smash Brothers or whatever, you can keep that secret.
Or if you and a friend are planning what substances to buy that the government might not want you buying, you can keep that secret. Or if you and your friend simply don't want various media companies taking every detail and phone carriers taking every detail of your life's conversations and turning that into analytics data, you can stop them from doing that.
And if maybe one day you might be engaged in speech that the government might not like, you can continue to engage in that speech privately without danger. Or with less danger.
Yeah. Or with as little danger as it is possible to do.
Especially if your messages automatically explode after anywhere between five seconds to one week. Right.
Which is a feature Signal has. Yes, you can automatically set it to delete stuff over a period of time.
You want to, if you're going to use it, turn off the thing where it pushes messages so that you can see on your locked phone. Yeah, turn them off because that'll fuck shit up.
Because then your operating system can read the messages without the encryption. Yeah.
Similarly, never open a QR code. Yes.
Really the only way that Signal can get compromised on scale right now beyond physical infiltration, right? Like what accidentally happened with Houthi PC Small Group, but the main other way that signal can get compromised is through malicious QR codes and unknown links. So really be careful about links, as always, on the internet, and especially be skeptical of QR codes.
Yeah, there's a quote from Herman Goering. I think it was from Herman Goering.
When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver. And I have adapted that Goering quote to the modern era.
When I hear QR code, I reach for my Glock 19. That's right.
Do not use QR codes. Yeah, the work of Satan.
Let's explain what Houthi PC small group is for the people who are... I'm getting to it.
So you've got this app, which is normally used by and has been used for a long time by like protesters and dissidents and journalists to communicate with sources because it's very secure.

The Trump administration takes office. One thing that they are annoyed about is that when you are government employees, even if

you're doing top secret shit, especially if you're doing top secret shit, the kind of

meetings about national security planning for like military actions that you are supposed

to own. even if you're doing top secret shit, especially if you're doing top secret shit, the kind of meetings about national security planning for like military actions that you are supposed to only have in something called a skiff.
And a skiff is basically a room in, you know, the West Wing, I think, or the Pentagon, right? I'm not 100% sure where all the skiffs are, but it's like a room that is incredibly secure and it is the only place that you are supposed to have certain kinds of conversations.

And in fact, if you are having one of those kinds of conversations in a skiff, no one, not even the president or the vice president, is allowed to have a phone in there.

It is a very strict rule.

You don't take phones into the skiff because none of them are fucking secure.

Now, the problem is, all these communications, all of this stuff is documented and potentially FOIA-able. Maybe not immediately because there's always security concerns.
They have the ability to redact stuff. But in 20 years, perhaps.
But at some point. Yeah, it might be archived even if it's not FOIA-able.
People who are in charge of our military now didn't like that and were like, hey, what if we all just did it through a single group? And they did to plan for an attack that started March 15th against the Houthis. Now, you will remember the Houthis from the episode James and I did.
I mean, from other stuff, too, because they're all over in the news. From, you know, the Houthis.
The Houthis stuff. James and I did an episode recently about irregular naval warfare and you.
Check it out. That's all still pretty relevant.
Better known for their other work. Yeah, better known for their other work.
The Biden administration was like, we can probably take care of these guys with airstrikes. And it didn't really work.
And the Trump administration was like, we can do a better job of taking these guys out with airstrikes. And at this point, it's too early to say if it worked or not.
But I'm gonna guess didn't probably not just generally given history maybe but they say they killed a lot more high value targets and top missile guys main missile guy quote i don't know i'm not i don't know i'm not privy to the information they're working off of or how much it matters at this point right so we'll see you you're not in that signal chat robert i'm not that signal chat. They have not accidentally added me.
I'm in too many signal chats, frankly. Yeah, yeah.
I could be, and I might not know. We all are in too many.
I might be in several government ones and be totally unaware of it because there's too many notifications on my phone. That shit's muted.
I'm not seeing that. Yeah.
So they decide we're going to plan an attack on some Houthis. We're going to be hitting them with stuff.
And we should probably all get, we need to get all of these different kind of people from different chunks of the, you know, the government together. So we got to have J.D.
Vance and his representative, because usually Vance is too busy to respond. And we got to have the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and his representative.
We got to have the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, her representative. We got to have the head of the CIA, his representativeia his represent you know that kind of thing there's a few more people in there mark rubio uh mark rubio right sex estate you know and his representative right miller steven miller uh i don't know that miller had a representative he feels like he handles a lot of this stuff on his own but yeah on his phone too much steven miller yeah chronically online steven mill Yeah.
And you have the head of, I think, Centcom was in there. Anyway, you got all these people in there.
And while they're setting this up, all the invites are going out. Because the way you do it with Signal is you click a button that says, like, start a new group.
You name the new group. In this case, they named the group the PC small group, right? And shit, what does PC stand for in this politically correct which honestly i thought that we were over uh yeah you'd think so huh don't say any slurs in the group chat that's what it's just a reminder yeah yeah no slurs in the small group chat planning committee i'm guessing yeah planning committee houthi planning committee small group sorry i had that written down somewhere so they they make this group chat and they a bunch of people and here's the way one of the ways signal works is that like if you're just importing your contacts in the signal it'll find the guys who have signal and it'll just like show you based on whatever your name you have for them in their phone right that they're on signal and you can just invite them otherwise you can set what your signal name is going to be and so when people type type in your phone number or whatever, they'll see that.
Or if you send them an invite, that's the name they'll see. And this brings us, I got it taken aside to talk about a guy who is not a member of the Trump administration and who is not a member of government, a man named Jeffrey Goldberg, born in 1965.
He is currently the co-editor of The Atlantic. Prior to this, he had what some people would call an illustrious career.

He grew up in Malvern and Long Island.

Surely Malvern.

Malvern, yeah.

I'm looking at his wiki here, which just has the line that his neighborhood was mainly Catholic,

and he described it as a wasteland of Irish pogromists.

Oh, Jesus.

I bet he had a fun childhood.

Okay. Interesting.
Interesting, Jeffrey. Fascinating stuff there.
Interesting. So, after college or kind of while he's in college, he leaves and he goes to Israel because he wants to serve in the IDF during the Intifada, the first one, as a prison guard.
Jesus Christ. Which is where Palestinian participants in the Intifub were being held.
And yeah, he had like an interesting conversation with this PLO leader who was also like a math teacher who I guess they were able to like discuss their Zionism or whatever in some way that he found useful. Anyway, weird guy.
Not a, I bring this up to be like, not a left-wing radical. Not one of, quote-unquote, our guys.
Not one of our guys. Not a guy who's probably broadly opposed to most of, and in fact, to most of what the Trump administration is doing.
Especially who's the airstrikes, frankly. Yes.
Now, he has pissed off. It's fair to say, he has really pissed off Trump a number of times.
Because he wrote some articles. He wrote that 2020 article in The Atlantic about when Trump said, got caught saying that Americans who died in wars are losers and suckers.
Yes. Which is, you know, based on sourcing that he had.
So he's also attracted their ire. But he's, again, generally, I would say, like, more on the bootlickery side of things.
Like, he's just kind of like a NatSec cheerleader, right? That would be a fair way to describe Jeffrey. Totally.
I don't know that he would entirely disagree with that description of himself, you know? Yeah, like a Neil Lib guy. That said, he's not so much of one that he's unwilling to report critical stuff, which is what happens here.
So he gets an invite on his phone that it just takes him into this PC Houthi small group. And people have done the work.
There's another guy in the Trump administration whose initials are JC. John Greenbrier, I believe.
Yeah, I think it was John Greenbrier. And the person who, because there was some debate initially about like who invited him, because after this came out, there were allegations that he snuck his way in or whatever.
We now know based on the evidence evidence, that he was inadvertently invited by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, right?

As evidenced by the signal screenshots.

Yes, yes, yes.

There's lots of screenshots.

Jeffrey did his, you know, the job of documenting it.

Eventually, yes.

Well, he documented it right away.

Yes.

So, now, here's the thing.

From the beginning here,

Jeffrey is having the natural reaction.

I will say this for all my critiques of him. He has the reaction I think any minimally competent journalist would have.
Someone's fucking with me. Yeah, yeah.
This is like something to get me, yeah. Like, you don't get invited into a chat with the sec def and the head of the CIA planning a military strike, right? Yeah, yeah.
Like, that just doesn't happen. I've been a journalist for a while.
That's not a good to me. Yeah, it does not really go down.
So he's like trying to figure out what the fuck's going on like what's happening and he's like he's making a note he's documenting stuff is there and they're talking about like weapons packages like these are the kind of weapons this is where they're striking and then as the strikes go and they're being like this guy headed into his girlfriend's house we're hitting it house blew up he's dead right that particular exchange was very funny because the The way he phrased was like it completely baffled jd vance yes let me pull this up because it was it was pretty funny no please please uh michael waltz vp full stop building collapsed full stop had multiple positive id full stop pete carilla the ic amazing job jd vance replies what michael waltz typing too fast full stop the first target m dash their top missile guy m dash we have positive idea of him walking into his girlfriend's building and now it's collapsed and then jd vance replies excellent at this point michael waltz responds with the fist emoji, American flag emoji, flame emoji. Yeah.
So it's great. And once it becomes very clear what's happening, number one, rather than stay in the group, see if maybe he could get invited to other groups, just kind of like keep track of what was going on.
Again, being a guy who's like primary concern. And I really do think Goldberg's primary concern here was the security of U.S.
soldiers. The national security of the United States.
Yeah, yeah. As opposed to, like, is any of this legal? His is just, like, these people are not being secure.
This could, if the wrong person got invited into a group like this, it could potentially endanger the lives of airmen and stuff. That's not my primary concern with all this, right? But that is his, you know? And so he hops out of the group.
He leaves. And he puts out this article.
And he redacts most other than what's happened, which is a story in and of itself. He like goes out of his way.
Like there's people who are like in intelligence that are in this that he has their names, and he's like, I am not naming them because they're serving intelligence officers, and that's a no-no. He doesn't, like, specifically give up, other than that this is happening, anything that's, like, particularly dangerous, right? But this is the kind of thing, as soon as it comes out, obviously it's a furor, and it's unlike most of the time when everybody gets pissed, it seems like it might have some legs because it's just such a what-the-fuck moment, right? And it's so contrary to so much of the messaging coming from the Trump administration regarding digital security, Hillary's emails.
Prosecuting individual soldiers for any..., losing a night vision goggle, right?

That's kind of the classic one.

Leaking information, how this administration's going to crack down on all information leaks,

you know, that sort of stuff.

At one point, Hexer says, we are clear for OPSEC, which I thought was pretty funny.

The funniest message in this signal group is that we're all good on OPSEC.

Yeah.

That he says in a group chat with a journalist.

Yeah. Yeah.
It's super funny. Everything that's happening here is very funny.
I basically want to move on to like what's going to happen next, which is they are going to try to nuke Jeffrey Goldberg. Like they're going to try to send him to a prison, if not a literal like El Salvadorian work camp, right? Like that is going to be their next goal here.
He embarrassed these people to an extent that it's... Anyone in uniform would have been court-martialed for this kind of security fuck-up.
Oh, yeah. In times of war in the past, if the version of this had happened in World War II, they would have just executed whatever soldier did this.
You don't have to be a spy if you're incompetent enough to just bumble into shit. It's the same result.
I did want to address really quickly a couple of things. One, I saw this USA Today article that was like, oh, it's so relatable that they made this mistake of adding someone to the group chat.
That was not the mistake. The mistake was coordinating things that should be classified, things that should be quote-unquote high side on personal devices using Signal as opposed to a State Department or government-issued device which doesn't have your personal contacts to avoid all this, like a device which is not hackable, a device which has not been exposed to QR codes, for example.
Yeah, make sure that in your contacts there's not two guys named JG. Yeah, yeah.
So you might add the wrong JG to your Yemen bombing chat.

Haven't we all added the wrong person

to a group chat?

And it's like, I mean, yeah,

but I've never like bombed Yemen.

Yeah, yeah.

Not for bombing Yemen.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not the same thing.

It's not the same thing as a birthday party.

Yeah, like I have two friends named John

and I added the wrong one to a group

about like planning a mutual friend's birthday party. But like, again, I have two friends named John, and I added the wrong one to a group about, like, planning a mutual friend's birthday party.
But, like, again, minimal damage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No service people's lives are put at risk. I did also want to point out this.
At one point, Waltz says, or Michael Waltz, who's a national security advisor. Yeah, not the other one.
Yeah, that would have been pretty funny that he had him as well. If he was just in there, they're like, hey, seems cool.
Put him in the group. Fuck it.
One dude likes to shoot phasms apparently. Seems nice.
He seems to be friends with J.D. Vance.
It wouldn't be surprising. So one of the things Wolf says, which is bizarre, is that European navies are incapable of defeating Houthi weapon systems, which just isn't true.
There was a coalition of 20 different states running operations in the Red sea last year and again like france has a navy like they've got nuclear submarines they could end the world just to cite one example hms diamond which is a british ship uh shot down a houthi missile last year the uk also airstruck houthi targets last year yeah i've i've watched the UK carry out airstrikes. I feel like they're very capable.
What the Houthis have is Iranian 358s to just get really nerdy for a second, which are not really a threat to modern fighter aircraft. It's like a loitering munition.
Maybe a drone, yeah, but no aircraft, not a manned or personned aircraft. The primary point of how the Houthis are conducting their strikes is not, we're going to knock all of these ships out of the sea.
It will create an unsustainable insurance situation for a lot of merchants if there's just always kind of missiles. Even if we never really or almost never hit anybody, that doesn't really matter.
You got to deal with the deal with the insurance thing yeah they're gonna make that much more expensive and that that that particular part of global trade much more difficult to conduct so far the trump administration has doubled down on its response this is pretty funny karen levitt on twitter uh x i guess called goldberg she's the white house press secretary i believe's correct. Yeah, White House press secretary.
She called Goldberg a, quote, Trump hater and also claimed the story was a, quote, hoax and a, quote, sensationalist spin. They are also right now claiming that, quote, war plans and, quote, attack plans are different things.
The information they leaked was too specific to constitute a war plan. Both of these things are kind of ludicrous claims, right? Very clearly, this is stuff that should be classified very clearly.
It's stuff that put those people's lives at risk. In the event that the Houthis had any means to respond to F-18s, which I don't think they do really.
But Iran, who absolutely is a state backer of the Houthis, does have the ability, at least in theory, they've kind of shown their ass a bit in the last year or two with Israeli strikes in Iran. Yeah, it's not the ability to easily interdict these kind of strikes, but certainly the ability to, and more importantly, kind of the ability to survive them, to mitigate the damage that they can do.
Sure, sure, to go underground or go somewhere else. And those planes are vulnerable when they're like certain points in their trajectory i think so you know yeah it's generally very poor to broad to broadcast exactly what you're doing when where and how it's kind of just a basic of like military stuff that you really don't want people to know exactly when you're sending dudes in to do what yeah yeah there was a very funny uh meme going around, which basically had imagined if the same discussion had been had about D-Day in 1944.
And yeah, that wouldn't have gone so well if they had broadcast. There's been a lot of great posts.
I'm looking at one by Katie Notopoulos on Twitter right now. Having read through the full Houthi PC small group blogs, I've come to the sad realization that I am the J.D.
Vance of my group chats. Overly emotional, slightly unprofessional, confused by what everyone else is saying because I won't scroll up.
Continually derails plans with late objections. That's so good.
Oh, that's so good. That is really funny.
That is brutal, yeah. It is interesting to see their dynamics.
It's interesting kind of steven miller seemed to have the decisive word on like let's go ahead with this miller oh yeah speaking directly for the president that's it what's interesting is no one ever says the president has approved this the president has said do this like miller says something along the lines of like we're going forward with this or i've been told we're going forward with this yeah which is again not in terms of like it's a very hitler way of doing things right yeah like there's this i talk about this in the show there's this decades-long debate about like did hitler literally order the holocaust or did he just kind of like keep making it clear to people that if they kept moving in a more holocausty direction that would like endear them to him yeah yeah intentionality aspects of both are true but like yeah this is definitely kind of example that latter thing where trump is probably like yeah somebody should probably fuck up those houthis and then stephen miller goes like yeah trump said you know we're good keep moving forward but he's also miller's not dumb he's not gonna say trump said to do this he's gonna say he's been delegating so much more than his first term to the point where his presidency is just projecting a certain vibe that then other people have to carry out all of the details for. This is very similar to the Hitler regime.
Yeah. There is a term for this at the time in the Third Reich.
It's called working towards the Fuhrer. Where you're not going to get direct guidelines.
You're supposed to figure out what he wants and move closer to it. Exactly.
That's kind of been his new governing style. It's a lot smarter.
In terms of just getting documents to sign and then projects certain slogans or vibes that then everyone who works under him, which is at this point maybe roughly 200 people tops have to all like figure out to like how to enact this thing

that they think he wants.

Yeah.

Like even to the extent

that he himself was saying

he didn't sign the evocation

of the Alien Enemies Act

that Rubio did.

His signature's on it

in the federal record,

but clearly it's kind of a Rubio

or it seems from that

that it's a Rubio concoction

that he just greenlit.

Just a quote from Miller in case anyone's wondering exactly what he said. i heard it the president was clear colon green light but we soon make clear to egypt and europe what we expect in return so yeah it's he never he never specifically says the president has okayed this but yeah that's uh obviously people in europe really pissed uh i've seen some statements from government ministers in the United Kingdom.
The sort of maligning of Europe and its military powers is obviously going to piss those people off. Talking of pissing people off, should we pivot to advertisements? We should, which does not piss me off.
It makes me really happy to consume. Garrison personally consumes all the products and services that support this show.
Yeah, that's definitely not true. It's the only thing that Garrison consumes.
That's also not true. Which is why they have pellagra.
I don't know what that is, but sure. Here's the ads.
All right. We are so bad.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
what's rending my additions james yeah okay i'll just start uh so uh very amusingly that's probably concerningly for him judge bosberg the same person who issued attentive restraining order against the trump administration for the rendition of people to Venezuela, has also been assigned the signal lawsuit, American Oversight versus Hegseth. So that guy, the one who Trump already called for his impeachment, right, has another crucial case in front of him.
What the Trump administration has done in the court case pertaining to the rendition of people to El Salvador is invoke the state secrets privilege in court. Very ironic, very, very ironic.
They're talking about state secrets now, having just added Jeff Goldberg to the group chat. But that's what they have done.
You can go back last week to understand sort of a bit more about where that's coming from, if you didn't listen to last week's. Yeah, we did a whole episode on it last week.
It's also continuing to claim that it didn't quote-unquote remove migrants after the tentative restraining order was issued because they'd already been removed. The removal happened when they were loaded onto the plane, is this argument.
Concurrently with this, there's a panel hearing. So that's a panel of three judges, right, at which the government is appealing the tentative restraining order.
During this hearing, Circuit Court Judge Patricia Millett said, quote, the Nazis received better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than these Venezuelan migrants, which is true. The Nazis had hearings in the 1930s.
They didn't just get loaded onto a plane and sent to a work camp. Not a great reflection on where we're at.
The Trump administration is trying to challenge the jurisdiction of Bozberg uh saying that he should have filed the same claim in texas meanwhile venezuelan government attorneys are filing a legal claim in el salvador to uh to liberate their citizens from secot it's worth noting of course that these people some of them have been tortured by the venezuelan government right and chose to to flee at no small risk to their lives like if people haven't listened to some of our older stuff, like I've been to the Darien Gap, which is the way that the vast majority of Venezuelan migrants come. You can listen to my episodes about that if you want to know more about why people are leaving Venezuela.
We have a little more information on some of the people detained. One of them is a makeup artist who's a gay man who was beaten beaten by guards as a u.s photojournalist watch another one the miami herald is reporting had been granted legal refugee status so it seems that they sort of randomly grabbed tattooed venezuelans some of these people have been through background checks already right at which they will have disclosed their tattoos that's one of the things that they'll be asked about.
And they will have disclosed those. So whether they control F'd it or how they came across these people is still a little bit unclear.
A couple of other things regarding to immigration enforcement this week that have come across my radar, but probably don't merit a whole episode. It's been reported that the IRS is close to an agreement to hand over the tax records of undocumented people.

It is claimed for decades that it won't do this. This is why most undocumented people pay taxes, right? Yeah, which is something that the conservatives just like don't believe.
Yes. They're like, all these undocumented immigrants aren't paying taxes like the rest of us.
Like, no, actually they are. What they're not doing is receiving benefits from those taxes.
Yeah, and yes. and this is a great way to have people

want to pay less taxes

if they're going to get their information

sent What they're not doing is receiving benefits from those taxes. Yeah, and yes.
And this is a great way to have people want to pay less taxes if they're going to get their information sent over to, like, the Gestapo. Yeah, exactly.
The whole point was to not provide a disincentive. This is similar to why California gives driver's licenses to undocumented people and allows them to insure vehicles, right? Because you don't want to provide a disincentive to have a driver's license.
You don't want to provide a disincentive to have insurance. We have now provided a disincentive to pay your taxes for undocumented people.
So yeah, that will have consequences and it will have consequences, especially in industries, right? Like agriculture and construction, where large numbers of people tend to be undocumented. Talking of undocumented migration, the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, reports that said it's on the all in podcast he has claimed to have already sold 1000 gold cards uh so gold cards if you didn't listen to our previous recording on that oh i feel like i feel like i'm getting dizzy i'm just like yeah yeah i i'm ill yeah yeah there is no process for uh applying for receiving gold card yet.
So it's extremely unclear what this means in immigration law terms. So he just got like a thousand texts from millionaires being like, yeah, I'll buy one maybe.
Well, multi-millionaires, five million each, right? So yeah, apparently not quite clear. And he claims that he sold them.
Is he going around shopping these around? Is this how they're going to replace the tax revenue from undocumented people?

Oh, my God.

No one knows.

No one knows what this means.

Who do you pay?

Very unclear.

So, yeah, that's great.

That is the current situation with immigration.

I also wanted to add that at least three people who were aware of died

in San Diego County on the 14th of March in a storm while crossing the border. One young woman who survived was found next to the remains of her father who died of exposure in a winter storm out here.
So yeah, the border continues to be doing violence to some of the most marginalized people alive, which is great.

We should pop in here. A story just

dropped. Michael Waltz.
continues to be doing violence to some of the most marginalized people alive which is great

we should uh pop in here a story just dropped uh michael waltz the national security advisor who invited jeffrey to that group chat journalists have found his public venmo no every time with the venmo always the venmo quote unquote it's full of. I'm just going to read a quote from an article on prospect.org.
Yeah, please. Unsurprisingly, Fox News holds the highest headcount for reporters in Mike Waltz's phone.
Griff Jenkins, whose Fox.com bio lists him as a Washington-based national correspondent for Fox, is joined on the list by Brian Kilmeade, co-host of Fox & Friends. Porter Berry, president and editor of Fox Digital, also made the cut.
But right-wing reporters are not the only ones represented in Waltz's Venmo list, which appears to be less than clean on obsec, as Secretary of Defense Hegseth wrote. Leland Vittert, a national correspondent for News Nation, is also listed on the digital account, as is Brianna Keillor, an American journalist who currently serves as co-anchor of the afternoon edition of CNN News Central.
Lauren Pykov, an executive producer at MSNBC,

is also in Walsh's contacts. Earlier this year, Trump tweeted about the network,

Wow, Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She'll be off the air soon.

But amidst the broadcasters, producers, and talking heads, one name stands out from the crowd,

Judith Miller, who was summarily fired from the New York Times after it was revealed that her

reporting on the Iraq war was categorically false and obtained almost verbatim from Vice

Thank you. One name stands out from the crowd.
Judith Miller, who was summarily fired from the New York Times after it was revealed that her reporting on the Iraq war was categorically false and obtained almost verbatim from Vice President Dick Cheney. Her dismissal was the price paid for cozying up too close to an administration set on war.
It's just like, okay. We don't check any of this.
We haven't locked anything down. Good.
Having your public Venmo itself is crazy. The fact that he's like the fact that he's like getting like dinner

with journalists to be like, I'll send

you a Venmo request for this

for this sushi.

Oh man, they've downloaded his

entire friends list and you can just scroll

it. Yeah, I know.
You can see everybody.

Oh my god. He's sending in like

a $15 Venmo requests

from Brian Kilmeade for getting drinks in a bar.

Like, what are we doing?

What are we doing? Yeah. Also, yeah.
How well these people make hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. They're getting so much money.
15 bucks. Just get the back.
It's just one drink in DC. It's so funny.
Oh my God. now I think it's time folks that we take a little bit

of a detour

and talk about tariffs. Oh, my God.
I love playing that song. I love playing that song.
We don't actually have anything to say about tariffs. Mia's not here.
I will note there's a graph going around about the potential cost of Guinness under Trump's tax plan, which is usually around $7 per pint in the US and will now be $22 to $27 after Trump's new tariffs for imported alcohol. That reflects its true value because it's also a meal.
Yes, absolutely. Anyway, we're done.
That's all I have to say on tariffs. As long as the twisted tea pricing doesn't get affected, I'll be fine then.
That's good. Good.
Not going to comment. Now, in some more upsetting news, another student at Columbia has been forced into hiding as ICE targets her for deportation.
Yoon Sao Chung is a 21-year-old permanent resident who immigrated to the United States from Korea with her family when she was seven. On March 9th, she received a text message from Homeland Security Investigations, reading, Hi, Yunsao.
This is Audrey from the police. My job is to reach out to you and see if you have any questions about your recent arrest and the process going forward.
When are you available for a phone call? So this message was allegedly in reference to being arrested, among others, at a recent sit-in protest at Bernard College at Columbia. She was charged and then released with misdemeanor obstruction.
So after receiving that sketchy text, something that you should never respond to, you should immediately send to your lawyer. But after receiving this text, Chung got an email from Columbia Public Safety, reading, quote, the U.S.
Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has asked us to inform you

that Homeland Security... this text, Chung got an email from Columbia Public Safety, reading, quote, the U.S.
Attorney's

Office for the Southern District of New York has asked us to inform you that Homeland Security investigation agents are seeking to make contact with you in connection with an administrative warrant for your arrest. Consistent with the university's practice, we wanted to share this information and their request with you.
If you are represented by counsel, it may make sense for your lawyer to speak directly with DHS.

Now, that same day,

ICE agents showed up at the home of Chung's parents

and Chung's lawyer called,

quote unquote, Audrey from the police,

who revealed she was actually an ICE agent

and stated that there was an administrative warrant

for her arrest

and that the State Department

can revoke Ms. Chung's residency status.

We're going to talk more about what's happened with Ms. Chung after this ad break.
All right, we're back. So when ICE failed to locate this Columbia University student, they started to enlist the help of federal prosecutors.
I'm going to quote from the New York Times who broke this story. On March 10th, Perry Carbone, a high-ranking lawyer in the federal prosecutor's office, told Ms.
Ahmad, Ms. Chung's attorney, that the Secretary of State, Mark Rubio, had revoked Ms.
Chung's visa. Ms.
Ahmad responded that Ms. Chung was not in the country on a visa and was a permanent resident.
According to the lawsuit, Ms. Carbone responded that Mr.
Rubio had, quote, revoked that as well, unquote. So this, similar to Mahmoud Khali, demonstrates that they have no idea of the actual residency status of the people that they're going after.
They are just going after non-citizens and may eventually start going after citizens too. They are just going after people that they assume have the least amount of protections, whether that's a green card holder, whether that's someone on a student visa or a work visa.
They don't really know going in. They're just going after people.
Then on March 13th, ICE searched two residences on campus with warrants citing a statute for harboring non-citizens. The Trump administration is arguing that Chung's presence in the United States hinders the administration's foreign policy agenda.
One 21-year-old student who was the valedictorian at her high school is hindering their foreign policy agenda for attending a sit-in protest. Her lawyers note that Chung was not by any means like a movement leader.
She was simply one of hundreds of students who joined in in nationwide protests against Israel's actions in Gaza. Her lawyers write, quote, Ms.
Chung has not made any public statements to the press or otherwise, assumed a high-profile role in these protests. She was, rather, one of a large group of college students, raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns, unquote.
Chung herself had previously faced a university disciplinary process, which found that Chung was not in violation of any university policy. So in response to the actions of ICE and Homeland Security to try to locate and deport her, Chung went into hiding.
Her whereabouts are still unknown, as the time of recording, and her lawyers filed a lawsuit to prevent her deportation, claiming that ICE actions against Chung are illegal and unconstitutional. The lawsuit reads, quote, officials at the highest echelons of government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike, including Ms.
Chung's speech. ICE's shocking actions against Ms.
Chung form part of a larger pattern of attempted U.S. government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech, unquote.
Now, this past Tuesday, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order halting efforts from ICE to detain or relocate Chung. The judge said that there is, quote, nothing in the record indicating that Chung is a danger to the community or a, quote unquote, foreign policy risk, or that she has communicated with terrorist organizations.
The judge said that there would be, quote, no trips to Louisiana here, unquote, referring to the movement of Khalil to ICE detention in Louisiana. A DHS statement said that ICE is going to, quote, investigate individuals engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization, unquote.
The statement also claimed that Chung would have an opportunity to present her case before an immigration judge, which is contrary to incidents of ICE just deporting people before their legally required hearings, even in defiance of extra court orders mandating those hearings. ICE is just lying here.
And I think it's worth pointing out what types of people they are going after, right? Now, one type of person that ICE is going after is like non-citizens who were arrested at protests, regardless of what they actually did, right? This can be anything from standing in the street, to doing a sit-in protest, to just, like, being arrested on campus and removed by campus police or NYPD, right? Like, just any arrest, like arrest on record that shows you at one of these protests. The other, in the case of Khalil, he was never arrested.
He was the subject of a mass doxing campaign by other students at Columbia, professors and other, quote-unquote, anti-Semitism organizations, which target high-profile activists to create public pressure against them. And those same lists are now being used by the Trump administration to target students.
Yeah, Itar had one, right? Or Betar, the ultra Zionist people who are going around like attempting to fucking present people with pages. I think they were one of the groups that had created like a quote unquote deportation list.
So we should just mention that a tough student, Ramesa Ozturk, was essentially abducted on her way to university, right? There's video, which we'll link in the show notes here. Very, very frightening video of her just standing on the sidewalk as first one man approaches her in like a navy hoodie.
Hood up, mask on his face. Approaches her, stops her.
And then as soon as they start engaging in conversation, she gets surrounded by like five other people all wearing like what I would describe as like a gray man block, essentially. Yeah.
That they then like pull out badges and they like detain her. And it's interesting, like as they approach, most of these people are unmasked.
And then as soon as people realize what's happening, like people in the neighborhood realize what's happening they all start pulling up like half face masks like gators they looked to me more than anything the way Proud Boys dressed a lot in like 2019, 2020 it's extremely concerning when you start seeing these people, masked people snatching people off the street, right? She asked if she can call the cops and they say we are the police. It looks like her phone falls out of her hand at some point.
They take her bag. We know this because it seems like somebody was filming from a building just above.
And you can hear that people say, like, why are you covering your, that person say, why are you wearing masks? Why are covering your faces yeah yeah the guy the guy filming is like doing about what he given the fact that you have to assume he had no real idea what was happening initially other than like something visibly fucked up like i'm glad he said the things that he said but yeah yeah she's a turkish citizen who is uh in the states on a student visa in boston uh massachusetts or outside Boston, Massachusetts. Yeah, she's a Turkish citizen who is in the States on a student visa in Boston, Massachusetts, or outside Boston, Massachusetts.
Yeah, she's on an F1 visa. So just a couple of days, just a few days before she was seized, her name was published by Canary Mission.
Canary Mission is a Zionist group that has been doxing pro-Palestine or anti-genocide people for several years now. She had co-edited an op-ed in the Tufts Daily last year that seems to be how they were able to identify her.
But as Garrison said, in terms of how they're picking their targets right now, it seems to be heavily tied to these vigilante Zionist far-right groups. I did see that a judge has already ruled

that she shouldn't be left.

She shouldn't be removed from Massachusetts

without further consultation with that judge.

And we don't know if she has been or not already.

But this is continuing to happen, right?

We talked about this last week.

I'm going to do a whole episode next week

about this issue.

She is in Louisiana.

Sorry, update.

She has already been moved to Louisiana.

Yeah, so I'm just reading a truth out piece here. officials that initially did not specify where else took have been taken kanabi it's her lawyer was unable to reach her later on wednesday hanabi said in a motion that she was informed by a senator's office that the student was already transferred to louisiana it's like in a in a matter of hours they worked to get her like outside of yeah her like home state probably has more legal protections.
Yeah, it's not something that's super uncommon. I've seen them do this with what they called lateral transfers under Title 42, where they would move people.
Under Title 42, they could immediately return people to Mexico, right? And what they would do is laterally transfer them along the border and return them to another location in Mexico, which obviously led to them being completely dislocated when they were dropped in Mexico. Something else that I want to note is the use of this harboring non-citizens warrant.
One problem that ICE can run into often is that people can choose just to not answer the door. ICE usually likes to rely on people that have already been arrested or already detained by police.
That makes it much easier for immigration officials to find people. Without that, locating people can be a little bit harder.
With the use of this harboring non-citizens warrant that shows they're trying to create this precedent for being able to actually break into more people's homes, even though she had a permanent resident status, this is just like, in terms of the tactics being used, similar to all these gray man block people approaching you on the street one by one that's like a tactic to to take note of uh the use of this type of warrant is also something to take note of we are already at the point where people have are like are like going into hiding right this is like very very like dystopian ya coded stuff where you're like you are literally as like as a 21 year old like junior being forced to to go into hiding because federal agents are after you because you sat down yeah you you sat down in front of a building in protest of a genocide you're not a you're not even a movement leader and this this type of thing shouldn't even happen to quote-unquote movement leaders, right? Yeah, the very First Amendment protects your right to do that. Exactly.
But regardless of whether or not you're involved in the planning, the organization, whether or not you're making statements to press, whether or not you're giving speeches, if you just attend these sorts of things, you are a target by what is very obviously a modern version of like gestapo like actions um yeah i think it's also quite revealing that she's somewhat successfully gone into hiding right like it suggests that their intelligent operation is not so advanced that they were able to immediately find her well no because again the resources to do stuff like trace somebody down by their shoes from like surveillance camera footage exists

we saw it used on those lawyers

who lit a police vehicle on fire

back in 2020 but like

there's not really much

in the way of crimes going on here

and there also have there's so many

of these people like the idea that you would

you would pull all of the footage that you

would need to track every one of these it's just

it's just not feasible yeah and I think

they'll just go after someone else right to get

the headline but I'll be following

I'm going to... you would pull all of the footage that you would need to track every one of these.
It's just not feasible. Yeah, and I think they'll just go after someone else, right, to get the headline.
But I'll be following this one with interest because it's sort of an alternative outcome to the other ones that we've seen so far. So it'll just be revelatory to see how it goes.
Yeah. So if you want to contact us about any of this, maybe if you're seeing things happening on your campus, if you have anything you'd like to share or things that you think we've missed, you can do so.
The email address is coolzonetips at proton.me. Protonmail is an encrypted email service.
It's only end-to-end encrypted like Signal if you send it from a Protonmail address don't copy any atlantic journalists on your email and uh you should be good to go uh thank you to everyone who's been sending those messages it does take time for us to go through all of them not all of them will have a response but we are we are reading them thank you i am still working on a piece on the lavender scare there's a lot of stuff lot of stuff happening regarding suppressing and going after trans people in the military. This takes time, but we are working on that slowly but surely, as well as stuff regarding ICE targeting students and what's going on in Colombia.

So we appreciate that.

The last thing I want to talk about is this past Monday, the IDF killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza in separate airstrikes.

Thank you. appreciate that.
The last thing I want to talk about is this past Monday, the IDF killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza in separate airstrikes. Mohamed Mansour, who works for Palestine Today, was killed, quote, in his house in southern Gaza alongside his wife and his son without any prior warning, according to Al Jazeera.
Later that day, the IDF killed a 23-year-old Palestinian journalist, Hassam Shabbat, in a targeted airstrike while he was driving his car in northern Gaza. I want to read the statement from Hassam.
Quote, If you're reading this, it means I have been killed, most likely targeted by the Israeli occupation forces. When all this began, I was only 21 years old, a college student, with dreams like anyone else.
For the past 18 months, I've dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.
I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents, anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival.
I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people's side. By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist.
I risked everything to report the truth, and now I am finally at rest, something I haven't known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause.
I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people. I ask you now, do not stop speaking about Gaza.
Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting.
Keep telling our stories until Palestine is free. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Thanks for listening.